This is a huge milestone for the project, and our team: Wendigo Workshop.
This is a thing a lot of other indie TTRPGs never have the chance to reach, and for that, we consider ourselves really lucky and want to thank anyone and everyone who supported us and believed in us!

For anyone interested in checking us out we got a free demo to try out, or if you feel inclined, you can order yourself the physical book here: https://arkelon-chronicles.backerkit.com/
Or a digital copy here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/510804
Or there: https://wendigoworkshop.itch.io/

Once again, thank you so much for your love. :')

Hay im making a system (i call it for now blood &heart) .. which is about playing what at best i can describe "rogueish fantasy"(cowboy beebop, black lagoon, extra) pretty much being a group of highly competent tragic characters down on there luck and cash doing of jobs.

The campaign structure its self is built around more "episodic" which are connected by the characters arcs and relationships .

Non of it matter right now but i write it for the background ( also i write it as a hobbie.. probably will never sell it for money)

What im asking about is my basic task resolution.

Besicly. Its a 2 step dice pool system

You roll a dice from one of your 6 approaches

Ans you roll a dice from one of yours 6 motivations

Every dice can range between d6-d12. Every 2 points above a 4 is a success (so 5-6 is 1, 7-8 is 2, 9-10 is 3 and 11-12 is 4)

(If you have more then 2 dice in the pool you just take the 2 highest scored )

When you roll you should annocened what is the main obj of the task. Then the dm(and players even) should decied on:

The difficulty of the task(how many success its needs to be able to pass through), If its has a clock(your regular bitd clock) and a list of complications that can happen through the action (and sence complications) the players can decide to use succeses to block them .or even the ubgrade its own action.so he could ecomplish extra stuff or make some sort of adv whit his action

The main reason i desgined it like this is my "momentum" mechanic
Mainly when a conflict scene starts(the dm announce it) players (ans even some enemies) can start generate "momentum" by doing suirtian (grammer bad) actions. And can use them as extra success (although not 1:1 ratio on suirtian actions)

The main reason for that mechanic is to make players feel like an action hero. They get stronger and cooler thr longer the battle last(but closer to death because harm)

The thing is. The basic action mechanic seems pretty... complicated? On one hand i like its flexibility on the other its will take alot of energy from the dm..but its also work so nicely whit the momentum mechanic

Do you have any advice?

Have you ever seen a tabletop RPG explicitly, specifically state something to the effect of "This system is meant to accommodate character optimization and tinkering around with different character builds"? If so, how did it follow through on such a statement?

To be clear, I am asking about tabletop RPGs that explicitly, specifically state such a thing themselves, independent of any "community consensus," personal recommendations, or the like.

I’ve thought about the use of weapons in a system. Being able to use a weapon proficiently requires more than just brute Strength; it requires Intellect as well. Basically, a trained fencer will out-duel someone with no training. The experienced one reads their opponent and has ideas ingrained into them.

How would you build a minimal attribute system that incorporates body mechanics and mental focus for weapons?

So I've been thinking and I have no idea how I can make this character with the power of future sight have an opposing character with a polar opposite power.. so whats the opposite of future sight?

(Some people might say the ability to see the past but I gen wanna hear something else)

I've recently gotten into Trench Crusade and I find the dice system the game uses to adjudicate actions to be very creative and unique.

From the rules:

When you take an ACTION (including Melee and Ranged Attacks), roll 2D6 and add any +DICE or -DICE from the character’s profile, injuries or other sources, pick the two highest (or lowest if any -DICE were applied) and consult the chart below to see if the ACTION succeeded:

2-6 Failure

7-11 Success

12+ Critical success

+DICE and -DICE are contextual bonuses that let you add 1d6 to your pool but not keep it. In the case of +DICE, you roll 3d6 and keep the 2 highest. With -DICE you do the same but keep the 2 lowest.

These bonuses derive from the unit's skills and gear, so a model that is skilled in melee may have a +1 or +2 by default, which will allow them to roll 3d6 or 4d6 and keep the two highest. Likewise, a model that is injured or unskilled could have a -1 or -2.

Further modifiers allow some models with special skills to roll and keep more dice in some situations, so 3k3, 4k3, etc. and certain skills give flat bonuses that are added or subtracted after a roll. These flat bonuses/penalties are always on a scale of +/- 1 to 3, in line with the values on the success chart.

I haven't run the math on this but the probabilities seem fine in the wargame.

If you'd like to find out more, you can check out the rules here: https://www.trenchcrusade.com/playtest-rules

All in all, the system feels very streamlined and elegant to me. It would be interesting to have some discussion on whether it would be transferrable to TTRPGs and what issues it might have in this setting.

