while I'm happy to be called out for incorrect information and, admittedly, Rolemaster is the one game in the list I haven't played or at least read myself, I am extremely curious what exactly I'm looking at here if not a table upon which you might find locations that a person could be hit
obviously it does bill itself as a critical hit table, but that's a hair I'm simply not willing to split. but then again, maybe that's why I'm not a Rolemaster player lol
In reference to your recent post about ttrpg adaptations that don't let you play characters like the protagonists in the source material, what in your opinion are the best examples of ttrpg adaptations of media where one character is dramatically more capable and important to the narrative than the others which (1) let you play that character (2) make the game fun for all players (3) without just making everyone a Timelord/Avatar/whatever?
I think it's actually kind of bizarre that this keeps getting brought up as a show-stopping issue with these types of adaptations in order to justify not letting people play as character who resemble the source material, because it's been a solved problem for decades. Not just in obscure indie games, either; Ars Magica had it mostly figured out way back in 1987, while possibly the best known mainstream example is the 2002 Cinematic Unisystem adaptation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In the case of Ars Magica, its solution involves troupe-style play, where each player creates both an extremely powerful wizard character and a non-magic-using "companion" character who acts as the personal assistant or bodyguard to a different player's wizard; play is then arranged so that only one player's wizard is "on camera" at any given time, with that player's companion character being occupied elsewhere. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer adaptation, meanwhile, implements a metagame currency for dramatic editing, with the players of non-Slayer characters receiving a much better "exchange rate" on that currency than the Slayer's player.
In other games, the matter doesn't need to be addressed in the first place, because the axis by which game-mechanical "power" is measured doesn't overlap with the axes on which some characters are "better" than others. The 2010 Cortex adaptation of Smallville, for example, is perfectly willing to let one player be Clark Kent and another be Lois Lane, because you're not rolling Strength + Athletics to get shit done – you're rolling your sense of justice plus your relationship with your father (if those are the values and bonds that happen to be relevant). Indeed, depending on the circumstance, Lois Lane might well be slinging around bigger numbers than Clark Kent!
I fully understand that these examples have to make some fairly substantial accommodations, but this is only a problem if we're unwilling to depart from a model of play that's essentially reducible to a party of first-level D&D characters smashing rats in a basement. Are we really saying that we're less willing to think outside the box than fucking Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
(And that's excluding examples which are simply willing to let a game-mechanical power difference stand without accommodation. It's not like this doesn't happen in conventional tabletop RPGs anyway.)
I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.
A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.
The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.
The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.
A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.
A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.
Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.
Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.
Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".
"This spell causes the hair to fall off cats." "It works with my tome"
"This spell causes the hair to fall off cats." "That's fixed in Xaranthius' latest publication, you just have to rewrite your entire spellbook for compatibility."
"This spell causes the hair to fall of cats." "Magister Olaus of Writhington uses it to help with his allergies. WORKING AS INTENDED."
I want to see wizards snarking at each other over different magical languages/scripts, the same way programmers do it over different languages.
Sure, "High Tower is a powerful language, but it's such a pain to write. I just use Unity* as it's simple to write and can do nearly everything I need" "cranky because you can't memorize all the conjugations and declensions, aren't you?" "LOOK MAN, I CAN MEMORIZE ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACE OF YOUR MOTHER IN ECSTASY. IN FACT, BEHOLD!" *a little time window appears between them, demonstrating exactly that. The first wizard (seen through the window) turns around and winks at the "camera".
"you kids today with your lizardman. How can you get anything done in a language without gendered pronouns? It's like fingerpainting. Sure you can learn on it but once you've got the basics you should switch over to a REAL language"
"the Kalic have been here already. We better get out before the rest of their army marches in." "how can you be sure?" "you see that teleport?" "no" "well, if you COULD see it, you'd see it's written in Adevic Yevi. That's the Kalic magic language." "couldn't it be someone else? We saw those Monon traders, maybe one of them..." "no. No one writes Adevic Yevi unless they're being paid to. It's a language written by committee."
