#ttrpg thoughts

[trashprinxe]

Let’s have a talk about malleability and TTRPGs

I come from a theatrical background. Did theatre for most of my life, majored in stage management, the works. Plays and the way they function are deeply embedded in my psyche.

So when I design and play games, I come from that theatrical framework.

Now — on the one hand, you have Shakespeare. Fairly universal stories, yeah? You can cut it up, switch things around, put it into a multitude of settings. And it still works! King Lear in space. Romeo & Juliet as pirates. The Scottish Play (old habits die hard) done avant-garde. It’s malleable!

On the other end, you have hyper-specific plays about hyper-specific themes. Angels in America. The Laramie Project. Venus in Furs. Etcetera. You can’t remove the core themes, change the setting, switch scenes around: without erasing the core intent of the work and the story it’s trying to tell.

And in the middle, you have plays that are somewhat malleable. Almost, Maine, for instance. It’s made up of vignettes; you can do only some of them, if you so choose. It’ll still have the same impact.

I believe TTRPGs exist on a similar spectrum.

You have systems that can accommodate many different genres or play styles. People play dnd this way. Pathfinder comes with pre built settings that run the gamut

PbtA games are hyperspecific. Monster of the Week is about, well, monsters of the week. Remove that, and you’re playing a different game.

Call of Cthulhu can be set in any time period, but you still have to be up against Eldritch horrors. If you’re able to fight the monster, that’s a different intent than the game was built for.

Lyric games are akin to 4.48 Psychosis (everyone should read that, by the way, it’s a master work of avant-garde theatre).

And so on and so on.

Nothing is better or worse than any other. It just exists, on a spectrum, in the same vein as playstyle or crunch do. Everyone has their preference.

But with any game, there comes a point where you’re no longer playing that game.

10 Things I Hate About You is not The Taming of the Shrew, though it were based on it. There’s a limit to even the most forgiving game to where you’re no longer playing that game, but something you and your table have created for yourselves.

You can’t take the queerness or religion out of Angels in America. That’s a different play altogether.

It’s a spectrum.

I choose to design in the specific. That’s what resonates with my brain. You may want to play something that’s capable of handling more universal narratives. That’s fine too!

But we can’t ignore the bones of the system, and it’s incorrect to say we’re putting on Hamlet, when we’re actually performing The Lion King.

So: the Theory of Malleability (working title).

I don’t have a great end to this. Just musings. But I hope it makes sense to you too.

[tgirl-tamag0tchi]

Playing in a setting built for one system… with a different one.

Implicitly changes focus and perspective I think.

Even with homebrew. The core mechanics of a system tell you what matters, what doesn’t, and what kind of story is gonna be told.

Changes how the setting is seen… and who you are in it… how you relate to it.

[arsene-inc]

I am a fan of Shangri-La Frontier. It is a manga that just...absorbed me when I first read it, to the point I remember the time and place when it happens. And then I reread it immediatly after.

It's been a few years now. I am impatient so I went past the scans to try to read the webnovel. Many ideas I want to steal, but my main problem stays the same as when I wrote a small article about it : How do I play a TTRPG of this?

I thought about .Dungeon, a game happening in a mmo. I thought about Break, Cloudbreaker Alliance, Fabula Ultima, games inspired by JRPG. But the system of Shangri La Frontier is too...on the fly and endless with its skills that develop depending on the player's playstyle. The build is a big part of the Manga. I thought about Thorn with its tactics and talents that can be created by the player. But something is missing. To use a webnovel skill as an example, which game would have a "get a buff for every critical strikes hit during the combat". And then a lightbulb struck like a fridge door opening in the night.

Which sort of games has also made the build its center point? Collectible Card Games. This is actually Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh

What if the better game to adapt SLF was Perfect Draw? A game in which the player makes their own cards with a whole system dedicated to it. In which big buffs comes with debuffs and only the big plays matter rather than the basic hits. MMORPG and CCG/TCG may be closer than I thought

[safelynte]

Open question: What should the difference between levels of play in TTRPG be?

In this context, the level is the character level. For a 20-level TTRPG, it's like low-level play at 1-5, mid-level at 9-12, and high at 18+

[ratinasuitproductions]

A Thought on Settlements

By settlements, I mean the places where players go to rest and resupply. They act as rest stops during/between adventures, a place to catch one's breath and prepare for the next journey. As a rule, settlements should be safe from immediate danger. 

Most settlements contain locations that perform the below functions.

A Place to Wait

A location where players can sleep, rest, and allow time to pass.

Examples: inn, motel, sleep pods.

A Place to Heal

Somewhere the players can recover from “big” injuries/ailments.

Examples: temple, medical centre, healing vats.

A Place to Socialise

Where the inhabitants of the settlement gather and socialise.

Examples: town square, diner, dive bar.

A Place to Purchase

A source for replacing or replenishing lost resources.

Examples: market stall, general store, vending machine-lined alley.

Often, a single location can serve multiple purposes; for example, a tavern can be both a place to wait and a place to socialise.

Each of these locations needs someone (or something) to run it, which naturally creates a small cast of NPCs for the players to interact with. 

The above is a starting point for building a settlement. In a future post I might write about growing settlements into something more, but that can be for another day.  