So I was thinking about skills and wanted to get my thoughts out there. This is mostly about traditional skill lists and the nature of the skills in them. So things like 13th Age profession based system, while I have no problem with it, are outside the scope of the intended discussion. That said, you are invited to respond to anything I bring up that strikes your fancy, I'll try to compartmentalize a bit. I'm looking for anything that might develop the subject matter further.

The first thing I want to do is list a series of skill "types" I've identified in the various games I've played. Here's a list of them. Skills can be more than one type. I'll talk about some conclusions and thoughts I have after the list.

• Elective Skills: Skills that can be used by choice or initiation by the player. This includes things that a player might seek out to do specifically, rather than (or in addition) coming up as a natural result of play. An example would be Crafting skills, or something niche like Accounting that might only be useful for something who seeks out things like ledgers and receipts. An elective skill is reliant on the player to find a use for it, not the GM to provide use cases.
• Fatal Skills: Skills that, when used, are fatal on failure. Examples: Climb, Jump, Swim, Stealth
• All or Nothing Skills: Skills that are very valuable in some games, but useless in others. A skill being elective means it isn't All or Nothing. All or Nothing skills can't be forced. Examples: Swim, Survival
• Triggered Skills: Skills that are asked for by the GM. They come up naturally during play. D&D 5e is mostly made up these skills. Generally the player says they try something and the GM decides what skill makes the most sense. They can be very reactive in that way. Persuasion falls under this. It's hard to avoid talking to people.
• Required Skill: A skill that comes up so often that it is basically required. Examples: Spot Hidden, Combat Skills. On this list for completion really.
• Split Skills: Skills that, as a group, are always taken together or not at all. This is usually because they are all part of one playstyle. So the player either uses that playstyle (and buys all it's skills) or doesn't. Jump & Climb, Spot & Listen. Some games have things like this for the sake of parity. Which is to say it's a way to make all skills equally useful by breaking up overpowered skills.
• Approach Skills: A group of skills that all serve the same function, but offer different approaches to that function. Examples: Charm, Intimidate, Fast Talk, and Persuade. A person can be convinced to give you information in any of the above four ways, but which one your character is good at tells us something about how they 'approach' the situation.
• Inspirational Skills: Skills that serve the purpose of inspiring the player towards a playstyle. They can reinforce mood, or remind the player that certain options are available to them that they might not have considered. Examples: "Wardrobe and Style", Library Use, Disable Device. Wardrobe & Style tells us that appearance is important in the game. Library Use tells us that research and study is important, and Disable Device tells us that there's probably traps in the game.
• Amplifier Skill: A skill that improves something players can already do. An iffy example might be the Thief from AD&D. The 2e book suggests that the climb percentile for the thief is for surfaces only a thief could climb. Things like shear surfaces. A normal mountain face wouldn't require it.
• Extension Skill: A skill built off from another skill. The primary skill always the most necessary use of the skill, and the Extension allows more Elective use.
• Coverage Skill: a Skill that overlaps with other skills in order to give a cheaper way to be an all rounder. Can cover the use of several other skills, but uses harder checks.
• Flaw Skill: A skill defined by creating interesting consequences if you lack it when you need it. Must be triggered. A player wouldn't seek out a skill they were bad at.

My Thoughts

• I'll get this out of the way: Fatal, All or Nothing, and Required skills are all bad design. They cause parity problems. Parity being the need for skills to be equally powerful (But not necessarily equally often used).
• Looking at this analysis I feel that just changing what the exact skill in the list are can change the way your game runs pretty dramatically. Extension skills, by nature only work in a game that runs skills in such a way that you don't always roll for them ala Mothership. Games like D&D that are very reactive with Triggered skills actively avoid Approach skills.
• I think I can separate skill systems into three general categories: Skills at stats, Skills that are interesting when you have them, and Skill that are interesting when you don't. These systems are often at odds with each other.
• Skills as stats treat skills like additional stats. STR, DEX etc and your skills are basically treated the same. This system is for adjudication first and foremost.
• Skills that are interesting when you have them: Mostly made up of elective skills. The point of this sort of system is what you skills allow you do. Skills open new doors and allow new possibilities. Creativity is encouraged to try to figure out how to use your specific skills to solve the problem. I'll call these Have Skills for short.
• Skills that are interesting when you don't have them: These are always triggered skills as the GM uses these to force interesting situations. There's a rushing river in front of you, but you can't swim! What do you do? I'll call these Don't Skills for short.
• Don't Skills and Have Skills seem like they are anathema to each other. Since Have Skills favor long lists of interesting skills and don't need to be recorded besides what a PC actually has, while Don't Skills require they be written down in advance so that a GM can trigger them where appropriate.

