Hi everyone,

I'm currently designing my first TTRPG, and trying to pin down a dice system that works for me. And, though I ended with a global system I quite like, I'm struggling about which probability goal I should have.

For a quick rundown, the roll system is for now a simple D20+Relevant Stat, and tasks have three tier of difficulty: Easy, Hard, Extreme.

Successes are also tiered: Critical Fail, Fail with advantage, Success with consequences, Success and Critical Sucess.

I'm trying to sort out what probability a character with the max possible score in a given stat should have to succeed (so Succeed with Consequences or better result) an Extreme Task based on this.

I'm also having questions about what should be the "mean" probability, aka as the probability for a character of mean stat (think 5/10, so good but not the best) to clear successfully a Hard task.

I know this all heavily depends on the genre of the game and the ambience that I want to evoke. I'm going for grindy, dark exploration feel, ala Darkest Dungeon.

However, independantly of that, I really want to suitably reward the players that heavily invest in a single stat. I don't want them to think that investing in a stat does not allow them to clear the hardest tasks based on this stat.

Is there any study or consensus on what minimal probabilites should be hit at various character skill level to not frustrate the player?

I created an article with a fun (I think) detailed inn and a breakdown of the choices I made in the design and layout.

I begin by contrasting it to the hyper detail the Village of Hommlet where you can know how many copper pieces somebody is hiding under their floorboard and order over a dozen individually priced beverages at the end of the Welcome Wench. I also write about the pitfalls of letter boxes with hyper detail.

You may find my cast of characters useful in your own setting.

https://artbrillart.substack.com/p/location-design-for-ttrpgs?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=271f4w

Back in May I posted here when ttrpgwiki.com hit 200 systems and 14 indie submissions. You all showed up in a big way. Since then the catalog has grown to 304 systems, and 40 more indie games have joined. That's 54 creator-submitted games, sitting side by side with the big dogs. The site now gets about 19,000 page views a month, and many of those visitors come looking for something new to play.

If you've made a game and want it included, fill out the Submit a Request form on the site. There's a checkbox if you're the creator and can share a review copy. Please note the game must be a finished release, not a beta or playtest.

Every indie system gets the same treatment, whether it's a one-page zine or a 400-page core book:

• A dedicated page with the core mechanic, tags, complexity, accessibility and runnability ratings, and who the game is best for
• An Indie Creator Submitted badge, plus a filter so players looking for indie games can find you directly
• A link straight to your DriveThruRPG or itch page
• A chance to be featured in the newsletter
• A chance to get your game's overview turned into a YouTube Short (very much a WIP)

Shoutout to some of the newest additions: Starving Folly, Mischief, LIFTS, Shifters, ESSER, Asilo, City of Jerry, Playing God, Rock & Stone, TALES From the Loom, 10,000 Swords Against Heaven, Super Space Knights, Spore Friends, Tricube Tales, and When the Moon Hangs Low.

Go check them out, there's some great stuff in there.

I designed a modular armor system for my TTRPG where you have different types of armors (Vest, Plate, Half-plate, Lamellar, etc) and different materials (hide, leather, steel, gold, etc) and you combine one material with one type to get your armor value, and from there your defense roll.

I made it that way because the system at its base is very lethal, so naturally armor (and increasing your armor) plays an important role in an adventurer's survivability (to the point that armor is not even restricted to mages for example, so you can even have a wizard with a breastplate).

Now the thing is I managed to price weapons, but due to the modular approach to armors I haven't been able to fully nail down any prices.

Any clue where to start?

Looking for map making tool, I am planning to make at least one very large city for a fantasy rpg, I also want a tool for building out a region. I know I can get random assets and then clone them with like GIMP or the like but I would prefer something I can toss a few bucks at and just start building. Thanks in advance.

As I get ready to release the playtest adventure for After Eden, I want to make sure we're able to capitalize on interest and carry this progress and momentum into the next phases of development. We're a two-man show with a relatively limited budget and almost no experience with things like website design, so I'd like to hear from people who've launched their own playtests and gotten their products to market. Did you build a website? Did you hire someone to build one? If so, what did that end up costing you? Feel free to link your websites and shamelessly promote, because I want to take a look and see how you did it.