Wizards going on a quest to get the spellbooks for a lost spell, only to find out that it was written in skydove cant. No one can read that shit! The creator must have been one of those weird "functional wizards". (They're obsessed with making sure their spells have no side effects)
There's a small library on the outskirts of Freeport which tries to collect versions of basic spells in every language. The Adevic Yevi version of "fireball" takes up 7 pages, mostly boilerplate setting up the interfaces with fire and explosions and ExplodingMagicalBallFactorySingletons. The Lizardman version is basically "AHAHAHA, YOU GO BOOM!"
There's a bunch of wizard apprentices working on porting an old "Summon Bread and Fishes" spell from the absolutely archaic language it was written in. Once it's in Unity, it'll be easy to modify and teach to more wizards, which'll obviously be good for disaster areas. It's just too expensive to keep paying the ancient guys who can still do magic in TRAN-FOR.
Eccentric wizards keep inventing new languages for spells. You look at them and they're neat, but it'll never catch on. And either you're right, or the next time you're applying to be a court wizard, the advisors want to know if you have at least 5 years experience in Tilted Runic and you're like "it only came out 2 years ago!" "aren't you a chronomancer?" "oh good point. Yeah I've been using it for 20-30 years."
There's wizards who will spend incredible amounts of time doing silly things with spells in strange ways. There's this guy (Vorth) who made his own language where there's only one basic spell: fireball. Everything else is basic magic glue tying multiple fireballs together. So like, he's got a breakfast spell. Stand back (good advice for all his spells), and you'll see a fish get knocked out of the local pond, flung through the air by successive explosions, and eventually it lands on his plate, nicely cooked and deboned, if slightly charred (the glass of milk is harder to explain). His magical door locks involve a quicksilver sphere and molten lead changing shape when heated... It's tricky but it seems to work. He's working on a teleport spell, but so far it's mainly just killed test subjects (primarily sheep from a nearby farm).
* so the funny thing here is that this isn't a reference to the unity game engine. The main country in my One Hundred and One Magical Pistols setting is called "the union" and their language is called "unity".
Wanders are like "they're available everywhere and once you learn how to do it it's so powerful!"
Staffguys always talk about how you can do ANYTHING with a staff. Wanders claim it's a pain to carry around an overpowered device that can do ANYTHING when you just need to cast fireball or a simple one man teleport.
Meanwhile the bare wizards are showing off how they don't need any magical tools and can just do hand motions.
Wanders and staffguys retort that when a spell goes wrong, THEY need to go to store for a new magical tool. YOU need new hands.
Something’s wrong with the world and I don’t know what it is.
It used to be better, of course it did. In the golden age of legend, when there was enough to eat and enough hope, when there was one nation under god and people could lift their eyes and see beyond the horizon, beyond the day. Children were born happy and grew up rich.
Now that’s not what we’ve got. Now we’ve got this. Hardholders stand against the screaming elements and all comers, keeping safe as many as they can. Angels and savvyheads run constant battle against there’s not enough and bullets fly and everything breaks. Hocuses gather people around them, and are they protectors, saviors, visionaries, or just wishful thinkers? Choppers, gunluggers, and battlebabes carve out what they can and defend it with blood and bullets. Drivers search and scavenge, looking for that opportunity, that one perfect chance. Skinners and the maestro d’ remember beauty, or invent beauty anew, cup it in their hands and whisper come and see, and don’t worry now what it will cost you. And brainers, oh, brainers see what none of the rest of us will: the world’s psychic maelstrom, the terrible desperation and hate pressing in at the edge of all perception, it is the world now.
And you, who are you? This is what we’ve got, yes. What are you going to make of it?
Apocalypse World is the award-winning and critically acclaimed game that launched the Powered by the Apocalypse school of rpg design.