I'm sure I have more in my brain somewhere, but that's what I wanted to get out. Opinions? Discussions?

How do you handle the issue where a player with high charisma monopolizes social interactions in your homebrew RPGs? Have you found solutions to prevent other players from feeling left out or to give each character a chance to interact, even if they don’t have high charisma? Specifically, how do you manage situations where players meta-game interactions (e.g. 'You shouldn’t talk to the ghost, your charisma is only 8')?"

I know a good player wouldn’t normally engage in this type of metagaming, but I’m trying to find a solution within my game system to avoid a situation where a player feels forced to make suboptimal choices just to avoid disrupting the flow of the game.

I'm currently creating a game system and I'm torn between two different core mechanics. Neither mechanic is really new, and I would appreciate any kind of feedback as to which one you think is better.

Either way, characters are created with a bonus of 1, 2, or 3 for all of their stats.

Core mechanic #1:

roll 2d6 + bonus vs. target number of 9.

Advantage/Disadvantage = roll 3d6 pick highest/lowest two accordingly.

Damage is weapon damage + lowest die number from the attack roll.

Example: your attack bonus is 2. you hit the bad guy and roll 3, 5 for a total of 10 which succeeds. damage is weapon + 3

Core Mechanic #2:

roll 2d6 (don't add) - if either die is equal or lower than your stat it's a success.

Advantage/Disadvantage = add a die or subtract a die (3d6/1d6) accordingly.

Damage is weapon damage + value of all die that succeed.

Example: your attack bonus is 2. you hit the bad guy and roll 2,4 which is 1 success. Damage is weapon + 2.

--------------------------

I keep going back and forth with pros and cons of each, and again, would really appreciate some other thoughts, views, criticisms.

So I've taken a break from number, cultures, stories and so on, and now I'm back to html, and trying to get a game setting and blurb in order. I feel the setting has misplaced text and the blurb seems long.

Any thought are welcome and thank you in advance:

https://slayersofringsncrowns.com/

There’s a lot of (understandable and necessary) focus on mechanics in this space. However, the more I consider lore, the more I notice it being relegated to being outside the design space of games.

Games either tend to have lore and setting tacked on as something extra (Freedom City in Mutants and Masterminds) where lore exists almost independent from design, or the whole goal of a system might be to create a game within a setting (most RPGs created for an existing IP like Star Wars) where the design is bounded almost entirely by the setting.

I’m curious what ya’ll think about lore being in the design space. I’m by no means an expert, but here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately:

Bounded vs Open

Has anyone found a game they’ve played to be too bounded by the lore? Running games set in something like Forgotten Realms can be constrained by very specific established dates and locations. Questions about the setting often prompt research rather than improvisation.

I’ve experienced the opposite problem in playing more open ended systems like Fate, where some people have trouble buying into a world without pre-established detail.

Now, plenty of people have fun with all of the above mentioned systems (me included), but I think it’s important to purposefully consider the balance of lore specificity and what sort of games our settings engender.

What are examples of systems that you've found to have seemingly purposeful lore?

Heyo hiyo!

After a rousing (and exhausting) month of mechanical playtesting of The Hero's Call through January, I've had a secondary opportunity crop up:

I may have a bi-weekly playgroup open to trying new things, and I figured I'd offer to try and to a blind playtest one-shot of some games this year! FOR FREE.

I'm a GM with going on 28 years experience across a wide array of games, and I keep expanding into more and more as I find them. I have, for most of my time, focused on introducing completely new people into TTRPGs, and currently have three (3) playgroups going (two are set in D&D Campaign -> The Hero's Call pipeline, other is Traveller shenanigans). I run off Rules as Written, tempered by Rules as Intended, with an overriding focus on achieving That Was A Fun Time For All Involved.

I can, at best, offer about 2 sessions (which may include chargen) each of ~3 hr length.

The Player play-testers would be: one (1) experienced D&D5e player that likes to try new things and has OSR mindset sensibilities of play, one (1) Pathfinder player that just wants to play games and have fun but their PF GM never shows up, one (1) newbie that runs on vibes instead of words and has a strict "If I think for more than 5 seconds before acting I'll explode", and one (1) newbie that will read the book cover-to-cover and riddle themselves with anxiety of the perceived (or actual) complexity before understanding how to actually play. They all have experience (and enjoyment) playing Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Horror, with some vague experience with Investigative type games.

