hi!!! i just wanted to say i really love all of your MASKS stuff. i'm something of a newbie when it comes to the TTRPG community, but MASKS seems to be not very well-known and i think that's a real shame. i'm a huge fan of old-school superhero-adjacent stuff, especially the silver- and bronze-age ones!

by the way, i was wondering if you'd be willing to share some tips for a first-time GM? you don't have to if you'd rather not! i just figured i'd try asking since i was planning on GMing a MASKS campaign for some of my friends later, but despite my decade's worth of roleplaying experience i've never been in a TTRPG campaign nor a GM (or similar) role before

Thank you so much!! I was just lamenting about how I felt bad for the MASKS tag because it is now flooded with all my npc nonsense hahah so this is really nice to hear.

It's awesome you're planning on running a MASKS game for your friends!! There is an indispensable post on twitter I saw that has a LOT of great tips for running MASKS that I recommend checking out. But for my own personal tips that are just me things, here's what I got. Sorry it's gonna be extremely long-winded, it may take a few months to read through it.

(Note: I am also hugely into RP and probably put more into it than what is necessary, especially with MASKS which is meant to be able to be played out of the box. It was definitely not played out of the box in our case because I require a lot out of myself and everyone else to feel good about running something. if anyone else wants to continue seeing me as a normal human being please don't click the Keep Reading)

Since you're running it, make the world interesting to you. If the world runs around themes you're personally interested in then you'll have a much easier time coming up with answers on the fly. For me, themes I'm interested in that lend themselves well to a superhero world: money, power, family, celebrity, media, the 24 hour news cycle and the desensitization of violence. Because I'm interested in this stuff anyway, wrapping a world around them makes it much simpler for me to figure out how the world ticks and thus how the characters fit into it and how the world reacts to them, and I am DESPERATE to find out how the characters react to all the questions and expectations the world is imposing upon them.

Make sure your players have a good grasp of the tone of story so they can make characters that gel well within it. For me the tone is a lil more adult because I'm not personally into younger morality tale stories in tone, it's pretty grounded, and I think comedy and tragedy work hand in hand so I lean into them.

Talk. A lot. Talk about the characters, talk about the world. MASKS is fun because it's a LOT of talking and figuring out the narrative together. It's not a lot of crunchy mechanics, it's all around seeing how the characters react to the world narratively, all hurt and comfort and emotions which (for me) requires people to have a good grasp on their characters and the world. I like to give my players "homework" where I ask them a question involving their characters in some way like "what hero did your character look up to as a child?" so they get to come up with past heroes, or "How does your character feel about _____?" etc etc. The only fans are gonna be your table and fans love to talk so be the biggest fans of the PCs!!

Figure out your framing. I know in MASKS they suggest framing it like a comic book, and basically talking about the frames on screen. For me, because I'm more into movies and tv than comics, I frame it like that. So I have an active "camera" in play during sessions and will ask things like "would anyone like to grab the camera?" to encourage the players to put the character into a scene or "what does the audience see as the camera focuses in on your character in this emotional moment?" There is a LOT of playing up to the camera and framing the sessions as episodes of a show, so it's like, okay, you have several options but what is going to be interesting for the audience to see? I find this encourages the players to have their characters take bigger swings and feel comfortable letting us into how their character is feeling because it all looks GREAT on camera. The camera loves it. The PCs are the story after all.

Because I frame it a show, I also like to play individual ending songs over the "credits" at the end of each episode. So I asked my players to make playlists for their characters so if I feel an episode had a lot of emotional focus on one character in particular, I can play one of their songs at the end of the episode! I also made a general MASKS playlist with a bunch of songs from the era we set it in (2004) to pull from. It's a fun little addition that I really enjoy and that I hope makes it all feel more special.

The Dino Donut Effect: create landmarks in your world. (OK THIS IS GONNA BE LONG BUT WORK WITH ME HERE) They don't have to be locations, more solid landmarks of the story that the characters can refer back to and lean on to make the world feel more "real." I call it the Dino Donut Effect because in our world the thing that made everything click into place was talking out the backstory of one of the PC's figuring out they had the power negation ability. We were talking one night trying to figure it out; we wanted the character to fall out of a building and be caught by a flying superhero and accidentally turn off their powers, so they toss the kid to another flying supe whose powers also get turned off. But we were like... holy shit what is the height of a building needed that can handle this much action in the air without them hitting the ground in 3 seconds. So after a long night of talking about terminal velocity and looking at Splat Calculators we figured out the height of the building, and we needed them to crash into something that wouldn't fuckin kill them. The first suggestion was a truck full of bananas. Nah. We landed on a giant balloon that could take the impact. And the balloon became a giant T-Rex holding a donut that was the mascot of the city's beloved decades old donut shop Dino Donut. And so we decided that one of the two flying supes grabbed onto the kid and the other and flew into the giant balloon to try and keep them all alive, which destroyed the balloon, which was a city institution, and there was a crowd of children there that day that saw their friend Dino Donut die. Killed by a superhero. The balloon deflated loudly so it sounded like Dino Donut was screaming in agony. All the kids were traumatized (screaming crying throwing up), the city was furious because everyone loved Dino Donut, it was constantly in the news cycle, and it ruined the career of the supe that "killed Dino Donut." AND THEN THEY REPLACED THE DINO DONUT BALLOON WITH A LAME "UPDATED DESIGN" DINO DONUT STATUE which everyone hates and people consider to be a memorial to the old Dino Donut. ANYWAY, the Dino Donut effect is that now all the PCs have one single incident to refer back to that they all have feelings about. A couple of them were there that day and heard Dino Donut scream, one is now the protege of the disgraced superhero that killed Dino Donut so she feels uncomfortable talking about it, there's the kid that was saved that day but was sworn to secrecy by the supe so no one would find out about his power negation ability, and then there's the kid that wasn't there because she's an alien that just arrived to earth and now the kids have to explain the incident to her with all their varying opinions. Now the PCs' meeting spot is at a Dino Donut. Having this one solid incident that is both funny and kind of goes into the themes of the world has been an absolute treat. Creating "landmarks" like that in the world has done so much and now I'm like okay I'm gonna try to do this moving forward with any other thing I run.

anyway these are my extremely specific to me tips. my RP standards are kind of high which makes me a bit of a terror but also when the flowers bloom from it it feels GREAT. i'm not sure if this will help but hopefully there is something there that can be useful!

MASKS is fun and simple once you get the hang of it, though, so I'm sure whatever you do you and your players will have a lot of fun! especially if you're someone who is into RP which is the background I'm coming from too; MASKS is extremely narrative! i'll be looking in the tag for your game hehe

(The Day Dino Donut Died art by JD)

Anyway Quackity was one of the people on DSMP who was most involved in and invested in lore. Las Nevadas and the Butcher Army and the Red Banquet and everything with L'Manberg. He clearly loved telling the story he wanted to tell and playing on a roleplay server.

But a lot of creators have pointed out that the most fun they had on the server was when they were doing improv, when they were reacting to things that happened and building the story naturally that way. When things got scripted, when creators had to come up with and write and execute their lore basically on their own, when it stopped being playing and started being acting, that's when you got players disengaging and losing interest and motivation. By the end, literally every bit of lore was scripted. Most of it was prerecorded just so it could end up telling a complete story, instead of starting a dozen plot threads that had to be abandoned when the other people involved didn't answer your DMs or the big lore day that was meant to move the whole server's story along didn't happen. The last big, whole-server lore event only happened because Technoblade was dying. Communication was so bad that was the only thing that could get everyone to get organised enough for a single day of lore, a story event that had been set up for months.

And so when Quackity comes up with his own server, he wants it to have a strong roleplay element (if that's what the other creators involved end up wanting). Quackity loved his roleplaying on DSMP. But he wants it to be fun for the creators as well as for the fans, and the way lore was fun on DSMP was for it to be improv, not for it to be creators acting out a script. But things got scripted because once they set up a story, it had to escalate in a specific way in order for it to be narratively satisfying, which made it less fun. A single arc is fine, but things just won't work for more than that without at least a loose script. By the end DSMP wasn't roleplay, it was acting. Some creators managed to tell satisfying stories, but it wasn't the same as when it was a bunch of friends messing around doing Hamilton Breaking Bad improv because it was fun. The DSMP, for a good chunk of its life, was not fun to play on. So people didn't.

