Err∅Rose

https://linktr.ee/err0rose Tgirl in the streets, still a Tgirl in the sheets. The names Rose, i just reblog stuff i like, It/She, certified catgirl, member of the homosexual underground, sometimes mildly nsfw, 20

[err0rose]

oooOOOOooooo

Watch my YTPs

oooOOOOOOoooooo

i smoke doobies, lick boobies and pwn noobies Twitch VODs/clips/whatever i feel like she/her

They suck

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

read my stuff also

[zybilna]

Playing @anim-ttrpgs' Murder at the Belle Nuit right now and my character is so deeply miserable. Worst night of her life since her sad backstory's inciting events. She didn't succeed on a single roll this entire past session. She's lost some of the only friends she made.

I am having SUCH a blast with this game right now, genuinely some of the best investment I've had as a player in a game of this scale and the mechanics have complimented everything perfectly.

[anim-ttrpgs]

A.N.I.M. Income Quota July 13th 2026

The Income Quota has been updated for July 13th. For the like 50 new people, what this means is that A.N.I.M. (that's us, the indie TTRPG studio that makes Eureka and also runs/supports the discord server for all kinds of RPGs) needs to make a minimum amount of income each month in order for our team members to pay our bills (and thus keep making TTRPGs and running this server and overall supporting TTRPGs as real art etc.). The count of how much money we've made is updated every Monday and Friday and if it doesn't hit at least $2,100 before August 1st at least a couple of us will be in financial trouble.,

July Total Income Quota: $772.01/$2,100

Patreon Pledge Drive: $1,360 per month out of $2,000 per month.

I personally have been hit with almost $1,100 of unexpected and unavoidable expenses recently including a $375 car repair bill and really, really need this income quota to be hit this month and subsequent months.

[anim-ttrpgs]

A vampire is showing you a video on her iPhone called “5 SCARY GHOST ATTACKS to Watch at NIGHT,” making you go through the whole thing and watching you really closely for a reaction especially when it gets to #4, grinning with her fangs out. The video narrator is explaining that four ghost hunters were enveloped in a black fog and that deep cuts and abrasions started to appear on their skin. Most of the bloody details are obnoxiously blurred.

[tpwrtrmnky]

Fucking incredible that this is the first example they used lmao

[bunnygirlpaws]

the last one is pretty funny too

[anim-ttrpgs]

Are you ever going to have Eureka on Drive Thru RPG dot com? I don't have PayPal (can't seem to get it) and I want to buy your game!

Right now we’re considering RPG Trader but haven’t gotten around to setting it up, but have kinda waffled on whether it’s worth it to bother going to DriveThruRPG. We don’t agree with some of their business practices and also they take a pretty big cut of the sales. That second one isn’t necessarily the practice we disagree with, they gotta make money to keep the site online, but it does dampen some of the appeal.

As for buying our game right now, have you looked into the patreon?

If that doesn’t work either, there are other ways you can “pay” by supporting us. Download Eureka for free from itchio, give it a 5-star rating, post about how much you like it on social media and Discord and stuff, play it with your friends. All of this puts Eureka in front of more eyes and increases its reach towards people who can easily pay with money.

[anim-ttrpgs]

you must read the rulebook

[kevytmaitohorsma]

Reblog this photo of a käpylehmä to have a käpylehmä in your blog

It's a trick! If you reblog you get TWO käpylehmäs in your blog!

[kevytmaitohorsma]

They're traditional Finnish toys, little cows made out of spruce cones, on their way to see the world from one tumblr blog to another

[molabuddy]

its good when band names are things that are nice to think about. 'imagine dragons' well i am & its awesome. 'owl city' awww cute. 'barenaked ladies' hell yeah

[5weekdays]

my doctor told me i have to do PT this fucking sucks

[5weekdays]

these exercises are sooo monotonous like i keep walking down the same hallway over and over 🙄

[5weekdays]

who was that.

[5weekdays]

the fucking fetus in the sink won't accept my insurance

[anim-ttrpgs]

Dog Physics

(Not to scale)

[anim-ttrpgs]

I want to make this into a shortform reminder that the purpose of most traditional TTRPGs is not to produce a conventionally satisfying narrative with character arcs and all that jazz, and that this not being their purpose does not make them less sophisticated, less artistic, less “roleplaying,” or less evolved. The point of AD&D is to put a bunch of assholes in a dungeon and see who makes it out and with how much treasure, and the various challenges along the way. And one of the most memorable moments from one of my group’s AD&D adventures was Dog Physics.

This was me running the adventure module “Eye of the Serpent” with a tiny bit of modification to remove its slight railroadiness. The premise of this module is that the party gets picked up by a giant bird and dropped at the top of a mountain, and the “dungeon” is a hexcrawl through an expansive valley trying to make their way back down to the bottom. Problem is, one of the PCs, Ceridwen, sweetest young druidess-in-training in the world, had a dog. A big one. Descending the first few cliffs, which were completely steep, with a big dog, was a comically significant challenge right out the gate, took most of the session, and produced this image during in-session discussion of what the characters were trying to do. To some extent, you had to be there, but years later I have this image still sitting on my desktop where I look at it every day.

