What

goes here

[aaronsrpgs]

A Worksheet Manifesto (Rough Draft)

The Worksheet Manifesto is an attempt to explain why I'm moving my game design toward something I can print for free at the public library and give away. It's not a scold or a call to action; I buy full-color zines and hardcover books, and I support people charging for their work. This is a personal manifesto—an exercise in self-exploration.

The first reason I pursue this is ACCESS. I want people to be able to find and play my games. (Accessibility is maybe a better word for this, but I don't want it confused with the process through which something is made easier to use for people with disabilities.)

Some of the main barriers I've seen are financial (someone can't afford my games), technological (lack of computers and/or printers makes it more complicated to read my games), and international (shipping to someone outside the U.S. is prohibitively expensive).

Combining these three elements, I realized I wanted my games to be cheap or free. The common "community copies" solution on itch.io is much touted, and for good reason, but as I tried explaining the process to friends who weren't familiar with the site (or who flat-out aren't tech savvy), many responses were confused or frustrated. So I've set most of my games to pay-what-you-want with a suggested price.

Going from computer tech to printer tech, my most recent games were laid out in black and white, without ink-sucking textures (although some still have large spots of black in the art--something I continue to consider). Many American libraries offer limited free printing, and I always hope people will "utilize" the printers at their jobs or schools. I want people to be able to easily print out my games and share them at the table or pass them to friends.

And more selfishly, I hate dealing with fulfillment and shipping. It's stressful for me, it requires money up front to print things, and I'm bad at it, which means shipments go out slow, or not at all if someone lives outside of the U.S. Creating a file that's easy to print hopefully encourages people to create their own copies.

These cheap print copies also hopefully contribute to a feeling of DISPOSABILITY. I grew up with comic books, magazines, newspapers, and mass market paperbacks, and I think these cheap, short slabs of culture helped them feel like someone could engage with them without having to be fancy or educated or in the know. (A lot of us gatekeep ourselves!)

Prices for RPGs, like so many nerd collectibles, have steadily risen at least since the start of the pandemic. Crowdfunders often capitalize on FOMO, encouraging people to go all in on deluxe hardcovers with fabric bookmarks or whatever. And if my experience working at a used game store is anything to go by, lots of those fancy editions go right onto the bookshelf, unread. Don't want to break the spine or get fingerprints on it!

And I guess I'm just against consumerism? If someone wants a nice thing, I hope they get it, but a culture of games as luxury items and status symbols is not something I'm interested in.

So if someone has a game of mine and they don't want it anymore, I hope they pass it on, put it in a little free library, or recycle it.

And those dirty little printouts of my games? I want people to touch them and write them. I want TACTILITY. This is partially a usability issue: 300-page hardcovers are hard to find information in, and they're heavy if you have to lug them to a friend's house.

So I try to design games where everything a player (including the GM) needs is on, at most, three sheets of paper. I want them to be able to spread a couple pages out and take in the shape of the game they're about to play. I want them to circle things and make notes in the margins. Moving a pencil around does wild things to your brain, the same way that picking at a guitar or molding clay does. It focuses attention in interesting ways.

And in the end, you hopefully have a personalized article of play. And if you spill beer on it, no one's worried about replacing that $50 hardcover.

Speaking of beer, I want my games to be available to and contribute to COMMUNITY. As the pandemic started, I retreated into lots of online spaces, and those were absolutely vital to my survival. But I lost touch with lots of my friends and acquaintances in my city. I want to reconnect with them.

One of my favorite cartoonists, Mark Connery, is known for drawing little zines and just...leaving them all over. Coffee shops, art galleries, bathrooms. And when I think of him, I think of an artist responding directly to the places around him. Is it sad that some of this work is probably "lost" to all readers other than the person that happens across the zine? A little bit. But I think that comes from a bad part of my brain, the part that wants to own things.

I certainly don't want the entirety of my own work collected and widely distributed. Some of those things were specific responses to specific times that I've moved past. Some were bad! But I want to keep responding to my specific times and my specific place. I want to give things to friends (even if they just pass them on or recycle them). I want to give a game to someone at a zine fest and have them recognize my name from a zine they read in a coffee shop bathroom. And maybe they'll give me a zine in return.

My last hangup is MODULARITY. First, similar to tactility, I want to be able to give a player only the rules that matter to them. Character creation and basic rules? Here's a page. And once you're familiar with that and we've entered a downtime phase, here's a page with those options. You want to start a farm? Here's a page. I want it to feel like printing coloring pages for kids or ripping out my favorite magazine articles. These are the parts that matter. And if they stop mattering, you can get rid of them.

But I also want modularity on a system level. I want to add a subsystem to game as I think of it. I want to throw in an adventure pamphlet when it comes to me. I can keep them all in a little box, like a care package from my past self, and when it's time to run a game, I can dig around like a verminous animal and build my nest out of the best bits.

In CONCLUSION, I want to reiterate that this is a personal practice, and I'm not criticizing people who work differently. I used to work differently, and in the future, I'll probably work differently again.

