Hey any game people I would appreciate feedback on this, I just don’t have anyone to check in with. I got a very nice comment and question about whether it was ok to adapt the system I made for my in-playtesting game (storythreads.itch.io/squire, make a sad knight sidekick today).
My immediate reaction is yes of course, some of the coolest developments in games come from hacks and adaptations and I’d love to see someone play with these mechanics that I’ve been alone with for so long.
I think I’m overthinking it, but are there downsides? I know it’s a long shot to ever get published but I don’t want to immediately shoot myself in the foot if giving this kind of permission messes with copyright stuff. Is this what creative commons is for? I don’t really know how any part of that works; I’ve done some reading but I just don’t know enough about the creative scene to know what kind of crediting is normal to ask for. If anyone has examples of how credit works for this kind of thing I’d appreciate that as well.
I release all my games on Creative Commons and the type of credit I usually ask is something like:
"The text of this work is based on [your game], developed, authored, and edited by [your name] (https://yourwebsite), and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)."
CW: pet loss. This post is unrelated to games. My dog recently passed away, and writing about it is helping me process the loss. This is my tribute to him. If this topic may be upsetting for you, please do skip this post.
-------------------------------------------------
It was the last penalty kick of the Olympic final.
My friend Luis and I, standing, waiting for the shot that would decide the title, when through my front door walked a small, fluffy, gangly little creature, with that characteristic expressive look that I would learn to love. A look that, in that moment, I never could have imagined I would one day have to learn to live without.
You came into our lives suddenly, and they were never the same again.
A blank canvas, on which we painted together. Routines, priorities, plans. And many, many lessons.
You taught me that most of the problems we create are solved with a nap, a snack, or a walk.
You taught me that simply being present is enough. Being in the now, 100%, for yourself and for those we love, is the greatest gift we can give.
You taught me that you don't need much to celebrate life. You just have to open your front door and see your family again.
And then, like a breeze, you were gone. And now we look at a new blank canvas, not even quite knowing where to begin.
Our apartment, so tiny, has never felt so empty.
I still catch myself looking at your little house, waiting for you to come out at any moment, stretch that big stretch, and come lie down beside me. I still hear that deep sigh you'd let out when you relaxed.
And in those moments I find you. Today, and forever. In our morning coffees together on the balcony. In our sunset walks along the beach.
And when I look at this new canvas, it's not quite so blank after all. Your presence persists, in everything you unconditionally offered us over these ten years. In everything you transformed within us.
In every detail you live on, from your infinite serenity and companionship that shaped our home, to the last little white hair I'll find on a piece of clothing some time from now.
You left our lives suddenly, and they will never be the same again.
Last year I shared my take on a player character emulator that I made for the One-Page TTRPG Jam, called Triple-O.
Much to my surprise, it was really well received, and I’ve since gotten some very cool reports from people using it in different ways; like running published adventure modules as the GM, emulating allies and hirelings while still playing a main character, or just experimenting with a different solo format.
Next month, I’m bringing Triple-O back in a zine format.
I don’t want to change the core mechanics at all. I honestly think the beauty of the tool lies in its simplicity, so the one-page rules will still work exactly as they always have.
What the extra pages give me is more room to support that core idea: more tables to help emulate character behavior, clear examples (especially for folks for whom “playing solo as the GM” might be a foreign concept), and some additional ideas for how the same engine can be used in different solo play situations.
If any of that sounds interesting, you can follow the project page on Backerkit to get notified when it launches. For early backers, I’ll also be sending out a printed version of the original one-page tool, folded as a brochure.
And honestly, thank you to everyone who downloaded it, played it, shared it, or told others about it. Seeing it quietly find its place in people’s solo toolkits has been incredibly rewarding.
Get excited about Triple-O: the player character emulator on BackerKit - come join!
The TTRPG industry and hobby weren't exactly highly newsworthy before D&D 5e resulted in a (D&D) boom. The thing is, there were and still are sites that reported on TTRPG industry issues (even though those sites were becoming largely supplanted by blogs and social media) but once D&D 5e hit the market and suddenly became a Big Thing it suddenly caused a surge of interest in TTRPGs, if by TTRPGs you meant D&D and like maybe a couple of other games worthy of mainstream recognition.
