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sprintingowl · 1 year

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What Non DnD TTRPGs Feel Like

Okay, quick thread about what playing different non DnD ttrpgs feels like.

Pathfinder

This is DnD. It feels like DnD. It's like going to a slightly different church. Some of the words used during the service are different, but at the end of it the pulpit turns out to be a mimic and you cast Entangle and summon your direwolf.

Fate

This is Rule Of Cool with additional rules. The GM has powers to one-up you or lead you into temptation, but you have powers to one-up the GM, and all these powers use the same kind of token that you ultimately shuffle back and forth.

Savage Worlds

Handwave-style DnD (positive connotation.)

The GM has a lot of freedom to pick genre and setting, and the gameplay is sleeker, rule-of-cool-ier without losing meaningful combat or character building.

Call Of Cthulhu

You may not be an old librarian, but you sure are built like one. Most acts of violence can flatten you in a couple of hits, but violence doesn't happen often. It's the punctuation mark at the end of a long sentence. Atmosphere and pacing rule over this land.

World Of Darkness

This is a game about getting deep into your character's headspace. It's about figuring out who they are and roleplaying them passionately. Your backstory choices and powers have a huge affect on how you interact with the world around you.

Warhammer Fantasy / Dark Heresy

You are Scrumbles McGrumbles, a walking heap of morbidity and washed-up soldiering. You are trying to find your place in a world that's having an even worse day than you are. Your best friend is a ratcatcher. Together you will be heroes.

OSR (Mork Borg, Mausritter, Into The Odd, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Labyrinth Lord, Cairn, tons more)

DnD boiled down to two components: GMing + Making A Guy. GMing is made as easy as possible and PCs are somewhat disposable, so the story is the hijinks you get into together.

The goal is to get into trouble and stir up drama. Succeeding on a roll with no consequences is rare, but when you fail you fail forward into even bigger, messier drama.

Blades In The Dark

You go on missions and then return to your base. The missions are about choices as much as about rolls, and you build your base together to make yourselves more powerful as a squad.

Trophy

Your goal is to lose. Specifically, it's to lose in a dramatic and harrowing fashion that sticks with everyone at the table. Think movies like Annihilation, but as oneshot games.

Golden Sky Stories

You like everyone at the table with you. When someone does something adorable, you can award them exp. The highlight of the session is someone getting flustered and/or speaking in a squeaky voice.

Ryuutama

You are going on a journey and helping other people along the way. Important choices include packing lunch, wearing appropriate clothing, and completely filling your canteen. Combat is a cozy, pastel color jrpg.

The Indie

There are so, so many games that are just completely their own thing, and that I can't squeeze into a single thread. If you discover you like game mechanics and you want to Get Weird with seeing what they can do, there is an entire scene here waiting to welcome you.

Stuff I Missed

There's lots of stuff I haven't played, or didn't remember in the moment, or absolutely love but it would take a whole thread to explain why I love it. I will do more game recommendations in the future, but you can also comment systems you like below!

#dnd #ttrpg #ttrpgs #ttrpg design #ttrpg homebrew #indie ttrpgs

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secretgamergirl · 3 months

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Do experience systems do more harm than good?

Earlier today I saw someone talking about the common wisdom that you can't make an RPG without SOME sort of system where after you finish a session (or maybe an adventure), the GM gives you some sort of points that, whether automatically or based on assigning them, makes your character better at doing stuff. Not only do I strongly disagree that that's something every game needs, I'd like to present the argument that even in games you'd have a hard time imagining without them, experience points might actually be doing more harm than good.

Before I even get into this, let's take apart the obvious perks to having experience systems:

1- It helps maintain longterm interest in keeping a campaign going when the players are getting some sort of regular reward.

This is true of certain campaigns, but I don't think I'd really ever want to be in one. In a good campaign, everyone involved should be having a fun time just hanging out with each other, putting themselves in the shoes of the characters, building up a story and a world together, and generating cool memorable scenes. That should be more than enough incentive to stick with a game, and if you don't have those things going on, you should really stop and work out what's going wrong, not try and pave over it by powering everyone's characters up. I don't need to boost some Watcher Score when I marathon through a good TV show or a movie, and I'm not even getting to influence how those unfold, you know?