Young Ceridwen only had a maximum of 1 HP during this whole adventure, I also remember everyone sucking air through their teeth watching the dice roll every time a monster make an attack against her. There were no deaths in this adventure, but there could’ve been, and if we had been trying to have a conventionally satisfying narrative with character arcs and shit, that risk would’ve been bad (one guy almost died getting bit by a snake, another guy almost died being attacked by a couple of very aggressive crows). I as GM would’ve been obligated to pull strings behind the scenes to make certain things not happen, making the whole thing fake and also increasing my workload. But because we knew that the point of the game was to be a game about a bunch of guys who might die at any moment, not a conventional storytelling medium, the actual stories they produced were some fun gameplay and a lot of very tense, funny, and overall memorable moments, much like you would get when playing a multiplayer video game. There’s a bit more likely to be a bit more of a characterization element in any TTRPG than in a video game I think, which is one of the cool things about the medium, but a “trad” TTRPG like (every edition of) D&D is producing its own kind of story as a byproduct of its gameplay, which is something unique to its medium. It is not lesser because it doesn’t produce the same kind of story as a novel or movie, producing a story isn’t even its main purpose.

[thydungeongal]

D&D is a type of collaborative storytelling game where players collaborate together to tell a story about how Bilbo Baggins got stung by a giant bee and died of anaphylactic shock just outside of the Shire

[thydungeongal]

Also Conan the Barbarian is there

[tenleaguesbeneath]

He also gets stung by a giant bee

[anim-ttrpgs]

Different Design Frameworks of TTRPGs

A lot of the ineffective discourse surrounding TTRPGs, and way more importantly a lot of the failures of TTRPG creators and players to make something functional and fun can be chalked up to the ignorance or refusal to acknowledge that there are in fact different types of TTRPGs, which is kind of a sub-problem of thinking that rules don’t matter and that rules are “just guidelines that you’re supposed to adapt to your specific table.” The pressure and expectation on GMs to “adapt the rules to your specific table” exists because people either don’t acknowledge at all that TTRPG rules have a purpose, or don’t know that different TTRPGs have different purposes and are trying to apply a mishmashed, confused play approach cobbled together from a bunch of different games onto every game they play.

So this is a big fucking essay about that.

TTRPG design is an artform, and like any other artform such as painting, movies, novels, sculpture, there are in fact “movements” which play off of and react to other movements within the same artform, even though your average TTRPG fan or creator seems less aware of this for their own artform than anyone who has taken a high school level or greater art history class. Maybe this is because TTRPGs are thought of as “just silly games” instead of a legitimate artform, but that’s a topic for another post.

I’m going to discuss this by going over a few of what I’d probably call “design frameworks” of TTRPGs. These are not “cultures of play,” nor are they based on how people approach these games wrong when they do so. People play any of these games wrong all the time, that doesn’t change the fact that they do have objectively and explicitly written rules text that, if followed, will produce a particular gameplay experience. (Though of course, badly written games have rules which contradict each other such that following the rules cannot actually be done.)

If you’re a player, knowing what kind of game you want to play will help you choose a game that doesn’t require you to sloppily change the rules or fight against the rules, and if you’re a creator, knowing what kind of game you want to create and what design framework/goals to build off of will help you make a game that isn’t a confused mess fighting against itself.

First of all, these frameworks are my observations, they aren’t comprehensive and even though I have a lot of game design study and experience and a lot of play experience, I do have a degree of expertise in this subject, insomuch as anyone can be an "expert" in any region of such a stagnate and immature artistic medium that is constantly reinventing the wheel, I haven’t played every TTRPG. I’m going to list and describe as many of the different design frameworks I have observed as I feel confident in my knowledge to do so. (And/or until I run out of steam on it.)

These frameworks are also not intended to be prescriptive, nor am I attempting to create a new strict taxonomy. Every game is unique, and many games will blend or cross frameworks and genres because of that and because of intentional or unintentional cross-polination. I don’t really want to hear your nitpicks. In fact, I don’t even consider your opinion a bare minimum level of “informed” on this topic unless you’ve read and played a wide variety of different TTRPGs of a variety of different genres and frameworks by their rules.

Just because these frameworks do represent "movements" in an artistic sense, they are not strictly based on the years that different games came out. There were/are times where various frameworks of RPGs were at their most popular and dominant in the hobby space, but just because that dominance may have passed for any given framework does not mean that new RPGs which fit into that framework are not still being made.

A lot of this essay will also include my own personal opinion on these frameworks, but even if I do or don't like some of them, that doesn't mean that I think they are inherently bad or that you can't make good games by building off of them with intend. I just might not enjoy them myself.

Also, kill Narrativist/Gamist/Simulationist, at least for the duration of you reading this post. This model, especially the warped, confused way people are using it now, is not helpful here. Stop thinking of TTRPGs this way. No TTRPG is Narrativist, Gamist, or Simulationist.

Wargames

Examples: Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Chainmail, Konflict 47, Bolt Action, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Warhammer The Horus Heresy,

Tabletop wargames are not TTRPGs but they are the ancestors of the very concept of TTRPGs, and that’s why I’m mentioning them here. The very first attempts at what we’d now call a TTRPG started with “what if there was a wargame where you just control a couple guys instead of hundreds of guys?”

There are also lots of different frameworks of wargames but I’m not going to get into them.

Wargames typically consist of pushing large blocks of infantry, tanks, monsters, giant robots, etc. around the board and rolling dice based on their stats to see who can kill who and accomplish certain objectives better, often with positioning and stuff mattering a great deal. Older wargames even had a “game master” who acted as a referee between two or more opposing players and their armies. The GM’s job was to have the rules memorized, act as a neutral party for rules disputes, and come up with fair on-the-fly rulings for actions which were not specifically adjudicated by the rulebook. I suggest you read this post for more insight about the purpose of a game master and rules in older wargames and how TTRPGs have gotten away from this in kind of a bad way, but do keep in mind that the post I just linked is not using the word "frameworks" in exactly the same way as I am in this essay.