The unfortunate side effect of this is that while it did bring a lot of new eyes towards TTRPGs they were almost singularly focused on D&D. While those old sites for TTRPG news that actually cover the hobby and industry beyond D&D still exist they have been pushed out of the spotlight by a number of other publications that had the benefit of exposure. Thus, in a relatively short time what most people see as TTRPG news became D&D news.
And like I do think it's unfair to expect this new crop of prospective TTRPG journalists to immediately know what's up with a hobby that's been around for fifty years by now but like sometimes I feel like I'm spouting the Deep Lore or some shit when I mention names like Fred Hicks or Avery Alder or Robin D. Laws.
If TTRPG journalists want us to take them seriously and not just as an advertising arm of WotC D&D they need to be willing to demonstrate a bit of curiosity about the hobby beyond the entry level stuff. We would absolutely make fun of film critics as a class if most of them didn't bother to cover anything besides the MCU, and I think we should in fact call out RPG journalism that only serves to advertise for the biggest game in the hobby while failing to account for the sheer amount of variety out there.
I'll take this a step further in that the journalists who pride themselves on covering things outside D&D still aren't going FAR ENOUGH. They're still coving mostly people who have sufficient cultural capital to maintain their own success. If you're capable of pulling off a 25-50k Kickstarter you already have enough visibility.
We need more journalists covering the fringe. The ones willing to go exploring and cover, like, literally anything that captures their own attention that hasn't captured anyone else's attention.
Hi, it's me, Mint! I'm your resident TTRPG librarian.
If you want to see quick introductions to a wide swathe of games, from bigger-named studios down to single indie creators, check out my ttrpg recommendations tag. I've got three years of backlog for you to peruse!
I've also got play logs under Mint Plays Games, and reviews for games folks have asked me to check out under Mint Reviews.
Even more, I have a whole-ass library of Google Sheets character sheets to make online play easier.
I'm not publicly funded, but I can be community funded! And by that I mean I accept donations on Ko-Fi.
I gotta be honest, I’m getting real tired of my own ideas.
I’m running a long-running Everspark campaign for my home group (over 30 sessions now!), and while it’s been amazing, I’m starting to notice a pattern: I keep recycling the same kinds of stuff. Floating objects. Glowing things. Cults. Always a cult. And the thing is, even though I’m using random tables and oracles, it still ends up looping through the same creative ruts.
I think that no matter if we prep ahead or improvise at the table, we rely on the same methods: pulling from existing content, using random tables, making stuff up, or free-associating from vague prompts.
But all of them have limits: either the material runs dry or you do. Even spark tables, which I love and use often (shoutout to Random Realities), can’t fully save you from your own mental habits. So I’ve been wondering: is there a tool that can actually dislodge you from your creative defaults, and help you make something that feels truly new?
You knew this was coming, but yeah, I made a tool for that.
Behold, Weird, Whimsy & Wonder (I also drew this cover art with a combination of photobashing public domain art and my own sketches, which was fun. Please appreciate the fishdude. I love the fishdude).
I could’ve come up with a large set of random tables with predefined out-of-the-box entries full of strange ideas, but that would have only got you so far (and also, Monte Cook Games already published ‘The Weird’, which does just that, brilliantly). Soon enough, those once unique entries would start to feel like the tired ones, or just be completely out of place for your context.
Instead, I opt to create a tight procedure—also aided by random tables, mind you—that allows you to start with a spark of an idea and elevate it to make it eerie, delightful or majestic. You push, pull, stretch, combine, morph and voilà, something your players will never forget.
You can craft encounters, NPCs, locations, monsters, items and more, using the same procedure. It’s great for GM prep or improv, and also fantastic for solo players.
You can see it in action here (or read a full example here):
I’m taking it to BackerKit, and I’m partnering with Critical Kit to offer the physical version as well. This is my first time on BK, and with physical tiers, and I am terrified. Can't do this without your help.
The pre-launch page is already up so you can follow today—and if you back it in the first 48 hours, you get a free postcard with a unique random table on the back—The Weird-o-Mator, instant formulas to weirdify anything.
Also, there's a FREE ONLINE DEMO you can try out today. Just follow the link.
