I don't disagree with the observation that a lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe that game design is real (i.e., in the sense that they believe any GM should be able to achieve any experience of play using any system, and refuse to recognise that rules are opinionated about what sort of games they want to produce), but I feel like putting that at the forefront is confusing the symptom for the disease. A lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe game design is real because they don't believe that games are real.
I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.
The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.
And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.
Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.
(Note that, while I've identified Hasbro's deceptive marketing as the ultimate source of this culture of play, indie RPGs are hardly innocent of perpetuating it. You only need cast a critical eye on the "Rule Zero" sections of many popular indie games to notice that their authors are all in on the idea that games aren't real!)
#ohhhh this is really good analysis #also i think large scale super professional actual play podcasts n shit are a big part of this #cuz imo that was a Lot of peoples main engagement with ttrpgs back in the day (about a decade ago) #and a lot of people thats still their Main TTRPG Experience #and like. those tend to be even less Game Like than the average dnd campaign #like a lot of that shit is in fact. scripted. and made to be more cinematic for the audience etc (via @st4rshiptr00per)
Yeah, big name "actual play" podcasts that pretend they're not scripted and workshopped to hell are a big contributing factor, though I wouldn't classify them as distinct from Hasbro's marketing apparatus so much as one of the most visible arms of that apparatus. The fact that Hasbro isn't paying them directly doesn't mean they aren't serving the brand.
(The weird part is that I get the impression that some of them don't even know it. Sometimes it seems like Brennan Lee Mulligan genuinely doesn't realise that best practices for running a game of Dungeons & Dragons as a kind of performance art for a paying audience are very different from best practices for running a game of Dungeons & Dragons for your three buddies in the GM's dining room.)
Maaaaaan. So I'm DMing two DnD 5e games at the moment. One of them is a high level combat focused megadungeon with very experienced players, while the other is more open and has more RP with a mix of experienced and new players.
I always feel way more drained after a session running the latter game than the former. And I think you really helped me see why. I'm DEFINITELY having to do a ton of track-laying while running that game, because it's such an unfocused game. I feel way more like I have to be an entertainer who's always the one responsible for my players' fun, rather than expecting them to make their own fun using the rules of the game, like the players in my other group do.
Quite so – that's the central paradox of the rules-heavy-versus-rules-light debate: provided that the game the rules want to produce agrees with the game the group wants to play, a rules-heavy game may actually be less demanding to run than a rules-light one. A rigorous framework of play can be a very effective means of distributing the workload of making the game happen; if you play your cards right, the players won't even notice they're taking a load off the GM's shoulders by making their own rulings, because to them it just feels like drawing the obvious conclusions.
"The Ancients were capable of wondrous things, but they often made mistakes, and 'dungeons' are the outcome of those mistakes" is a common conceit in dungeon-crawling fantasy, but the Ancients' fuckups are typically framed as products of hubris or madness. I want to see a setting where they messed up for the same reason that real-world engineering and public works projects often come to horrifying ends. The safety reports were suppressed because the architect was somebody's cousin. The plans clearly called for unobtanium rods, but a malfeasant contractor swapped them for mudanium and pocketed the difference. Somebody got sick of having to re-summon the hellgate each dawn and propped it open with a shoe.
The warding sigils would have detected the problem, but they were so overtuned that they were constantly throwing false alarms, so eventually one of the assistant thaumaturges simply disconnected them and forgot to tell anyone they'd done so.
I support this 100%, if only because I want to listen to the Well There's Your Problem OrbCast, starring Roz the Wizard, Liam the Rogue, and November the Sorceress.
"But how can you justify a player character with a (non-disinherited) noble background in a dungeon-crawling fantasy game" well, the most obvious approach is a fantasy setting whose nobility practices cognatic primogeniture where, instead of "first son inherits, second son goes into the military, third son becomes a priest", it's "first son inherits, second son goes into the military, third son becomes an adventurer". From the player's perspective, it handily explains why the title comes with little material support from the family; from the family's perspective, there's an unspoken understanding that most of the spare heirs will be eaten by a dragon (or whatever), thereby simplifying the inheritance situation, and the few survivors will become great assets.
(There is, of course, the possibility that a surviving third son, having grown powerful and understandably harbouring some slight resentment, may return, kill his elder brothers with dark magic, and take over the dynasty, but in practice this almost never happens.)
As an added bonus, if you, the first born son, ever run into -true- trouble, you probably have a few aunts/uncles/second-cousins hanging around who can bring utterly insane amounts of force (political, physical, magical, whichever) down upon it for you.
