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dice-wizard · 2 years

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Hey traditional TTRPG game designers. Hey, you. Yeah you. Look at me.

Stop including mechanics that remove player engagement.

What do I mean by this? I mean shit like stunning effects that prevent a character from taking actions and therefore remove a player's ability to continue to participate, abilities that knock out a player character and therefore remove the player from participating in a fight, effects that instantly kill a character (therefore removing a player from participating), and literally any other effect you can think of that ends in the player no longer playing.

Trad designers, our artform is dependent on player participation. People enjoy maximalist, crunchy, tactical games because they're fun to engage with. What's the point of having all these rules if you're going to include things that stop your players from using them??

You're gonna say "oh, but only D&D does this" - no it fucking does not. These rules are everywhere. They're even in Blades in the Dark. Stop it.

Here are some cool alternatives. I'm trying to present these as open ended as possible:

Force a choice between two actions

You can't attack this enemy, but you can attack another, make a movement action, or any other non-attack action

Present a hard bargain

Attacking this enemy means you choose between taking a certain amount of damage or accepting emotional attachment to them, causing issues later.

Present high risk and high reward

Attacking this enemy means incurring extra damage against you if you hit, but if you succeed, you gain a stat boost for the rest of the fight.

Consider stakes other than character death

In many instances this will require rules reconfiguring, but that's a topic for another post. Besides that, remember that if someone's character gets instantly killed in the first round, that player must then sit on their hands for the rest of the session.

Yeah I know "let them play an NPC" is often a "solution" to this problem, but why do that when you could just implement a rule that lets other PCs get the downed character back to the fight - like in Borderlands or Left4Dead (or Gears of War or Vermintide, or...)

Consider how much more exciting that is, and how much energy won't be lost by someone having to literally sit out while all their friends have fun. Furthermore, players make much more interesting and risky decisions when they aren't at risk of losing their blorbo.

The point is to play. Nothing else. Stop shooting yourself in the foot with your own rules.

#ttrpg #dnd #d&d #tabletop #tabletop rpg #ttrpgs #ttrpg design #dm advice #gm advice #dungeon master #dungeons and dragons #Dungeons and dragons advice #Dungeon master advice #storytelling #game design #Traditional game design #Trad games #Trust me I'm a professional

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jaypilled · 1 month

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doodled my gwen and bridgette designs :)

#total drama #total drama island #total drama gwen #td gwen #total drama bridgette #td bridgette #idk why i chose these two in particular they're just fun to draw #gwen probably wears a lot less during the actual game this is just what she'd wear normally #imagine having to do a challenge in full trad goth like that'd suck #jay art

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bevirspnsblmnt · 7 months

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trad sketches I drew today and then cleaned up and enhanced in ps later

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 astarion #khael tav #disegna e bevi #otp: warding bond #I missed sketching with pencil and paper #I need to get back to it my digital art always improves after a good round of trad sketches #anyway! in order:#vampires lacking reflections keep worming its way into my mind in more way than one and I just have to get it out #I never gave khael nice camp clothes in the game bc they look so weird on him to me but I bet astarion would appreciate lol #the next two drawings are just me being feral about them #esp the last one

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silly-stings · 1 month

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more doodles that twitter seemed to eat up

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rubia-peregrinart · 3 months

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the faceless

#specifically those seen in-game but not as humans - i'm still a gijinka artist after all /j #critically ill man gilbert #laurence the first vicar #ludwig the holy blade #rom the vacuous spider #saint adeline #bloodborne #rubiart #rare trad art !! because i found out my markers do cooperate on normal printing paper. which i can scan. unlike my sketchbook

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svampira · 5 months

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oc lore drop👆📢‼️

text under thee cut

elias (died 19 cur 21)

lives in his middle aged best friend's basement. his job is onlyfans. kills people for fun but not food. id smash

social media star murdered an embraced by his obsessive stalker > his sire was executed by diamila on the prince's orders for turning him without permission. doesn't have any memories of his human life

occasionally acts as a camarilla "enforcer" despite being a chronic masquerade breaker himself. Somehow maxed out his presence powers just weeks after his undeath

diamila (died 26 currently 45) the middle aged best friend. Also canon fledgling > spent the last 20 years playing attack dog for the camarilla and doesn't feel like she has anything to show for it

ventrue, maxed out dominate, very high firearm skills. Has never killed anyone to feed. def did it for other reasons though

Cressida (died 65. currently 65, looks like she's in her 40s because she was a ghoul) clan tremere's newest embrace, she had been picked by her sire 20 years before her death. She was already a ghoul during the events of vtmb, and has known and disliked diamila for over a decade. Ambitious but fiercely loyal to her clan, she ends up butting heads with the equally ambitious but much less trustworthy ventrue

brooklyn (died 21 currently 40) an unpredictable vampire whose allegiances change every couple weeks. kept around because of her frequent (although cryptic) visions and her coming across as relatively saner than the average malkavian. emphasis on coming across.

eden (died 24 current 43) an anarch malk who pretends hes a brujah. has the same sire as brooklyn and they were dating before they were turned. Hackerman. Doesn't experience visions of the future and barely seems to be afflicted by the clan curse. or does he > his curse is his portrait came out kind of bad here

#forcing everyone to look at my ocs. as usual #this is so funny it looks like trad art #god i messed eden up but its ok. brooklyn drew the portraits she wanted to f w him #putting this in the tags so everyone knows theres a hidden plot behind the toreador pin ups #vtm #vtmb #vampire the masquerade #plot as in the og game's fledglings (basically everyone who was turned in LA while caine was there) being op👍#elias and cressida's sires were the toreador and tremere pcs. the other clans are tbdesigned #/elias #/diamila #/eden #/brooklyn #/cressida

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mossizi · 7 months

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