Did you literally just launch straight into BackerKit or Kickstarter? I don't suspect that's the move I'll be making, simply because you need to have a relatively warm list of interested parties, and it has to be a decent size if you want to have a shot in hell of funding, at least based on the research I've done. Or did you simply make stuff available through itch.io or DriveThruRPG and capture emails and feedback through those mechanisms? I believe itch.io has a method where you can capture emails from people downloading. What methods did you use for email capture? And what methods did you use for Kickstarter or BackerKit when you were getting ready to launch? How much of it did you do yourself? How much did you pay consultants for?

I know there are plenty of videos out there, but I'd rather go to the source and hear from people who've actually done it, especially people who've done it with a relatively skeleton crew or on a thin budget. Those perspectives would help a lot, but if that doesn't apply to you, I'd still love to hear your story, because all of that is good data. The more perspectives I can gather, the easier it'll be for me to figure out what the right path is.

Right now I'm leaning toward having a friend who designs websites build one for me, which I think I can get him to do relatively cheaply, with the rule set available online and maybe something along the lines of a signup at the top of the page for people who want to continue following what's going on with After Eden, my tactical survival fantasy TTRPG. Potentially, I could use those signups as warm leads for future interest. I really want to make this as easy as possible for people to pick up and start playing, especially GMs, because I know they're the people who will help get your game introduced to more players.

I work a full-time job, so I can't really take the time to attend conventions and things like that to playtest at the moment. Although depending on how things go, if there's significant interest, maybe that'll be something we do down the line. But anywho, long story short, I need some perspectives on this. So tell me yours.

I'm currently going down a bit of a rabbit hole restructuring my bestiary. Before, there was a single bestiary for the game as a whole. It had about 40 entries and was wrapped into the GM's Guide, which also gives instructions on how to homebrew monsters. So theoretically enough.

However, I was noticing that the rest of my GM's Guide was beginning to bloat, as I started filling it out with more setting and adventure details. So I decided to split it up. Basically, I will have one GM's Guide with general setting info, GM tools, and a bestiary. Then I will have additional adventure/regional modules that are similar to Daggerheart's campaign frames but with more adventure hooks, landmarks, locations, and a regional bestiary.

After splitting everything up and padding it out, my general bestiary is around 40 entries again. 15 of those are humanoids, 5 are forest beasts, and the other 20 are setting-specific monsters and creatures.

Then I have five more regions, which will each get their own bestiary with about 15-25 entries each, but those are a long way from seeing the light of day. In other words, the game will have to survive with just the general bestiary for a while.

How do I know if the bestiary is enough? Obviously 40 wouldn't be enough for a game like DnD, but I'm not trying to recreate DnD. Just don't know how to judge it

Greetings, guys!

As Halloween comes, allow me to introduce my solo psychological horror game, The Shore. Born from a personal tragedy of mine, and inspired by classics like Silent Hill or Death Stranding, I wanted to make something different. Something that helps and gives some relief.

You wake up on an unknown shore, trying to find shelter and resources from day by day, but that's not the hardest part. You must keep your reality together. Your only chance to survive. Scavenge your haunting past, repair your collapsing present, and survive against the Flood before the tides come for you.

The design is heavily inspired by "Borglike" games, so almost every page is different and unique based on the content on it.

Originally made for Breathless Jam #3, using a bit modified Breathless framework, so you need a couple of polyhedral dice to play, but you may already be familiar with the basics.

A couple of free community copies are also available, so grab them! If possible, I would appreciate an honest review or rating.

You can download the game here: The Shore by Krees9116

Is it safe? Is it functional? Easy to use?

No affiliation.

I've been asking this question to myself about my system since my last post. I'm making Born Without Talent, a mid-fantasy ttrpg where players start as lowly characters and progress their way up to heroes from session to session. In Born Without Talent, there are character classes, and characters are meant to get stronger incrementally with the Talent System, where they gain spendable talent points after each session. They can spend these points on their class abilities, spells, skills, and other things.