This is also one of those many things where what we have today is sort of a twisted ghost of what was originally conceived back in the early days of D&D. I had an old project on this very blog where I was reading through the books for 1st edition AD&D with a critical eye, and a huge takeaway from that was that Gary Gygax seems like he was just the absolute worst kind of GM (also backed up by reading message board posts of his, and various accounts). Back in his day, leveling up wasn't the expected inevitable progression as a game went on necessarily. You'd roll your stats, with some harsh restrictions, be forced to play what you had, roll your HP too, and the game was just kind of inherently hostile to the PCs, so you had a good chance of dying in a given session. Not only that, but when you did, there was no real coming back from it, you make a new character, starting from scratch, with 0 experience, and see if you can keep this one alive long enough to get up there again.

And aside from the carrot of maybe getting one of those elite high level characters if you stuck with it, there was the stick of characters partying their gold away. Seriously, by AD&D 1e rules, characters would just kinda burn through... I want to say it was 100 GP per level per day. And not in-game day. Real life day. You'd better show up for every session, because a week from now, your character's going to have 700 less gold in their pocket whether you show up to play or not.

We don't really play that way anymore. At least nobody I know does. Leveling up is planned out in advance by GMs, characters level up at the same time as everyone else even when the player misses a session, and if you need to make a new character or you're just joining the game late, obviously you come in at the same level as everyone else. I don't even want to dignify the arguments against doing that with discussion. It's even common for people to start games at levels other than 1 because people just don't like low-level play.

And you know, this is way outside the scope of what I was sitting down to write, but I've gotten into the jobification of video games before, right? Where people keep doing stuff like daily login rewards and weekly challenges just so there's a sense of obligation to log into games every day? That crap doesn't actually make things more FUN, it's in there to keep players compelled to play regardless of how much fun they have, and that's... literally the argument behind experience as an incentive to keep a game running.

2- It good when number go up!

Funnily enough, this is the hardest one for me to refute. There is some basic direct release of the good brain chemicals when you have numbers, and they go up. And I mean... sure, but in a tabletop game you're not generally seeing a number climb on its own, you're getting points thrown at you that you have to jot down or mark off or otherwise track and do math with, and like... there's plenty of other results from playing the game good to release the good brain chemicals. You don't explicitly need this one.

3- It's cool when you can have a story where like some dorky little kid starts off barely able to do anything and all unconfident and then gradually gets it together and gets more confident and competent as time goes on!

Oh yeah, everyone loves that sort of thing, and there's a strong case to be made that this is the primary reason people feel the need to put an experience system in basically every RPG, but those systems are all kind of just the worst at actually delivering on that, is the thing.

D&D and its derivatives are the absolute worst with this. The way I put it in this earlier conversation, you start out all, "I am a poor peasant child, barely able to afford the clothes on my back, a length of rope, a week's worth of food, and this dagger here" and then a few months later "I am basically a god and any amount of money less than 1,000,000 times my starting net worth isn't even worth stooping over for." And when I made this point someone corrected me that if you really go by the expected pacing, a campaign without big stretches of downtime between adventures with the recommended combat pacing is going to get you to level 20 in a month.

Now, I don't want to completely spit on the D&D power curve here (the economic one though can absolutely go to hell, stop making me a billionaire as a side effect of killing monsters and do all that bookkeeping). I do enjoy the eb and flow, campaign to campaign, of playing the same characters as wimpy little nothings and demigods over however long it takes my regular group to finish a campaign. But as far as having characters with arcs to them? It is AWFUL!

First off, it's just too damn fast and abrupt. When our little ragtag band heads off into the swamp to deal with those goblins or whatever, we're going to come home from even that little speed bump of an adventure tougher than all our neighbors and absurdly wealthy, to a point where it feels almost inevitable that you leave your old life behind completely and look down on everyone you grew up with.

It's not IMPOSSIBLE to have some sort of long or medium-term personal quest to avenge my parents or show I'm better than some bully, but it takes a real delicate touch to do it right, since you really have to decide up front when exactly I'm going to have that confrontation, make the villain something of an appropriately challenging nature for the level I'm going to be when I settle things, and that I don't manage to arrange that confrontation much earlier or later than planned, because again I'm pretty quickly going from dealing with food rationing, animal attacks, and slippery ravines, to taking down monsters four times my size without breaking a sweat, to like changing the course of history and rivaling evil gods. There's a very small window where it makes sense for me to get back at that owlbear who put me in the hospital or whatever.