Get excited about Weird, Whimsy & Wonder: fill your TTRPG sessions with awe! on BackerKit - come join!
Back now and get:
✅ The core book
✅ Interactive PDF (unlocked)
✅ Web App (unlocked)
✅ Bundles w/ Everspark, Random Realities, Against the Wind
✅ Add-on store w/ 6 physical games
I gotta be honest, I’m getting real tired of my own ideas.
I’m running a long-running Everspark campaign for my home group (over 30 sessions now!), and while it’s been amazing, I’m starting to notice a pattern: I keep recycling the same kinds of stuff. Floating objects. Glowing things. Cults. Always a cult. And the thing is, even though I’m using random tables and oracles, it still ends up looping through the same creative ruts.
I think that no matter if we prep ahead or improvise at the table, we rely on the same methods: pulling from existing content, using random tables, making stuff up, or free-associating from vague prompts.
But all of them have limits: either the material runs dry or you do. Even spark tables, which I love and use often (shoutout to Random Realities), can’t fully save you from your own mental habits. So I’ve been wondering: is there a tool that can actually dislodge you from your creative defaults, and help you make something that feels truly new?
You knew this was coming, but yeah, I made a tool for that.
Behold, Weird, Whimsy & Wonder (I also drew this cover art with a combination of photobashing public domain art and my own sketches, which was fun. Please appreciate the fishdude. I love the fishdude).
I could’ve come up with a large set of random tables with predefined out-of-the-box entries full of strange ideas, but that would have only got you so far (and also, Monte Cook Games already published ‘The Weird’, which does just that, brilliantly). Soon enough, those once unique entries would start to feel like the tired ones, or just be completely out of place for your context.
Instead, I opt to create a tight procedure—also aided by random tables, mind you—that allows you to start with a spark of an idea and elevate it to make it eerie, delightful or majestic. You push, pull, stretch, combine, morph and voilà, something your players will never forget.
You can craft encounters, NPCs, locations, monsters, items and more, using the same procedure. It’s great for GM prep or improv, and also fantastic for solo players.
You can see it in action here (or read a full example here):
I’m taking it to BackerKit, and I’m partnering with Critical Kit to offer the physical version as well. This is my first time on BK, and with physical tiers, and I am terrified. Can't do this without your help.
The pre-launch page is already up so you can follow today—and if you back it in the first 48 hours, you get a free postcard with a unique random table on the back—The Weird-o-Mator, instant formulas to weirdify anything.
Also, there's a FREE ONLINE DEMO you can try out today. Just follow the link.
Get excited about Weird, Whimsy & Wonder: fill your TTRPG sessions with awe! on BackerKit - come join!
The One-Page RPG Jam just wrapped up. I’ve joined every year since I started making games, and although I almost missed the deadline this time, inspiration struck at the last moment, and I just had to run with it.
The optional theme this year was growth, and after a week of half-formed ideas, something clicked: what if there was a tool that let us imagine the history of a world before the "first age" of adventurers? A cosmology generator, a mythmaker.
With just a standard deck of cards, 1–6 players, and a single page of rules, you take on the role of primordial gods shaping a new world. From its very inception, through ages of Elder Beings, Avatars, Wonders, cataclysms, and finally the arrival of Mortal Kins with their wars and migrations, you will weave myths of divine drama and strife, all the while drawing the map of the world itself.
Here’s a snapshot from one of my recent playtests:
I think it turned out pretty cool!
Fun fact: I actually recreated this game from scratch three times. The first draft was a complete headless mess. The second version morphed into a board game which, while fun, felt too mechanical and perfunctory. Finally, I landed where I wanted to be—a tool for crafting the origin myths of a world.
You know, I was so excited yesterday to just get something out, that I actually completely forgot something I told myself I wanted to do when writing these posts: Not just explain the rules and mechanics, but also the reasoning behind those mechanics. So let's get that out of the way for the "Making A Shot" mechanic first.
Pinball is very much about controlling the chaos. The ball is darting around the table, colliding with all sorts of obstacles, a lot of which are explicitly designed to have the ball ricochet right back at high speed. Lots of people starting out with pinball will just wildly press the flipper buttons to keep the ball from draining, but more experienced pinball players will make aimed shots and use techniques to get the ball under control. This is what I wanted to emulate with the Control mechanic and the cards. Drawing cards from a deck is inherently random, but of course, the more cards you draw at once, the higher your chance of getting the one you want. So having a higher Control value means drawing more cards, which emulates having more control over the ball. But the more cards you take at once, the more shots you're trying to make in quick succession, meaning you're losing control over the ball more quickly.