More recent wargames, like more recent editions of Warhammer 40,000, have gotten away from the use of a game master some time ago, which does streamline the gameplay, but also often reduces the options that players have for what their soldiers can do.

When me and some of own Warhammer buddies play, we sometimes kinda bring this idea of a GM allowing for actions that are not explicitly defined in the rules back but with each player acting as the GM for his opponent. (Calling over a neutral third party just results in them going “Huh? Wuh?” and wastes a ton of time.)

“Instead of shooting their rifles, can my guardsmen who are on top of this building here all push to topple this giant statue down on your demon for 1D6 Mortal Wounds?”

“Sure, but it’s gotta be at least 5 tons so I’ll say you have to roll a 5+ for them to do it.”

OSR (Old School Revival/Renaissance) + Just Plain Old School

Examples: Knave, The Black Hack, Mausritter, Mothership, GREED, Mork Borg, FIST(kinda). Also Basic D&D while not technically OSR, I’m including it as an example because OSR as a design framework traces its lineage directly back to Basic D&D, trying to recreate the “roots” of TTRPGs, and therefore Basic D&D plays a lot like an OSR game. It’s the very Old School they’re trying to Revival.

While this is actually one of the more recent “movements” or “frameworks” to develop in TTRPGs, I’m talking about it first because of its connection to the very oldest. OSR TTRPGs are like “what if we went back to the very roots of TTRPGs but took it more seriously?”

Honestly you might compare this to the resurgence of “boomer shooters” in the artform of video games. “What if we made a very very old style of game but tried to improve it with the more advanced technology we have today?”

OSR games tend to be rules-light, with only a handful of relatively simple mechanics, and not a ton of mechanically adjudicated character creation options. One of the mottos of OSR is “rulings over rules,” which is pretty close to what I and this post described about GMs in old-school wargames. The hard-written rules are very simple, with a GM expected to neutrally come up with a fair ruling for what happens when a character tries to do something that the rulebook itself doesn’t have an explicitly written stance on. "Neutrally" is a very important word here, the GM is not against the PCs, but nor are they on the PCs' side. If they die they die.

OSR games often have very limited or no rules whatsoever for “social skills” of a PC, instead expecting you to “talk it out” without any dice at all. Even pre-3e editions of D&D all use the “Charisma” stat not for talking but instead for determining how many loyal NPC buddies your guy can attract, and rolled once at the beginning of an encounter to decide if NPCs think your character has a face they’d like to punch or not. It is never meant to be rolled for “persuasion,” that comes down to what words you say they say, and passing the Charisma roll might just be what determines if the goblins/orcs/whatever decides to give them a chance to speak in the first place.

Often, you’ll also want to try to choose your character’s actions very carefully and avoid having to make dice rolls whenever possible. “Dice are dangerous,” says Mausritter. Dice rolls only come in when PCs are doing something risky that has a chance to go very badly if it fails, such as getting into a sword fight. Damage is high and HP is low, and because it’s rules-light there aren’t a lot of guaranteed bonuses or other things that can be done to consistently gain a tangible advantage in a fight.

This is a slightly embellished and summarized example that is not actually from an OSR game it’s from a Trad game (AD&D) but they have this in common. One of my many AD&D characters, Sir Ferdinand the Fox, is a Fighter with mediocre Strength and Dex but relatively high Charisma for a Fighter.

Just look at that grin and mustache! Art by @chaospyromancy.

“On the way to the village, the party can see a bunch of armed men step out into the road a few dozen yards away, and more step onto the road behind them. They have the insignia of the Allant Band on their shields, [mercenaries working for a pretender to the party’s employer’s claim to this fiefdom].”

“Ferdinand passes a Charisma check. He raises his hand to them and says ‘Hellooo’ and keeps his horse going forward.”

“[because of the Charisma success] One of them gives a hand signal for the other men to hold and steps forward to talk.”

“Uhh, Ferdinand says ‘My name is Ferdinand, Captain of the White Company, hired by Sir Raul, rightful castillan and claimant to this land to clear the road of bandits and brigands hired by those who would usurp him. My eyes are old and tired, I can’t quite see the colors you fly. You men would not happen to be from the Allant Band, would you? No of course not! They wouldn’t be so foolish as to attack here with so few men, where the White Company can encircle them from that ridge and drive them to the river with our horsemen. If you were, we would have to cut you down here where you stand. You men best return home quickly, it’s not safe here for you.’ He grins down at them from his horse with one hand on the scabbard of his sword. He knows who they are but he’s giving them an out, and he knows they know.”

The Allant Band men did run off, Ferdinand talked them out of what would’ve been a bloody fight for both sides. Even though the Charisma roll was a success, if Ferdinand has just said some shit like “run away or we’ll kill you” that would not have worked.

Anyway something that OSR games also tend to have, like Basic D&D, is what I’m going to choose to call a “superobjective” for the purposes of this “essay” or whatever the hell I'm writing. There exists mechanics like HP, combat rules, carrying capacity, etc. all in a very simplified format, but these rules and other character actions are all employed for the sake of overcoming moment-to-moment challenges such as disarming a trap or defeating a gang of orcs, and those moment-to-moment challenges act as hurdles to overcome in service of completing the superobjective, which in the case of most OSR games (or at least most of the ones I listed) is “collect as much treasure/money as possible without dying.” Crucially, the PCs in the world of the game know about the superobjective.

Trad (Traditional)

(No, it has nothing to do with “virgin tradwife” trad, those aren’t exactly the same “tradition.”)

Examples: AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, Death Bed: An Impenetrably Medieval Dungeon Game, (Old) World of Darkness games, Warhammer Fantasy RP.