One of the games of all time. Whatever your feelings on Powered by the Apocalypse as a framework may be, I encourage you to look at the original Apocalypse World because there's a lot in there that a lot of PbtA games haven't followed up on. It's a game that is so much more than just playbooks and moves and 2d6 with varied degrees of success.
Also, it's not an adventure game, don't run it as an adventure game, the player characters are not a "party" going on "adventures", I swear to god,
I wasn't impressed by the first PbtA game I encountered, and I kind of wrote the whole system off.
Later, a friend recommended Apocalypse World, and it was an absolute revelation.
The thing I always come back to is how it handles violence, and in the process weds the story to the mechanics.
Let's say that, in D&D, you want to threaten someone. Give me the McGuffin, or I'll hit you with my sword.
You deliver the threat, alongside an Intimidate roll. Assuming the roll fails, you now get to decide if you're going to enter into combat. Once you enter into combat, you get to decide if you're actually going to make an attack roll.
There are so many opportunities to bail out of the violence. You get so much fine control over whether violence actually happens.
In Apocalypse World, that entire process falls under a single move, with a single dice-roll:
In D&D, the threat of violence is a scalpel. In Apocalypse World, it's a chainsaw.
This accomplishes two things - one, it makes violent situations messy. The player decides to open the violence box, knowing they don't get a ton of control over what comes out. And two, it requires your violence to be story-driven. There is no baseline "hit them" move*. The player has use "go aggro" or "seize by force" or maybe "act under fire", and in the process has to decide what they're really trying to accomplish.
As for "adventures"… yeah, holy shit, this was the most delightful shock. When I ran Apocalypse World, without any intention on my part, it very quickly morphed into a violent soap opera. Our sessions very naturally spawned a huge cast of NPCs - way more than I would have ever set out to create - and the players just automatically kept track of them, and their relationships. I've never seen a roleplay dynamic like this; it was incredible.
* There's the "exchange harm" move, but you don't get to invoke it on demand; it's invoked by other moves.
apocalypse world was the first non-D&D game I ran, what a good fuckin game. Very few pbta games live up to it (said as, generally, a pbta-enjoyer)
The Bakers have a bunch of other cool games too such as
Under Hollow Hills: be a traveling fae circus
The Thief and the Necromancer: you're pals
(Sort of) DOGS: Dice pool and mOral predicament based Generic roleplaying System. Technically a setting neutral version of a game Vincent Baker wrote and subsequently erased from the internet for personal reasons, later turned into the setting neutral version (with permission) by a different author. Apart from the interesting history, it's also just a cool game
I think an important part of the "D&D is easy to learn" argument is that a lot of those people don't actually know how to play D&D. They know they need to roll a d20 and add some numbers and sometimes they need to roll another type of die for damage. A part of it is the culture of basically fucking around and letting the GM sort it out. Players don't actually feel the need to learn the rules.
Now I don't think the above actually counts as knowing the rules. D&D is a relatively crunchy game that actually rewards system mastery and actually learning how to play D&D well, as in to make mechanically informed tactical decisions and utilizing the mechanics to your advantage, is actually a skill that needs to be learned and cultivated. None of that is to say that you need to be a perfectly tuned CharOp machine to know how to play D&D. But to actually start to make the sorts of decisions D&D as a game rewards you kind of need to know the rules.
And like, a lot of people don't seem to know the rules. They know how to play D&D in the most abstract sense of knowing that they need to say things and sometimes the person scowling at them from behind the screen will ask them to roll a die. But that's hardly engaging with the mechanics of the game, like the actual game part.
And to paraphrase @prokopetz this also contributes to the impression that other games are hard to learn: because a lot of other games don't have the same culture of play of D&D so like instead of letting new players coast by with a shallow understanding of the rules and letting the GM do all the work, they ask players to start making mechanically informed decisions right away. Sure, it can suck for onboarding, but learning from your mistakes can often be a great way to learn.