So, that's how you lose control. But how do you gain it. Well, that's where Nudging comes into play.
In pinball, nudging the machine to influence the way the ball will roll is a key technique that every player has to learn to use to be competitive (I admit, I myself struggle with it still). But if you could just shuffle the machine around willy-nilly, the game would lose most of its skill aspect. That's why pinball machines have mechanisms in place to keep players from overdoing it with the nudging: Do it to much or too heavily, and you get a warning. Get three warnings, and you'll "Tilt", which means the game will turn off your flippers, guaranteeing that your ball will drain. And you won't even get the end of ball bonus you usually get when your ball normally drains.
So, how does that work in Silverball Strike? Well, before I explain that, let me quickly say that, while I initially had my own idea for it, I eventually had a "Eureka" moment where I realized that the ideal way to do this would be to just steal someone else's idea.
Push by @capacle is a neat little rules-lite system which is - as the title might suggest - all about pushing your luck. Which, of course, is what nudging is all about. So, let me just quickly borrow and modify Push's core mechanic (hope it's okay Cezar!) for the Nudging mechanic:
As said in my last post everyone has a Low Tilt Tolerance (LTT) of 5 and a High Tilt Tolerance (HTT) of 6. I'm still thinking about how those could be modified during a campaign, or maybe even character creation.
If you decide to use the Nudge action on your turn, you roll 1d6. If the result is at least equal to your LTT, while not exceeding your HTT (or in other words, going with the starting values stated above, if it's a 5 or a 6), you gain 2 points of Control! If your result is lower than your LTT, you get a choice: You can either gain 1 Control AND 1 Warning, or you can roll again. If you roll again, you have to add your new result to your old result. If the total is still lower than your LTT, you get to make the same choice again, and if you decide to roll again, you add the new result to the sum of the previous results, and so on. So if, on your first roll, you roll a 1 and roll again, and then on your second you roll a 2, you now have a total of 3. If you now decide to roll again, you have to add the new result to that 3.
But beware! If your total ever exceeds your HTT (so, assuming base stats, it becomes 7 or higher), you will JUST get a Warning, while gaining no Control, and your turn ends.
So, what's up with these Warnings? Well, they don't do anything for the first two... but once you get your third one, you immediately lose a ball, as well as all face cards lying in front of you. But also, of course, your Warnings will be reset to 0.
And... that's Nudging. Feel free to ask questions, btw. I'm gonna open the Ask Box as soon as I publish this post.
I gotta be honest, I’m getting real tired of my own ideas.
I’m running a long-running Everspark campaign for my home group (over 30 sessions now!), and while it’s been amazing, I’m starting to notice a pattern: I keep recycling the same kinds of stuff. Floating objects. Glowing things. Cults. Always a cult. And the thing is, even though I’m using random tables and oracles, it still ends up looping through the same creative ruts.
I think that no matter if we prep ahead or improvise at the table, we rely on the same methods: pulling from existing content, using random tables, making stuff up, or free-associating from vague prompts.
But all of them have limits: either the material runs dry or you do. Even spark tables, which I love and use often (shoutout to Random Realities), can’t fully save you from your own mental habits. So I’ve been wondering: is there a tool that can actually dislodge you from your creative defaults, and help you make something that feels truly new?
You knew this was coming, but yeah, I made a tool for that.
Behold, Weird, Whimsy & Wonder (I also drew this cover art with a combination of photobashing public domain art and my own sketches, which was fun. Please appreciate the fishdude. I love the fishdude).
I could’ve come up with a large set of random tables with predefined out-of-the-box entries full of strange ideas, but that would have only got you so far (and also, Monte Cook Games already published ‘The Weird’, which does just that, brilliantly). Soon enough, those once unique entries would start to feel like the tired ones, or just be completely out of place for your context.
