#titterpigs

[pachycephalopod]

Game Idea

Bahamut Lagoon ttrpg Not necessarily tactical grid combat, but each player controls A Dragon and picks their initial human party from a starting pool of options Human party members give combat abilities and bonuses based on their classes and your dragon stats, and party members can be traded, between battles, among the dragons

[tin-star-games]

Add this to your next RPG for some fun times: Choose two players. Next session, both their characters get to die. Big excite! Next session, their characters appear from an alternative universe, now being played by the other player.

[pachycephalopod]

I wanna talk about rpgs I read but I'm desperate to do so in a venue where there are actual responses or it just feels like I'm annoying people with something they don't care about Or here, I guess, where, like, one person has a chance of seeing what I post

[pachycephalopod]

Solitary Endeavor: “Sacred Forge” by Peach Garden Games

Had a grand time finally playing a round of this one, a game where you make a sword for someone for some reason and hope it’s a good one

Basic structure is

Figure out who you are and where you work

Figure out who you’re making a sword for and why they need it

Roll a total of 20 (or sometimes more) dice across 5 phases of making the sword to add some amount (0-4) each of Earth, Water, Wood, Metal, and Fire to the sword (only one element per phase)

Evaluate the final blade

Which element is strongest (doesn’t matter how strong) at the end gives some feature to the blade

How weak the weakest element is (doesn’t matter which element) determines how good your sword really is, from just kinda normal to Truly Legendary

You roll some set of your dice pool each round and pick what element to add based on the numbers available to you (as compared to a table at each phase, but each number consistently corresponds to the same element each phase). Every phase is aligned with a particular element, so if you pick that one you get a bonus as though you’d rolled an extra die of that number, and each is hostile to an element, so if you picked that but, say, only rolled one die of that number you get a total bonus of 0

I haven’t run the numbers, but I’d imagine my playthrough was pretty typical: one element at 2, the rest at 1, so it’s a pretty good but not heroic sword. The math for getting 4 as lowest is harsh, and the game doesn’t even account for the possibility of getting 5 in all stats, an outcome that would require rolling a specific number on all 20 dice in a row (not all the same number, but all four each phase being the correct specific number for that phase, which is 1 through 5 but not in order). I guess if you get that 1/6^20 chance of an outcome you can make up whatever the hell you want for what your sword does and no-one is gonna try and stop you. You’re sword is a new universe, perhaps, or both is and kills god. You got the long odds, you’re one in four quadrillion, go wild.

Anyway the math is a bit mean but the prompts are flavorful and matching the setting I wanted to the description provided was genuinely fun for me to flesh out how I was making a sword and with what materials; a good use of 20 minutes, more if you’re feeling imaginative and/or verbose, and if you don’t like the sword you made, make another! Some heroes lose. Sad but true.

[pachycephalopod]

Sometimes reading games be like

[pachycephalopod]

Having good game design ideas, even fleshed out in detail, in my head is really cool Having to put them down on some paper or paper-analog is an undue burden

[pachycephalopod]

It's a dream of mine to lift the GMPC experience progression from Ryuutama in a more generalizable way to apply it to other games, maybe make a few semi-system-agnostic supplements to add it to various sorts of game I think it's genuinely a useful way to ease someone into GMing to limit their powers by DMPC level, where the xp is measured in sessions played

[pachycephalopod]

Dang my face hurts from reading Buried Without Ceremony’s game “Simple World”

Because, see, it slaps

[pause for laughter]

A fun little toolkit for throwing together a PbtA game. Literally a fill-in-the-blank form for making alterations via a step-by-step guide. Not really guidance on how to design for genre, but I think if you need more on that than this document provides you probably need more than this document to make such a game.

I’ve read guides for designing PbtA moves, and they’re pretty detailed on what the point is and how to reach it, and this does not do that, but it neatly sidesteps it by giving three (really, two, with one working slightly differently on NPCs than PCs) moves and just suggesting situational bonuses and/or drawbacks on an as-needed basis with mostly-implied guidelines for intensity and how to apply them based on roll results.

So, you know, pretty baller. I don’t know that this would sustain a game for more than one to four or so sessions, something short but not necessarily one-shot, though you could use it to brainstorm the start of a game you fill out above and beyond the given guidance as you go. But I could absolutely see myself spending less than an hour on prep for what the game will become and then throwing it at players to bulk out during play.