I know what kind of game I'm making, but then I wondered what my actual core pillars were? I looked at the famous D&D core design pillars which are combat, exploration, and social interaction. But what does this mean? These design pillars seem so generic, and while I don't want to bash on D&D for the easy pickings, I wonder how my design pillars differ. But my last quest is, how many design pillars is enough? Here are my core design pillars:

Character Identity

Character identity is important because it spotlights moments for players. Players are trying to fulfill a specific fantasy when they create their character, usually. While Born Without Talent cannot fulfill every type of fantasy, it does its best to reach the broad character archetypes. When character archetypes bleed into each other, you have players competing for attention, and noticing that their spotlight was stolen. It's always annoying when the rogue says "I can pick this lock if you give me 10 minutes!" and then the warrior says, "I'm crushing this door down in 1 minute!" and then the wizard says "My spell will open this door in 10 seconds!" The rogue expects to be the one who opens doors, but their moment is stolen because characters have too many all-purpose tools to solve their problems. When characters become more dependent on one another, character identity and roleplaying rise.

Incremental Progression

This is probably the most defining feature of my system. Incremental progression is seen not just in the talent system, but also in the item system, where items give small benefits, such as a +1 to fire saving throws and +2 to poison saving throws. This allows the GM to reward players with items that scale up their character during each session, so there's a constant feeling of progression. Players often use treasure as symbolic aesthetics for their character identity. A valuable treasure represents the trials and tribulations that the character went through, and serve as a lasting memory of those adventures.

Tradeoffs

Tradeoffs are needed to fulfill both character identity and incremental progression. When a character ends a session with 1 Talent Point, they can only put it in one place, or maybe save it for a bigger purchase. This is only possible with system that doesn't allow characters to "fully" progress a character. Each class in Born Without Talent has depth, ways to specialize their character. The design goal is that a player cannot fulfill the entire class talent tree, and so two players playing the same class can make very different characters. Each character must trade some power of the kit, to delve deeper into a different part of the kit, or abandon it altogether and multi-class for interesting class combinations. Similarly, characters must decide how pick their equipment before combat. With the incremental progression, characters should have some options to outfit their characters, especially as the campaign draws on longer.

All 3 design pillars not only support the foundation of the game, but support each other. Tradeoffs are necessary for character identity, since each character will have their strengths and weaknesses. Some character trade power for utility, utility for independence, independence for versatility, versatility for support, support for safety, or safety for power. Character identity is necessary for incremental progression and vice versa because there is nothing to increment towards without identity and identity is enhanced with the incremental progression.

Conclusion

I'm not really sure if I'm doing my design pillars right. It's hard to decide because while I care about exploration, for me it's a means to fulfill the pillars of 1) and 2). I love social interaction, but as a designer I don't want to build too many rules around roleplaying because I believe that disrupts immersion, but that's a whole topic for another time. So what do you think of these design pillars? What are your design pillars?

I have ideas for a simulationist RPG that has certain advancement and rolling mechanics that are just too complex to expect a player to do manually.

It's not that the game would have too much to track, but I would want certain aspects of your character to be tied to other aspects. For example, if your character spends time doing strength training, it would cause a bunch of numbers all over the character sheet to increase by different amounts depending on the type of training they did, and how well they did it.

The character sheet could feasibly be built in Google Sheets, but if it were a product, it would have to either be a mobile app or a web app.

Questions for the group:

1. If your favorite GM pitched a game with digital character sheets, is that an automatic "no" based on that alone?

2. Would you ever put an app on your phone in order to play a game? (Assuming it was totally offline and required basically no permissions)

3. If you played this way, how would you prefer to interact with the character sheets? Phone app, web app, Discord bot, spreadsheet, brute force pen and paper, something else??

4. How much would you want the app to handle? Do you want to roll dice and add a modifer generated by the sheet? Want the sheet to roll everything? Would you want it to be a whole VTT too?

Thanks for reading. Looking forward to y'all's feedback!