Instead, I opt to create a tight procedure—also aided by random tables, mind you—that allows you to start with a spark of an idea and elevate it to make it eerie, delightful or majestic. You push, pull, stretch, combine, morph and voilà, something your players will never forget.
You can craft encounters, NPCs, locations, monsters, items and more, using the same procedure. It’s great for GM prep or improv, and also fantastic for solo players.
You can see it in action here (or read a full example here):
I’m taking it to BackerKit, and I’m partnering with Critical Kit to offer the physical version as well. This is my first time on BK, and with physical tiers, and I am terrified. Can't do this without your help.
The pre-launch page is already up so you can follow today—and if you back it in the first 48 hours, you get a free postcard with a unique random table on the back—The Weird-o-Mator, instant formulas to weirdify anything.
Also, there's a FREE ONLINE DEMO you can try out today. Just follow the link.
Get excited about Weird, Whimsy & Wonder: fill your TTRPG sessions with awe! on BackerKit - come join!
Everspark is finalist as Best Indie TTRPG of the Year!!
I'm thrilled to announce that Everspark is a finalist as Best Indie TTRPG of the Year at the Crit Awards, among other incredible games!
Isn't that fantastic? If you want to cast a vote for Everspark (or any other of your preference, really), here's how:
There are 50 categories to vote for (you don't need to vote for all of them, but they are all there for your consideration)
The voting form is here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf8YSKrjEei20hfNnH1TgJ3MgeNoTcjEcEuT_zaOVWHASuCXQ/viewform
If you want to read the list with all the finalists first, follow this link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1REC7Pu8P6saFltG8sA-e7tdAz9_2BQFlM1LhTfHkyKs/edit
Thank you so much for your support and enthusiasm!
You can find the Prompts podcast here, I drew some of the covers :D Also check out this digital library full of Creative Commons Solarpunk art (neither of these are sponsored).
🦗Somewhat shameful plug🦗
I would highly appreciate if you threw me a couple bucks on Buy Me a Coffee or bought a commission, my money number is only getting smaller these days 😔🤙
Before the Storm is a solo journaling RPG about the electric stillness before a high-stakes operation—a heist, an assassination, a stealth infiltration. You are already in position: perched in the shadows, breath held, waiting for the moment to strike. The job is minutes away, but your mind is racing, your senses heightened. This is the calm before everything changes.
Using a standard deck of playing cards, you’ll draw prompts that describe what you feel, hear, see and think. Perched in the shadows, you reflect, observe, and brace for impact—while building a puzzle-like poker hand that reveals your state of mind in the final breath before action.
You can play it standalone as a complete solo experience, with prompts that help you envision your character, their mission, and a setting that can range from medieval to cyberpunk. Or slot it into an ongoing campaign to zoom in on a moment of quiet tension before a mission.
Each card gives you a moment: something you sense, remember, question, or notice in the shadows while waiting for the right moment to act. A leading question guides your reflection: about your state of mind, your past, your doubts, or your instincts.
But that’s just half of it.
Alongside the narrative, you’ll be playing a custom variation of poker solitaire. As you draw each card, you place it onto the table, building a grid. Your goal is to form the strongest possible poker hand in a straight line—horizontal, vertical, or diagonal.
Each new card must be placed adjacent to the last. Your entire layout must fit within an imaginary 5x5 grid. If you place a card outside that space, the grid shifts—and you’ll lose any cards left behind. The rules are quite simple (less than three pages), but the strategic tension builds fast (I have to say, this card mechanic works surprisingly well as its own solo puzzle game).
When you finally complete a line of five cards, the game ends. That line becomes your poker hand, and its strength determines your emotional and mental state in the final moment before action.
From there, you can leave the scene as a cliffhanger. Or jump into your system of choice to play out the mission itself. If you’re using Before the Storm as a plug-and-play, your final hand can offer narrative momentum—or even mechanical advantages and complications, depending on the system you’re using.
So if this feels like your jam, check out the campaign and help me spread the word!
A solo journaling RPG where you play the tense, silent moments before a high-stakes mission. Perched in the shadows, you reflect, observe, a
There’s a fascinating phenomenon I observe every time I play with beginners.
Of all the unwritten rules new players are expected to grasp through play, a very common one is when to interject their narrative with a dice roll. Sure, most games have a variation of “describe what you want to do, and then roll the dice to see how it goes,” but exactly when one should stop narrating what happens and let the dice tell part of the story is more of an art form.