Very few adventuring-third-children nobles have any desire to take on all the hassle and responsibility of running a noble estate when they finally return home after years of seducing dragons and fighting gods. They just want a nice comfy chair, lots of respect, and all the wine they can drink. And in exchange, they occasionally pull a few fistfuls of gems out of the ol Bag of Infinite Holding, tell stories about that time they cut the head off that giant dragon whole's bones are a mountain range now, and head on down to the Senate Chambers to incinerate whoever's making their sweet nephew so upset these days.
Inadvisable tabletop RPG premise #137: Ultra-lethal OSR dungeon crawl where every time the group eats a total party kill, they switch to playing as whatever killed them. Brave adventurers all crushed by a descending ceiling trap? Now you're playing as the goblins responsible for maintaining the traps. Good luck!
For clarity, no-one is "becoming" anything. The transfer of protagonism occurs purely at the level of the table – the in-universe party members aren't possessing whatever killed them.
Bold of you not to have them play as descending ceiling traps.
For playability reasons, we follow the chain of causality until we bump into the first set of entities which are a. capable of independent action, and b. themselves able to be killed; e.g., if the party is stabbed to death by bandits, we then play as the bandits, not as their swords. This need not always wind up in the expected place, but it should at least wind up in a place where the new set of player characters can do things!
How does it work when the party wipes to a singular boss (e.g. a classic dragon at the end of the dungeon). Does one player get the boss and the rest its lieutenants/minibosses? Is the gm obligated to reveal that the dragon was part of a conspiracy of dragons? Does the party collectively play the dragon?
You know how a lot of old-school dungeon crawlers address the boss monster action economy problem by mechanically modelling a single large monster as a collection of smaller ones that each get their own turn each round?
(For everybody who keeps asking, if the party manages to wipe because of something that cannot causally be linked to anything that's even hypothetically playable at any remove whatsoever, you roll on the current dungeon level's random encounter table until you get something playable, and that's what inherits player character status by virtue of looting and/or eating your former party's bodies.)
💍 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Ring of Busy Hands Ring, common ___ This ring has a second one outside of it which can be spun around idly. The spinning ring features interlocked and wringing hands. While wearing the ring, you can choose to automatically create a relevant, magical illusion around your hand whenever you make recognizable hand gesture, such as tipping a hat (creating a fanciful hat atop your head), drinking from a cup (creating a steaming cup of tea), or stroking a beard (creating one for you while clean-shaven). The illusions created are Tiny and obviously magical, and they only serve to complete the illusion of the hand gesture.
___
✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for as little as $3 a month!
hello fontseeker! do you happen to know what font the big letters are?
The original font was designed for D&D by Bree Heiss, and isn't available to the public. But there is a fan-made version called Solbera Imitation (2015), which is what was used here. You can download it here.
I like the idea in fantasy that humans are better at maintaining things long term because they set up societies or professions to do it whereas dwarves and elves and stuff are like “just get bob to do it he’s got a good few hundred years left” and then bob doesn’t teach anyone else how to do it
Human: Wait that’s why there’s ruins of elven cities even though you live for so long? You just keep not asking people how to do things? How do you learn anything?
Elf: There’s a lot of “you’ve got time to figure it out on your own” attitudes floating around in our society that I’m starting to question somewhat.
Elf: Impossible! Those metalworking techniques were lost a hundred years ago!
Human: What do you mean lost? My great-grandmother learned to make these swords from an elven smith, then taught it to her kids.
Elf: That's ridiculous. No elf would give such secrets to a human.
Human: They didn't. Meemaw delivered the metal to the forge, and no one kicked her out when she stayed and watched. She always said they barely acknowledged her even when doing business with her, like she wasn't worth noticing.
Elf: Come to think of it, my great-uncle always was rather single-minded when he started working.
Human: So he wasn't ignoring her, he just forgot she was there?
Elf: Oh, he was definitely ignoring her, too. He was super racist.
The stars have aligned, but are you ready to conjure? In part one of our final episode of necromancy, we explore the nature of magic circles
The stars have aligned, but are you ready to conjure? In part one of our final episode of necromancy, we explore the nature of magic circles and how to ensure you're drawing the correct type for the demon you want to conjure.
Join our discord community! Check out our Tumblr for even more! Support us on patreon!
Get your copy of Marginal Worlds, a deck of 50 magic items pulled directly from medieval manuscripts, built for any TTRPG system here!