And that's not even getting into the problem of how I've got these other three humble little kids from home experiencing all this rapid growth at the same time. Can't really have a wise old mentor if we're using experience as experience. We're either never going to catch up, or we're going to leave them in the dust if they're not leveling with us.

Now, again, D&D is kind of a huge exception here. Most RPGs I've played instead go with a starting setup where you don't start off as some starry-eyed youth who can't do anything, but instead have some skill-based system where every character is an expert without peer in a handful of skills that fit some archetypical theme, and for anything else, they need outside help, either from fellow PCs, or making arrangements with NPC experts. Standard with this is a little drip-feed of extra skill points, but this... really doesn't work for what we're looking for here. If I want to be the party's hacker, I'm going to start off as an excellent hacker. I'm not going to put all my points into shmoozing people and then expect the rest of the party to put up with me looking for the any key over a dozen adventures before finally working out this make or break ability.

4- You gain new abilities as you level up!

So... first off this actually isn't generally all that true. If you're playing a wizard in D&D, sure, every couple levels you get access to a new tier of spells, and hey that's a big game changing deal maybe. Most level-ups though are just about numbers going up. All of them in most games. Hitting harder, more often, in bigger areas, maybe. Skills and abilities work more consistently. You maybe get more HP.

For now though let's focus on when you do level up and get cool new abilities. One moment you're some kid with a stick, then you bonk the magic number of goblins with it, and now suddenly you can make all your friends fly, unbound by gravity, or you can read the thoughts of everyone around you, or you can teleport home where it's nice and safe no matter what the situation. Well that actually really sucks for the GM!

Let's say I'm doing what everyone ever making an 8 or 16-bit RPG did and lifting plot concepts shamelessly from Laputa. We've got our big floating continent. Maybe we've got some kinda evil emperor up there, raining terror down on people or something. Nobody can get there and confront him... until they hit level 7 or whatever and have access to the fly spell. I better get any air superiority based adventures out before then. Also anything where there's a tower that has windows, or dangerous terrain, etc. Better get mysteries and hidden agendas taken care of before that mind reading. Better not think about trapping the party or them getting word of an attack somewhere else before that teleporting. And that's assuming I'm being on the ball about that sort of thing. I might have this whole thing planned, where the party desperately needs to get to that flying continent, and it's this whole quest hook where maybe they have to befriend a dragon or help build an airship or get some kinda rubber bones potion and access to a powerful cannon. Whole adventures about getting that power of flight, and any of these might just totally fizzle because oh whoops, the party leveled up and they just do that now.

Less dramatically, what if we're playing of those skill point games. I'm already a super great seductive femme fatale sneaking past laser sensors and stealing keys off people I'm charming right from the start of the game, and hey, cool, that's a nice simple archetype, everyone knows what I'm good at, we can plan missions around me being all sleazy over here while someone else sets up in a sniper position and someone else is in the basement hacking and all that. Several adventures down the road, well, I have all these skill points, I haven't been able to put them into the stuff I'm good at, so now I'm also a combat monster. The original combat monster can also hack. The original hacker can also charm the pants off everyone. We're starting to develop a lot of redundancy, but that's not necessarily bad? But then we play a bunch more adventures. Those secondary concepts capped off, we're working up more. Nobody is unparalleled at the thing they originally did. Have the party is equally amazing at a given thing. If we keep going like this, eventually everyone is going to loose all sense of unique identity, and there isn't really a strong in-game reason we need this whole ragtag crew anymore. Anyone of us can take on any problem solo, really.

5- The power fantasy of being super amazing.

This is kind of a point I've already hit but I'm stuck with this format, but the thing with experience is, again, sometimes sure you gain new abilities, but usually all your various numbers go up, and that actually kinda sucks in practice. First off, it's a lot of tedious bookkeeping, in basically any system you can name. It also doesn't generally really make a difference in the grand scheme of things?

I'm level 3. I've got a +7 to hit, doing 15 damage a hit, and an AC of 18. I'm fighting some orc with 40 HP, 15 AC, and attacking at +5. I level up a few times. Now I'm level 7. I've got a +13 to hit, doing 30 damage, and an AC of 24. I'm fighting crustaceanoids now, with 80 HP, 21 AC, and attacking at +11. Objective numbers wise, crustateanoids are way way tougher than orcs, but in my experience this is the EXACT same fight. I hit on an 11. I need 3 hits to take something down. It's bad news for me if my enemy rolls a 13 to hit me. All we've done is a bunch of annoying math refactoring with nothing to show for it but cosmetically reskinned mooks.