“Trad” TTRPGs are basically what happened/s when a bunch of GMs decide to write down and codify all of the rulings that they made when neutrally refereeing different novel situations in the kind of Old School TTRPGs that the OSR takes direct heritage from.

Almost everything I said about Old School/OSR games tends to be true of Trad games, except that they tend to be more “rules-heavy,” because all the edge cases are written out instead of being contained entirely within the GM’s head. Because of this, instead of a few simple mechanics, Trad games tend to have a dozen or so medium-depth systems, trying to adjudicate every situation that could come up.

These dozen or so medium-depth systems and mechanics within a Trad game tend to, like an OSR type game, be there as rules for how PCs can overcome the various moment-to-moment challenges which stand in their way as they try to accomplish some kind of superobjective, like “get treasure” or in Eureka’s case “solve mystery.”

Where in an OSR game you would ask the GM “Can Ragnar the Mighty get some kind of bonus to hit if he immediately backs up to higher ground when the beasts attack?” , in a Trad game it’s more like “Okay because Ragnar the Mighty is on higher ground, the rulebook says he gets a +2 to hit the beasts.” The rulebook itself of a Trad game takes on much more of the role of a neutral arbitrator of in-game situations.

Despite “Trad” being by far my favorite framework of TTRPG to both design and play, I realized I actually don’t have that much more to say about it, mostly because a lot of what I would say was already said in the OSR section.

I play an OSR game and I’m always like “dang this is so fun but I wish it had more rules so we wouldn’t have to try and figure out what the designer intended or make shit up on the fly, and so that players had more direct and hard agency over the success and failure of their characters” (except for Mothership, Mothership is the only OSR game that hasn’t made me say this), and a Trad game is just that, it’s like an Old School/OSR game but with a hard-written rule for every situation.

More self-aware Trad TTRPGs often get called or call themselves “toolbox games,” they’re like a big toolbox full of a variety of different tools, each for a particular job. When a particular situation comes up in-game, you dig around in the toolbox to find the right set of rules to be the tool for adjudicating it.

Neo-Trad

Examples: D&D3e/3.5e, 4e, Lancer, Pathfinder 1e and 2e, (yeah I ran out of examples; this is a really really common framework especially for the past 10 or so years but I just don’t enjoy it much personally and don’t run in many circles that like it so I only get exposed to the very very most popular ones)

Neo-Trad is actually a pretty significant departure from Old School/OSR and Trad, despite tracing its lineage directly to them.

The more I examined the rules of the example games, the more and more I came to realize just how much this design framework is inspired by video game RPGs, which makes sense. Video game RPGs which tried to emulate TTRPGs were very well established by the time this kind of game started being made, but the limitations placed on video games by limited horsepower of early computers and the sheer fact that code, art, and sound design must be created for everything a character can do in a video game(requiring much more effort and variety of skills than just saying it out loud or writing a rule in a rulebook), resulted in the scope of video game character activities being severely reduced. Conversely, the fact that a computer does all the math and physics for you in a video game means that those limited activities can be just about as deep and complicated as you want. Neo-Trad TTRPGs are also very much like this. This is not a bad thing when done well and with intent. D&D4e, Lancer, and Pathfinder 2e are probably the better examples of doing it well and with intent. D&D3e is kind of a weird spot between Trad and Neo-Trad and in my opinion this confuses its design and it suffers greatly for it.

While a Trad TTRPG tends to have a dozen or so medium-depth systems for handling each different moment-to-moment challenge that PCs may face in pursuit of their superobjective, a Neo-Trad TTRPG often does not have an in-built superobjective - if it does then that superobjective is unique to each PC party and not often found within the rulebook itself - and it has, like, one system for which it goes all in on the depth, with systems/mechanics for other activities the PCs might incidentally encounter given much less attention and rules text.

This results in a game that is very much about specifically the moment-to-moment challenge that the rulebook has the deepest rules for. Often, but not necessarily, this will be fighting. All the games I listed as examples are about fighting first and foremost. If there’s a problem in the way of the PCs, according to the rules it is going to be handled by fighting 99% of the time, and this very much mirrors the structure of most video game RPGs.

Though they do tend to have a more limited and prescribed framework of actions, there is still a lot more possibility for a variety of PC actions - even ones which are not given an explicitly defined rule but still make sense within the framework and established bounds of the rules themselves - compared to video games, board games, or more recent wargames.

Neo-Trad games also often have way more emphasis on having an “optimized build” for your character, or even having a concept of a “build” at all. They are also way more likely to have “balance” be desirable both between the strength of the PCs and the strength of opposing NPCs, and between the members of the PC party themselves.

In a Trad game for example, PCs are likely to encounter such a variety of different challenges that a variety of different skillsets are desirable, but nobody necessarily has to be good at anything that anyone else is good at. In AD&D for instance you would have Fighters who are very good at fighting but not much else, and Thieves who are terrible in a fight but very good at sneaking and scouting ahead. If it came to it, the Fighter could kick the Thief’s ass eight days out of the week, but the Thief is very valuable to the party for his non-combat skills and each have their moments to shine. The Fighter will stand back while the Thief disarms a trap, and the Thief will run for cover while the Fighter does battle with skeleton warriors. Also in a Trad game, there is no expectation for dangers the party encounters to be “balanced” to their levels, the party may run into monsters or groups of monsters that could crush them in a single combat round - but this isn’t a bad thing, it just means that one of the many medium-depth mechanics the rulebook has is probably a bad way for the party to interact with this threat. They should try sneaking, diplomacy, or just running the other way.