Forbidden Rites: a Necromancer's Manual online version here
All of Richard Keickhefer's books on magic here
The Munich Manual of Demonic Magic: info and get one yourself here
Peter of Abano: Heptameron, or Magical Elements - read online here
Beekes, Robert S. P. “θεός.” Etymological Dictionary of Greek, vol. 1, Leiden, 2010, p. 540. Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10.
Beekes, Robert S. P. “God is Non-Indo-European.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, vol. 54, 2000, pp. 27-30.
“deiw-.” The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, revised and edited by Calvert Watkins, Houghton Mifflin, 1985, p. 10.
De Meyer, Isabelle. “L’étymologie du mot grec θεός « dieu ».” Revue de Philologie de Littérature et d’Histoire Anciennes, vol. 90, no. 1, 2016, pp. 115-38, 260-1.
“dhēs-.” [& cf. “dhē-1.”] The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, revised and edited by Calvert Watkins, Houghton Mifflin, 1985, p. 14.
“gheu(ə)-.” [& cf. “gheu-.”] The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, revised and edited by Calvert Watkins, Houghton Mifflin, 1985, p. 23.
Kulik, Alexander. “How the Devil Got His Hooves and Horns: The Origin of the Motif and the Implied Demonology of 3 Baruch.” Numen, vol. 60, nos. 2–3, 2013, pp. 195–229.
O’Shea, Stephen. The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars. Walker & Company, 2000.
Rau, Jeremy. “The Derivational History of PIE *diéu-/diu-´ ‘(god of the) day-lit sky; day’.” Ex Anatolia Lux, edited by Ronald Kim et al., Beech Stave Press, 2010, pp. 307-20.
Watkins, Calvert. “‘god’.” Antiquitates Indogermanicae, edited by Manfred Mayrhofer et al., Innsbruck, 1974, pp. 101-10.
dnd setting where dungeons are as ubiquitous as roman ruins are in parts of europe
"i was just trying to dig a pond in my yard when i hit some kinda puzzle door, now i gotta get the adventurers guild involved. they say its gonna take at least 3 months to explore the whole thing, can u believe that?"
D&D 5e supposedly has a GM shortage and idk maybe if the player culture of the game didn't treat GMing as a thankless job and the rules of the game as an issue to be fixed by the GM maybe things would be better. Ah well, who knows. Maybe a couple hundred more "we ruined the GM's campaign on purpose" memes will make people enjoy running the game better.
Yeah, seriously, every game does not have a GM shortage. My experience outside of D&D circles is that there is no shortage of people wanting to run games. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but I have to say that the fact that those spaces usually don't have a culture of shitting on the GM's fun built in is probably one of them.
I don't think this is entirely untrue but it's a bit more complex than that: D&D is often treated as a generic product and lacking a core identity, and this is something that both its fans and marketing are responsible for. The players will tell you that D&D is actually an infinitely varied tapestry, a tabula rasa on which its players can project any kind of experience, and the people who own D&D benefit from not correcting this false notion because it allows them to sell D&D as the game that can do anything.
But in actuality D&D the game as it exists as a text actually does have a pretty strong core identity: it's a game about dungeons. Its rules are most opinionated about going into dangerous places that must be explored one five-foot square at a time and where light is often scarce and there's also monsters that want to eat the characters. This is true even in D&D 5e, the edition of the game which I feel is the least opinionated and the most afraid to say it's about: it might not be the best dungeon game in my opinion, but it's still a game of dungeons.
The issue is that many people see the dungeon game as something that is not desirable and something that D&D should be elevated above. Which ties into the original point of running D&D itself being a thankless job, because many people in the D&D have convinced themselves that running D&D as a dungeon game is a sign of a bad DM and a good DM's job is to lift the game out of dungeons and run a good (non-dungeon) game with it instead. Which is dumb for a number of reasons, including the fact that it is a dungeon game and absolutely thrives in dungeons and kind of sucks when taken outside of dungeons, but also because dungeons kick ass, actually.
But yeah as I said I think you're not entirely wrong: like, I think this is not an issue with D&D itself as a game but with the play culture surrounding it. D&D itself does have a strong core identity, but because that strong core identity is built around something that large portions of its fanbase see as pedestrian and dysfunctional it gets treated as something without a strong core identity.
This ship features a top deck armed with 8 cannons, a quarterdeck with cabins for the captain and first mate, and a cargo hold for the rest of the crew, a kitchen, and storage area. Historically, a sloop was a small sailing ship with one mast and a jib, making it ideal for low-level raiding parties.