I usually see beginners falling somewhere between one of two ends of the spectrum. There’s either:
Player: “I swing my sword at them and cut them in half, and I look around, and the princess has fallen in love with me.”
GM: “Wait, wait, wait. Let’s, uh… start with the attack roll first. How about that?”
Or:
GM: “It’s your turn.”
Player: “Oh.” *rolls a d20*
GM: “Wait, wait, wait. What are you even trying to do?”
It usually takes a few rolls (or a few sessions), but once we grasp that timing, it becomes so second nature that any game that subverts that norm feels… weird.
Well, it just so happens that I love weird.
“I punch them and knock them out.” Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash
The misfortunes of fortune
When I say “norm” above, I’m oversimplifying. Different games have different moments when you’re expected to stop and roll the dice. Even within the same game, different types of action might call for different timing in rolls.
This "dice roll placement" is what is normally referred to as fortune positioning, and if you search online for “fortune in the middle”, for example, you’ll find… well, contradicting definitions. But that’s beside the point. What’s important is that fortune positioning determines at which point in the trajectory from declaration of intent and narrated outcome we stop to check the dice (or any form of resolution mechanic, really).
Traditionally, players learn when and how to do it by experience—observing their friends, absorbing table culture, and getting it wrong a few times until they get a feel for it.
For some actions, it is easier to tell the right moment. If you are using a specific ability, there’s usually a well-defined order in which things happen. You say, “I’m going to activate my Soul Blast” or whatever, and we go, “OK, roll, and then we see what happens.”
Things get murkier when there’s no hard-coded procedures, like social situations in trad games. You perform that incredible speech but roll poorly—now what? Do we undo what you just said? Do we make some mental gymnastics to justify why it didn’t land? Should you have gotten a bonus because of your roleplay? But if your character is not very charismatic in the first place, should they have even been able to articulate such a compelling argument? Endless discussions over this topic alone have filled forums for the past decades.
Even when games have a much clearer instruction about fortune positioning—like PbtA games, which literally have a trigger for every move—it is still an acquired skill to understand when to shut your mouth and say, “Well, I guess we have to roll now, right?”.
“Well, I guess I actually insulted the king instead.” Photo by Julia Taubitz on Unsplash
Fortune at the extremes
There’s no one solution for that situation, because, at least for me, it is not a problem to begin with. I see it instead as a fertile ground for experimentation.
I’ve tried different approaches for fortune positioning with my games, and I especially like to push the needle beyond what’s usually considered the far ends of the spectrum. Let me explain what I mean.
See, when people describe “fortune at the end”, it usually implies that you describe everything that your character is able to do to affect the outcome, then you roll the dice, and then narrate the result. But what if you narrated even the outcome before you rolled the dice?
That’s what I did in Insurgent. The game says:
Regardless of your result, everything you describe happens exactly how you describe it. The roll of the dice determines the fallout of your action.
See, the dice don’t determine whether you succeed in your intended action. Instead, you describe the whole action beforehand, including its result. The dice inform the consequences of your action. A “fortune at the very end” kind of roll, perhaps?
At the other end of the spectrum, we have “fortune at the beginning,” which is usually described as rolling right after a declaration of intent and approach, using the dice result to inform what and how it happens. But… can’t we go even further back? What if we rolled before we decided what to do?
Fortune at point zero
That example at the beginning—the player enthusiastically reaching for the dice and rolling even before clarifying their intention—always stuck with me. What if we didn’t try to stop it, but instead leaned into it as the intended behavior?
For that to work, I figured that the system would have to follow these criteria:
All rolls in the game should be the same.
A roll is expected to be made at every turn.
There should be meaningful choices after the roll is made.
I finally managed to pull it off in my latest release, Load the Simulation. Let me show you how I followed these criteria and why I believe it works.
At the top of your turn, before you even think about your action, you grab 3d6 and roll them. It’s always 3d6, and there are no modifiers. If you had attributes, skills or actions that indicated different modifiers (like d20 systems), dice pools (as in Blades in the Dark), dice sizes (as in Savage Worlds), or dice pools and sizes (like in Cortex Prime), that wouldn’t work. You’d at least need to declare your approach before rolling. I didn’t want that, so all rolls are the same (meeting the first criterion).