Now here, interestingly enough, I ONLY have the D&D type example here. Again, most other RPGs I have don't have that same sort of rampant power creep. You start out absurdly skillful at whatever your specialty is, and there's little if any room for growth, numbers wise. So here, if we go from orcs to crustateanoids to hellborn cyberdragons as enemies, not only is this technically a set of progressively scarier enemies to have to deal with, they actually ARE more meaningful threats to the party. Maybe those orcs were all show, they never really hurt us because we're awesome secret agents or something, but now things are getting serious because these crustaceanoids are just as good at sick flips and firing machine guns in two different directions as we are, so we have to take them much more seriously. And oh damn, after this we have to deal with a hellborn cyberdragon? Those are so scary if we all just rush in we're probably all gonna die. We need to come up with a whole complex plan to avoid directly engaging that if at all possible, and run for it if that doesn't pan out, or something.

And hey, we don't need something even more epic than a hellborn cyberdragon to top that. One of those is still going to be harrowing no matter how late in the campaign we bust it out. We can establish a power balance early on and keep it relevant like that. PCs gotta get more innovative and clever not just kill most monsters until demigods are easily punchable.

6: Revenge of 3- Well character growth is still important!

So, I really shouldn't be trashing experience points' ability to deliver cool character growth if I don't have some alternative to it, right? We need some way to change things up so the game doesn't stagnate. Well sure, but we can do better than experience there.

Just off the top of my head, how about we go with plot relevant respec-ing? Like at any given time a character's got their main spotlight thematic kit. Your best of the best at being a hacker or wizard or whatever. Maybe also a secondary skillset. And then definitely some number of slots for stuff they're into but it's not their main thing. Maybe we have a few variant minisets for those. Like if someone just unlocked their psychic powers and haven't fully figured them out, you have access to this here set of abilities. Once you have your big dramatic power mastery moment, that becomes their main thing and we demote their previous main thing to a secondary thing... and if we don't like this psychic stuff in the end, we demote it back down and fill a tertiary slot with like Lost Psychic Powers, where you still get to be all knowledgeable about how this sorta crap works and maybe have some battles of wills but your cool telekinesis is all locked away. At least for now.

I don't want to sit down and fully design a game at the tail end of a blog post here, but feel free to try this out with whatever system you like. Just pick whatever level feels like the good one, build characters with that as their basic kit, let'em have a few dips into secondary and tertiary angles, do a lot of getting thrown out of orders and taking major injuries and getting temporarily possessed or infused with mystery things. And you can do the plucky young kids in over their head thing with this sort of system easily enough. Start off with just the tertiary interest/mini-skill-packs, and once whatever you want to grow into starts coming up, rapidly grow into that over the course of a few adventures, no needing some big dramatic status quo change like this usually calls for.

Oh and I haven't been talking about video games here, but kill experience there too. If I'm not doing the whole Metroidvania/Zeld'em Up thing to pick up new powers as I explore, just gimme the whole kit from the get-go. Have traditional difficulty curves. We're good. Leave the skill trees and the level-grinding out of it. What are you holding back for, replayability? It's been raining free big-name big commitment games for years. Quit demanding that much of our time.

Oh and I keep forgetting to beg for money while I write these. I went 24 hours here without eating because I was just out of food and couldn't afford to go to the store. Someone took pity on me and hand delivered a big bowl of soup. Things are getting real bad. Patreon link.

#game design #experience points #leveling up

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sevilemar · 1 year

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Since I don't have anyone else to ask, can a dnd character constantly change genders, like a curse or wild magic, you role below 3 with d6 and you change. And also, can you play as a paladin (or similar, paladin is just an example that fits the idea best), but you're something else in disguise, someone who actually doesn't care about justice or just doesnt believe in the ideas the outside class of them should (that's why I used paladin as an example). Would you then play more cowardly and try to not engage with skills and abilities your character should know, and work with your DM so they'd treat your actual actions and skills as a game thing? Like oh idk your group gets attacked by whatever, and you should be good with a sword but instead you disengage, and try to do your action in secret? But then how to keep it a secret and still help in combat? I know cr had Dusk, but it involved full on change of a character, so is that the only option? You have no idea how much I like character surprises and when they impact the story, uhhhrrr, I love it so much. And I love all the deity stories, so the character in the hiding would probably be a warlock. You could hide one with other magical User, but that's not fun, isn't it.