But how do you set up satisfying, coherent stories over a long period of time while also maintaining the fun roleplay element? Someone needs to guide them and develop them, but it can't be the creators on a server if you're going to keep the fun roleplay element.

Hence the admins, and their role not just maintaining the server, but in developing and guiding the story. Their role is basically a GM, in tabletop roleplaying terms, and the creators get to be player characters roleplaying in reaction to that. Creators don't know much more than we do; how many times have creators said they don't get told shit, have they been told to log on and been faced with huge big developments they didn't see coming and have to figure out how to roleplay that? QSMP works kind of like Dungeons and Dragons but in Minecraft. Keeps the story consistent and escalating, without the need for creators to sacrifice their own enjoyment of their content.

I don't know how stuff like Karmaland works, maybe Quackity got it from there. But as a former Dream SMP fan, I see Quackity taking the best part of DSMP and finding a way to make it work for something a lot more sustainable and ambitious, keeping it fun and enjoyable for both fans and creators.

@alizarinessence thank you for your patience as I took my time to respond to you! PbtA games can be pretty daunting, and I certainly didn't understand how the play flow was supposed to work at first. I personally learned through trial and error, as well as watching other GMs who had figured it out - I am blessed to have a friend who is very experienced in running PbtA games so I was able to play in some of his games and ask him questions.

That being said, there have been a few things that I've also found helpful that I can refer to you, so I'm going to put them up here.

The Flow Chart

This flow chart was originally posted in a Dungeon World reddit post, and later referred to me when I started asking for PbtA advice. You'll likely see a similar flow chart in Apocalypse Keys, where Rae Nedjadi illustrates how a typical session of play is likely to look like.

In any given PbtA game, you as a GM are going to be presenting pieces of information to the players, just as you would in any other ttrpg. PbtA codifies this information as "moves," and each game will present you with information that is considered useful for the kind of story that it is design to tell.

In Masks, the players are teenage superheroes, so the game encourages the GM to introduce facts such as "civilians are in danger" or "your dad thinks you're being irresponsible."

In The Ward, the players are medical doctors in an Emergency Ward, so the game advises the GM to introduce truths such as "a patient's condition is worsening" or "someone's dad is fighting with a nurse in another room."

This reinforces the common maxim that the game is a conversation, a cycle of presenting new information, letting players decide what they want to do with that information, and making a roll if the fiction calls for it. This is a rather simplified cycle of course - the "see what happens" sections may include moments when players may jump in with their own characters' reactions, generating more events that the GM doesn't need to add to in order to make them interesting. Many PbtA games thrive off of player conflict, which can occupy the table for a couple of hours without the GM needing to add anything (Last Fleet is a good example of this kind of play.)

Listening to Others

Listening to other people play PbtA games can give you a sense of how the game is meant to feel, especially when the GM's and players take their time to talk through their moves and how they work.

I found Monster Hour to be exceptionally helpful; they started out as a Monster of the Week podcast, and even though I've never run MotW specifically, listening to Quinn talk the players through how to ask questions or use different moves made the game very easy for me to understand.

Joining a Community

Joining a community that loves a specific PbtA game, or PbtA games in general can be very helpful when seeking out advice. The PbtA Discord channel has a number of players and designers, who have a lot of game experience and are more than happy to dish out advice.

Start With Games That Have Guide-Rails

Not all PbtA games are created equal, and while the original spirit of the game was to make sure you didn't plot out a story-line, there's still some games that have a certain amount of prep that will give you the tools you need to gain confidence as a GM. Here's some of my favourites:

Visigoths vs. Mall Goths can be played as a one-shot, and doesn't require players to make a lot of decisions when putting their characters together. It has a number of scenarios that you can throw at your players, a mapped-out mall with details on all of the NPCs (and whether or not you can flirt with them), and some pretty hard limitations on what you can and cannot do. You can't leave the mall, for example - go through an exit on one side of the mall and you'll just pop back in on the other. You can visit the stores throughout the day, but each team of players can only go to so many places before the mall is closed for the day, therefore bringing the mission to a close.

Apocalypse Keys has a game structure that looks daunting but can be broken down into steps, and also comes with pre-written scenarios as well as instructions on how to create your own. The concept is pretty straightforward - you're solving a mystery, and you need to do it before one of the Doors of the Apocalypse is opened. This puts the game on a timer, which helps GMs keep their players on task, and also provides the Game Master with a list of clues to drop into the story as the players look for them. I've heard very good things about how Brindlewood Bay, which inspired some of the mechanics in Apocalypse Keys, makes itself easy to run for new GMs, so if you can get your hands on that book, you might find it helpful!

Last Fleet is laser-focused on a very specific premise - you are humans, in space, running away from a terrible and insidious threat. What is more, this threat has the ability to infiltrate your fleet. The laser-focus brings everyone at the table to the same page pretty quickly, and the setting includes a mounting pressure track that will make sure things keep happening, so as the person running the game, you won't have to do much after you set up the initial scenario. The game also comes with some really good advice on where you want to start with your players, to make sure they're on edge, but not fully panicking yet. Then you just need to tip the scales enough to cause them to ask questions, make questionable choices, and start a series of actions that snowball into catastrophe.

Wrapping Up

This is all the advice I have for stepping into PbtA, but more than anything, I recommend just diving in and giving it a go! As with any GM-ing endeavour, you will likely walk away from your first session with a list of things that you'll want to do differently the next time around, but that's just a sign that you're learning.

No but serious. Dungeons & Dragons is one of the least flexible systems out there. So whenever I hear someone asking, "Why can't I do X in DnD?" or "How would I do (thing that the system is totally ill-suited for)?" my first response is just "GURPS."

For those of you who aren't familiar, GURPS stands for "Generic Universal Role Playing System." I always say it's like the Linux of ttrpgs, in the sense that it's less a system and more a framework that you can use to do whatever you want with.

And I really do mean whatever you want. You want high fantasy? Done. You want gritty realism in a dystopian world? Got it. You want superheroes? Good to go. Super tech space opera? Oh boy we got you there. You want magic systems that aren't based on spell lists? Go for it. Horror games where character death is a constant and very real threat? Sure thing.

You can set up your game to be anything from a complex data driven grinder to a cinematic rules basically optional flight of fancy.

You can play characters who are anywhere from realistically squishy humans to god-like super beings.

Characters personal flaws and strengths can have a direct impact on mechanics. Character species can have a direct and serious impact on mechanics.

The existence of so many options can make GURPS seem overwhelming at first glance, but if you are willing to put in a bit of effort, it's actually a very simple system to play. Most of the hard work is front-loaded into setting and character creation. Once play starts it runs as smooth as can be.

It's totally possible to play it with just the two core books, BUT there are dozens of books that are nothing but tips and advice for how to build a particular type of world or a particular flavor of campaign.

And the books, while not nearly as pretty as DnD books, are laid out in a way that makes it incredibly easy to find exactly the information you want.

Some more mechanical things that I particularly like about it (under the cut):

Characters are created on a point-buy system, but you don't just buy your basic stats, you also buy your skills, advantages, and secondary stats. And you can gain points back by dropping stats below average or taking disadvantages.

The advantage/disadvantage system. This is sorta the core of the character building, and it is *so* much fun. See, rather than pick out a class or species, you have a list (selected by your GM from a much larger list) of things you can buy that will have mechanical impacts on you in the game. Basically, an advantage is anything that opens up more possibilities for you in-game, and a disadvantage is anything that closes off possibilities. They can be superpowers, species traits, cinematic plot armor, personality traits, or things like chronic illness, bad temper, physical or mental disabilities, or being doomed by the narrative.

