Trans XP TTRPG @trans-xp-ttrpg - Tumblr Blog

We Are An Exclusively Trans TTRPG VTuber Group

Our Mission

In the face of fascism our all trans group feels that it's more important than ever to create trans content for trans people, by trans people. We know we are putting a target on our backs by being so unapologetically our selves, but we want to create space for our community despite that. The only way we can get through what's happening is by not stopping in the face of fear and creating in spite of it.

Our Content

We release weekly episodes of TTRPG games that always have our world perspective that is intrinsically tied to our transness in them. Weather its the characters we are playing that are trans, or just us as trans players influencing the way we construct our worlds from a trans perspective. All of our group is made up of writers so we also have lot's of experience creating interesting and dynamic character arks and vivid worlds.

Our Members

Kat is our resident GM and bright pink catgirl, the mastermind of our stories, and she uses She/Her pronouns.

Mitha is our resident editor and recap writer, the furry that runs the internet, they use She/They pronouns.

Azure is our resident TikTok/Shorts/Reels maker and who's gender is... well, what is a suit of armor piloted by raccoons anyway? He uses He/They Pronouns.

Silver is our resident graphic designer and project manager/creative director, a he/him/hoe vampire him self, and he uses He/Him pronouns.

Our Current Running Game

F*ck it! Only Trans People Can Be Wizards

This game is set in Scotland at a wizard school for those newly awakened to their magical abilities. In this world, only trans people can be natively born with magic. This is definitely not for any particular reason. Each of our PC's are struggling with personal obstacles while trying to keep up the appearance of studious students. But with the weave of magic in this world starting to act straggly, threats from outside politics and family challenges, can they make it through unscathed?

Find free weekly episode recaps, character sheets, and more!: patreon.com/c/TransXPTTRPG

Watch our past episodes you might have missed!: youtube.com/@TransXPTTRPG

Watch our episodes when they come out and talk with the crew!: twitch.tv/transxpttrpg

Find us everywhere els!: transxpttrpg.com

Our Hashtags

#transxpttrpg - All of our content

#bloodofthetriad2099 - All about our Vampire the Masquerade series

#Fuckitonlytranswizards - all about our kids on broom series which is a

#transxpfanart - Any fan art made by the lovely community

#vtm #ttrpg #vtuber #transgender #trans artist #transttrpg #transxpttrpg #trans community #trans content #trans character #trans pride #vtuberen

depsidase

trans-xp-ttrpg

Remember its important to be the change you see in the world

#ttrpg community #transgender #queer #trans pride #trans wrath #antifascist #communist

wingkink

btw it's so fucking stupid you can be anxious physically in your body even after you've decided mentally you don't care. I'm supposed to be in charge here

trans-xp-ttrpg

This is way to fucking real

depsidase

i-bet-on-winning-dogs

I've come to realize, I'm kind of a polyamous whore when it comes to ttrpg books

#transxpttrpg #ttrpg #ttrpg community #actual play #live play #ttrpgs #queer #transgender #I'm a slut for well applied rules and game mechanics

Being a communist is basically being transgender

Complete off topic comments had in conversations with our group

#transgender #transxpttrpg #queer #communism

colinarcartperson

Had the pleasure of working on this commission the colors made me very happy~

trans-xp-ttrpg

Omg that so pretty

#transxpttrpg approves this message

moringmark

runcibility

I liked this post, scrolled for like another minute before I went “SHIT FUCK SHIT” and scrolled back to reblog it

quadriviummuse

I always reblog this one when I see it on my dash. When someone posts their own art, writing, or music here they are really hoping you will share it.

prokopetz

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!)

prokopetz

#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.)

prokopetz

@hayeseveryone replied:

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.

haley-dreams-of-comets

courtesy of @asimovsideburns

cavegirlpoems

So, I've got a little experience with playing in APs, and it's a subtly different medium to a home game: the audience's presence nudges things in certain directions. In my experience, the thing isn't scripted per se, although it often tends away from sandboxy play and closer to a train-ride, because the key thing is minimising friction. Likewise, there's a tendency to play fast and loose with mechanics, to just kinda roll something and go with it because you don't want to bog the game down in minutiea. Likewise tactical play isn't super engaging for an outside audience - particularly combat or exploration - so you want to lean towards other avenues. Social drama, politics, mysteries and comedy-of-errors work pretty well.