So... you'll get a good gamut of Player Comments, and I will break down every iota of issue I have trying to play as a GM. None will come with attached malice or bad faith assertions, but instead be structured into What Confused, What was Obscure, What Didn't Work, and to our best understanding: Maybe Why? I will also include my full GM one-shot adventure document, so you can have perspective of what type of adventure I thought was appropriate, and to give you further context.

If we are able to really nail down the Why part, that will be included as well (which will either be inform you, be redundant to you, or help you clarify what we did wrong with your game).

# If you want me to Playtest your Game, Please Read:

DO NOT link your game in this post, or send it to me in a DM. I will forget or lose it in such a flood.

Please make a comment including only the following (please! for the love of the ancients, just this stuff please!):

1. The Game Name - When I get to your game, I'll DM you about it specifically and ask for whatever documents you wish to share for me to use. Ex: The Hero's Call
2. A one-sentence Theme/Tag-line - This is what I will read to the players, and is limited to one-sentence. Ex: A Fantasy adventure game about Humble People being thrust into the Hero's Journey.
3. Do you have Pregenerated Characters (4) to use? If no Pre-Gens, is there a Character Sheet? If no, that's okay! I'll make a simplified sheet (effectively a tax form) for the Players to use. Ex: No pre-gens, but there is a basic PDF/Google Sheet I can include.
4. Are there additional items necessary to play (beyond standard polyhedral dice)? Ex: No extra items needed, but different colors for d10s (or a d100 pair) is recommended. Note: a Battle Map/VTT would be considered additional items.

I will, over this weekend, start compiling comments that meet the above into a reference list. As the playgroup becomes available to try out a game, I will pose the unplayed list's Tagline (see above) for them to choose from. The Players will choose whichever sounds most interesting, and we'll give it a try.

# Disclaimer

I absolutely will not guarantee that I will test your game; I will only try. The playgroup may decide they really like someone's game (which you'll receive a report about!) and want to keep doing stuff with that (in which case, I'll reach out further about that). They may decide to not try your game at all. They may not get through chargen, or past the first scene, or roll, or anything.

If we playtest your game, you will receive as much feedback as I can get for you. Even if we only get halfway through chargen.

The players may decide they vote for a completely different game, and move away from being "Try new ice cream flavor each month." If that happens, I'll attempt to find a secondary playgroup to continue playtesting the list I have, but will not guarantee I will be able to succeed in that.

All I can do, is my best. Because anyone actually making a game in this sub, in my mind, deserves an extra hand to throw dice, and fresh eyes!

EDIT: Thanks to everyone for the kind words, but they aren't necessary! :) Replace 'Pizza' with 'Games' and 'Eat' with 'Play'

I like having catch-all terms for these mechanics, so that I can reference them in other rules and statblocks faster. For example, I call advantage/disadvantage "rolling with bias."

I'm having a hard time coming up with a good term for these though. Damage Scaling could Maybe work, but I don't love it.

Any ideas?

Edit: Thanks for the help, everyone! I think right now, I'm leaning towards one of these unless something better comes along:

• Damage Affinity
• Damage Multipliers
• IRVs (acronym)

Hello All!

I am officially in the gameplay rules phase of development for my TTRPG DeepSpace (shamelesspromotion) and I'm creating the rules for Downtime/Large Scale travel since space travel can be lengthy. Basically, the goal is to make it almost like a resource management game - each time you embark, you're tracking certain resources (mostly food, energy and fuel). As encounters go on you can lose or expend resources, perhaps requiring you to take risks you normally wouldn't in order to get the resources you need to survive.

The problem I'm running into is the variance in resource consumption. The first idea was a "Volatility" score for a resource. Each day you roll a d20 - if it's above the Volatility score, you consume one unit of that resource; if it's below, you consume twice as much (due to supplies going bad, someone stealing rations, etc). I really like the system, actually, and it's really good when encounters take place on a daily timeframe. The problem I'm running into is when you increase the timeframe.

The idea is that you can utilize these rules with one round of encounters representing one day, week, month, etc. With resource consumption being adjusted accordingly (for each round in Daily, you consume 1 unit of food, whereas in Weekly you consume 7). The problem is that Volatility feels a lot more, well, volatile, in higher time frames. The idea of a single dice roll determining whether you consume 7 or 14 Food or even 30 or 60 if you do it Monthly feels pretty off - Volatility scores will be relatively low, so it'll end up feeling like either the score is useless and never gets rolled or will be absolutely devastating to an unlucky crew.

It's a pretty tough statistical problem - even though the probabilities are technically the same the risks of a bad Volatility roll feel a lot more high-stakes in longer travel, which I don't think I like. My goal is to make it difficult to plan for a trip due to random consumption of resources, not leave the party stranded due to a bad roll. So I guess - any advice?