Simple dice system. To play a GURPS campaign you need three d6. That's it. All checks and saves are done by rolling 3d6 (low rolls are better than high). This has an additional advantage over the d20 system in that there is a probability curve. You're more likely to roll numbers in the mid-range, which makes both critical successes and critical failures rarer, and therefore more satisfying.

Your target roll is adjusted, rather than adding/subtracting from the roll itself. Say you're trying to, idk, hack a computer. Your skill level doesn't affect your dice roll, it affects the number you need to roll in order to succeed. This makes things a lot simpler on the player's end, imo, because there's less they need to keep track of. (You're trying to roll under the skill check, so whatever the base difficulty is, the GM just adds or subtracts your skill level from that).

The basic stats are on a much tighter scale, and they make a lot more sense. Human average is a 10 in everything. When you make your character you can buy higher stats or take lower ones and get more points to spend on other things. All stats cap out at 18, because that's the highest number you can roll. At a 10 strength you are a normal person. At 18 you're basically Superman. You'd have to roll a critical failure not to succeed in a strength check, and remember: critical failures are far less common than in a d20 system.

I could keep going ad infitum here, but instead I'll just close with:

Come with me boy, play my games! We'll have cowboy times in space!

Thoughts on Daggerheart!!

I'll admit I haven't really been following it until today, but after watching the videos released today I got very excited and ended up building a character and reading a lot of the book, as I am wont to do (might post about them later lol).

Now, full disclosure, I wouldn't say I'm all that familiar with the TTRPG space outside of D&D, so take my opinions with a grain of salt. That said, I've played D&D, Wanderhome, Alice is Missing, and the fan-made Hollow Knight TTRPG, and I've watched some AP of Kids on Bikes, Call of Cthulhu, Monsterhearts, and Candela Obscura, which is a longer list than I was expecting. Huh. Anyways, my thoughts!

I really like the duality dice! It's such an interesting way to do mixed success that incorporates story/character into mechanics, which is great.

Related to that, I also like Hope as a fluid resource, and I think that Fear is a nice way to both prompt GM action and to just create a fun sense of dread as the GM takes more tokens

The lack of turn order/action economy is... cool, and a really interesting idea, but my thoughts on this are complicated. As we're seeing in the oneshot right now, it really helps to keep combat as part of the story and give the players and GM room for creativity. (For example, Bunnie describing a counterstrike as part of her dodge, and being able to take it as soon as the GM's turn is over, as well as the tag team feature, which is very cool.) That said, I think this mechanic might not work so well with less experienced or less confident players, who might have trouble taking the initiative (heh) to act in combat (I know I certainly would if I wasn't playing with close friends). That's not really a criticism though -- this is a collaborative storytelling game, and part of playing it is making big moves and taking turns guiding the story. If that's not for you, then you might prefer a different system, which is fine! I think this mechanic has the potential to be really, really dope, but I also think it's the bit that has the most potential to go poorly in my eyes.

The art, design, and general aesthetic feel of this game are so unbelievably up my alley. I love it. That's all.

I'm excited to see that they're working on mechanics for playing disabled characters, but since they aren't out yet I can't really comment. (I did notice that the character in the bard art is in a wheelchair, which is dope.) Also, as others have noted, Daggerheart uses "heritage" and "ancestry" rather than "race", which is a small but good choice.

Personally, I also really like the choice to move away from precise measurements of distance and gold. This one is very much a personal preference, and I know some people will rightfully disagree, but I like it! As a DM, trying to determine the appropriate costs and rewards for things has always been a headache, and this seems much easier to manage; measuring distances with convenient and tangible measurements like the short side of a playing card or the length of a piece of paper also feels much easier to use.

The downtime mechanics are great! Each of the activities you can take prompts you to describe how you heal yourself or another, destress, repair armor, or prepare yourself for what's ahead, which really encourages quieter character moments both introspectively and with others. I'm a big fan of this. This combining of role play and mechanics is also present in other features, such as one of the major level 1 healing abilities, which is more effective if you spend the time it takes to cast learning something new about the person you're healing or sharing something about yourself.

I didn't look at this too closely because I was just making a character for fun and don't have a party to play with, but as part of character creation you're given questions about your relationships to your party members to answer. Wanderhome also has these, and they were MASSIVELY successful in creating depth and meaningful connections between players -- after our table's session zero I was already so invested in all our characters, and when we actually played them they really came to life. I haven't looked to closely at Daggerhearts version of this, but I'm very excited to see them.

The experience mechanic seems really fun and creative, and I especially like the idea of using a phrase rather than something specific. That said, when I played the Hollow Knight TTRPG, which also lets players create their own skills, the open endedness of it was more confusing than inspiring, and there was a lot of potential for a usefulness disparity between players. I do think Daggerheart explains it better, though, and limiting the use of experience with a Hope cost helps to counteract any choices that might be too broad, so hopefully it will work better

I probably have more thoughts, but it getting late and I have a headache, so that's all I'm saying for now :D

Overall, Daggerheart has combined a lot of things I've liked in other games with promising mechanics I haven't seen before, and I'm very excited to try it out. I'm now realizing that I just made a list of things I like without any negative feedback, which isn't what I wanted to do, but I'm not really sure what to criticize without having played it myself.

I'm most curious to see how the non-initiative mechanic works; it has the potential to be a really excellent solve for a major problem in D&D (plenty of people have talked about how initiative limits teamwork, can be boring when its not your turn, etc, so I won't get into it here), but I don't think it's a solution that will work for everyone. Of course, games can't work for everyone, and shouldn't try to. It's working really well on CR's oneshot as I write this, but making choices and sharing spotlight in TTRPGs is literally their job, so I'm not surprised this works for them. I could see this going really well with some tables I've played with, and really poorly with others. I'm still really optimistic, though; it seems like the kind of thing that with the right table could be really excellent.

Hi! 10kDays has had a vice grip on my psyche for the last week or so, and I'm really excited to play the preview. However, I don't wanna make anyone else in my group GM this game just because I want to play it, so I'd like to try out the GMless mode of play, and so would they, but none of us have any experience with that style of game.

Is there any game you'd recommend we look at for a general picture of how you intend GMless play to work? I do own Ironsworn, which has a GMless mode, so if that jives with what you're intending that would be really convenient lmao.

Thanks for your time!

So there's a couple of thoughts i have here, starting with the shape of the game and the pieces of it that need different kinds and amounts of attention:

The game itself is kind of designed in three strands: courses, combat, and the Face game.

Courses are an adaptation of the Arc/quest mechanic from Jenna Moran's Glitch. I've found that they reduce the GM load hugely, for two reasons: you can roll up half an hour before game, ask "who wants to be in the spotlight, what does your quest say is happening in your life right now, and what needs to happen?", and drop something in. Connections and debts are also designed to give you improv prompts, and to a slightly lesser extent perspectives. The other benefit of Courses is that they move planning burden from "GM, night before game" to "player, whenever they want to think about their blorbo". So on a large-scale, "figure out what the campaign looks like" view, you can get away with improvising every session and just following your own character arcs. Likewise, the District moves and intentions are intended to give GMs an easy "i don't know what to do next" button, and the focuses of mask/gear/bell are intended to share around the responsibilities of worldbuilding. Ironsworn's oracles are another example of how to help outsource some of that decision-making, and it's the reason Appendix Yi is earmarked to be a million random tables. For more information on how oracles work, please google Jay Dragon's Sleepaway on your work computer (or at least read this Twitter thread from NightlingBug).

There are a couple story structures that are well suited to wuxia and this game. There's the Shaolin Soccer/shadowrunner/classic ttrpg setup where you are clearly a team, and there are enemy teams, and you are doing hijinks against them. But there's also a Jin Yong wuxia epic type thing where you have, let's say three or four PCs, and you're maybe nominally on the same side but you're clashing a lot and you're tied together by sworn and blood kinship and you keep running into each other. I think the most pared-down version of 10kdays you could run and still call it a full game is 3 players, characters living sort of far apart so they rarely run into each other, and interactions are 2 of the PCs clashing at a time while the 3rd player picks up any NPCs, throws in some District moves, etc. You could do a 2-player game but the kinds of interactions you could have would be severely limited, I think. The Face game of politicking and building support structures is kind of just... you two, face to face.

