SerenaOculis

That's my name. I'm an adult, btw.

[200-word-rpgs]

200 Word RPGs 2025

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

This is the submission thread for the 2025 event, running from November 1st, 2025 through November 30th, 2025. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.

[serenaoculis]

WIN STREAK NEGATIVE

a game for X LOSERS and 1 HIGHER POWER.

STATS have values 0 through 6. LOSERS have 3 stats: UNLIKABLE, SICKLY, and IGNORANT, with total value 9 at game start (distributed under player's discretion).

every round, HIGHER POWER defines, per LOSER, a CHALLENGE of type PERSONAL, SOCIAL, ACADEMIC or ECONOMIC, of difficulty X, associated with STAT Y. LOSER rolls 1d6 - STAT value. if roll is lower than X, LOSER gains N STRESS of type equivalent to the failed CHALLENGE. if roll is higher, LOSER gains SUCCESS of difficulty and type equivalent to CHALLENGE.

N is a factor of STAGE LOSER is in: 1 - TODDLER 2 - CHILD 3 - TEENAGER 4 - YOUNG ADULT

if a LOSER accumulates 5 STRESS in any category, they instantly RAGEQUIT and return to stage TODDLER, preserving all their SUCCESSes. a LOSER may choose to spend a SUCCESS in order to lower the DIFFICULTY of a CHALLENGE with an equivalent TYPE by the difficulty of spent SUCCESS.

stages are N CHALLENGEs long at game start, increasing by 1 per RAGEQUIT for ALL LOSERS.

every RAGEQUIT adds -1 to WIN STREAK tally. FINAL SCORE is RAGEQUITs + total DIFFICULTY of SUCCESSes remaining upon completing STAGE 4.

highest scorer wins.

i hereby provide my consent for this game to be archived off site.

this is actually a concept i had for a short story but given that i'm working on like 5 short stories right now i've resolved to scratch the itch to make something like this with this instead.

couldn't clarify in the rules but you are actively encouraged to be as flavourful as possible in your descriptions of CHALLENGEs, and both SUCCESSes and failures.

[serenaoculis]

revisited this and i have a few thoughts.

1. at first when i was reading it surprised me that i came up with a wholly original stat system that isn't derivative of my other works. this was because the stats in win streak negative are organ-based and not world-based, if that means anything to you. unlikable is head, sickly is body, and ignorant is left arm.

2. didn't have enough space to explain the framing device, but the game is a sort of homestuck time loop inspired thing where you keep iterating through failures until you succeed, and it is intended as a sort of dark comedy. ragequitting is a euphemism for suicide; your character kills themselves and then respawns at their own birth with new RNG and some lessons learnt from their past life.

3. the game is skewed in terms of characters toward the creation of what i believe my evil friends would describe as "downwardly mobile college students", due to the slice of time it takes into consideration and the framing of the challenges. if i were to rework it, i would explicitly make every phase 8 years long and the endpoint of 36 years as an explicitly arbitrary one where a character is more primed for midlife crises than startlife crises. i would also rename challenge types to "family", "friends", "life" and "money", where "life" fits both professional career choices and alternatives to them.

4. talking about this, i should provide examples for what a challenge of each type looks like. i'm going to only do one handful of these aimed towards the toddler stage

family/unlikable: your parents are arguing one room over. is it about you?

family/sickly: your family drops a mention of some strange medical condition. did you inherit it?

family/ignorant: you ask an innocent question about a complex topic. does your family care to explain?

friends/unlikable: your friends tell you to play a game with them and then start running away from you. are you actually playing?

friends/sickly: your friend wants to playfight; they're a bit larger than you, which you fail to account for. does it go poorly?

friends/ignorant: your friend proclaims some innocuous fun fact that you don't actually know is true. does it get permanently absorbed into your psyche?

money/unlikable: your birthday is coming up but your sibling just asked for something cool and got it. did your parents save for you?

money/sickly: you want to get a ball to play games with your friends on recess. do you get it?

money/ignorant: there's a cool illustrated book about your favourite subject from school. do you get it?

life/unlikable: you seem to have problems approaching other kids at the playground. do they try to include you?

life/sickly: you seem to get tired faster than other kids while playing sports. is it a lack of practice?

life/ignorant: it seems like every time you ask a question at school, the answer is boring or mean. has this been an unfortunate coincidence?

[goldensunset]

idk who needs to hear this but if you have been putting something off bc it doesn't need to be done until the end of the month. we are almost done with the teens we are approaching the big numbers (the twenties). that date shall dawn upon you swiftly and without mercy before you know it. psa for everyone except me i got plany off time

[serenaoculis]

was i really waging the cost/value ratio of a relationship with someone i didn't like where i had to have the initiative with everything a mere one month ago, three weeks away from someone who is capable of doing the conversational equivalent of giving my brain a deep massage

[serenaoculis]

haven't posted this on here so here you go. "promotional" thing for dungeons of australis, inked, digitalised, and aliased for your enjoyment

[draconym]

Getting dumped really puts children's cartoon villains into perspective. Like dude you're SO right, love and caring ARE disgusting and we SHOULD cast a spell to drain all human emotion into your amulet.

[draconym]

Friend breakups are how you get lines like "Your friends? You think your friends are coming to save you? Don't make me laugh."

