Indie Rpg - Tumblr Posts
This thread helped me design my first game. Thanks guys!
I'm working on a Wild West/Horror fusion RPG that uses playing cards instead of dice. The main conflict resolution system has The Dealer (GM) lay out 2 or more cards face-up and the final card face-down to represent the difficulty of the action. This is a Challenge Hand!
The Player then must choose cards from their hand to beat the Challenge Hand. Only there are a few obstacles in their way:
1. How many cards the Player can choose is restricted by how they're handling the situation. Are they bashing down a door? That's Strength, aka Clubs. Say the Player's Character has a Clubs of 3. They can only play up to 3 cards to beat the Challenge Hand!
2. The suit of the highest card the Player chooses must match how they're handling thr Challenge Hand. In the aforementioned example, that would mean the highest card the Player chooses from their hand would have to be a Clubs card. Spades are wild-cards in this system so those can be used in place of the required suit if necessary.
3. Because the last card in the Challenge Hand is face-down, the Player only has partial information of the score they need to beat the Challenge Hand. It could be anywhere from +2 to +11 more than the face-up cards show!
4. Players don't get to refill their hand of cards back to 6 until their hand is empty! This means the Player will occasionally have to face a Challenge Hand with very few cards in hand. This creates intense situations where players really have to cross their fingers and pray that the face-down card in a Challenge Hand is low.
So Challenge Hands use both the partial information from face-up vs face-down cards, as well as the extra values a card can have instead of dice, namely the suit.
I've also got additional mechanics that tie into other points mentioned in this post, like using the cards in character creation to determine what personality traits a Character has through a large random table, but I've gone on long enough for one post.
Just wanted to say thanks to the people I'm rebloging and share what I've done with their ideas!
Ultimately an RPG that uses playing cards as a randomizer but doesn't actually utilize the cards for. You know. The things that cards can do. Is just using them as a fancy, weirdly shaped die.
A few things that cards can do that dice can't:
You know that dice superstition that people have about how if they roll enough low numbers they're bound to get a high one? That sort of actually works with cards provided cards aren't immediately returned to the deck and the deck reshuffled. Because there's a limited number of each "roll," good or bad.
You can hold them in your hand. It's basically like pre-rolling a bunch of numbers and then getting to spend those numbers as they become relevant. Maybe you only get to draw more cards by playing all your cards, meaning that if you don't conserve your good cards your character's luck is eventually bound to run out.
You can make poker hands with them. Added to the previous point, maybe you will be forced to play a worse hand and have your character flub a non-critical roll because you're hoping for that better hand that'll turn the tide.
There's suits as an added bit of information that can be utilized for some mechanics. Maybe matching suit with an action type results in an extra benefit?
One of the strangest things about writing a TTRPG in the Horror genre is that many of the typical trappings of TTRPG design get flipped on their head. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that you're not writing to fulfill a power fantasy.
I've run into this phenomenon a few times while working on my wild west horror rpg. Here are two of the most relevant incidents:
1. Started the game with traditional Classes. Switched to a table of flawed character Traits. Turns out, giving the Characters flaws was way more interesting than giving them skills and abilities. Instead of answering the question "How does this character solve problems?" it's more entertaining to answer the question "How does this character create problems?". So I've opted to let the Players themselves answer the former question, but only give tools for the Players to expand upon the latter question.
2. Up until recently, the Players could harness the magic of the setting whenever they wanted, as long as they sacrificed something for it. While the sacrifice concept does narratively fit into the rest of my game, I've found that Players having unregulated access to magic meant that Players could reasonably "chop-finger-off-ex-machina" anything the GM throws at them. I want the Horror of a session to have some staying power, and it'd be best if the Players interacted with a specific narrative thread to harm a Horror instead of having a catch-all rule for interacting with the setting's magic.
RAAAAAH I LOVE WHEN GAMES HAVE NON-STANDARD COMPONENTS FOR PLAY
Gonna start posting my one pagers on Tumblr because why not. This one is about a weird dome I saw five minutes from my house that I’d somehow missed for an entire year
*furiously taking notes for nostromo-inspired setting playbook in a sci-fi horror game I haven't even started*
part of the fun of the original alien is the horror of the nostromo itself imo. it’s a cell of corporate greed ferrying narrowly-trained workers across barren space. it’s huge and yet claustrophobic, cockpits crammed with machinery giving way to yawning berths dripping chains and water. the supercomputer is named mother in a stroke of human anthropomorphization, but instead of providing comfort or protection, it’s only a courier between its creator and its wailing brood. ripley yells “mother! mother!” at a matronly-voiced computer that speaks calmly over her helplessness. the ship is full of endless details and patterns and unlabeled buttons and dials the audience can’t entirely make sense of; to do anything on the ship is a rigorous, technical process, and we must depend on the characters to know it. the internal mechanics of the ship are so alien that a literal alien can hide among the bits and bobs and not be noticed. it’s great.