This is simply the way I've identified what's important to me, set that up against the things that cause me to stumble, taken advantage of the privileges I have, and tried my best to bring that all together in a way that keeps me excited about my own work.

[7dmom]

I am so sorry you had a traumatic childhood and it made you stupid on line. I was raised as a lotus flower and I smell like vanilla all the time

[7dmom]

I put your name on a beetle and let it die of thirst

[screenshotsofdespair]

[transnest]

[sheepydraws]

The secret Dungeon Meshi sauce that's getting people to eat better is that it's so non-judgmental. Senshi and the rest of the gang never talk about what not to eat besides things that taste bad and literal poison. They don't even talk about "health" that much besides the importance of a balanced diet. It's so much easier to eat well when you think of food simply as something your body needs, and that it's often worth the extra effort to make it taste good, especially when you understand how to connect "things your body needs" with "things that taste good"

[sunshine-tattoo]

I love that when marcille says she really wants some cured ham senshi says "oh that means your body is craving fat which is actually a very good and normal thing. Let's go kill a snake chicken and have a picnic."

[thekingofcouldhaves]

One thing people get immediately about Dungeon Meshi is that so much of it is about Dungeons and Dragons. I think a less discussed thing is Dungeon Meshi is also very much about backpacking.

I used to backpack for a living as part of my job and the logistics of how much food I could carry was very much a limiting factor of how far we could get in a week before we had to turn around.

We had to do so much planning about food, I counted calories for the first time in my life not to lose weight but to establish a bare minimum of how much food I needed. I started with 2000 calories before realizing that they decided that number was an average for people who hiked way less then 8 hours in a day. I went up to 2400 calories a day, I would have done more but reasonably I could only carry so much food on my back. I made sure a good portion of it was salty because after the first day my sweat would taste like water and if I didn't pack enough gatorade powder my legs would cramp. Pringles have never tasted as good as they would on day 3 of a hike when my body craved salt the most, at home they were disappointing. Food was about what my body needed and what would let me keep hiking.

I would often train new volunteers and impressing upon them how much food they needed to pack and how they needed to think about it differently was always hard. The hardest was young woman. They would tell me they only ate 1400 calories in a day, they were never hungry after that, they couldn't possibly eat that much. They always listened to me in the second week. No one ever brought enough in the first week man or women.

The logistics of carrying enough food was a frequent topic, we discussed yes, if we were going to a lake, could we fish? Would that be reliable, could we save pack weight and money (dehydrated food is expensive) on that? We would talk about what fresh ingredients we could bring, how long they would keep, how we could cook them. Like a lot of adventurers mention when running into Laio's party, the kind of dried food that goes well in a backpack wears on you after a while, you want something actually cooked, not dried or at best rehydrated. The problems about food they discuss in the manga are the exact same problems I have sat around and discussed with people I worked on the trail with.

[ospreyonthemoon]

What is adventuring if not backpacking with weapons

[everydaylouie]

Queen Anglerfish Theme (another underwater synth track made entirely with a Moog Grandmother)

[thydungeongal]

Ultimately an RPG that uses playing cards as a randomizer but doesn't actually utilize the cards for. You know. The things that cards can do. Is just using them as a fancy, weirdly shaped die.

A few things that cards can do that dice can't:

You know that dice superstition that people have about how if they roll enough low numbers they're bound to get a high one? That sort of actually works with cards provided cards aren't immediately returned to the deck and the deck reshuffled. Because there's a limited number of each "roll," good or bad.

You can hold them in your hand. It's basically like pre-rolling a bunch of numbers and then getting to spend those numbers as they become relevant. Maybe you only get to draw more cards by playing all your cards, meaning that if you don't conserve your good cards your character's luck is eventually bound to run out.

You can make poker hands with them. Added to the previous point, maybe you will be forced to play a worse hand and have your character flub a non-critical roll because you're hoping for that better hand that'll turn the tide.

There's suits as an added bit of information that can be utilized for some mechanics. Maybe matching suit with an action type results in an extra benefit?

[prokopetz]

A few other stupid card tricks you can use in your tabletop RPGs:

Playing cards can be used to implement large random lookup tables where duplicate results need to be avoided without resorting to forced rerolls. (Tip: remove the aces, jokers and court cards from a standard poker deck, leaving only the 2–10s of each suit, and you've got a set of cards which can be used to double-index a full d66 table to allow it to work with either cards or dice. Also, you just set aside 18 cards, so you can use those to double-index a separate half-d66 table if you need both.)

Even when you're using playing cards as ersatz dice (i.e., just drawing the top card from the deck and treating that as your roll), the drawn card automatically furnishes a persistent token representing the result of that "roll"; this token can then be fed into a resource economy, retained as an historical record of the outcome, or both. (For example, Rose Bailey's Beautiful Anomalies, in which "rolled" cards are played face-up on the table into a linear queue from which the GM draws, allowing players' actions in the present to control the GM's dice rolls in the future.)