I think the idea of constantly changing genders is very cool. And since it probably does not interfere with any game mechanics, there is a very good chance a GM will allow it. I would even go further, and assign a number for every die: when you roll a d20 for a skill check, and you roll 8 or below, puff, you change. Or when you roll a d10 for damage, and you roll 4 or below, puff. I think it's gonna be hilarious!

I'm creating a Changeling character like Dusk at the moment, but Riz is gonna change constantly. To express moods or thoughts, to communicate, or just because it's fun. Sometimes, they'll change their whole body, sometimes only a few features. They have no concept of gender, or a fixed form. But they only change their appearance, not their character. It's a bit of a different concept of a Changeling character, and I can already tell it's gonna be so much fun^^

It's probably very difficult to hide your class from other players, because classes are very distinct by design. Especially when you want to disguise a spellcaster as a martial class. There are hybrid options that make it more realistic (Hexblade Warlock, War Magic Wizard), but there are good reasons why spellcasters never want to be in the front line of an attack. They cannot wear heavy armour effectively, and they have significantly less hit points than a martial class. Both of these factors mean they will probably die very fast if the enemy directly in front of them attacks them repeatedly with a weapon.

You can probably work something out with your GM, with stuff like feats that make you tougher, or able to wear heavy armour, or some way to regularly bring them back from the dead. It would need a lot of special treatment, and I don't think I'd allow it at my table unless the other players get the same amount of feats and benefits, which would make the whole party very powerful right from the start.

Maybe if we start at level 5 or higher, since it's easier to balance combat with a higher level party, but not at level 1. Also, you'll need to rename your spells as special attacks, so you can call them out and have the GM know what you mean, but not the other players. It's extra work for the GM, and I'm not sure I could handle it when I'm running the monsters, the battlefield, the NPCs, battle tactics and spell casting for the monsters and NPCs, and keeping track of damage and who's turn it is.

If you want to role play against your class though, you absolutely can. There is even an option for that with the Paladin, the Oathbreaker subclass. It's originally designed to be a villain option for the GM, but it's perfectly playable as a PC. It means you have broken your Oath, and though you still look and fight like a regular Paladin, you have lost faith in whatever you believed in before. Experienced players will probably still be able to tell after a while, because you have a few unusual spells, but it will take a lot longer.

You can be a cleric that hates their god, but follows it anyway because it gives them powers. And there are neutral, chaotic, or evil gods, too, so Clerics, Paladins and monks don't have to be good. It's a common theme with warlocks, actually, who more often than not have a love/hate relationship with their patron. One of my players looks to free himself from his contract and his patron, that's his arc. You can also choose weird combinations that go against the traditional reading of a class, like a Warforged druid, or redefine what it means to be a barbarian in space. But I don't see a good way to surprise your fellow players with a different class reveal.

It's also not something that the characters themselves talk about very often, so I don't think it would have that much of an impact as a surprise. Learning that someone you thought of as a fighter is actually a very weird spellcaster will not have the same impact on your table as learning that the person they knew and trusted has kept vital information from them, or is actually a completely different person. The emotional component is what gives the surprise that delicious oomph.

#dungeons and dragons #dnd #ask answers

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bonetrader · 5 years

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Unusual RPG combinations

I like to tinker with mixing and matching rpg settings and systems. I will try to collect the ones I'm most fascinated with. I haven't found the opportunity to actually try any of these combinations, but I guess it doesn't hurt to put them out there in case someone finds any of them interesting.

Shadowrun redux

Setting: Shadowrun

System: Blades in the Dark

I adore Shadowrun. It takes all the bleakness of reality, amplifies it, but also mixes it with a lot of magic and wonder. And if you read the books selectively, even with hope.

But playing it can get convoluted, especially if your group is prone to overplan. And we know that plans always go sideways. There's no such thing as a milk run. Spending an hour on planning can be annoying in itself. But it's extra painful if it has to be thrown out the window in the first five minutes of execution.

Enter Blades in the Dark that instead of planning ahead encourages to use flashbacks on the spot to reveal how you prepared in advance to get past an obstacle. That makes pulling off daring heists a lot more easier for the players. Infiltration is way less stressful on the player if they can make up any forged backstory on the go, and do a flashback to make sure it's believable. There's still some minimal planning, but it's practically just setting the starting scene of the run. You don't have to specify anything beyond that.