When you have people that have actually done some reading on the rules vs. people that just coast and foist the majority of the game onto the GM, it makes it appear like the more knowledgeable players are sweaty power-gamers or rules-laywers.
Best example I've got with asking players to make informed decisions was when I ran the Wilderfeast Quick Start. The GM has the info about what ingredients can be gathered in any of the regions, but the party then has to cook it. They know what the ingredient does and just have to make the decision on how they want to combine their ingredients as a party.
#i just wanna play a silly game#i feel like. gatekept. while reading this#i don’t have the drive to read a several hundred pg game manual i just wanna play a game w my friends#like. it’s a game. play it how u want#jeeze
My point is not to say that people who don't want to learn the rules shouldn't play, only that people who don't actually know the rules aren't necessarily engaging with the game to its fullest, especially in the case of a relatively rules-heavy game like D&D, and that as the previous poster mentioned it can actually result in a bad rules dynamic where the DM needs to do more work due to player unwillingness to learn the rules as well as casting players who actually know the rules and can engage with them in unfavorable light. All of these are negative elements of the culture of play surrounding.
Like, there isn't anything meaningfully gatekeepy about saying "players who don't know the rules of the game aren't as good at playing the game as the people who know the rules of the game." Because playing games is a skill that can be cultivated and knowledge of the rules is an important part of that skill.
And respectfully, if the idea of learning the rules of D&D seems like an insurmountable task, you don't have to learn them, but you might actually gain something out of actually making an effort because it can make engaging with the game more rewarding for you. Or if the idea of learning the rules of a game that has hundreds of pages is an insurmountable obstacle, there are lots of games with much more modest page counts! D&D is actually relatively heavy as far as RPGs go but it's not the only RPG, and you can get rewarding mechanical engagement combined with cool stories for a much smaller time investment.
Pointing out that, if you're playing a game with a several-hundred-page rulebook and haven't even made the effort to read the parts of it relevant to your character, then you're pushing a lot of cognitive load onto your friends, isn't gatekeeping. Nobody's kicking you out of your group for it.
i also think that the OP is kind of more about the people who bite back against people going "hey, maybe try something other than D&D" with "but those games are too crunchy/hard to learn" when they don't even really know the actual rules of D&D. i mean, i've had people like this push back against learning PbtA games.
i really hope this was just an unusual case, but i've even had that exist response from one of the local DMs where i live, when i invited him to be a player in a game of Masks i was starting up.
Oh yeah, that was definitely the original context. And it's really funny to hear "learning another game is hard" as a reason for not engaging in game beyond D&D when clearly people are not learning D&D either if they consider the act of reading the rules beyond the pale.
The folks this post is about are the reason you get dudes on Reddit posting about prepping to DM games for 60+ hours a week and still feeling inadequate.
At this point, it’s a fun game for *almost* everyone at the table. And nobody wants to take on the role that has you showing up to game night with a wagon full of paper, an external hard drive, and a heart condition due to anxiety.
Be kind to your GM. Learn bits of the rules and help out :)
Quite so. If you just want to fool around and occasionally roll some shiny math rocks, that's a perfectly cromulent aspiration, and there are plenty of games that will give you exactly that – but if you just want to fool around and occasionally roll some shiny math rocks while simultaneously insisting upon using a rules-heavy system whose rules you refuse to learn, what you're doing in practice is making the GM do all the work of playing your character for you. It isn't gatekeeping to point this out; it's simply a fact. To be sure, there are a few GMs who are receptive to that sort of thing – it's often termed "black box" play in the hobby's jargon, likening the rules to a box the players can't see inside – but most GMs merely tolerate having all the work of making your character happen dumped on them for the sake of avoiding drama. It can be worthwhile to think carefully about whether this is something you're really okay with doing to someone you call a friend.