In physical play spaces, the fact that cards have face-up and face-down states allows randomised outcomes to be made known to some but not all players much more easily than with dice. The face of a drawn card can be selectively shown only to certain participants, while a played card can be placed on the table face-down to offer assurances that the unrevealed outcome hasn't been tampered with. (This can be done with the outcomes of dice rolls via note-passing, of course, but using cards in this way removes the need to trust that the note accurately reports the unrevealed roll, which can facilitate some types of adversarial play.)

Building on the previous point, cards have extra axes of statefulness. A die typically offers only the rolled number and its position on the table as stateful information, but a card can be face-up or face-down, placed in an upright or rotated position, etc. In face-to-face play, cards are also much easier to move from zone to zone on the table when position-as-state is required, making them better suited to applications where randomisers double as resource tokens or playing pieces.

Deckbuilding. It's a lot more feasible to give each player a personalised mini-deck of cards to draw from than it is to give each player a set of dice with customised faces; if you're determined to bring deckbuilding mechanics to the tabletop, basing it on actual playing cards is going to be a much easier sell for potential players than asking them to screw around with papercraft tokens or blank dice and markers. (Or, heaven forefend, asking them to actually buy custom dice which can only be used with your game!)

Finally, standard playing cards get you a lot of cards for not that much money (you can usually buy three to five full 54-card decks for the same cost as a single set of standard polyherdrals), which is a strong selling point in contexts where you need (or want) to be throwing around lots and lots of individual randomisers and would prefer not to go the "great thundering handfuls of dice" route.

[cryptotheism]

Hey, just wanna say, as someone who knows far to much about the horrors air warfare from WW2 onwards, the idea to make warplanes literal dragons fucks bigly on a symbolic level. Yeah, the big planes that wipe out human life in indiscriminate fire, rained from above, should be seen as monstrous! That's not cool that this is a thing that exists!

My grandfather worked in aerospace during the war. He took me on a tour of an American aircraft carrier once, when I was very young. I thought it was conceptually pretty neat. It had places and things I recognized like water fountains and a cafeteria and bunk beds.

I live somewhere with lots of predatory birds. I still enjoy sitting out by the lake and watching the perigrine absolutely annihilate ducks. Redtail hawks are way bigger than you think they are.

But I remember heading up to the deck and seeing a decommissioned gulf war era combat aircraft. I think it was an old F4 Phantom II. It had dead missiles still loaded onto the wingjacks for display. I knew what combat aircraft were but I think I was young enough that part of my conception of this object was "dragon".

It's the curves yk. They look upsettingly organic in real life. Biologically predatory. Like they're suddenly gonna stand up and walk away on their landing gear.

[cryptotheism]

The concept of a warplane is so depraved to me. It's a flying machine for killing people, a physical manifestation of wanton, mechanized, imperial violence. Yet distant and impersonal. Few things are more deserving of the term "monsterous".

[datserblord-blog]

Ive compiled all the different packs from Dnd 5e masterfully drawn by Betterlegends on Tumblr! I’ve been printing these and handing them to my players for character creation, truly useful (and preeeeeetty)

Serious shoutout to the artist! All credits to him! 

(I only made it in a pretty and easy post, don’t mind me)

[dailydungeondelves]

Of course I would never

[beedallo]

Thats Fair II

36"x36" flashe and acrylic on wood

[jeffstormer]

Love yourself like tabletop RPG designers love Capitalized Words.

[depsidase]

[littlealienproducts]

Desiccant Silica Gel Tee by KREEPLORD

[sarkos]

[sprintingowl]

TTRPGs Bundle

Gargantuan mega superbundle alert!

If you want a ridiculous number of TTRPGs---and also for your money to be donated in full to a medical aid charity that is attempting to tend to the victims of an ongoing crisis---games in this bundle include:

Wanderhome, FIST, Gubat Banwa, Caltrop Core, Eyes On The Prize, Gun & Slinger, Maharlika, Karanduun Make God Bleed, Oldhome, Cuticorium, Gravemire, Moonlight On Roseville Beach, Hypermall Unlimited Violence, Killotine, Mourn, Beacon, Sunfish Sitting There, Mashed, Kernel, Star & City, and a great many more.

That's nearly 700 TTRPGs, all bangers, something for every genre and table, available until end of June 2024.

(in this post I have avoided saying certain words in case they algorithmically influence its reach and visibility, please feel free to say those words in the reblogs)

TTRPGs for Palestine: 643 items for $10.00

[cryptotheism]

I feel like people these days don't really have a handle on how crazy the Satanic Panic was. A lot of cops wholeheartedly believed they were gonna have to arrest evil wizards.

[cryptotheism]

"magic is real and evil wizards are a legitimate, immediate threat to public saftey." Was something that occasionally had to be debated at a policy level among government officials.

[jdragsky]

my favorite way of thinking about TTRPG rulebooks lately has been as a work of art which has been designed to inspire a group of people to create a new work of art together

[jdragsky]

a thing that is beautiful about playing a TTRPG is that it's simultaneously a sacred ritual, a generative creative session, and a silly elfgame we do for fun, and all of these things are true, and all of these things build on top of each other