That being said, none of the AP's I've been involved with have been scripted, and generally dice haven't been fudged (indeed, dice-rolling has generally been minimal enough that there was little call for fudging). You don't need to ~cheat~ (pre-scripting, fudging the maths, etc) to make an entertaining AP, just to lean into the incentives of the medium and play for an audience not the table.

I do think there are games that are better or worse suited to AP play because of how well they facilitate this particular style of play. Modern D&D is pretty low down on the list, whereas I can see

So I don't want to devalue APs as a medium: there's a lot of skill that goes into it. But Best Practice in one is different to Best Practice in another (and indeed, Best Practice in playtests is different again, etc etc).

Take all this with a pinch of salt, of course, my experience as an AP player has been pretty minimal (although non-zero), and maybe the big shows do it very differently.

anim-ttrpgs

I think you can do 99% "home game" style play for a decent number of RPGs and have it be entertaining to watch in an edited format, the list just gets a lot shorter if you're doing it "live." And, your target audience has to be people who actually enjoy RPGs as games and not as a thing that "gets in the way of the story." They have to be excited that a character in the story did something cool as adjudicated by the rules, not just that the character did something cool.

Our crew has had pretty good success making actual (playing exactly by the rules, never faking dice rolls, not prescripting anything except the mere fact the PCs are going to meet and team up) actual play extremely entertaining and engaging with Eureka (a very very "trad" challenge game with a whole lot of very opinionated rules) just by editing out stutters and pauses, and only sometimes editing out rulebook checking.

The only difference between this gameplay and our regular unrecorded games is that we sometimes stop to explain a rule to the audience. There aren't a lot of rolls being made in the first few episodes (until episode 5 where dozens of rolls start happening), but just about everything that happens is still rules-adjudicated or at least rules-influenced. (Like, they go to a restaurant because they'll start losing Composure if they don't eat enough in a day, they go to sleep because they will lose Composure if they don't sleep, the amount of time it takes to get from location to location is rules-adjudicated, etc..) Even certain questions being asked in otherwise-freeform-y dialogue are because there are rules on certain PCs' character sheets that either penalize them for not asking, or reward them for asking.

It can be done with "crunchy" games that have a lot of friction, you just cut out all the times you pause and also play for an audience that cares and knows that games and game design are real.

trans-xp-ttrpg

As a creator of a ttrpg actual play series, we produce a show that is about the story being told. Things are not scripted preplanned and we do play the game but there is a somewhat large section of the rolls that are cutout.

The rolls do matter and effect the game significantly and no fudges happen. In my most recent game "Fuck it only trans people can be wizards" some rolls went a different way that expected and the entire planned hook of why the players were going to start being around each other completely went arwy. (Essentially 2 of the players we're meant to get in trouble and then get detention and that would bring the third character in to being responsible for them)

I've never planned a roll going one way or another the when a roll goes well and the players convince a npc thst they we're not meant to that changes the game.

I also tend to prefer talking/intrgue based games and not combat heavy ones. This allows for narrative and story and this story is told.

I personally rely heavily on the game mechanics to help me tell the story. Its how I do so.

#ttrpg #ttrpg community #transgender #transxpttrpg #actual play #queer #live play #ttrpgs #just my thoughts

opheliathegrey

trans-xp-ttrpg

I fucking hate how true this is omg

#ttrpg #ttrpg community #transgender #transxpttrpg #queer

It is my firm belief that more gms need to let their players drive the narative we are all players in this space and you are not writing a book this world is meant to be collaborative

#ttrpg #ttrpg community #transxpttrpg #actual play #transgender #live play #ttrpgs #queer #ttrpg hot takes

I understand the purpose of the term of unreliable narrator as is this person sees the world in extremely squewd ways that are either delusional or just wrong do to misconceptions or like prejudice, but like isn't every narrator unreliable?

They all have their unique and somewhat unqualified takes on the world. They're only just a lens of the author and their values.

#musings #trans writers #transxpttrpg