Now the problem on everyone's mind is fighting. It's attention-intensive, everyone's interested in it, and depending on your setup there can be loads of combatants that a GM would normally be expected to pilot. Again, there are a couple of scaffolds for trying to do this GMless. The sample Techniques in Appendix Jia come with combat tactics to make use of them, so any player can pick up an NPC combatant and figure out what they're going to do. Fight choreographing like this runs the pitfall of it feeling sort of bad to hurt your friends effectively, at least for some tables, but there is the incentive of hitting your friend's Bite highlight when you grab the corpo thug and bite them in the ass.

It is one of my mid-to-low priorities to create like algorithm type protocols for enemy fighters to run themselves, though that's still in the pipe dream phase. One thing I'm looking at here is Katabasis by Rathayibacter, which has a super cool system for easily lining up combatant actions, enemy or not). Maybe I'll end up with literal combat loop Turing machines or something.

There's one more option here which is to lean the other way -- to foreground the GM themselves being a player. I'm talking Ryuutama dragons, I'm talking Fellowship Overlords. Obviously I one hundred percent have not added this yet, and I'm not even set that I will, but it's definitely a tool I'm thinking of to help manage the wuxia/cyberpunk/other bullshit genre merger. If you went this way, it would look like picking a district -- secret note, each district is built to amplify a genre. Gongshan is made to focus on wuxia/the bell, Jiaotou is made to focus on cyber/the gear, Youzhou is made to focus on punk/the mask, Jingcai Xin is made to focus on court and courtroom politics, and Yuanhai is made to play Nezha Reborn. Pick a district that corresponds to the genre the GM is playing as, turn those Moves into Heroic/Humbling Moves and the landmarks/NPCs into Treasures and Connections, turn the Intentions into Skills. Now you can combine this with what I first talked about, sharing out cognitive load, and focus on playing as a district/genre. Is that meaningfully different from being a GM, who let's recall still counts as a player at the table? I'm a sicko who loves being a GM so I'm unqualified to comment, but try out any combination of these options and see how they take you.

Amazons

Amazons, Warrior Women Games, 2006

As one would expect, you play Amazons in this game - women from out of Greek myth.* You're warriors, hunters, scouts, sailors, and sages. There's only one supernatural power involved (which I'll get into later), so no witches or demigods or anything.

Your characters are defined by a fairly standard set of attributes and skills - Strength, Agility, Wisdom, Spear, Archery, Stealth, etc. All of them are done with a pyramidal cost scheme. As a result, it's easy to build a group where your characters overlap too much. It costs the same number of points to buy a 10-point skill (rolling 1d10x10) as it does to buy two skills at 8 and 6 (1d10x8 and 1d10x6), and the 8 and 6 are generally high enough to hit the typical target numbers. I think what I'm trying to say is that the game could really use a better approach to handling character archetypes, both for flavor purposes and for niche protection.

As mentioned, the game uses multiplication, which you'll either be fine with or will really bother you. Since it's dice-times-stat instead of dice-times-dice, the probability distribution is fairly flat, and you don't have weird statistics stuff going on. You do get margin-of-success effects from rolling higher, but you don't actually have to do two-digit subtraction. Instead, you get one "rank" of success for every point by which the tens place in your result is higher than the tens in your opponent's result. You roll a 25 and they have a 48? They have a rank-2 success. Same if you roll a 28 and they have a 40. Ranks get you damage, but also duration and effectiveness for other types of roll. It's a little weird at low values - a 12 and an 18 get you a tie even though one is 50% higher than the other - but it works well for higher values.

The particularly cool part of the game is that you play in two time periods simultaneously: ancient Greece and modern-day Athens. Your characters went "through" the Oracle at Delphi (is that how that works??) and are experiencing parallel events. When they run into a businessman in the modern day, they meet a merchant in ancient Greece. A Spartan warrior might become a rich but violent criminal. They see both things happening at once, and the GM is encouraged to mix the two in their descriptions. Philosophers arguing in the shadow of concrete and steel. Ocean liners passing by sailing vessels. It's an interesting conceit, and it gives you some cool ways to solve problems in one time by approaching them i the other.

Typical antagonists are "cruel people in positions of power" - slavers, price-gouging traders, sadistic princes, petty senators, etc. Several examples are statted up, along with their entourages. There isn't much discussion of what the backlash is going to be from your characters going after those people and their well-trained bodyguards. Like a lot of this game, the surface level is presented and any implications are left to the GM and their table.

As we leave this review, it may be interesting to know that Warrior Women Games was two cis men in their twenties. The game is written with respect, but without personal experience. There's no major misogyny here, no particular fetishization or anti-feminist rhetoric involved. There's also no real punch to the fact that you're actually playing women. On the one hand - awesome! The game treats your women characters just like it would treat men characters. Straight-up equality. On the other hand, there's a missed opportunity to dig into how your ancient women experience the modern world. There's no discussion of what has changed and what has not since the (admittedly fictional*) time of the Amazons. I think a game written by someone able to delve into that experience more might be more compelling. But I'll at least give it credit for not having fallen into a number of traps that plague other men-written-women-centric games. You're not going to cringe reading this.

*Edit to add, March 2024: Maybe the Amazons are not as fictional as I thought! https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/24/truth-behind-the-myths-amazon-warrior-women-of-greek-legend-may-really-have-existed

Is the 3D part of the demo also made in GMS2...? Do you have any advice for approaching 3D in GMS? Tutorials, maybe? Please teach me your ways. (Or don't. Anyway, great work!)

To your first question; yes and no. The first "dungeon" (seen in the demo) features a lot of objects I made in blender, but before bringing them into the game itself I made HD renders of each pose and then manually scaled and tweaked them to be sprites.

There are a lot of ways to use pre-rendered 3D but you're almost always going to want to render using an Orthographic camera. Perspective renders will immediately betray the depth of your in-engine environment by implying a different focal point.

I wanted the 3D presence to be obvious, so I lit the model in Blender as close to finished as possible and then shrunk it, using nearest neighbor to preserve the expression as best as I could. To make the 3D obvious you want to prioritize gradients, which are hard to re-do after doing tweaks, so you want to get things pretty close to perfect before rendering them.

Beastieball is a 3D game made in GMS2 that I work on and from what I gather from Greg it seems pretty miserable to do anything large-scale in 3D in the engine. You'd be better off in Godot if you want the benefits of 3D aside from the visuals.

How the OGL will affect YOU the Player

Gamer Solidarity is important, but here are the ways it might affect you the player. If the new OGL happens as it was written in the leak, here's how it might affect you, the person who only plays - It WILL cost you more money - WotC/Hasbro wants to move to a monthly subscription. One D&D would see you paying a monthly fee even if you're not online. So if you're using something like Roll20 or Tabletop Simulator, you'd be paying licensing fees for D&D on top of whatever they charge to use their platform. (they also want to do micro-transactions, which could also make it pay-to-win, but I'll cover that in another point).

It will be harder to find a group - Gamer Solidarity means a lot to a lot of people. Those of us who are mostly unaffected are still likely to side with the creators of the content we love. People are going to be refusing to play the new version, and moving to totally different systems or playing the old versions straight from the books. It's also going to be harder to find somebody willing to GM, which leads me into the next point -

There will be less GMs - Even if you somehow don't care that it's goinng to cost more for GMs, the new OGL will make it harder for them to run the game (which, BTW, 5th is already a lot more work for GMs than a lot of other systems) it's going to make the pool of people willing to run D&D smaller. Just don't play the new system you might say? Well, WotC has made it so it costs licensing fees to run it with Roll20 or Tabletop Simulator- and they're charging GMs more. Not to mention how if a GM uses 3rd party content, that content may not be available anymore thanks to the new OGL. Also, if you manage to find a GM running the newest version, the micro-transactions WotC wants to add in will make balancing encounters much more difficult.