(There is also no expectation in AD&D that all members of the party be anywhere near the same level - in fact, all classes level up at different rates!)

Meanwhile, in a NEO-Trad game, because the rules are so tightly focused on one activity, for all members of the party to have an equal chance to shine and participate, they must all be roughly the same skill level at that one activity, even if they have different roles within it. The Fighter is good at front-line combat, the Rogue is good at stealth attack combat, the Wizard is good at magic blasting combat, etc..

So in a NEO-Trad game, a party of all level-4 PCs will most often encounter a carefully sculpted “Encounter” with a variety of enemies designated to be an evenly matched challenge for a competent level-4 party.

In a Trad game, a party of two level-4 Fighters, one level-7 Fighter, one level-1 Thief, one level-3 Cleric, and one level-1 Druid encounter a hastily rolled 1D12 trolls. Whether they can beat them in a straight fight is none of the rulebook or the GM’s concern, it’s up to the party to think on their feet about it.

“Challenge Games”

Every game I have listed thus far is what I’d call a “challenge game.” The gameplay involves the PCs encountering a variety of challenges, and trying to overcome them using the wits, abilities, and system mastery of the characters and/or players. This is why “dungeons” are such a good setting for challenge game gameplay. It’s an enclosed location where all sorts of monsters, mazes, traps, natural obstacles, and treasure abounds. Where else are going to find that all in one place?

One thing challenge games are typically * absolutely unconcerned with however is “telling an conventionally satisfying narrative.” If you know what you’re getting into, this is good. They are not, in fact, good tools for conventional “collaborative storytelling,” and attempting to use them as such will often result in one or more people at the table having to fight against the rules or against the agency of the other players. This is bad.

There won’t typically be story beats, character arcs, etc. in a challenge game. Characters will overcome challenges in ways that range from effortless to skin-of-their-teeth, and die unceremoniously often in a very narratively-unsatisfying way when they don’t. Trying to have a plot that builds up to an epic conclusion and long character arcs for your characters will often result in the rulebook saying (to quote @thydungeongal's post) “No, Bilbo Baggins dies by being stung by a giant bee right after he leaves the Shire.” This is because they are games, and only produce a story as a byproduct.

The stories they produce as a byproduct can sometimes accidentally produce something like a character arc or story beats, and whether they do or not, they can still often be great stories. The good stories they most often produce will be less like The Lord of the Rings, and more like that one time the ghosts almost got you in Pac-man but you slipped out between them just in time, or that time you got to the boss in Dark Souls with just one drink of estus left and then your weapon broke because you forgot to repair it so you had to run around trying not to get hit while searching through the menu for something else to equip, or that time you and your friend annoyed all of BOTH teams in TF2 by playing Engineers and building sentryguns hidden underwater on 2Fort, or Dog Physics, or this from AD&D or this from Eureka or this or this or this. These are “emergent stories.” (I used a lot of video game examples here because they're shorter and easier and provide good examples of stories that are very good stories but do not inherently have a grander narrative significance or character arcs or story beats or anything, and this kind of emergent story is the kind of story that playing a challenge game TTRPG by the rules will most often produce.)

Even though challenge games are not typically built for the more conventional types of stories as seen in novels, plays, movies, etc. that hasn’t stopped people from trying, often at great expense to the rules and play experience themselves. This leads to a resentment of the rules of TTRPGs themselves(which, means a resentment for TTRPGs, because TTRPGs are entirely made of rules), because "rules get in the way of the story/roleplaying.”

In reality what is usually happening is that people who really would prefer to be collaboratively storytelling have been deluded by marketing into buying and playing a challenge game instead. This is an issue exacerbated by the marketing and play culture surrounding D&D5e and big budget “actual plays,” but actually stretches back at least about thirty years in the hobby.

(Old) VtM, for instance, is built just like any other challenge game dungeon crawler of its era if you play by the rules-as-written, but they just say “ignore the rules and lie about dice rolls until you produce a satisfying story” - instead of writing rules that produce story beats and character arcs consistently just by being followed (such TTRPGs can and do exist and I will get into them a little bit later).

I hugely value the types of stories that challenge games produce, in case it wasn’t clear. Also none of this is to say that characters in challenge games can’t have strong and engaging personalities. Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy (one of my games) for example, is a very trad-y challenge game where a PC’s personality is a huge part of determining their stats and abilities.

If you override the rules every time the rulebook or dice would make the story go in a direction you don’t want, the unique type of story that challenge games produce will never happen, all that’s happening is you laboriously telling a story yourself while wrestling against the rulebook. This is also where railroading adventure modules go wrong, but I have a whole other post about how adventure modules are very important to the health of a challenge game and should not be linear plots, nor do they have to be.

I didn’t know how to end this section.

Powered by the Apocalypse Games

Examples: Apocalypse World, Apocalypse Keys, Monster of the Week, Dungeon Bitches, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Monsterhearts, FIST(kinda),

At this point, we’re just about at the edge of my wheelhouse. This is the last design framework I feel confident in attempting to define and describe, and I have less experience with games that fit into it than I do with the others.

PbtA games are games modeled after Apocalypse World.

While most challenge games will disappoint you if you are trying to play for character arcs and conventionally satisfying narratives and plot beats and shit, PbtA games might be (one of) the types of TTRPGs you’re looking for. While any of that can happen by coincidence in a trad/OSR/neo-trad challenge game, PbtA games are often way more concerned with story beats and the complex inner lives and feelings and character arcs of the characters as adjudicated in the actual rules text. While in a Trad, OldSchool/OSR, or Neo-Trad challenge game, the characters may break down and weep when one of their allies is slain in battle and bury him with his magic sword, or may simply loot him for his best gear and move on(and either one would fit perfectly within the established bounds of the rules, and would say something about the characters), a PbtA game is way more likely to have some kind of rule that says “if a character breaks down and weeps over a slain ally, gain 1 EXP” or something, in fact it is probably part of that particular character's narrative role to weep over slain allies.