The concept of crew from Blades also fits nicely with Shadowrun. It can tell the GM what kind of runs the players prefer, and gives the players the ability tospecialize their team. Blades was created for a different level of technology and magic. But it mainly focuses on the hierarchy of the criminal underground, and that translates easily even to a modern world. So I expect the same crews to work with Shadowrun, but more thematic options could be added to tie it closer to the sixth world.

The concept of hunting grounds should be reconsidered. In Blades it means a specific neighbourhood the characters are more familiar with and usually target. In Shadowrun it makes more sense to make it a specific scenery they usually operate in. For example it could be a specific megacorporation they often go up against, or a type of gang that's common in the sprawls they operate in.

Blades also offers a nice subsystem for handling reputation, growth, notoriety, and even stress and trauma between runs. Incorporating a specific vice for each PC also seems completely in line with Shadowrun's concept.

The biggest difference will be in character creation. Blades' system is more abstract than Shadowrun's. In Blades you have to pick a specific playbook for your character. I think that's OK. While Shadowrun allowed building characters skill by skill, it always encouraged working toward specific archetypes like face, rigger, or adept. Your playbook determines your starting stats, but you can still somewhat specialize it. Blades also allows crossing from a playbook to a new one, but that's long term character advancement.

Adding some elements of Shadowrun might not be trivial. Spirits could be more or less handled as the ghosts in Blades. But magic and technology would have to be specifically addressed. Some of it could be treated like fluff, making it mechanically irrelevant whether your efforts are more effective because of training, because of an implant, or because you are infusing them with magic. But at least mages, riggers and deckers would probably need their own playbooks.

Twisted Houses of the Drow

Setting: any fantasy setting with drows, but I have a specific campaign idea for Spelljammer

System: Houses of the Blooded

This is a re-skin of Houses of the Blooded. The ven and the drow have different values and cultures, but I think they share a similar style. Decadence and intrigue runs deep in their societies. I'd replace the virtues (attributes) of the original game with corresponding vices. And each vice would be linked to a drow god instead of the totem animals of the original game.

Instead of the romance mechanic there would be rivalry. It would work the same way, just with a different flavour. Drows could pick someone as a rival, driving each other to greater feats. Instead of creating art drows could develop schemes. Same as the art mechanic. The scheme could give a bonus to those it was shared with. Seasons, regions, holdings, and blessings would have to be reworked, but I think renaming them would be enough in most cases.

My campaign idea is for a group of drow renegades employed by the elven admiralty as covert agents. They would be sent for long term infiltration missions to places where surface elves are not welcome. Each of them would have an affiliation with a drow god as well, and each would have their own hidden agenda. It might even work if not all characters are drows. I could imagine one or two elf, half-elf, or shapeshifter mixed in.

If I ever got to it seasons of the campaign would include: Building up a career of piracy in space (remember, Spelljammer) to get on the good side of a notorious and elusive pirate king, and lead the elven navy to its hideout. Instead of holdings the players could manage trade routes they raid, and their ships. Another would be infiltrating a drow city to stop an invasion. I think this would be the closest to the original Houses game. And finally I'd drop them in a mission to arrive as inmates to Elfcatraz, the secret prison of the admiralty (named by one of my players) to find out who's really in control there.

Around Cerilia in 80 days

Setting: Birthright

System: Primetime adventures

This one is kind of cheating, because Primetime adventures is quite setting-independent. So I rather mean it's a better fit for the kind of stories I'd like to run in this setting.

Birthright's setting works on a comprehensible scale for me. Most fantasy worlds have gigantic continents with dozens of large countries. They are too large for me, and I end up with a vast countryside where everything's the same for weeks to go. But Birthright has a small continent, maybe more like a large island with five distinct cultural regions. And each of those regions have a dozen provinces, each province described with its own flavor. It's not complicated, but colorful.

I guess it was done this way to accomodate the strategy aspect of Birthright that was one of its main features. While the concept of ruling provinces sounds great, the setting really makes me want to have a game about just travelling through this world. Not with adventurers, but rather with tourists, merchants, travelers who are going there to see a foreign place, or do business with the locals, and not just to explore a dungeon that happens to be there.