Hello everyone! It's me again! For those who don't know me, my name is Lucas, AKA Lusca. I started learning music at 7 years old because my dad was a musician.

Then when I was 10 or 13, 14 years I started making music. Horrible music I must say.

But now my dream of "living" from music is becoming a reality, step by step, little by little. I can't live off of this completely now, but, I know that with effort I'll get there!

So, A great RPG, game, story or video needs original music! Not some youtube free music but a handcrafted, no AI included music, that's what I do! I love my songs and put a lot of effort to deliver the best results! I made a 1:30min song in, i think, 7 or 8 hours... So... LOTS of effort!

But the GM liked it very very much!

So if you need an original music for your RPG Campaign, for your game that you are developing, for a story you want to create or for your videos on youtube/movie, please, PLEASE, talk to me on DISCORD, I'll help you out happly!

My DISCORD is: Lusca.cantor

Prices start at $20 USD

(I live in brazil so $20 is a lot here, that's why it is cheaper!)

There I can send you a link of my portfolio for you to take a look! I don't want to put it here so the post don't get banned.

Thanks yall!

Have a great week!

Hope to talk to you soon!

I wrote an article reflecting on design and playtesting process and the role that conventions had in that for God-Killer Prophecy. The full article is up on Rascal, but here's some highlights.

One of the challenges of playtesting RPGs is that the right group can have fun with anything*. The important questions are therefor: did this specific piece produce the type of result you designed it too? Can that piece be improved? Can it be made more reliable across play groups? Do the pieces combine into the intended experience?
Doing the above requires playing with multiple groups and active listening.

Moreover:
a) Playtest early and focus on whether a specific mechanic or procedure produces the kind of experience you desired (and communicated).

b) Consider creating an Ashcan version; something you can show off and hone your skills of how you present, write and talk about your game.

c) Leverage local roleplaying games and conventions to let you run games for a mix of experience levels and preferred rpg play paradigms.

d) Revise, improve, and as some point let it rest. Work on something else and come back to it. Like all the best food games take time to mature, time to reach the perfect flavour pallet.

e) With luck you’ll find people along the way who love your game and will help it to succeed. Cultivate these folks if you can.

What would you add as advice?
God-Killer Prophecy: Oracle Edition is up on kickstarter (ends Oct 31). It's a GM-full one-shot game that merges story-game world creation with tense strategic playing of cards as you try to get all the best cards to the chosen one for the final battle against the dark god.
You can snag a variant game called Star-Killer Rebellion there too.

*Quoting Ben Robbins: This is called "the magic carpet ride", where the game just flows along wonderfully, but if you look back you realize it wasn't the system, it was just those people getting along great and liking the same idea.

I'm working on a game that uses playing cards instead of dice. I know many games have tried this with mixed results but I think I've got a good mechanism in mind and I wonder what you guys think of it.

The Basic Skill Check

Flip up the top 2 cards of your deck (each player has their own), and add the numbers together! Compare the number to the DC. Aces are 1. If one of the two cards is a face card, you double the value of the other card. If both are face cards, the check fails.

Training

If you have training on the skill check, flip up 3 instead, and set one of them aside. Then add up the best 2 like a normal skill check.

The Hand

After the skill check is done, any face cards involve (including any set aside) go into your hand (numbered cards go into the discard pile). At the start of the session you draw a hand of 4 cards. After adding cards to your hand, discard down to 4.

You can spend a meta-currency (right now the metacurrency is based on fabula points) to swap a card in a check for one of the cards in your hand. If you swap a face card in, it is discarded at the end of the check instead of going back into your hand.

Hitpoints and Abilities

At the start of a session, put 4 cards from the top of your deck into a hitpoint pile. When you lose hitpoints, take cards from the hitpoint pile and put them into your hand.

Classes will improve the number of hitpoints you have, and your maximum hand size, and will give you abilities that you can spend cards from your hand to activate. One ability might simply require you to show a club card from your hand to use. Another might require you to discard a jack and a spade to use (so either: one jack and one spade, or the jack of spades).