I am creating a Fate + PBTA hybrid system. And I think the mechanics are solid, because is basically FAE + apocalypse world dice and harm system.

But I found a problem in adapting the dice and wanted opinions in the two possible solutions I found.

The problem:

You can envoke aspects to get +2 in a test. And this rule was specifically made for the fudge dice, so I had to find a way to adapt the probability of one system to the other.

The first solution was to just use +2 like in the system, but I'm not sure it will translate well with how much aspects impact the tests. A +2 is a lot in pbta games, because of it, approaches cap at +3. And when a aspect is forced, the player gets a -2 in a test.

The other solution is to use aspects as another dice, and use the "3d6 drop the lowest", and when a aspect is forced, it gives a negative dice.

What do you think about the solutions I though?

A recent comment in another group got me thinking about how some effects should scale exponentially instead of linearly. But every game I can think of has damage or other effects only scale linearly. Exploding dice is as close as I can think of, but that is not scaling with the cause nor exponentially.

This was specifically about falling damage, think doubling instead of adding damage dice every 10', but I suppose could apply in other areas as well.

So my question is, are there any examples using exponential effects in a ttrpg? I'm curious of its playability.

Venture and Faction Influence Mechanics in 18th-century Cornwall, you can imagine as a Poldark RPG that blends economic enterprise with social drama, for example:

Ventures give a framework for running mines, estates, or smuggling routes—tying the fortunes of the PCs to the success (or failure) of their business or other endeavors.

Roles keep the party or their followers engaged, each dealing with operational, social, or security aspects of the enterprise.

Faction Influence models how local gentry, bankers, smugglers, and religious movements wax and wane in power—impacted by the PCs’ successes and failures.

Stability ensures that each season or story arc offers new troubles to fix or opportunities to seize, making the “soap opera” of Poldark an ongoing, interactive saga.

Ultimately, the same principles of resource-based storytelling and power struggles—so central to Poldark—align perfectly with a Venture-based RPG approach. The result is a setting where money isn’t just a line on the character sheet: it’s the fuel for building alliances, inciting rivalries, and shaping the social fabric of late-18th-century Cornwall.

What do your players characters do with all of their accumulated game gold? Stick in "magic" bank is not a great answer.

Hello, I'm LuizZ_Mestre, and I'm developing a Minecraft RPG system.

You probably found it strange or interesting that I tried to adapt a Virtual game to the tabletop game.

My purpose is to create an environment similar to Minecraft Story mode and a little like Minecraft Dungeons, where there are no classes or races, just collectible equipment, buildings and genuine survival.

Even though the adaptation of Construction, Resource Collection and Environment are very important points for this proposal, in this post I will only focus on Combat.

Minecraft Combat Attack System

In Minecraft, all players always have 10 hearts of life, so we will use this as a default parameter and rule.

In my system, due to the aesthetic aspect of being similar to the cubes in the game, I will only use d6.

Armor reduces damage (Letter -1, Netheryte -5)

however, even though some weapons have a negative modifier (1d6-2), they all have Minimum damage (Sword and bow 1 or Ax and Crossbow 2), so even if a Zombie has full diamond, each player's attack will still guarantee 1 damage.

However, this happens the other way around, where monsters have 1, 2 to 5 minimum damage. (Ex: creeper explosion, 2d6 damage, 5 minimal).

So even at the end of the game, powerful Monsters were still scary, an observation is that enchantments such as sharpening increase the minimum damage and Protection decreases the minimum damage (it cannot be less than 1), thus, enchantments being extremely strong, and guaranteeing a genuine Evolution

Table with the function of how the system works
https://anydice.com/program/3b2cf

https://www.theverge.com/news/602096/copyright-office-says-ai-prompting-doesnt-deserve-copyright-protection

tldr: Separating attack and damage rolls creates narrative dissonance when they don’t agree. This is an additional and stronger reason not to separate them than just the oft mentioned reason of saving time at the table.

I’ve been reading Grimwild over the past few days and I’ve found myself troubled by the way you ‘attack’ challenges. In Grimwild they are represented by dice pools which serve as hit points. You roll an action to see if you ‘hit’ then you roll the pool, looking for low values which you throw away. If there are no dice left, you’ve overcome the challenge.

This is analogous to rolling an attack and then rolling damage. And that’s fine.

Except.

Except that you can roll a full success and then do little/no damage to the challenge. Or in D&D and its ilk, you can roll a “huge” hit only to do a piteous minimum damage.