Your favorite 3rd party creators will probably leave D&D - There's a lot of content that's been published under the old OGL and instead of grandfathering that in, WotC wants to just revoke the license. These means legal action could possibly be taken against them, even if they're publishing for versions of D&D that are out of print. The new OGL also means that WotC is allowed to just TAKE their content - so for fear of having their IP stolen, a lot of creators just aren't going to make things for D&D anymore. For ANY version.

Public Play will be an even bigger nightmare - This isn't really the OGL here, but this monthly subscription and micro-transaction BS only rewards those with cash and you WILL find yourself at the table with some asshole who bought a bunch of crap and is making the session all about them. I was there, I saw it happen with 4th.

None of this will affect me! - Well, good for you I guess? If you already have a steady game group who is all financially well off enough (or has a member willing to sponsor those that aren't) and you're all excited to try out the next edition D&D - cool, but if there are enough of you, you're supporting the people who do NOT care about you or the game. All they want is your money - and wouldn't it FEEL better to put that money somewhere better? (if your answer is to play in person, with an old edition, from books you already have, you're actually already kinda supporting the movement against the new OGL - be vocal about it)

Final Points - WotC didn't make D&D, they bought it. We aren't talking about a creator trying to regain control of their IP here, we're talking about a greedy company that wants to squash the competition. 3.0 saw a huge D&D resurgence into popularity, thanks a lot to the OGL. They tried messing with it before, this is why 4th edition gets shit on so much - I was there. (4th is actually a wonderfully accessible system and corporate greed messed it up). Fifth is so popular because the OGL came back, because content creators could make stuff for the new system again. WotC wants to STEAL these creators content. It's baked into the new OGL - they want the 3rd Party Creators to pay WotC royalties but if they take your self-published content and print it in one of their official books? They owe you jack-all. This will change the face of how IP legally works if it's allowed to just happen. It sets a DANGEROUS precedent for large companies to be able to retroactively steal IP.

Call to Action - Be against it, be loud, share with others WHY this is bad. Vote with your wallet, because that's all that WotC cares about- they have shown us now more than ever before, they do NOT care about you or the community. CANCEL YOUR DnD BEYOND if you have one - they have actually said this internally that the only numbers they're looking at as proof of if this will work are the DnD Beyond memberships. Cancel it. Might I suggest Roll20, Foundery, Tabletop Simulator, or Obsidian Portal for storing your character sheets for now?

Hope this helped somebody. I might write more about this topic.

Not to go all Game Designer on Main (too late, I know), but again found myself thinking about D&D as a game, and again... failing to see the appeal.

By volume, combat accounts for like 75-80% of the rules. I find the combat system ponderous and dull, which means I tend to avoid it at all costs. I just don't find it fun to wait 10 minutes for my turn to Do the Cool Thing on my character sheet, find that the opportunity passed 2 turns ago, and whiff my basic attack *again*.

But this leaves us with about 25% of the rulebook being dedicated to everything else, including a lot of the rules people always tell you you can ignore (encumbrance, lifestyle, food and water, etc). What's left is a bunch of stuff that I find interesting (sneaking, animal handling, perception, deception, acrobatics, sleight of hand, and a bunch of other stuff). But, we again run into mechanics that I am not interested in:

1d20 + Modifier vs Difficulty

The DMG doesn't have a ton of guidance for how to set Difficulty (not no guidance, but also not much I found helpful when running), so it feels very arbitrary. Players also don't have a wealth of resources to impact that roll, outside of Advantage/Disadvantage (which is probably why people are always asking if they have it).

And the outcome is usually either: you do the thing OR you do not do the thing. Which, depending on context, could be interesting, but could also be boring, or possibly soft-lock some content behind a door you can't open.

Plus, I think other systems do it better. Here are some other systems I'm familiar with, and how they do it (I think) better:

Powered by the Apocalypse

One of the core ideas of PbtA games is that whenever the players touch the dice, something in the world should change. So, something as simple as picking a locked door becomes way more interesting, because if you fail, you could: Alert guards to your presence, Take harm, Lose something valuable, or Whatever Else the GM Comes Up With.

We are still looking at a roll:

2d6 + Modifier vs 2-6 Fail; 7-9 Mixed Success; 10+ Full Success

Adding that extra layer of success changes a lot. Mixed Success adds a lot of Narrative Juice, because in addition to the players' success, their situation can get worse. Statistically, 7-9 is also more likely than the other two outcomes (I think? I did get a D in stats in college), meaning you can succeed but also make things a lot worse for yourself in a few rolls.

But another neat design element is: moves with triggers. Players can choose moves during character creation that also impact how things progress. The move might trigger "When you pick a lock" or "When you fail to pick a lock", and then give the player or the GM some kind of tool to use during that situation. Sometimes it's just a tweak to the modifier, sometimes it's another option for the outcome. In some cases even it's "whenever you pick a lock, the door always opens; but on a failure, the worst possible thing is on the other side."

Now, picking a lock is a really interesting choice.

Special Case: Monster of the Week

MotW in particular has a neat additional mechanic: Luck. Players can spend their Luck resource several times per campaign (usually 7), and declare that a roll was a Full Success. The resource is Limited, and the book tells GMs that players who run out are Doomed, which makes it a capital-D Decision every time someone uses it. This forces us to wonder: Is this lock *worth* picking? Is it Mission-critical, or can we find another way in?

Forged in the Dark

As a system, FitD is very much drawn from Apocalypse games, and has some similar ideas behind it. But, we have some interesting changes.

First, a roll is a bit more of a process:

Describe your process. Work with the GM to determine what kind of roll you're doing. (This is interesting, because different skills have different statistical ratings, but also because they can change the outcome. You could "Engineer" the door lock open, or you could "Wreck" it; both will get you past the door, but one may take more time, while the other may leave more evidence).

Determine Position and Effect. If it goes well, how well does it go? If it breaks bad, how bad does it go? (Knowing the stakes up front helps you make a decision about what resources to commit, and feels realistic, in that your character would be able to foresee some possible outcomes).

Assemble a dice pool, based on your rating and any resources you're spending. (Dice pools are already a different mechanic, but you also have resources to increase your odds. All characters usually have Stress or a similar resource, which you can spend for extra dice, position, or effect--or that your colleagues can spend to help you out).

Roll the dice. Look for the highest result (or Lowest if your rating is low). Again, we're looking at Success/Mixed Success/Fail. Things change in the world based on it. (FitD games also use a lot of clocks and tracks, and typically a Mixed Success or Failure ticks up some of the "Bad" clocks, and Successes or Mixed Successes tick up "Good" clocks. Some of these clocks are secret, and some are open, which gives players a sense of how their actions have consequences.)

Resist consequences. You can also spend stress to undo some of the negative aspects of a roll. (If the GM introduces a bad consequence, such as "You set off the alarm while picking the lock", you can roll and take stress to say "Actually I stopped that.")

There are also PbtA-style moves with triggers, but the dice mechanic here is already doing a lot. I like that the stakes are written up front, and it also encourages the GM to come with some ideas for what could go wrong, but not plan too much (Which I also really hate doing anyway; planning is hard!)

It feels like a lot written down, but genuinely when you're playing, it feels very smooth. It also helps keep people engaged, because the options to help are more at the forefront, and the outcomes impact everyone equally.

No Dice No Masters / Belonging Outside Belonging

This one is a slightly odd case, but it also draws from the PbtA design philosophy. Generally BoB games are GMless, so we're already putting everyone's hand on the narrative ball in a different way.

Your character sheet will probably have something like the following:

Strong Move (Spend 1 token to...)

Succeed without any negative consequences

Basic Move (You can always)

Complete a task, but draw unwanted attention

Weak move (Gain 1 Token when you)

Completely fail at a task and draw unwanted attention

Let's assume you already have 1 Token, and you want to pick the lock.

You could do it. But, you can also talk to the rest of the table and ask: "Hey, is it narratively interesting if I succeed here? Or are things going a little too smooth, and should we mix things up?"