[krawkpaladin]

I pretty frequently see posts about "If you think that D&D is too complicated or the rules get in the way of your story, try Monster of the Week/Flying Circus/other PBtA game or something else rules light," but I don't know if that's necessarily the best advice with no caveats, and it's specifically because of how rules are treated and structured.

Since I mentioned Flying Circus, I will explain my thoughts via an overwrought airplane metaphor. D&D5E is like a commercial jet liner. It's big and complex, sure, but it can also survive if some of the bolts aren't put in perfectly. The plane will likely survive and still function in getting you from point A to point B, even if it isn't the most comfortable flight, so long as certain core pieces remain intact. But something like a PBtA game is like one of those ultralight gliders, where absolutely every part is needed to stay in the air.

If you start with D&D, you're very frequently okay if you ignore rules here and there. As long as you have the core rules down, you can play the game without things breaking down entirely. But if you bring that mindset into something where every rule counts because there's only five of them, you're going to start running into issues the moment you go "we can skip this one" because every bit of rules tech is that much more important.

I guess what I'm getting at is that, unless someone is specifically citing an issue that is specifically caused by following a rule along with all of its adjacent rules (looking at you, material components for spells) or some sort of genre conventions that do not gel with the rules (looking at you, every *slice of life* campaign that ever unironically contains the phrase "cone of cold"), just recommending them a different set of rules to ignore isn't going to help them enjoy whatever game they choose to play. Like, if they're really that against any rules at all, they'd be better served doing improv with their friends or like a communal writing thing. At least they'd be having a nice time.

Anyways, safe flying.

[makapatag]

fiction--or that imaginative cloud that emerges from the collective interdependent game-consciousnesses of all the players involved, the text, cultural context, inspirations, the ideal, the preconception, and the gameworld--is role-playing games' greatest innovation

i've been using a different word for it lately: world. fiction-first for me is "world-first". fiction is too loaded a term. due to its literary rasa it feels like it is synonymous with "narrative" when it's not. it can be, if that is what the world must be, or what the design is

my supplication is that all rpg game design is created around building a world/fiction, whether intended or not. it might arise as detritus from complex interlocking mechanics, or it might arise as something having to be grasped by lite mechanics that chase it

feels like it's something that's not to be aspired to but rather IS the game itself. through it, "badly designed games" keep puissance. a fiction arises from it nonetheless. better designed games acknowledge what fiction arises from its mechanics, procedures, prejudices

more instances of buddhist philosophy seeping into design thoughts. i wrestled with so much of my design being attempts to emulate video games but i really think i should stop looking up to video games and embrace rpgs for what they are instead of seeing them as bidyogaem-lite

[illogarithmil]

I'm presently writing* a short Mage: the Ascension adventure for the TTRPG JAMuary jam on Itch, so MtAs is very in my brain at the moment. And it's remarkably how much stuff just in the world feels like it comes straight from Mage:

Walking the dog around a nearby posh private estate absolutely gives an impression of what moving through a different Reality Zone should feel like. Even though it's not really a gated community and none of the people are unfriendly per se, you get a sense of full-body unwelcomeness that just seems to permeate the environment. You can feel that really basic things like interacting with neighbours and moving between estate and non-estate spaces Work Differently Here. I get this with the distinction between the university town and normal town bits of my uni city, too.

There's presently an elaborately set-up stack of three books and a pen which hold my laptop charger in the one specific position where it will keep my laptop alive. There is no obvious reason why it only works in that position. The position changes every 2-6 hours and I have to readjust the books. This is a capital-T Technology which interacts with not-obviously-related objects to produce an effect largely confusing to everyone around me; most obviously, it feels like an Etherite thing, but you could extrapolate out to say that this is sort of what all mages do. It makes sense from their very specific perspective and appears like random, useless chaos and clutter to basically everybody else. (Oh look, the position needs changing again.)

Starting drinking coffee has really adjusted my perspective on how adjusting your perspective (with mind-altering substances or anything else) could be a magickal practice. It doesn't have to be as obvious and direct as 'trip on shrooms until you hallucinate a dragon; now there's a dragon!'** Rather, different perception of the world, greater clarity or somethingity of thought (depending on method), allow you to interact with it from wholly different angles. In a subtle fashion, they shift the entire pattern of life over a course of days so that new things become possible, new avenues that you literally couldn't see or imagine before. Make that magickal: now you can find the alleyways-between-alleyways because your Awakened LSD is (from your perspective) letting you look at angles sideways for the first time... if you see what I mean, there aren't really good words in the English language for this. And then if you want to go super vulgar, apply that more directly - it's not that you're just hallucinating a dragon into existence, it's that you're giving yourself the spike of vision, of possibility, needed to see and talk to the dragon that was always there in a space which is much more accessible than it normally seems and convince it to give you a hand.

I love finding the magic(k)al in the mundane.

*Attempting to write, I'm mainly working on it in the breaks between dissertation work so whether it'll get done... ** Nowt wrong with perception=reality as an element of paradigm of course, but it does tend to prove the point of the MtAw fans who insist that all MtAs mages are basically just solipsists. I've definitely played that character, but it's always good to underline that there can be others within the vaguely Ecstatic-y mind-alteration space