[dreamyphantasia]

the prismriver sisters

[serenaoculis]

Ten feet twenty, potential man

Is waiting for the start of his fight

Ready to make a stand against the knife

By his palace waiting

Minibosses still hold the line

Surely the golden won't be the last

Onto the fountain he'll let nothing pass

So he stood

Potential man, fakeout boss

Maybe once, but no more

Expecting still

His encore or debut

That won't come

Holding strong to his throne

Challenged by none at all

Looking tough

Prepared for all things but

Cutscenes

[serenaoculis]

this is the last thing you see before you wake up on the floor and there's a gringo in your bed telling you he's manifesting his destiny by developing your house

[prokopetz]

Deltarune fanfic is in the odd position where the source material has basically exactly the same sense of humour as mainstream fanfic culture, but does it better. You'll read a fic where the author is clearly doing their best to have a particular character come off as a wacky caricature, and meanwhile in the actual source material there's some random optional interaction where they say or do something ten times as unhinged as anything in the fic and it just never gets brought up again.

[prokopetz]

The real problem with D&D's contemporary culture of play is that it's basically a worse version of what Paranoia was doing forty years ago. It's a faux pas for players to display knowledge of the mechanics and the GM is expected to maintain an elaborate kayfabe where they merely pretend to be moderating a game with rules while actually doing something completely different, and they're not even allowed to kill players with orbital laser strikes for talking back.

[prokopetz]

Like, I'm not keen on any framing of play where the GM is expected to do literally 100% of the work of making the game happen, but it seems to me that if you're going to do that anyway, the GM being both allowed and encouraged to kill you with lasers whenever they want is only fair compensation.

[prokopetz]

@danwhat replied:

The number of people willing to accept players who won't read the rules even though they come back week after week is bizarre - you wouldn't accept it for any other game, and RPGs are just a kind of game! If the rules of one game are 'too complex' just switch to a different game! If they claim they 'don't have time' - cancel one session. That 3 hour block is now dedicated game-learning time, and 3 hours is plenty. Easy.

See, "RPGs are [...] a kind of game" is where the disconnect lies. There's a large chunk of the present D&D fandom who don't think of tabletop RPGs as games; they think of them as performances being put on by the GM for the audience of the players, who – like any audience – are obliged only to be physically present. In this understanding, the "game-ness" of the activity is part of the performance – i.e., the GM is merely pretending to moderate a game with rules as an act of kayfabe; there's no point learning the rules because there aren't "really" rules to learn.

(Partly this is a product of folks coming to the hobby whose sole prior experience is with high-production-value podcasts, where the GM actually is an entertainer putting on a show for an audience, and often a professional actor to boot; partly it's a product of Hasbro attempting to market D&D as a zero-entry-barrier hobby by framing the GM not as a fellow player with special responsibilities, but as a volunteer service provider whose job is to facilitate other people playing D&D.)

The observation I'm gesturing toward here is that Paranoia is a game that actually, textually works this way – i.e., the GM is a performer putting on a show for the players, and the rules are fake and don't matter – but it does so within a narrative frame where the GM is both allowed and encouraged to demand that the players dance for their amusement, so at least the fuckery flows both ways. Contemporary D&D's culture of play doesn't even offer that (indeed, in many circles a GM who expresses any preferences at all regarding what kind of game they want to run would be regarded as an odious gatekeeper!), then has nerve to wonder why rapid GM burnout is such a massive problem.

[prokopetz]

I don't necessarily agree that Susie Deltarune having a YA fantasy bildungsroman arc while literally everyone she knows is an active suicide risk is a genre disconnect, per se, since a lot of YA fantasy is genuinely Like That, but I'll grant that we don't usually see it from this particular angle.

[feyd-rautha-apologist]

Kris: I feel intensely alienated from the people around me, everything I do is constricted by several layers of obligation and whenever I try regain some tiny degree of agency over myself it's actively killing me

Noelle: I feel so stuck in place and unable to deviate from the role I've been assigned that I'm willing to literally kill myself just to prove I can change something about my life

Susie: Even if it's scary, I have to learn to make friends and be myself, and to hope for a better future!

Ralsei: I can't allow myself to think of myself as truly alive because otherwise I will never be able to cope with the knowledge that I'll never get to live the life I want to live

[inkyxward]

Let susie have her moment she's like one second away from being put into the torment nexus

[3liza]

SNRIs should probably be unilaterally banned

[serenaoculis]

i was just wondering if my major depressive disorder was fucking shit up again and it was why i felt so shit, and thought of maybe taking fluoxetine for a week again and seeing if it changed anything. i am taking this post as a sign that i should not do that

[serenaoculis]

every fandom older than 2 decades has five queer people and grunglerish men who are thirty or forty years old who have a ton of new and refreshing takes and thoughts and bits of knowledge regarding the fandom subject, and they're hidden behind a fucking wall of 20 year old conservative men who will call you a poser if you actually engage with the fandom subject instead of with their powerscaling debates and goon sessions

[parabiota]

STOP SCROLLING

Your life ends in the wasteland.

[professionalchaoticdumbass]

there’s a japanese radish just below this post but you can’t reach it

[gon-iii]

収穫祭

2015年、長屋門公園。

立派な大根がリアカーに積まれていた。ここで育てたものだろうか。

[prokopetz]

Discussion about Types of Guy in tabletop roleplaying groups is always "the Rules Lawyer", "the Method Actor" and never "Guy Who Always Plays A Human And Invents New Setting-Specific Slurs For Their Character To Call A Specific Type Of Nonhuman Characters" even though I see the last one a lot more.

[serenaoculis]

are roaring gc jokes still funny