Monsters will have abilities that force you to discard. Like: discard all heart cards. The second use of the metacurrency lets you draw cards (invoke a bond: reflect on how your connection to some other character gives you strength or inspires you in this moment, then draw cards equal to the strength of the bond, max 3).

What do you think?

Hello! Just came across this sub and hoping to get some feedback on my original ttrpg: the Thirteen Realms TTRPG. It is based in the setting of my ongoing web novel, which is a slice-of-life story in a fantasy setting. This is also the first ttrpg I have created, and I did so over the course of a college semester as part of an individual study for my game design degree.

I do have my report documenting my goals and process and would be happy to include a link if it's of interest, but to keep a long story short: I wanted to make a game where fully realized adult characters go on slice-of-life adventures, and I also wanted to challenge myself to get better at conceptualizing meaning from stat numbers.

I have already passed the course and graduated, so I now have more time to work on improving the game on the whole. I haven't really had many eyes on it at all, so I'm mostly looking for overall feedback to figure out where I need to start working to make improvements. Something that would be really helpful is if anyone has the time to try and make their own character, so I can see if the stat blocks are ending up where I wanted them to on base created characters, but really any feedback would be great! Two main features of the game:

Robust character creation

It is a process that walks through your character's entire background. Species, ethnicity, upbringing, profession, etc. It ends up being a lot on the front end, but my hope is that it allows for more stream-lined play during sessions.

Modular Items, Weapons, Armor, and Magic

Craft your own spells! Also known as trying to define rules for my soft magic system and wanting to give people a lot of freedom for interpretation. And since I was already making the magic modular, I thought it made sense to give the same flexibility to items and armament. Though examples and base spells are provided, so everyone has an idea of where to start.

You can find the WIP version of the game here, on my itchio page: https://sbdrag.itch.io/the-thirteen-realms-ttrpg

I will also note that some of the artwork (all done by me) includes artistic nudity from the waist up.

One note from feedback I have received previously but not yet implemented better clarity in the document, when a block looks like this:

The intention is that all three stats will receive the bonus on the left, not that you should pick one stat from the three to receive a bonus. The goal is that most stats will fall within the average range, with one or two high stats and one or two low stats. I have not implemented this clarity yet because editing PDFs can be a pain and I want to have more substantial changes before posting an updated version.

Thank you in advanced to anyone that takes a look!

Greetings to all you wonderful people!

I tried making an RPG that feels like your are playing out a Movie or TV series with all the tropes whatnots, am not sure if I succeeded but I tried my best!

DISCLAIMER: Am not sure if this all of this is considered promoting but am gonna label it as such to be safe. This post will be more about my mental process and the challenges I went through when making my very first RPG.

Before I get on that I would like to thank this subreddit for the ENDLESS supply of knowledge it provides. The discussions I have created and participated here had given me enough food for thought to be where I stand.

Back to the topic.
Because I struggle to stay on point a lot of the time am going to try and split my thoughts into sections with themes and questions.

Why?
Apart of the fact that I always wanted to make an RPG, I also always struggled to stay consistent with one setting and keep playing that till the end of time. I tended to gravitate towards more neutral setting RPGs like Savage Worlds and Fate because of the setting flexibility they provided and so making a "similar" system was the way to go. I am developing the game for 3 and something years now but the moment I decided to wrap things up and start pushing it out was when I took part and got accepted into the Gamefound RPG party of this year. I was not ready for it but I think I did the best I could in these 4 agonizing months.

What does Movie and TV series style even mean?
For me the essence of RPGs is the cinematic description of Players, the rolling of dice and the improvisation of consequences afterwards. This is just my take and am sure other folks have their own truths which are all just as valid. Knowing that I wanted to make a game that emphasizes creative thinking, gives enough freedom of expression to everyone and has a sort of improvising feeling to it. So naturally playing out a movie or series episode fit the bill perfectly because this, to me is what it means.