This is probably one of the things that trips new NDNM players up, because it's so unlike other systems. You can choose the outcome! You and your fellow players are encouraged to "Metagame". You're telling a story with your friends, and it can be the story you think is cool.

Resistance System

(as seen in Heart and Spire)

Resistance is another dice pool system that uses Stress, with d10s instead of d6s. There are also moves, as in other systems. But, there are a few interesting things that I think are worth looking at.

Characters have Skills that they're good at, and Domains that they're familiar with. A Skill is going to be something like your Lockpicking (or a more general, like, mechanics skill), while the Domain is going to be related to the area you're in. The locks in a "Technology" domain are going to be different than those in a "Haven" or "Wilderness" domain (I don't remember the exact terms, so I'm kinda fudging them).

So, as you assemble the dice pool, you get bonuses if you have the right Domain and Skill. You can also get a die for help from other players, as well as a die for a Knack: Something you're especially good at. The roll ends up being:

1d10 + 1d10 (if a relevant skill) + 1d10 (domain) + 1d10 (if getting help) + 1d10 (knack) (- dice for difficulty) = Success +/- Stress.

(With a gradient, where low results give you stress with no success, and higher rolls give you success with no stress, and all results in between)

The Stress is what's interesting, instead of being a resource, it's closer to your HP, but you have different kinds of it. So the GM will tell you up front what kind of stress you're taking. After you take any stress (and there are ways to not take stress, or take less of it), you roll again to see if you get fallout.

Fallout can be temporary or permanent, and usually has a mechanical consequence. Fallout can also take different levels, and upgrade over time. It does give each roll a sense that the player is pushing their luck, and hoping the fallout doesn't take hold. This makes the rolls feel very significant, because even picking a lock badly could turn into a Fallout; so is it worth taking that kind of a risk?

----

And this is just three categories of games that I think do it in a more interesting way. There are a ton of other games out there, many of which I've never even played, so I don't know how they work. I also think there are ways to spice up a 1d20+mod roll in interesting ways, but generally, I prefer that kind of stuff.

So yeah, I watched this week's Critical Role. And wow, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings.

To start with, I've also been watching a series on YouTube by supergeekmike where he's gone through the Vox Machina episodes one at at time and talks about what we can learn about GMing and playing TTRPGs from how the CR cast does it. Which is very interesting overall, but the most recent episode has a surprising amount of synergy with this week's CR. He reached the Umbrasyl fight, and talks about how some of the awkward tension in this fight stems from the fact that the players, at this point, tended to keep Matt in the dark about big battle plans they wanted to implement, presumably because they didn't want him to plan a counter for them. This is partly seeing it at least a little as an us vs them, players vs GM sort of game, which can be a valid way of playing if everyone's on board, but doesn't super work for something like CR. But it's also a way players try to exert what little control they have over the situation, especially in very tense situations in which their characters are in serious danger.

Anyway, that sense of control is something I thought about again while watching this most recent episode. Spoilers ahoy!

99% of the time, I'm on team Marisha does nothing wrong fuck you Reddit, but in this one I think that, in her panic and desire to control the situation, she overstepped a couple of times. First with the scryball thing - yes, she mentioned it earlier in the episode, but if you want to assume you have it up and are staring at it 100% of the time you have to say so. Also, knowing Otohan was that close wasn't going to give them any kind of real advantage - there wasn't time or space to create an ambush or do much of anything that would improve their position when she arrived. Looking at the scryball earlier told them that Otohan was there and getting closer - realistically, that was about as much warning as they needed or were going to get. I think the thing to take away here is that sometimes, you can't make plans for everything as a player. Sometimes, the best you're going to do is "big shit's coming, at least you're aware." If you want more than that, especially in a very high-stress situation, you have be specific. "I have the scryball in my hand and will look at it every minute or so." "I am keeping very, very aware as we run so can we just use my passive perception against anything in the area as we move forward?" "I have specifically taken X weapon out of the bag so I don't have to spend an action when we inevitably get ambushed." The more info you can give your GM, the more control you can have, however little it may be. But at the same time, sometimes you're just going to be surprised or get caught in a suboptimal situation, and sometimes that's what the story needs.

As an aside, it did feel like Otohan was a little overtuned - 4 attacks PLUS two action surges PLUS legendary actions? And that's without her crazy shadow backpack? But there's also the fact that the party had used so many of their spells for the infiltration. But still. I wonder if Otohan was meant to be an even later boss fight, and they were meant to flee again, maybe with the teleport back to Exandria. But that wasn't clear, so maybe this really was just supposed to be a brutal deadly fight. It just didn't feel like fun for the players for a good chunk of time.

(I struggle a lot figuring out how to make a fight hard for a large group of fairly overpowered players myself. I haven't figured out how to make it work. But it's a little comforting to realize that Matt might not even quite know how to do it all the time even after all these years.)

But anyway. The second time I started to get irritated with Marisha was when she started trying to bargain/beg after they all realized what Sam/FCG was doing. Thankfully Travis brought out the dad voice to shut her down - I get it, I understand the impulse to want to find something, anything that will change this inevitable outcome, but at the same time, this show is as much a piece of improv theater as it is a D&D game, and there comes a time when you have to just let your fellow actor have their moment. And while Sam will make ridiculous snap decisions to commit to the bit, when it comes to the serious, important stuff, he's clearly a player who knows exactly what he's doing and why he wants to do it.

Ultimately, I think this is why I continue to appreciate CR's no-editing approach to their episodes, even though finding 5 hours to watch one episode can be a pain sometimes. I like seeing these awkward moments, these missteps, the times when it becomes clear that even veteran players and GMs, even professional improv actors don't get it right all the time. It's validating, as a GM and player who feels like she sucks at both things, even after playing for like 7-ish years.

Before I post any art, I gotta say a thing. And I've told a few people already but I am gonna share it here, too.

TW; Anxiety (but like positive?)

At work I am quite well-known as "that person with anxiety". I think at most points, despite turnover rates of employees, at minimum 65% of all employees have seen me cry at work before. If they haven't, it's probably someone on night crew. The thing is though, it has it's really weird benefits? I'm absolutely not here to wish anxiety on anyone but when someone that isn't me has anxiety? A lot of coworkers will ask me to talk to the person in the middle of an attack because "hey you can relate".

And today all I had to do was listen to someone vent their work stress as she cried out back and vaped a little to calm down. Like, she didn't ask me to join her out back. A guy told me to go check on her so I did. And she just... let it all out. And as she calmed down and was about to go back in I told her "hey it's fine to feel better but if you go right back to where you were it's not gonna help anything. Go into the walk in cooler for a minute to literally cool off" and she paused and was like. Stunned. That it could be that easy. (note, the back? no AC. her station? the pizza station? ovens AND multiple people for body heat. outside where she vented? also hot!)

I just enjoy the fact that while it sucks to have anxiety, I've been there long enough to help multiple people through an attack because I'm just a small and little fella. The least intimidating person in the restaurant who has been seen crying more than any other worker.

I remember having my own anxiety attack and my GM at the time just walked over to me and stood at a slight distance and started to talk to me about a video game he'd been playing lately and when he left to get back to work, I felt better. He just ... rambled about something to distract me and it worked. I remember a manager who had real bad anxiety prior to working and had it under control who told me it was fine to feel anxious because your brain's stupid. And, as a restaurant, he's like "to your brain under an anxiety attack, you could have a line out the door or a lion at the door and it's the exact same sense of fear."

Basically, I haven't had super huge attacks at work lately but I'm still known for having them and for some reason, that gets spread around and no one ever acts like it's a defect. In fact, plenty find it relatable! And when I can help someone with advice I've gotten before or just distracting them with a silly story about the one time I walked in the back door and walked into the cooler and started to cry and shake and a manager found me and goes "did you even clock in yet?" and I shook my head and he told me to go home but after I sat in my car for a bit to calm down. It's nice to hear someone laugh when I tell them "so hey, at least YOU got to clocking in so you're getting paid to cry".

It's just wild how a little understanding goes a long way? How it doesn't fix anything but dang it really does help to just co-exist as "ah yeah I get that - do you want some water?"