Like, there's this stereotype of the "play literally any other game" crowd as a bunch of arty snobs who want to force everybody to play semi-freeform Jungian psychodramas about giant telepathic bugs or what-have-you, but in my experience, the greater part of them are folks who've been GMing Dungeons & Dragons for years, and spent that time single-handedly doing all the work of making the game happen, and all they really want is for their group to pick a game whose baked-in expectations regarding mechanical engagement are compatible with the level of engagement they're actually willing to put forth!
Mage The Ascension lore is so fucking funny. The Demiurge is real and it's the friends we made along the way.
The Super Secret Organization that tries to control reality organized the Apollo 11 mission to try to make werewolves weaker but the sheer sense of wonder and amazement the moon landing caused made fairies active again.
Said super secret organization also own several terminator like robots, several space bases (because if a wizard is powerful enough they can't exist near civilization without getting vibe checked by reality) and a Dyson Sphere
So today I want to talk a bit about what this game wants to be. In particular, I'm going to go over its key technical and artistic goals.
The Far Roofs focuses on immersive hidden world fantasy adventure. It's intended to offer the experience of a grounded, emotionally real base world attached to an idealized, fantastic "hidden world" setting.
One might say, the streets and buildings and houses of the game's world are basically our own. Above us, though, is a stranger, more idealized, and more fantastic place. It's hard to get to. It's dangerous. It's less grounded. It's full of wonder.
Those are the Far Roofs.
This divide exists to make the game feel as real as possible, if you want to go that way. That's part of what hidden world fantasy is about, after all---the idea that magic is here. That it's not in some distant alien land or mythic future or past.
It's here, if you want to reach for it.
(Now, the game is flexible enough that you can play "protagonist" types instead of realer people, and many traditional gaming groups will probably prefer that, but that'll mean getting less of that immersive effect.)
The mood the game is interested in is that feeling you get when you take a huge risk---move to a new place; try a new thing. The feeling you get in those times in your life when everything is alienated and wondrous and terrifying but there's also so much more *hope* than there was in the still times before.
It's a mood of being swept up and called forward.
This is, among other things, meant to be a game for people who've been beaten down or exhausted by the ... everything ... to feel that sensation of moving forward again.
To remember what it's like, why it's worth it, how to reach for it again.
It's meant---and I do understand that I am finite and flawed and this can only go so far---as a tonic and refreshment to the soul.
--
Rules
The Far Roofs uses a 5d6-based dice pool system for day-to-day task resolution. It's relatively traditional and optimized for fast, fun dice reading. There's a loose consensus I've seen in RPG design circles that dice are for when outcomes are uncertain and both options are interesting, and I don't disagree ... but there's also this thing where rolling dice to decide is intrinsically interesting and fun, where it's fuel for a certain part of the brain.
This game tries to get as much out of that side of dice as it can.
You'll also collect letter tiles and cards over the course of the game. This is for bigger-picture stuff:
To answer big questions and to complete big projects, you'll either assemble representative words out of those tiles, or, play a poker hand built out of those cards. Word and their nuances express ideas and shape how outcomes play out; poker hands, conversely, just give a qualitative measure of how much work you do or how well things will go.
In keeping with this, the campaign is represented principally in the form of questions or issues your words and hands can address. Player/GM-created campaigns would be the same.
--
Physical and Electronic Product
I wanted to put the print version within the range of as many people who might need that tonic as possible. That means that for this particular game, I wanted to cover the full territory that I'd normally cover in a two or three volume set (core rules, setting, and campaign) in a single 200-250-page volume.
In practice this means there's a guide and examples for constructing the setting, rather than a deep dive into a fully-detailed world; that there's a bit less in the way of whimsical digression and flourish than in the writing I'm known for; that there's minimal "flavor" text on abilities; and that the campaign presentation is pretty fast-paced.
Conversely, it means that the game should be easy to absorb and to share with other possible players, and, that the game and campaign in this one relatively small volume should provide enough content for five or six years of play.