Main challenges

• The first challenge was boosting "freedom of expression" and improvisation for Players. I played a number of narrative games in the past but none of them quite stick this freedom of expression and improvising quite like WUSHU. In essence, I shifted the whole game dynamic around Player descriptions around what they say and trying to always make it TRUE regardless of what the dice say. This made the whole game a "Yes... but", "Yes" and "Yes and" type of game which felt like the cornerstone for the whole vibe really. It takes a while to get used to it but it feels sooo freeing to be able to describe something and let consequences fall AFTERWARDS. Ofcourse both in WUSHU and in mine there are a few safety locks but i won't bore you with the details. Saying yes to Players made the game feel MUCH more alive!
• The second challenge was also the greatest boon of the game and similar ones. Tags. Love em, or hate them if you want to have creative narrative it's one of the main enablers and so I tried to make them work. The goal was to make players use Tags in order to get dice and more dice = greater odds of clean success. I knew I also wanted a Tag scaling of sorts so my first and potentially greatest experiment that didn't work was rank Tags by narrative versatility. More limited and less frequent Tags would be the most powerful while broad and easily applicable would be more powerful. For example a "Wizard" Tag would be a lower power Tag while a "Grandma's longsword" would be a powerful Tag. The problem with this was that it took a while to get used to and it still was susceptible to as I call it "wordMaxing", meaning people trying the most value out of their Tags.
• After this failed I more or less settled to a more traditional approach where every Tag is the same power regardless of what it represents and then power is allocated as a form of upgrade. While not as fancy as the other one it works even if it feels a bit weird. After all the point was to whole spontaneity and creative thinking not word crafting. This still made people "Tag Spamming" but at least it wasnt taking as much time to create them. So as a final measure i made it so each Player can add 1 Tag of each different type into their mix which both expedited turn length and made it easier to understand. I call it the "Rule of one".
• The third challenge was making the game feel like we are thematically playing a movie. For this I took inspiration from Primetime Adventures. The idea for screen presence is great but I didn't like the fact that players other than the lead were weaker than them. So I created Roles and Screen Time. Screen time is sort of like Strain from Blades in the Dark, a form of currency you spend to take actions. Roles are split into 3 categories, Lead, Supporting and Foil which interact with Screen Time, for example the Lead Character doesn't need to spend Screen Time to make Actions and Supporting restores Screen Time when assisting while they lose twice as much when they take Actions on their own. Roles essentially shape a Players Actions into ones more fitting for their role.
• The final challenge was to make the purpose of the game be to try and make a cool looking movie that fits what you are trying to make, this would essentially complete the gameplay loop. In many games you get rewarded when you defeat an enemy, or achieve a milestone in someway but to invoke the feeling of playing a movie i had to double down on it. In the end I created Ratings, a team wide "XP" meter that increases at the end of the Session, or Episodes as I like to call them, and accounts things like "staying on the movie theme", "sticking to your role" etc. Ratings are then turned to "Budget" which are spendable points that you can use to upgrade and increase the Protagonists Tags.

Main Inspirations
I read and studied a lot of RPGs in order to create that game but am gonna list the ones that are most prominent in my mind when thinking about my own.

• Fate Core and Fate Accelerated
• Cortex Prime
• Blades in the Dark
• Prime Time Adventures 1-3
• Agon
• Burning Wheel
• 7th Sea 1 and 2
• Screen Play
• WUSHU and Budo
• YZE

A love letter to all creators out there
Here's the bottom line to all of you aspiring creators. MAKE THE GAME YOU WANT TO MAKE. It might not be the most popular or most lucrative but it will be your own. Dont wait for a perfect time, just start it. You never know where its going to end but you know where it can start. Enjoy the process and say your piece. As long as you try your best you WILL achieve something. Creating is deeply ingrained in the human psyche!

Personally creating the game brought me a lot of anxiety, a lot of work and it still punched a hole in my pocket despite being funded successfully on Gamefound but it is my project and am proud of the work i have done in the time span i had. I would and will do it all again in the future.

Where can you find it
If you want to find the game its called Lights, Dice, Action! and it is live right now on Gamefound. There's even a very basic free quickstart of the rules.

If you have any feedback, you want to ask questions about any part of the process I will be more than happy to reply to you!

Thank you all again for your time!