All the TTRPGs I Played in 2023

So it's about halfway through the year and I wanted to talk about all the gaming I've done this year. I've learned a lot this year - about games, definitely, but mostly about how I like to play them. And the big learning for me is around prep. I don't particularly enjoy prepping for games as a GM. So I tried to run a bunch of different games this year without any prep and basically, these games were less fun than I hoped for. So basically I've realized I either do the prep... or I play games that are explicitly designed with support for no prep or low prep play. Right now, I'm leaning towards the latter.

Anyway, here's wonderwall:

Spire (7 sessions, player): This is a game about being a dark elf freedom fighter or terrorist, more or less That's a tough premise honestly. I think I wanted to play it straight - blood and tragedy. But it's probably best served with a huge dollop of irony or comedy. Like many, many people have said before, the setting is the star here and in future, I'd probably play it with something more forged in the dark. I converted the playbooks a long time ago but haven't done anything with them. I've scribbled some notes for the Great Spireblack Campaign but I haven't put anything concrete yet.

Swords of the Serpentine (3 sessions, GM): Conan the barbarian via GUMSHOE. It's sword and sorcery but you're investigating things as much as fighting or stealing. This is the first of the two games where I botched the ending because of a lack of prep. Bottomline, I think GUMSHOE is exactly the kind of system that doesn't work for me as a GM. It is built around the idea of a certain kind of prep (a breadcrumb trail of clues) and I don't think I enjoy leading players to a finale in that sense. In a one shot, I'm all for a tight breadcrumb trail but not really in a campaign. My primary enjoyment comes from players surprising me and I don't think this game is built for that. Loved the setting though! Eversink is a quirky, charming place.

Blades in the Dark (12 sessions, player): We played a crew of hawkers but we peddled highly illegal avant-garde dining experiences. It started out very light but we quickly became vengeful, violent freaks. Amazing, 10/10, no notes. It's crazy how cutthroat the hospitality industry can be! The system mastery of the table definitely helped but these sessions were a guaranteed good time.

The Veil (4 sessions, GM): A cyberpunk game with a focus on the em9tionx and internal lives of the characters. I really enjoyed emotions as stats. I loved asking my players how they felt every time they picked up the dice. But this was the second game where I botched the ending. Partially due to prep but partially due to misreading the text. I thought it was more like Apocalypse World where the players are often semi-antagonistic. But I think maybe it works best in a more standard "everyone is on the same side" kind of way. Would love for it to get a second edition with a better rulebook but will either way, probably return to it at some point.

DIE (5 sessions, GM): Goth jumanji. Slightly misleading but yeah, it's a game where you play people who get sucked into a game. I don't think I could make this game really work at my table. It relies on bleed to really shine (to some extent) and I'm not good at creating bleed. My table was also very culturally different. It would've been tough for anyone. Very jealous of those it worked for! If you haven't read the comic, you really should!

Bite Marks (6+ sessions, Player): A game of werewolves and pack dynamics. This is definitely in the vein of games where the players most complicated problems can be each other. Sure, there's a strange creature killing werewolves like us but thats an easy problem to solve. How am I going to keep this family together? How will I find someone to replace me as Alpha? Those are tough problems! I really enjoy that kind of play. I enjoy having the family as a character. I'm enjoying wrestling with being the leader of the pack, the Alpha. Ongoing.

World of Dungeons? (5+ sessions, GM/player): This is a bit of an odd game on this list. It's basically freeform pretending to be homebrew World of Dungeons. I take turns running it with a friend and it's the first RPG campaign for a couple of the players. When I run, I tend to run for 2 hours. It's dark fantasy, low stakes, and very satisfying. We're maybe one session away from the finale and I'm keen to find out if people want to play something else later.

Apocalypse World (3+ sessions, Player): The Blades in the Dark crew are now playing AW and it's similarly fun. Much more weird (fungal, jungle apocalypse) and PvP than Blades (characters has their own ulterior agenda, but players know everything though). I'm really enjoying it but still feel like it's just getting started. The engine hasn't kicked in yet and we have less system mastery than with Blades but I'm excited for when it kicks in.

This Ship Is No Mother (5 sessions, GM): So this is my own game of sci-fi horror that isn't out yet (except to patrons). I've run a couple oneshots and then a three session mini‐campaign. It's a game I love to run. Every playtest was a joy. I'm basically tweaking the text right now but it's basically ready for release. I'll talk about it more when it's out!

Are there any RPGs that would work well for a Touhou-styled game? What are your thoughts on recreating something as complex as a bullet hell shooter in tabletop form? Thank you!!!

THEME: Touhou Bullet-Shooters

Hello friend! Bullet Hell Shooters are not usually the kind of games I like to play. I prefer social drama over physical combat, although I definitely understand the allure.

I looked up Touhou and as far as I understand, it’s a shoot-em-up game in which the protagonists protect a haven for yoke called Gensokyo from various threats, or “incidents’. What I understand about bullet shooters is that knowing your enemy is key; so repeated runs or play-throughs are expected so that you can get used to enemy attack patterns, etc.

Now, I'm not a dungeon-crawling aficionado here, but from what I've heard about dungeon-crawls - that is, if you think from the point of view that rogue-like video games provide the same level of grinding and failure as a bullet-shooter. Dungeon crawls have the ability provide the same kind of feeling, because your characters have to travel the same ground over and over again. The difference might be that in dungeon crawls and rogue-likes, it's not just the player getting better - the character also receives upgrades in the form of equipment, or abilities.

So when it came to recommendations for this post, I found a few games that might vibe with Touhou themes, but I also tried finding some other rules systems that you could potentially play around with to find the style of play you're looking for.

Next Dream, by ohnoproblems.

A gmless, diceless game for 3-6 players using the belonging outside belonging system. You will need to know the rules detailed in Chapter 1: Playing the Dream found in the full rulebook to get the most out of this play kit.

Based on the Touhou series by ZUN, Next Dream lets you create and play your own stories in its world. Play as one of the colorful and eccentric denizens of Gensokyo as well as its undergirding social, metaphysical, and narrative pressures. Plot festivals and crash incidents; delve into the arcane and mingle with the divine; fill the skies with your own histories, emotions, and desires as written in the language of magical artillery.

I’m including this game even though it doesn’t really fit into the bullet-shooter vibe, because it’s inspired by Touhou. Your characters might be involved in conflict, but you could also take actions like “fall out of love” or “delve into old knowledge.” Belonging Outside Belonging games ask players to play both a character and a setting element, facilitating GM-less play. These games are usually very exploratory and emotional. I suppose the answer that the designer had for your question about recreating a bullet-hell-shooter was to… well not do that. Instead their goal was to focus on the story elements of Touhou that felt meaningful and abstract the combat out to look at the emotions underneath it.

This World Summons Too Many Heroes, by Nick Duff.

This World Summons Too Many Heroes!! is a tabletop rpg about regular people being pulled into a fantasy world to become heroes, demon lords, goblins, talking swords, or any kind of adventurer you could think of! Go on an isekai adventure in the Kingdoms of Ceria, where summoning scrolls have been scattered across the countryside and people are recklessly using them to steal people from other worlds and bring them into this one with new powers gifted to them by a goddess of reincarnation.

A hidden magical world is basically an isekai, so this game has some thematic elements that might resemble the setting of Touhou. The idea in this game is that people from other worlds keep being brought into one kingdom, and the sheer amount of them is causing a lot of problems. If Gensokyo is letting too many things past its barrier, perhaps the problems in This World Summons Too Many Heroes look pretty similar. The Goddesses Expansion is an add-on to this anime game, and it comes with new classes, new enemies, and new toys to play with in the same fantastical world.

I’m also including this game because it’s based off of the LUMEN system, which prioritizes combat and making your characters feel powerful. If you are interested in dynamic combat and the ability to face off against a vast number of foes, you should definitely check this system out. I even have a LUMEN folder where you can see a number of different themes!

Gun Witch - Lead, Thread and the Dead, by Blackberry & Holly.