Ever since I saw the Roman Mysteries TV series I've been particularly fascinated with the idea of having a bunch of kids as player characters who are brought along by one's aunt/uncle on business trips to foreign lands, and get into trouble there. For example a trip from a frontier barony to the capital city, traveling through the woods of wary elves, then sailing down the river, stopping in a few more interesting port. Or a journey to the magnificent kingdoms in the east, although there are many perils both natural, and man-made on the way.

Thinking in Primetime adventures terms each province or city could be a separate episode. And the peculiarities of the place could be used to decide which character's spotlight episode should happen there.

Even domains of awnshegh (people and animals infected by the power of a dead god of darkness, becoming "monsters") don't have to be off limits. Some of them were quite sociable, and even more ruled over people whose perspective could be interesting.

Crown of Wings

Setting: Council of Wyrms

System: Birthright's domain management

Council of Wyrms focuses on playing dragons from various clans who work together. Despite the central role of the council, and the politics between the dragon clans, Council of Wyrms didn't touch much on the actual politics and realm management. It was the same AD&D, just scaled up to dragon PCs.

But I think there's so much more potential in the setting. I could easily imagine dragons ruling the land, managing guilds, and churches, and building out ley line networks to cast spells affecting whole realms. So everything that Birthright's system offered.

The setting isn't fully fleshed out, but it lets us fill in the land with fantastic locations. Some cities and towns were mentioned at unusual places, full of various races. So players could run wild with ideas when they create their own domain. Should their be trade routes with a merfolk city, and underwater ley lines? Absolutely. Could there be a church based on promoting the halfling lifestyle? Why not?

And then there's the Council. Domain Power could determine the character's status in it. Regency Points, and Gold Bars could be used as bargaining chips.

But what should be its purpose? I have seen enough of the trope of warring factions who have to be unified against some common threat, maybe with a traitorous faction thrown in the mix. I mean it makes for a fine story, but I'm getting a little tired of it. This time I'd rather see a council as a way to trade, to exchange ideas, and to help everybody improve their own clan. It doesn't make for a strong narrative, but I think it's a more positive message overall.

I think the biggest restriction in the setting is that dragon clans are too homogenic. Like, each clan consists of just one kind of dragon. That doesn't help in putting together a game with diverse characters. The original game concept solved that by making the PCs agents of the Council who may come from various clans.

For a more political game we could introduce mixed clans. So the characters could be part of the same clan, while still coming from various places. Maybe they are outcasts or survivors who created their own clan. Or maybe their clan was open minded, and was located in a central place, so it naturally lead to it becoming more diverse.

Or we could say that they are from different clans, but their clans are neighbours and allies of each other. At least if you're like me, and you don't want to set the players up for PvP by putting them to opposing sides of a clan feud.

Custom Quest

Setting: Your long-running campaign

System: Fiasco

I think any campaign that went on for a while should be an easy source for creating a Fiasco playset for a one-time play. Fiasco is about nobodies trying to pull off something bigger than they are. It's about petty people, and half-baked ideas going wrong. And while that might still sound like your average adventurer party, here we know they can't win. They will be lucky if they don't end up in a lot worse situation they started in.

For convenience I will refer to the PCs of the original campaign as heroes. It's okay if they are not actual heroes. That happens pretty often. But they had the greatest influence on the campaign this one shot is based on, so we have to heavily rely on them.

So the player characters in this one-shot are probably just background noise in the original campaign. I think this is a great way to explore how the actions of the heroes might affect the common people in unexpected ways. Objects driving the character dynamics could be things the heroes brought back, created, or just used in a memorable moment. Maybe an artifact they sold off is making its rounds on the blackmarket, and someone sees an opportunity in it. Or evidence surfaced that could incriminate one of the heroes.

And it's not just Objects. Their shenanigans might have brought the unwanted attention of a powerful cult to the city. Or the local barkeep loathes the heroes because they trashed his place one too many times. And he's just looking for some idiots to exact his revenge. Really, just look for whomever the heroes might have ever slighted or aided to get a plethora of petty plots and strange driving forces in the community. This can give you the Needs and Relationships between the player characters.

Locations could be places well known by the players, preferably close to a place the heroes frequent. The heroes, and the more memorable NPCs could give some enjoyable cameos. And finally they could become part of the Tilt table to turn a bad situation worse in the middle of the game.

#tabletop rpg #fiasco #drow #Houses of the Blooded #Birthright #shadowrun #spelljammer #Blades in the Dark #Primetime Adventures #Council of Wyrms #rpg #rpg combos

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