Ever since I learned about the concept of the Philosopher King during a greek philosophy class I took in college, I've implemented something adjacent to my worldbuilding on multiple occasions. It doesn't pan out exactly like the original concept of a Philosopher King, but normally it goes like this:
The Players meet the beaurocratic leader of a people.This leader has a scholarly background, usually having been mentored by a missing/deceased/retired great thinker in their youth. The leader demonstrates this background by introducing the Players to an ethical or philosophical dilemma that they are both familiar with, asking the Player Characters how the problem ought to be solved. The Philosopher King then shares their own insights, revealing either a different, but respectable perspective or a cunning and tricky solution.
Throughout the story, the Philosopher King acts as a mostly benevolent wild card character. Sometimes I'll pit the Philosopher King against a BBEG counterpart, typically a generically evil monarch. When I do this, the Philosopher King runs circles around the monarch with their wit, but there are always a few quirks about their philosophy that concern the Players.
This might manifest into the Players questioning who is truly the "good guy" in the scenario, or whether or not they can actually trust the Philosopher King to not betray them in service of themselves, their people, or some other value made clearly important to the Philosopher King.
I'm sure this "niche trope" might just be a sub-category of an already well-documented one, but I think the ethical/philosophical angle adds an interesting dimension in TTRPGs. Because of Player Agency, Players can really sink their teeth into the implications of said philosophy in ways that a passive audience member cannot.
Just finished my first playtest of my wild west horror game, and my biggest takeaway is this:
It is equally important to be good at communicating your rules as it is to have fun an interesting rules.
Now, this is an obvious token of advice that any game designer worth their salt should be aware of, but it's not until I sat down to playtest that I understood the GRAVITY of it.
Because my poor players, my dearest friends who were willing to take time out of their day to understand my game and play it through, read the rulebook up and down multiple times. And each and every one of them came to the table with a sheepish admittance of guilt that they didn't understand the rules.
But they shouldn't feel guilty for that, that's MY fault as a communicator of the game's rules. See, I initially wrote the rules of my game for myself, as a designer. I made a step-by-step list of the procedures between the GM and the Player. But to someone that isn't a designer, my rules were described in a way that was positively USELESS.
My point is, it's very difficult as a game designer to communicate your mechanics to non-designers without hands-on demonstration. But you don't have that luxury when selling that game to strangers once the playtest is over. It's a skill you have to develop, a skill where you need to view your game from the perspective of someone who has never encountered it before. That's difficult.
Now, once the Players understood the mechanics, they actually got really into my game. And for that I'm very proud, and even more so relieved. I was worried I would have to rewrite my rules from scratch because the game wouldn't be fun.
Turns out I will be rewriting my rules from scratch, but not because the rules were bad, but because my communication was bad!
TTRPG where instead of levelling up to get new abilities you can just yell and new abilities appear on your character sheet.
Will they be good abilities? Not always. But they will certainly be new abilities.
Solving this exact design problem is why I've been toying with the idea of a GM-less horror game where the details of the monster are revealed via playing cards as the players encounter the monster in increasingly dire situations.
The card system would be inspired by Sleepaway's Lindworm events, but each encounter would then be logged into a Monster Sheet that documents what the players have learned about the monster so far.
if you want to make your players roleplay out the process of trying things on the monster to learn its weaknesses in a challenge game, it behooves you to invent a monster they don't know about.
them playing dumb until you arbitrarily decide they've experimented enough to be allowed to try what everyone knew was the correct answer going in is not a satisfying play experience for anyone
I'm bored of elemental giants. Use environmental giants instead.
Environmental Giants all start out the same, but their bodies take up the features of the place they live in. They become a reflection of their domain.
Giant takes up residence in the cliffs of dover? Not a stone giant. No, that's specifically The Giant of Dover. Its body is made of chalk. It can create dust clouds of chalk with its breath, its shoulders are padded with tufts of short grasses and blackberry bushes.
Giant takes up residence in the ruins of a highway during an apocalypse? That's the I-95 Giant. It has rebar spines along its back, skin of pavement and concrete, and wears wrecked cars as armor.
And to make this idea more dynamic, the giant's form changes as the ecosystem changes. A river gets diverted away from a Giant's domain? Then the Giant dries up along with its land. Now the Giant has an incentive to protect its dominion, and a weakness that its enemies can exploit.
So I just discovered that elephants can communicate via seismics!
And now I want to design a fantasy proboscidea species for my world that are intelligent, nonverbal, and communicate with said seismic waves. Maybe they can even harness magic this way!
What if there was a TTRPG where you're only a part-time adventurer? So all of your abilities and toolkit are specific to your mundane job and you need to find ways as the player to apply them to dungeon crawling.
Comfort game
It's all in the logo. Please help me out TTRPG Family.
I cannot decide.
Check out my cool and new indie game A_BREY game it is very work in progress and 80% of assets ARE placeholders but thats OKAY! If you gaf about my game and want to playtest or help with it my discord is a_breygame talk to me i like to talk to people :3c
cameo from @foxlorre you can see them they are there
for the first post here, have some (very rough) concept art.
little doodle of some guys
first draft of a potential layout for the battle menu
my friend made an improved version, I'll see if I can post it here later
Sparkle on! It's Wednesday! Don't forget to be yourself!
a concept art for one of the shops :)
a restaurant of sorts, called The Diving Bell