GUN-WITCH: LEAD, THREAD, AND THE DEAD is a role-playing game designed for two or more players, centred on making your way in a world wracked by war and decay, where even the gods are struggling to find their footing. It’s a game about building community and connection inimical to the very context, about finding common ground with people who view things in a way you never could, and about doing what you can to bear a weight that you can’t let drop, no matter how much you might want to let go. It’s also about the weight and power of violence, wielding your weapon properly, and working astonishing miracles of life and death at the end of the barrel of a gun.

This is another game that lists Touhou in its list of inspirations, although it also digs into the western genre to give you a world full of danger and violence. This game also has guns as an integral part of combat - so expect to have the ability to shoot through your problems. Your characters are Covens of different orders, all of which take different jobs and walk the Sacred Path of the Six Chambers. The art really draws me in for this one.

Knave, by Questing Beast.

KNAVE is a rules toolkit by the creator of Maze Rats and The Alchemist's Repose for running old school fantasy RPGs without classes. If you are introducing a group of new players to OSR games, Knave allows them to make characters and understand all the rules in minutes.  Every PC is a Knave, a tomb-raiding, adventure-seeking ne’er-do-well who wields a spell book just as easily as a blade. This is an ideal system for players who like to switch up their character’s focus from time to time and don’t like being pigeonholed. A PC’s role in the party is determined largely by the equipment they carry.

Knave is a pretty well-known game in the OSR scene. OSR stands for Old-School Revival, which is a very popular sphere for dungeon-crawlers. Your characters are pretty small and squishy, and you are raiding tombs. It’s very likely that your character dies during play - and you’ll have to create new characters to throw into the dungeon and try to solve problems that you didn’t survive the first time.

RUNE, by Gila RPGs.

You are an Engraved. Cursed to wander the shattered world of Obron, you seek the power to take back control of your fate. Explore Realms, kill Rune Lords, and carve the power of fate into your very being.

RUNE is a solo tabletop RPG inspired by the soulslike genre of video games, including Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. In RUNE, you are a wanderer of the lands of Obron. The world is dangerous, but full of power if you are willing to reach out and take it. RUNE combines narrative exploration with tactical combat to capture the environmental storytelling and high stakes combat you love in soulslike games.

What stands out for me in the RUNE pitch is the following quote: “Enemies have movesets that are determined by dice rolls, telegraphing their intentions and giving you a moment to react.” The designer also describes RUNE combat as a “puzzle” that you will have to solve - which sounds similar to the idea of learning enemy patterns in order to overcome them. It’s not going to work for group play, but it’s something that you could play around in solo mode and maybe steal some ideas for something else!

Breathless Games (SRD designed by Fari RPGs)

Breathless Games are games about characters who are getting into more and more dangerous situations, with depleting resources that can only be re-charged whenever you decide to “take a breath.” The biggest problem about taking a breath is that, well, the GM gets to advance the situation, make it worse. There are a number of Breathless games that have been made for different genres, quite a few of which focus on horror and survival, but there’s also a Magical Girl game, a monster-hunting game, and a southern gothic game! You can check out my Breathless folder to see what I’ve found on Itch so far.

Other Games I’ve Recommended

Mystic Lilies, by Will Uhl at Merry Mancer Games.

Blood Neon, by Rad Mad. 11dragonkid's video about Infinite Revolution also mentions Touhou games in terms of game feel, even though the game itself is in space.

I’d also recommend checking out my Hellbusting Games post, particularly the bit about Hell Grinders.

I'm actually really glad TFS got delayed for entirely selfish reasons--I like to take my time and enjoy the game so that usually means I'm still doing some wrap-up on gathering gear, crafting, or powering up stuff until late in the season. But this time around I wouldn't have been able to do that because I had gender affirming surgery scheduled for the tail end of the season, and if there's been any complications or it was a rough recovery I'd have risked missing out on any finale stuff. The delay meant I could take my usual sweet time, enjoy everything at a relaxed pace, and not risk missing out on anything that'd be removed at the drop of the new expansion

Honestly same! Long seasons have been a fave of mine since Arrivals. It just gives you so much extra time to take things at your own pace and make sure you're not stressing out about finishing everything. Most people don't play this game as a job! People have other things to do and they don't want to clock in at the Destiny factory to play 24/7 so they don't miss something. I play a lot, and yet there's still a lot of stuff I haven't done! I still haven't finished my GMs this season because everyone has been busy; if not for the delay, we would've had to cram everything and risk getting annoyed or burned out before the final expansion.

I really really hope that with Episodes they do something about this urgency to finish things in a specific time slot or else... My greatest wish for Episodes is that they will be the type of content that can stay in the game indefinitely instead of being removed after a year. This is a super complex topic btw (the whole thing with seasons leaving, as well as vaulting) that I think a lot of people tend to oversimplify because it's easier to just say we don't like it and assume malice. I might make a post about it and my thoughts on it because damn, I really don't like story elements being removed, but also there's so many interlocked issues with the type of game this is and how it works that it's a huge undertaking to talk about it in a responsible and neutral way, instead of just farming easy upvotes by saying "vaulting bad" (and for the record, yeah, it is bad, especially for the story).

But yeah, the thing I want the most out of Episodes is that something about the content cycle is fixed and that we get to keep them so we can continue playing at our own pace instead of feeling forced to grind when we might not be into it or we don't have time. Keeping things for a year is better than before, but I would really like if this content is something that we can play (and replay!) for as long as the game is alive.

So yep, totally agree. Love the extended seasons and the amount of time it gives players to breathe and not stress out. It makes the game more enjoyable since you can take a break and come back and feel refreshed about playing again.

And congrats on your surgery! I hope the recovery is going well for you and that you're happy with it! :D

I remember you mentioned you're someone who DMs, what are some of your favourite parts of being a DM? Do you have any tips for beginner DMs?

Hey anon!

My favorite parts: making a story for my friends to play in, seeing how it fits together (DM-ing hits a certain puzzle-loving spot for me), getting to embrace failure wholeheartedly (I want the party to kill my monsters, I do not want to win the fight), hearing the absolutely wild things people come up with. In case you could not tell I am not a go with the flow person, and ironically DM-ing is like…both running something but also requiring you to go with the flow, and it’s a really good exercise for me.

Tips for new DMs (or GMs for any game with PCs in it): this is super vague, so if you have more specific questions about like, technical aspects, go for it as this is high level.

Have a session zero in which you ensure everyone’s making a character who wants to be here. You can have a session zero/pre-zero (session negative one?) to get a sense of more generally what kind of game people want. This is also the time to talk through anything that's totally off limits for any players (or the DM) and what needs to be dealt with with care (commonly referred to as lines and veils). Personally I find just calling for a time out is the easiest and most effective - I find cards or code words to be a lot more confusing and inaccessible - but basically my point is have a session to hash out what this table needs to be comfortable.

Modules/published adventures are a really good way to start. It helps you understand what kind of information is good to have prepared in your worldbuilding and how to structure plot.

In D&D, one of the rules is basically "the DM can make a call if you're not sure" and this should be taken to heart. Basically: you need to be consistent (ie, you can't have a monster suddenly develop new powers out of nowhere - though they can develop new powers in response to something) but if you don't use the exact stat block, it's whatever.

Schedule prep time unless you are the most organized person on earth in which case you probably scheduled it anyway.

Be open to feedback

Don't be afraid to say no. You want the players to have fun, but you will get people, even well-intended people, who will ask some wild-ass shit. Look. I am extremely not a people-pleaser, but there are places where being a people-pleaser is really good. DM-ing is not one of them. And, to be clear, you can have a wild yes-and game that's rules light in which you let the players be murder hoboes if that's what everyone wants - you don't have to insist on running the module as is. It's just that like, if you don't want to run the murder hobo game, you need to advocate for yourself, and you need to be able to say no, because the DM/GM is a player but they are also doing much more work and they do, in fact, get a much greater share of the vote. I lean towards "kind-hearted hardass" as a DM but adjust accordingly.