There are 8 total variants including Fire, Ice, Storm, Night, No Cannons, Pirate, and Underwater. I also made tokens of each floor of the ship to provide full flexibility in using this ship!
Foundry VTT modules with pre-built walls and lighting are available to patrons.
I think a lot of people reblogging this from @probablybadrpgideas are interpreting this as “this would be such a funny wacky way to make the table soooo complicated” but I mean this as a complaint about the way that so many tabletop players seem to just. completely lack an understanding of ethics. what it actually means to behave ethically and treat others ethically. and i dont mean this as "why do people want to be mean and play as villains? :(" i mean "why are there so many tabletop players that sympathize with outright fascist factions to the point of wondering why theyre listed as 'Lawful Evil' in the book"
Goblins were in fact, for me, a turning point on this concept. I had a player who wanted to be a goblin, and I forgot about this fact up to the point that the party got a quest to kill goblins. As soon as I was announcing the quest I realized it would be a problem, though I didn't have anything else ready so I went with it. And it was! The players immediately questioned why the mayor was paying mercenaries to kill goblins, and then further questioned his justifications, at which point I realized it would be a better story if the goblins were a scapegoat and not an actual villain.
This turned into a terse interrogation where the mayor threatened to put them in jail once their questions got pointed enough that he would have to either field accusations or lie; they then went CSI on the situation and drilled through his political cabinet to get answers. I had to improv pretty much all of it and I don't remember the actual ending (I know they sided with the goblins and the mayor was guilty), but this helped me realize that the Gary Gygax writing style of "certain races are just BAD and that's why they hang out in dungeons" was very short-sighted.
D&D writing, by and large, encourages a lack of questions. The surface runs deep. "Go into a cave and chop up goblins." Why are we doing this? "Goblins are bad." All goblins? "Yes."
I think the question of "why are there players comfortable siding with fascist factions and wondering why they're called 'lawful evil'" is pretty easily answered with... because D&D itself is inherently kind of fascist. And it's the most insidious kind of fascist, too- its villains are fascists, so how could you point fingers at the book?
Fire Giants are dwarf slavers. Drow are a megalomaniacal theocracy who hate men. Orcs are violent tribes of marauding killers. Illithids want to destroy all life and keep an entire civilization to scrub their floors. But these narratives still push the idea that "evil" is a racial trait. The players are not only justified in their campaign to destroy these cultures, they're encouraged to do it.
They let the cat out of the bag by making these playable races; because now, they're not cut-and-dry villanous societies. They're people. There are Drow accountants whose lives are about balancing taxes, not worshipping Lolth. There are Yuan-Ti who don't sacrifice babies on altars, and much prefer playing the lute or sewing blankets. Yet we're still expected to read "Chaotic Evil" under the Monster Manual entry for a bugbear and take it seriously.
Reblogging again to add a quick take: as a DM introducing ethics makes your game so much better.
I had an intro to my campaign that involved a mad scientist kidnapping someone and turning them into a wererat. I didn't think much of it and I spent way more time fleshing out the other NPCs, I just wanted to use that wererat as a boss fight.
Once the party encountered him though they immediately saw what I totally missed: the guy who became the wererat was absolutely the victim of this story. I did my best at thinking on my feet and made the wererat this defeated guy who only followed the mad scientist because he felt like his life was ruined. So they, through good rolls, convinced him to help them fight the mad scientist and it made for such a better story.
The moral I'm trying to convey is that you need to treat every NPC in your game as a world within themselves. And I mean EVERY NPC. Why are the wolves attacking people? Are they desperately hungry? Mind controlled? Territorial due to poachers? Why are the goblins working for the wizard? Extortion? Promise of riches? If the bandits see that everyone is in armor, why wouldn't they just let the party pass and wait for easier prey? If one of the bandits die, why wouldn't the rest of them run for the hills?
here’s a couple of articles on the history of racism + xenophobia in tolkien & how that influenced dnd
This is the first installment of a two-article series about the racist origins, nature, and ramifications of orcs, a malevolent humanoid spe
This is the complement to my previous article , “Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror.” In t
anyone interested in the subject should definitely also check out the whole Three Black Halflings podcast, which talks about being black in nerdy spaces. a lot of times they’ll have on guests talking about their intersections and experiences in nerdy spaces. they have an episode with the author of the articles above.
they’ve also played a ttrpg based on african mythologies rather than mostly european ones like most mainstream fantasy.
Hi! I scrolled through your asks (and found a lot of cool ttrpgs to look at) to see if you asnwered this recently and I don’t think you have:
Do you have any Agatha Christie style mystery campaign system recommendations? So far BitD has been recommended as an option but it’s more heists than murder mystery.