The book will be 8.5"x11" with grayscale art, available in a limited hardcover print run and a print-on-demand softcover form.
--
On the Rats
You'll see a lot of talk from me and others about the talking rats in this game. They're one of the jewels of the experience, and I think they're probably a significant draw just for being talking rats that are core to the game.
... but I'm going to hold off for now, because, to be clear, this is not a game of playing talking rats. It's just a game where talking rats and probably one of the top three most important setting elements.
I couldn't get that feeling I wanted of ... the base world being grounded realism; of the hidden world pulling you up and out and into a world full of magic ... with your playing rats, with your playing something so distant from the typical player.
So this is not a game of playing them.
They're just ... I like rats, and so I made the rats in this game with love. They're great ... whatever the equivalent is to "psychopomps" is for a magical world instead of for death ... and a way of talking about how in the face of the world, we're all pretty small.
--
I'm really excited about this game; the playtest was lovely.
jerry pretends to understand the rules of shadowrun to impress his new girlfriend. elaine helps him fill out his character sheets but accidentally bases all the characters on famous terrorists she saw on the news. george starts a paid GM service but keeps finding ways to partykill his players so he doesn't have to work the full hour. kramer gets into chuubo's
elaine tries to break up with her goth boyfriend by repeatedly killing his character in her vtm game but discovers that he finds it romantic. george gets into trouble when a botched kickstarter scam puts him on the hook to deliver a 5e licensed adaptation of the dictionary
jerry joins a dream askew table to prove that he's a good roleplayer after his ex-girlfriend calls him a 'trad gamer'. kramer tries to get out of being contracted to write a supplement for an OSR game after he realizes that the creator of the game is racist
I kinda wanna know who it was that started the idea that Powered by the Apocalypse games have few mechanics, because I feel like even the more middle of the pack PbtA games are awash in mechanics.
I wonder if that's maybe the perception because the rules tend to act on less concrete elements (as in, rules that are more directly interfacing with, interacting with, and changing the narrative, which itself is such a fluid concept)?
All the PbtA games I've sunk time into (and have enjoyed!) reward a deep understanding of;
What even is PbtA (not all PbtA games have an equal understanding of this).
System mastery of the game you're playing right now.
A good PbtA sings when you play with the rules, and it feels like the game is lifting up whatever sort of scene or story you're telling.
I think PbtA (and to a similar but slightly different extent Forged in the Dark), have a false reputation of being easy to just pick up and play, when I think you really need to spend some time understanding the rules of the game, and the designer needs to spend time understanding how PbtA works.
Having been involved in some PbtA projects now, good PbtA design is hard. Worthwhile, and rewarding, but hard.
If you haven't yet, you can try out the Martial Epic Fantasy Tabletop RPG skewered through by Southeast Asian story and lore GUBAT BANWA for free with the quickstart! A fantasy take on what a Southeast Asia looked like before the rise of modern borders and categorization!
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Quickstart:
A quickstart for the martial arts fantasy RPG GUBAT BANWA
Musanghari on Itch
Southeast Asian Fantasy Island Zine for Gubat Banwa
Musanghari on DrivethruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/422021/Musanghari
Additionally the game has been given a Patch 1
As we're working with the final text of the doc, the devlog names will now be referred to as Patches or Fixes, rather than 1.X. General clar
I always say that I can only personally reckon with these things, Southeast Asian past, directly through Fantasy because so much of is it lost to us and it is a false venture to found a National Consciousness from Pre-colonial Cultural Artifact so Gubat Banwa is a violent revelry of the things we've lost and the things we know we've lost, the connections removed to us, the similarities severed through borderline and empire. Everyone is welcome to join the feast! Also we should be having our Backerkit set up pretty soon!
Yeah, [indie tabletop RPG] is my very favourite game. I've been obsessed with it for years, and it's been a huge influence on me both as an artist and as a person. Some day I'd love to actually play it.