These rolls happen during the training exercise—your character is on a centuries-long mission to prepare exoplanets for colonization, and you’re going through training simulations (think The Matrix, X-Men or Star Trek). Since every turn represents an attempt to progress toward your mission objective, a roll is always required (meeting the second criterion). In a more open-ended scenario, that assumption wouldn’t necessarily apply.
Each die represents something different:
• The YOU die – Your character’s effort.
• The FOE die – The opposition.
• The ECO die – The environment.
You roll them together and arrange the results in a vertical line on the table, from highest to lowest— the Stack. The die with the highest roll determines the dominant force in the scene. If the YOU die is not the highest, you’ll take Conditions. You have to choose whether to affect:
Your body (Harm) – Bruises, burns, or worse.
Your mind (Stress) – The slow wear of fear and pressure.
Your relationships (Friction) – Putting crewmates in danger, failing to have their back, or blaming them for your mistakes.
You can also choose to break one of your modules to avoid a condition, or use them in the scene to break a tie. So there’s this short mini-game you play after you roll to determine the mechanical implications of your roll (the third criterion).
With all the mechanical bits resolved, you’re left with a scene to paint. The roll generated a lot of input, and you can create a rich narrative that won’t later be contradicted by a dice roll.
Say the ECO die is higher, and you marked Friction. How does the environment take central stage, and how does that affect your bonds with your crewmates? Perhaps a tremor opens a giant crack in the ground, you grab your friend by the arm to keep balance, but end up sending them tumbling down near the edge of the cliff. That is… so much fun!
You get to look at the dice as a fortune-teller reading runes, and extract juicy, colorful fiction from the results. You decide if you’re in a more active position, taking the lead and making progress, or in a more reactive one, trying to resist this alien world that is trying to crush you.
See, it is not that you are abdicating control over what your character does by rolling before deciding. You still have total freedom of choice, but you’re informed of the outcome beforehand, so you get to frame that snippet of a scene, including actions and reactions, in a vivid way that incorporates everything you accomplished and everything you suffered in the process. And I think that’s neat.
There’s more nuance to it (each combination of dice position has different mechanical ramifications), but that’s the gist of it. I’m certainly not the first person to think of the roll first, think later approach to resolution mechanics, but I am really excited about how I managed to implement it in Load the Simulation.
If you want to learn more about this game of high-octane training simulations and intense interpersonal conflict, the crowdfunding campaing started yesterday and I'd love your support.
A sci-fi tabletop RPG for 1 to 4 players where brutal training simulations prepare you for an unknown mission. Fight, adapt, and struggle wi
Load the Simulation is a tabletop role-playing game set aboard a massive spaceship on a centuries-long mission to discover and prepare exoplanets for colonization. Players take on the roles of crew members selected not for their prestige but as the essential yet overlooked backbone of the mission—explorers, frontierspeople, and problem solvers who are also expected to clean up any messes (literal or figurative) they encounter along the way.
Waking from cryogenic sleep, these characters find themselves thrust into rigorous and unpredictable training simulations orchestrated by the ship’s AI, DAX. Each day, they are dropped into a different simulated environment—wildly alien, utterly unpredictable, and filled with potential threats—to prepare them for the unknown dangers that await when the ship finally reaches its destination. Think of the high-octane training sequences from The Matrix, the Danger Room in X-Men, or the holodecks in Star Trek.
Outside the simulations, players navigate the interpersonal challenges and emotional tensions of life aboard a confined spaceship. Bonds are formed and frayed as crewmates work together to overcome challenges, while personal goals and differences create moments of connection and conflict. Between these dynamics, players spend time recovering in the medical bay, repairing and upgrading their gear, and working on personal projects to keep their minds sharp. All the while, they grapple with the emotional strain of an extreme voyage into the unknown, unraveling hints of a deeper mystery about the mission’s true purpose.
The campaign just launched with a limited Early Bird discount, so check it out! There's some more explanation of the system on the page as well!
A sci-fi tabletop RPG for 1 to 4 players where brutal training simulations prepare you for an unknown mission. Fight, adapt, and struggle wi