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy by @anim-ttrpgs. It's my favorite system for investigative gameplay and while it is specifically meant for modern day urban fantasy mysteries, it is enough of a toolkit system that it's easy to not include the supernatural elements and to transport it back in time to the early 20th century. It's still in development, but there is a free version of the game available on itch.io and the creators are constantly updating it as they prepare for final release.
A TTRPG for deep character roleplay, realistic combat, player deduction, and secret monster antics!
Hey! I was wondering do you have any reccomended replacements for dnd? Im trying to find a fantasy ttrpg but im not sure where to go or what to start reading
This is an incredibly broad question and there is no exhaustive answer I can give without some specifics. What is it you want out of a fantasy TTRPG? Do you more or less like D&D's gameplay but wish you were playing something else? Do you want something less focused on dungeon-crawling and resource management, or are you okay with those parts but would rather the system was crunchier? Is it specifically the current edition of D&D and its design that bothers you?
Anyway, a while back I did make a two-part post highlighting some alternatives to D&D, all broadly in the same genre Fantasy Adventure Games, or FAGs as I like to call them, as D&D.
You know what, there's still a lot of trad stuff that I haven't even touched out there, and I would be remiss if I didn't feature some of th
I should really make a follow-up to that post. But yeah, the question here is quite broad and I am more than happy to offer recommendations, but I also want to make my recommendations specific, because as I have posted many times, a lot of people make the mistake, in their game recommendations, of not actually identifying what the other person actually wants, so then they end up recommending Pathfinder to someone looking for a game that's not D&D.
Hi, just wanted to ask if you have any advice for someone who grew up with DnD 3.5e and wants to branch out into other game systems. I would really like something that is more storyfocused but also has a space for more rules light combat.
(Sorry if this ask is too demanding, you can gladly delete it. I just have seen you answer other asks about recomendations and wanted to try my luck)
I can give it the ol' college try, but firstly: the ask that something be "story focused" is a bit too vague and broad and can mean any number of things depending on what the person means. Some people use it to mean "rules light instead of crunchy," while others use it to mean "a game focused on genre emulation," and yet others mean "you know, something that's not about dungeon-crawling and combat." I know this is one of those issues where it might be hard to articulate what it is you want exactly unless you already have been exposed to other games, but it's always worth trying to be a bit more specific.
Anyway with all of that out of the way, I'm going to keep these suggestions within the realm of fantasy. Even though you didn't specify that, I'm going to keep at least one angle consistent between these suggestions, because otherwise this'll be all over the place.
Quest is a game I've recommended a bunch of times for people looking for a game that is broadly in the same genre of D&D (fantasy adventure) but does away with some of the mechanics that the genre of "D&D as it's played on podcasts" does away with. It's a simple d20-based fantasy RPG with lots of room for player input and relatively light mechanics. The perfect type of game if you mostly want to chuck some d20s with your friends while playing a pretty straightforward adventure game with minimal logistics. It's also free!
Quest is a thrilling adventure with your friends that you won't forget. Get the game and join the fun.
Grimwild is another one I've found quite charming. It's an interesting one: clearly inspired by D&D 5e (like, the character options are straight from 5e), but approaching that genre from a completely different direction. It clearly takes cues from some more modern indie RPGs like Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark, but still has its own unique twists on many ideas. Worth taking a look if you're into the broad genre of fantasy adventure but want something that approaches that genre via something a bit more generative. Also has a free version available, with the paid version mainly adding some essays about the designer's rationale for some of the choices in the game as well as advice on how to hack the game to different subgenres of fantasy.
Third I'm going to suggest QuestWorlds. QuestWorlds is technically setting neutral, but specifically meant for pulp adventures where the heroes are larger than life. It's a game with a history going as far back as the early 2000s and has gone through a few names, with QuestWorlds being the latest, and at the time of release it was one of the first examples of a roleplaying game that did not try to simulate its fictional reality via specific procedures but very specifically applied its rules towards emulating story convention. The main issue with QuestWorlds with regards to this ask is that it's very much a toolkit and also it doesn't really have a combat system. It has systems for resolving conflict, and those systems can in fact be used for resolving combat, but it's probably not what you're looking for if you want an actual combat system. Regardless, a very interesting game, but sadly no free version of this one.
Hopefully at least one of those will scratch and itch. If not, do let me know if there's something more specific you're looking for! :)
vaporwave
ellievsbear
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
izzy806