Character arcs are often built into the “playbooks”(PbtA equivalent of character classes) themselves, with “moves” and unique EXP rewards for characters about fulfilling their playbook’s archetypical role in the story. (Not literally all PbtA games have “playbooks” though.)

Sometimes there is some kind of threat that these characters may contend with as a party, other times there isn’t, or there isn’t even a “party,” just a bunch of characters doing their own thing in some kind of situation. There is not often a superobjective. I would say that PbtA games are typically not “challenge games,” even if some do occasionally involve characters overcoming challenges. While in a challenge game you would almost never knowingly, deliberately make your character walk into a deadly trap or something, a PbtA game is just as likely to have a playbook the role of which is to be the bumbling character who is always falling for traps, and award EXP or have some kind of “moves” related to falling into traps.

Improvisation of elements of the game world is a core part of PbtA too, and a good PbtA game will actually have enough of a framework that you really don’t need to do any pre-prep or use an adventure module, whereas most challenge games, at least of the trad/OSR/neo-trad variety, do strongly desire pre-prep and thrive in (good, nonlinear, sandboxy) adventure modules.

Dice rolls are also often used very differently in the PbtA framework than in the frameworks of the more traditional “lineage” of games, and no, not just because they usually use 2D6s instead of D20s. Where in most of the traditional lineage of games, a dice roll will be used for a single risky action, such as a leap across a chasm or clashing swords with an opponent as an Attack, and then the DM makes a dice roll for the opponent’s Attack next turn, in most PbtA games, a single dice roll will often dictate the course of an entire scene or situation, and it is often only PCs that have rolls for their actions. For instance, if a PC is trying to beat up an NPC, that would just be a single dice roll based on the PC’s beating-up-people skill, no matter how many blows are actually described. No roll is made for the NPC. The PC wins if the roll was high, or loses and takes damage if the roll was low.

Another difference is that unlike most games of the traditional lineage, the dice rolls themselves have the power to change the world. (I mean the game-world. Playing TTRPGs isn’t activism.) What I’m saying is that dice rolls can exist outside or the character’s own agency and determine literally unrelated - but narratively cogent - events in the game world itself.

For instance, on a high enough roll to beat up the NPC, but not as high as it could’ve been, the NPC might get beaten up, but the then his friends just happen to come around the corner and see this happening and jump in to outnumber the PC and now the situation is worse. The friends are an element of the game world which happens because the dice roll wasn’t high enough. Trad/neo-trad/OSR games can have multiple degrees of success too, but those degrees of success will more often apply to just that action and not be able to affect what happens outside of the literal bounds of that action.

The very different bounds of what a dice roll can do and how great their scope is is something that often really trips people up when they are used to something like trad/neo-trad/OSR and then try to play PbtA game or vice versa.

Some Other Shit

I’ve spent too much time on this and also reached the edge of TTRPG frameworks I feel confident giving in-depth descriptions of. So now I’m just gonna fire off some other interesting or influential games that don’t fit into any of the frameworks above (and probably do fit into some framework which exists but that I do not have enough experience with to define), or that I just have more to say about specifically.

FIST

Fist is interesting in that it is very firmly both OSR and PbtA. There's no playbooks, there is a "party," there is a superobjective, and it is very much a challenge game, but it does also very pointedly use the PbtA roll framework.

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

Even Eureka is a bit of a mutant, breaking a lot or trad conventions while still being structurally trad and being a challenge game. A game of Eureka does not even necessarily have a “party,” for instance, and the rules are intentionally built to produce very three-dimensional characters with beliefs and attitudes which affect their behavior and abilities. I built this game up through a very trad-y challenge game framework with the trad-challenge-game-type stories I wanted it to produce as a byproduct in mind.

Eureka uses the trad challenge game framework to achieve some of the same things that something that a PbtA framework game might be going for, or whatever the fuck Burning Wheel is, while also doing things that only a trad challenge game could do and that a PbtA game could not do,

Burning Wheel

Trad-ish mutant? Kind of like Eureka in that it tries to be about the complex inner lives of three-dimensional characters via rules text with beliefs and stuff but is still built pretty trad-ily. Has fewer of the trappings of a trad challenge game than Eureka though, like lacking a rulebook-designated superobjective(but definitely not being a Neo-Trad game).

Blades in the Dark

Definitely descended from PbtA, but different enough to be its own thing. Is a challenge game. Does have a superobjective. However, is very like PbtA in its improvisation emphasis and scaffolding based around and allowing for gameplay with little to no pre-prep.

Blades in the Dark has spawned the framework of Forged in the Dark.

Fiasco!

Improv game?

Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG

One of the reasons that I feel much less confident in Silk & Dagger than Eureka or Death Bed is because I can’t identify the framework of it and it’s my own game, so it feels like I’m flying blind. But people seem to like it, even in its very very early and unfinished state.

Paranoia

Parody of Trad/Old School/OSR games gone wrong, wherein the GM does not maintain neutrality towards the PCs.

Dungeons & Dragons 5e

Design is kind of a confused mess that doesn’t know what it wants to be because being anything might result in less sales. Has mechanics because those mechanics are from "D&D" not because the mechanics are intended to produce a particular gameplay experience.