This is annoying not just because the game has more procedure - two rolls instead of one - but because it causes narrative dissonance. Players intuitively connect the apparent quality of the attack with the narrative impact. And it makes sense: it’s quite jarring to think the hit was good only to have it be bad.

I’m sure this is obvious to some folks here, but I’ve never heard it said quite this way. Thoughts?

----------EDIT 2-------------

After some thought i saw that the mechanic of "free single tap" don't fit well with the other rules of my game (like different kinds of ammo like piercing, hollow point etc, which would be directly counted), so i saw that is better to keep the agency on the ammo directly for the players. I saw that the rule of "shooting auto to hit and shooting to 'damage" wasnt great, it was adding a layer that was difficulting the balacing of weapons, so i changed to something different, and the part about adding one d6 for each ROF added was creating problems on weapons with high ROF.

The change i made is that the ROF rule is to be something like "For each ROF of the gun, you can expend 3 bullets and attack another target, but receiving -1D per target added. Alternatively, for each ROF added to attack a single target you can increase on +1 the trade of exchanging successes for extra damage" < Not the exact text, just something that i wrote as a draft. Each ROF is 3 bullets (some weapons will have 4 or 5, adding damage or some other bonuses, but specific to some weapons), and you're limited by the ROF amount of the weapon on how many bursts you can include in an Autofire attack.

Also, all the kinds of ammo tracking helped me a lot, and the part about using dice and tally marks are really good and will help me.

Thank you everyone for your help!

----------EDIT-------------

Thank you everyone for your insights and disposition to help. I narrowed down the opinions for two options (a bit modified) that i feel that are more aligned with my game and will test both, being:

1 - Firearms have "ammo/shots", similar to xcom. Single tap for weapons are kinda "free", lowish damage but reliable, but changing magazines every now and them. Burst consumes 1 "ammo", with full auto consuming more ammo depending of ROF of gun. Example. AR with 6 shots, ROF 3 can make make a full auto of up to 3 "shots", gaining more chance to hit and damage. Each ROF on the current rule adds extra dice (or remove) depending if you're "shooting to hit or controling recoil to deal damage".

2 - Firearms have a "ammo/shots" quantity, like first option, but instead adds an extra d6 to hit up to the ROF of the weapons. Since my game can trade sucesses for extra damage and other bonuses, you are directly exchanging more ammunition for more chance to hit/damage. This one is a bit more simple, but in a way i feel that it fits better with the system, and will be my first choice to test.

Again, thank you everyone for your help again. WHen i start my playtests i'll try to give some summaries of my findings, which could help other people too.

Cheers!

----------ORIGINAL POST-------------

Hey everyone, thank you for your help on my previous post about defenses, it helped a lot. Now i'd like to ask another help about my firearms and ammo.

My game is a bit more focused on strategy, and since is a cyber futuristic "post apocalyptic" where people leave the "safe city" to explore i can't just ignore ammo usage.

Currently i'm using the famous "abstract caliber", with ammo being light (pistols and SMG), heavy (ARs, revolvers), precision (snipers), shotgun and energy cells (some specific weapons). At the moment i'm using a more 'realistic' approach with counting each bullet, and automatic weapons shoot in "ROF", with each ROF being 3 bullets (to facilitate) and adding or removing chance to hit, depending if you just wanna hit someone or controling the recoil to "cause more damage". Naturally some weapons have more or less ROF, and even semiauto weapons have some kind of ROF with a different rule (like double tapping with a pistol)

I was liking how it was going, but since i was revising some stuff before the first playtest i found not liking it a bit too much atm (yeah, it happened again). My game is a bit more focused on strategy and such, but i don't really feel that my players need to count each bullet, only tracking magazines and such (they ahve slots for them, with modifications on armor to carry more or less). Anyone have tips or opinions on this?

Problem is, i don't really like using mechanics like degrading dice where you roll dice and if it's 1 you're out of ammo" or some abstract stuff like that, i just want some more compromise between realism and abstraction.

I looked some other systems that deal with this, but they are generally more towards one of the ends. One small thing to add, i'm trying to keep my games more on the light rules side (d6s with sucesses), but the crunchy part is the possibilities to customize weapons, armor, vehicles, drones and the usage of cibernetics, this is why i felt the need to revise the ammo system.