[henstomper]

now i can finally play as a vampire: the masquerade character in a tabletop roleplaying game

[anim-ttrpgs]

I don’t know what’s more detrimental to the health of TTRPGs as a medium, D&D5e players who think that TTRPGs are “collaborative storytelling” and that D&D5e does this great if you just ignore all the rules that make it not do that, or non-D&D players who realize that no edition of D&D5e is good for “collaborative storytelling” but still think that the primary purpose of all TTRPGs is to be “collaborative storytelling” and that not being good for “collaborative storytelling” a satisfying narrative is what makes D&D bad. D&D5e is bad for other reasons but you’re complaining that a cheap toothbrush doesn’t keep you warm at night.

An expectation is being placed on all pieces in this artform to do something that the majority of them were never meant to do in the first place.

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

Ok. Genuinely, though. What would you say the purpose of D&D5e is? What are the majority of TTRPGs made for?

Because like, a dungeon crawl is a story. So is a complex political negotiation. So is a heist. So is playing out a battle tactically. All of these things are stories, and insofar as each player contributes the actions of their characters and (in a good group) an equal stake in the enjoyment of everyone in the group, it is collaborative.

I don’t see how it isn’t for “collaborative storytelling”, and I don’t even play D&D5e. The relationship between the GM and the players isn’t adversarial. All of them are players trying to have fun, and crucially in a healthy group that doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s fun.

Collaboratively telling a story, in some form playing make believe with rules to simulate and constrain the ways we are playing, that’s. Just what a TTRPG is. Like. Categorically.

[anim-ttrpgs]

First of all thanks for the good faith response.

The thing is you’re pretty much right, but I think it would be more accurate to say all of those things are collaborative, and they produce stories, which I’ll explain in a minute. This is a case of the two of us agreeing about 90% but defining terms differently and in different context. What you’re saying is true, but isn’t what most people mean when they say “TTRPGs are collaborative storytelling.”

The issue is that when people begin to define all TTRPGs as the buzzword “collaborate storytelling,” particularly coming into the hobby from watching big budget “actual play” podcasts that are more invested in producing an entertaining story for an audience than playing the game by its rules, they begin to consider the purpose of TTRPGs to be the telling of a conventionally satisfying narrative story by the standards of a book or movie, rather than the playing of a game which produces (as a byproduct) a series of actions and events which can be strung together and told as a story ad-hoc. Such a story may or may not fit marks of “good storytelling” by the standards of other mediums such as books or movies by having things like “a good plot” or “character arcs.”

By only valuing the stories produced, and by grading those stories by the storytelling standards of a different medium, you get to a mindset where a dungeon crawl is not “a good story,” nor is playing out a fight tactically, because those things, by the rules of most TTRPGs that involve them, do not produce conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs, and often actively resist them. If you think that the only point of a TTRPG is to “collaboratively tell a good story,” then TTRPGs where characters can just make a mistake and die randomly and unceremoniously to a trap or goblin before they finish the plot or their character arc are therefore fundamentally broken and bad TTRPGs. This leads to the player base writing off like 80% of TTRPGs as complete failures, and either never touching them, or trying to “fix” them by making the GM responsible for overriding the rules every time something is about to happen that wouldn’t fit the mold of a good story by the standard of a novel or movie. I won’t get too into it here because I’ve made a million posts about it but putting this responsibility on a GM burns them out. At best, assuming the GM doesn’t burn out from this misplaced responsibility, it results in a group completely missing out on the kind of fun experiences they could be having by going with the game instead of against it. They never experience a TTRPG, they experience an improv storytelling session while the TTRPG itself constantly gets in the way like a housecat trying to climb on the table at supper time. They experience “the rules getting in the way of the story,” because the story they came for is not one the rules were ever meant to produce.

The kind of events/situations-that-become-stories produced by TTRPGs that have any D&D DNA in them(which is the majority of TTRPGs, even if the designers don’t realize it) is kinda similar to the kind of events/situations-that-become-stories in a match of Team Fortress 2, even if they do not necessarily involve violence (though of course most D&D DNA games do involve violence).

Here’s a short TF2 clip where I sneak behind a Sniper as Spy and kill him, then get scared by a ghost which renders me helpless to another Sniper who comes around the corner to kill me, but he also gets scared by the same ghost just in time for me to come out of the scared stun and kill him.

Here’s a TF2 clip where I’m playing Medic and me and a bunch of other Medics are healing one Heavy, but then he and one of the Medics get killed by a Spy right when we run into the enemy. Through a little luck and seizing the initiative in the fight though, I, as Medic with only a crappy melee weapon, overcome the odds to kill all three enemies.

Here’s a short TF2 clip why I’m playing as Spy and sneak behind a Sniper to backstab him, but he keeps moving even though he doesn’t know I’m there so I keep comedicly missing.

Here’s a short TF2 clip where I join a match to play Spy and turn invisible to sneak behind the enemy team only to get immediately killed in one hit by an enemy rocket that hit me completely by accident.

All of these are fun little stories, but they don’t have a plot or character arcs or anything like that, and all the other events of the matches they took place in, while very fun in the moment, aren’t really anything worth telling a story about after the fact, so I didn’t save the footage.

This is the kind of story that most TTRPGs produce. Here’s a similar one that’s actually from a TTRPG, where the party had to somehow get a dog down a sheer cliff at the top of a mountain.

(And TF2 players are collaborating, even if they’re on different teams. Cooperating or competing, they’ve all agreed to participate in a game where the rules of TF2 apply.)