Thank you all so much for your advice and attention to my last post!
I seriously didn't think I would reach this many people. I feel blessed and I'm more than grateful!
But to get down to brass tacks, I have read every single comment, even u/Hillsy7's, and I have compiled everything I have learned from you all into the notes as this week's "playtest". I don't know if I'm quite ready to share my work here yet, but I will be reaching out to everyone who asked to chat and playtest and will start working on a more presentable version with lore and flavor. Once that is done, I will post it. With that, I'd like to share my takeaways to let you all know how you've impacted me, and hopefully as a lesson to others who have had similar struggles:

1. I need an elevator pitch: What I presented originally was very curt and not meant to pitch but what I have demonstrated needs more to it. With that, I'm starting to piece together an elevator pitch that should answer at least a few of the following questions. Dice, notecard sheets, and greco-roman aliens aren't enough and though I don't quite have answers yet, I know the questions:

• What kind of characters do you play and why is it fun? 
• What unique features does it have?
• How do the dice mechanics affect the feel of the game and represent the world and lore?
• What is the most interesting piece of lore?
• Why did you make this, for what aim, for what purpose, and why should someone care?

2. Work at your own pace: I blamed myself and others in the last post for not taking my work seriously. Now I realize that unless this is my job, I need to work on what gets me satisfied and excited and not blame myself and others for not working. Hell, I should feel fine to "turn it on and off again", I've worked in IT after all. I have other projects I could be working on, like reverse Jenga, asymmetric card games, actual video games, etc.

3. Flavor is the spice of life: My game(currently called Petra), needed more to it for players during initial tests than an ok dice system, it needs a hook. The world my DnD sessions inhabited wishes to breathe into the rules text and I should allow it. I was hesitant because I wished to rewrite a bunch of the lore to reinforce the mechanics and themes and based on player reception. You don't really see people playtest settings often, do you? With that, I need to put in races, cultures, and lore ASAP, and I need to try to hook players with the world of Petra.

4. Network and communicate: Ultimately, this has been the hardest part for me since I'm socially awkward, but if I can network at GDC, I can sure as hell do it for my work. I need to post fliers, get on itch.io, playtest other games, become more active here, interact with more discord servers, attend conventions, participate in game jams, get back into Youtube and Twitch, become involved in Apocalypse World, BITD, BoB, etc. etc. et cedera. I need to turn on the salesman my father wanted me to be and sell myself as a charismatic personality.

5. Don't playtest. Play: Clearly, the format of my playtests wasn't working. I should have started these sessions when the game had more flavor and content and I should have been interacting more and taking part in the testing rather than watching them like a scientist. These are players, not testers. I need to present myself as a fellow player rather than a developer using them as guinea pigs. Firstly, an environment like a library is far too professional. I should switch to a game store. I should be the one GMing the games, and sometimes, I should take the role of a player. I should be providing pre-gen character sheets and not have them waste their time with a boring google doc manual. Speaking of which, I need to get rid of the google form. Instead, I need to ask its questions after the tests, or even infer the answers to the survey's questions based on the players. Finally, I have also considered having more specific playtest groups, one that is casual and might have friends and strangers, and one for fellow designers and experienced playtesters.

Thank you all soo much for your help and advice on my journey. I'm truly grateful and I'll be sure to update you all soon when I can.
Sincerely,
Sam:)

tl;dr: I learned my lessons from my last post. To pitch Petra better, to enjoy my work, to add flavor, to network and community build, and to make playtests a more fun environment.

I've had this idea of a war-based ttrpg but I encountered an issue. I want it to have no turns and be live, but that could be too chaotic but if there are turns, It might be sluggish. Could you give your opinions please?

I added my brother and child's work as well but I'm more concerned with my female human Barbarian, Kaida.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JJba9DOyp-yy3jcICbWD92CINyNBPHQbN5MfNLrj2oc/edit

I am making a fan game for the World of Darkness setting and I am figuring out the few pieces of art/graphic design I need. For non-commercial use, how much should one spend on a character sheet design, and does the fact that it would be largely similar in layout to the already-existing World of Darkness sheets change anything?

We’re going to start a series of discussions for designing an RPG, with the goal of asking questions that are important but don’t see a lot of discussion. The goal is to do a new topic every two weeks. You can see a synopsis of the topics at the bottom of this post.

If you’re here at Rpgdesign, it’s a safe assumption that you’re designing an rpg. One question that I find I get asked all the time by people I talk with about my project but aren’t designers themselves is: why are you inflicting all this pain on yourself. Okay, that’s not how they phrase it. They ask “Why make a new RPG when there are thousands of them out there already? Surely, there must already be a game that does what you want it to.”

I can’t answer this question for you, but I will assert that knowing why you’re doing something is essential to make it over the hump when your enthusiasm for your project falters or when you get distracted by a new shiny.