This kind of TTRPG also can natively produce plots and character arcs and stuff that are very satisfying in the same way a well-written book or movie would be, I can think of several that happened over the course of AD&D and Eureka adventures, but this isn’t the norm nor the point. It’s a rare occurrence and not something they should be expected to do because it isn’t what they’re built for. If I logged on to TF2 with the expectation that I would experience the plot and character arcs of an action war movie on Upward, or even for the sole purpose of getting those clips to show my friends, I would come away very disappointed from most matches and probably tell you that TF2 is a bad game. This is the situation with TTRPGs and the phrase “collaborative storytelling.”

[glypt0don]

So you are saying, in order to get the best experience, we should view TTRPGs as mechanics-driven games. Even though most adventures are built up the same way a story would.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Yes, TTRPGs are mechanics-driven games, even the ones where the mechanics are actually intended and properly geared towards producing a conventionally satisfying narrative. But most TTRPGs which take after D&D in any capacity at all do not have mechanics geared towards conventional storytelling.

The reason "most adventures are built up the same way a story would" is because of the rise of the treating TTRPGs as "collaborative storytelling" foremost instead of being games which may produce a story has increasingly encouraged a playerbase who does what I described above, and that playerbase is making the adventures that are plots rather than situations, and having the "linear story with a plot" style of adventure marketed to them by WotC, whose marketing pervades every inch of the space even outside of D&D itself. When you play the kind of adventure that a particular game's rules are in sync with, it will click and you will have a fun time going with the flow of the rules. In D&D's case, its -and all descendants of it - rules are most geared towards "sandbox" adventure modules* with preset environments and situations not plots.

"The PCs will defeat the evil wizard by going to the six temples and having specific interactions with NPCs at certain times and places in a certain order and develop particular planned relationships with them" is a plot. "The PCs are in the town of Bumbleshire. There are two abandoned castles to the north and south, and some NPCs who can give XYZ information are located here, here, and here. The layout of each castle is this and this and the traps and monsters can be found in these rooms" is a situation.

*and I always have to clarify, an "adventure module" does not necessarily mean "linear scripted plot," WotC has just been putting out linear scripted plot adventure modules for 20 years because they want to keep tricking the "collaborative storytelling" people into playing their game even though it does nothing that they desire, which has unfortunately tanked the reputation of "adventure modules" because these kind of adventure modules just do not work with D&D.

I have a couple of posts where I explain these concepts further.

Post by @anim-ttrpgs · 2 images

💬 7  🔁 241  ❤️ 275 · Different Design Frameworks of TTRPGs · A lot of the ineffective discourse surrounding TTRPGs, and way more importantly

Reblog by @anim-ttrpgs · 4 images

💬 29  🔁 2230  ❤️ 2900 · Yeah many people just plain do not know that an adventure module can be something other than a completely linear scr

and just as a disclaimer, in the second post, because I didn't expect it to go anywhere, I made the mistake of saying "TTRPGs" when I should have said specifically "traditional challenge-based TTRPGs which share any DNA* with D&D."

*sharing DNA with D&D here doesn't just mean being a fantasy dungeon crawler, as will be explained in the first post I linked. Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Delta Green, Shadowrun, Mothership, Eureka, Laner, etc. just off the top of my head all have huge amounts of D&D DNA in them even though none of them are fantasy dungeon crawlers (though Call of Cthuhlu is still pretty dungeon-crawler-y).

[snommelp]

My followers will probably remember me complaining about the time my character died in my most recent D&D game (which was a while ago now). The thing is, the way that my character died (getting comboed by unfortunate monster synergy) was frustrating, but not to the point that I should still be thinking about it over a year later. What actually made the character death so hard to stomach was that the DM had set my character up as the primary protagonist of the story he wanted to tell, about an ancient sorcerer king who was reborn to the opposing faction. If we were just playing D&D as a fun game that happened to generate a story, then that session would have been a story about a dragon-man who got in over his head and paid for it. But because the DM wanted the story to come first instead of the game, it meant we had a major problem and needed to figure out how to resolve it so that the story could continue.

[zybilna]

One thing that makes me kinda sad is seeing people who feel like TTRPGs just aren't for them because they bounced off of some element that is clearly just a symptom of them trying out D&D5e. Like people who have had a hard time with learning the rules would probably do well with any system where the rule formatting and play culture around learning them aren't a mess. One friend of mine didn't like waiting a long time for turns to come up in combat, not even knowing that many games don't even use a turn-based structure.

A lot of D&D5e defenders on here like to claim that asking someone to learn a new system is "gatekeeping" somehow, but I'd argue that acting like one game is emblematic of the entire medium to the exclusion of people who don't click with that one game is way more meaningfully a form of gatekeeping, even if it's fully unintentional.

I strongly believe that not all RPGs are gonna appeal to everyone, but there is an RPG out there for everyone, and I just hope that people who haven't clicked with the most common option to be introduced to can find something that works for them.

[zybilna]

One thing that makes me kinda sad is seeing people who feel like TTRPGs just aren't for them because they bounced off of some element that is clearly just a symptom of them trying out D&D5e. Like people who have had a hard time with learning the rules would probably do well with any system where the rule formatting and play culture around learning them aren't a mess. One friend of mine didn't like waiting a long time for turns to come up in combat, not even knowing that many games don't even use a turn-based structure.

A lot of D&D5e defenders on here like to claim that asking someone to learn a new system is "gatekeeping" somehow, but I'd argue that acting like one game is emblematic of the entire medium to the exclusion of people who don't click with that one game is way more meaningfully a form of gatekeeping, even if it's fully unintentional.

I strongly believe that not all RPGs are gonna appeal to everyone, but there is an RPG out there for everyone, and I just hope that people who haven't clicked with the most common option to be introduced to can find something that works for them.