I think this is a very personal question, and I’ll answer it for myself. When I first thought about my game, there weren’t a lot of games out there that attempted to do what I wanted. Since then, some have appeared, but none of them do what I want. So I’m making the game I want to play. And I am foolish enough to think that some of you may also want to try it out. But the “why” question is bigger than just that: I’m doing this, like people who host a podcast, write a story, or create art. No, it’s not for the huge amounts of cash, it’s because I have something inside to communicate that I want to give to the world. I’m doing this because I need to.

That’s my answer. Let me open it up and ask you what’s your reason?

Let’s discuss…

This post is part of the bi-weekly r/RPGdesign Scheduled Activity series. For a listing of past Scheduled Activity posts and future topics, follow that link to the Wiki. If you have suggestions for Scheduled Activity topics or a change to the schedule, please message the Mod Team or reply to the latest Topic Discussion Thread.

For information on other r/RPGDesign community efforts, see the Wiki Index.

The BASIC Basics

• Why are you making an RPG?
• What Would you Say You Do Here in Your RPG?
• What Format is Your Game Going to be Released In?
• Where Are You Going to Work In?

Now that the year is getting a little warmer, it’s time to make sure and get our projects moving. The key to all of this is to have resources available to help. We have a great group of talented people in our sub, so I’ll ask for you to post both your needs and offers of assistance.

So, LET’S GO!!!

Have a project and need help? Post here. Have fantastic skills for hire? Post here! Want to playtest a project? Have a project and need victims playtesters? Post here! In that case, please include a link to your project information in the post.

We can create a "landing page" for you as a part of our Wiki if you like, so message the mods if that is something you would like as well.

Please note that this is still just the equivalent of a bulletin board: none of the posts here are officially endorsed by the mod staff here.

You can feel free to post an ad for yourself each month, but we also have an archive of past months here.

RPG design has been a hobby of mine for about 5 years, so not super experienced, but not brand new either. I have two separate lines of games that both recently had their 2nd edition release (i consider them twin games, see link below if you want more details on that).

Something interesting I've noticed is that my fantasy games always get more downloads, but people generally donate less. The Scifi one is less downloaded, but tends to make more money (mind you, neither are super profitable, only about $4k in sales and half that in profit).

It's always been a thing I've noticed, but this time specifically I had both lines go live at the exact same time, and both are PWYW and fairly similar. So seeing them "compete" with far less variables is interesting.

I think is because fantasy TTRPGs (especially d20) are more popular, so people will check it out more often, but less likely to spend money because they already have 17 games they haven't played. Scifi is more niche (especially because scifi is more subdivided) so finding something of interest is more of a treasure hunt.

This has been my Ted talk... If one person finds use from this post, it's a win.

Link where I quickly describe twin games https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/s/0YbfbmDeLF

Sorry I had no idea how to word the title

Basically in my system the core of character creation and progression is a set of ability trees (abilities have point costs and level requirement tiers), where the average character focuses on progressing in 1-3 of these depending on how focused or versatile they want to be. The stats you use for your abilities are purely based on the highest tier of ability you have in the associated tree. Some examples of these trees are nature (like druid/ranger abilities and magic), blood magic, shadow (like rogues and dark magic/trickster stuff), brawn (raw strength based fighting and abilities), tactics, etc.

But I'd like characters to have something along the lines of "skills" like in 5e for specialising or being expert at certain tasks beyond their auto generated stat. I'm not sure how to go about this, whether to have narrow defined abilities for this that you can unlock on your ability trees, or to have a set list of skills that affect everyone, or something else entirely. I know I want characters to be able to invest in being stealthy, athletic, persuasive, etc. to some extent.

As for perception I'm considering having it so the more perceptive you are, the worse your initiative rank is and vice versa since those are both widely used by all characters and this creates a dichotomy of careful characters vs hot headed characters.

I'd be happy to describe more about my ideas for my system if anyone has questions but I'm still in the stage of figuring out how all my ideas for subsystems fit together and flow together, and I haven't come up with all that many specific abilities yet.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in 36-word RPG Jam. Creating a game with such a few words was quite a creative challenge, but thanks to this limitation I managed to approach it from an interesting perspective.

I came up with the idea of ​​creating an RPG game that you can play solo, where the goal is to recreate a murder, starting from the end, i.e., by finding out who the murderer is.

Since I couldn't exceed the word limit, I decided to use Wikipedia as a generator of possible clues to add to the story being told.

I wonder if you know of any games that used similar mechanics, and how you think it fits into RPGs?

Is this a good way to create absurd, yet fascinating stories, or is it better to use classic tables and such tools?

If you want to check out the game, it's free, so I invite you to test it.
I'd love to hear your opinions, whether it's on the main topic or on the game's design itself?

https://pusheeneiro.itch.io/crime-rewind