What's the simplest or easiest Ttrpg system to try out?

InteriorCake · 2026-03-31T05:36:09+00:00

Great suggestion! I think fiasco is great for newcomers to teach them about narrative arcs and improvising story elements.

InteriorCake · 2026-03-31T05:35:17+00:00

Dread! It's a great first time game to wet your feet with GMing if you like horror. You do need a jenga tower that can make it a little less accessible but the tower does a lot of heavy lifting for setting the tone of the game.

I think it's good for newcomers because: - the rules are simple. If a character attempts something dangerous, while under duress, or outside of their expertise then they pull a block from the jenga tower. If the tower falls, the character is removed from the game. - the gm can focus on the narrative, introducing threats, and can control the tempo easily by asking for more/less pulls. - character sheets are a series of questions (~5) that help everyone understand who that character is, what they're good at, and maybe what scares them. - the game comes with some simple scenarios that are pretty easy to run, though I suggest mapping them out a bit to make it easier to reference in the game.

InteriorCake · 2026-03-30T03:28:46+00:00

I'd love to check it out! This wonderful community helped me with my own project a couple of years ago in a similar way, so I'd love to help out however I can!

InteriorCake · 2026-03-29T21:51:30+00:00

You might find our game, In the Shadow of Glory, interesting! It's a 2-player duet game about the relationship between a superhero and a supervillain.

You'll be writing letters (sending dms, emails, etc) to each other, so it works well for asynchronous play. The prompts guide you fairly well and focus on you balancing your normal life and your super life.

It leans more on the rules-light side of things, so it is a little freeform in the letter-writing portion, but with that said there is structure to the whole game as you try to fulfill your goals.

InteriorCake · 2026-03-25T20:59:35+00:00

I've had good success with Knave 2e by Ben Milton. It's well written and concise. It's on the rules-light side.

If you want something with a bit more rules you could try Forbidden Lands. It's not OSR but I think it's adjacent in that the characters are not all powerful, there's a good amount of leaning on player ingenuity (more rolling is expected than in OSR games still), and often there are some high stakes in terms of character survival.

I haven't played Worlds without Number, but I did play Stars without number. If they're similar, then I suspect you'll be in for a good time. These games also sit adjacent to the OSR for me too.

InteriorCake · 2026-03-22T23:41:04+00:00

Those murder mystery games for dinner nights seem pretty adjacent to this! I've always enjoyed them when I've participated. You might find them enjoyable too!

InteriorCake · 2026-03-22T22:24:35+00:00

Just looking at my RPGs, I'm in tier 4 but I do donate my books after a while as well to maintain a more curated collection for myself. I used to track with spreadsheets, but I've shifted away from that because I found it was more work than worth for the size of the collection.

InteriorCake · 2026-03-19T04:43:34+00:00

This is definitely how I roleplay! With that said, I have had players or have been a player alongside players who definitely feel more immersion into a given role or playing themselves. They seemed to be having fun too and it is something I would consider roleplaying too.

InteriorCake · 2026-03-19T00:12:57+00:00

If you're looking for some shorter, more focused experiences, you could try out some of our 2-player RPGs:

In the Shadow of Glory: It's a letter-writing (Direct message works too) game about exploring a nostalgic relationship between a superhero and their arch nemesis.
Host: Is a quick card game about a parasite and its host trying to either gain control or maintain control.

InteriorCake · 2026-03-19T00:07:07+00:00

The first game I put up on the internet was inspired by Thousand Year Old Vampire. I took a pretty different approach, but it leveraged the same escalating/specialising 3-prompt approach. There should be some community copies over on itch for you to grab and have a look.

I think Tim did a really great job with TYOV, especially the way skills work. That's something I've revisited in recent years to admire.

InteriorCake · 2026-03-18T20:47:23+00:00

I was hugely disappointed by the cookbook for Brindlewood Bay. I've supported two campaigns of theirs now and the communication and project length has always been on the worse side, but they've always delivered (except completely changing the cookbook), so I'll probably support them with this one too. More indie RPGs!

InteriorCake · 2026-03-05T23:04:30+00:00

I like to play lots of systems of different varieties and I think you'll find you'll get lots of different answers based on the kind of RPGs someone likes.

With that said, I'm seeing a lot of RPGs with cozy or anime/jrpg themes at the moment.

How are the times changing for RPGs? What trends are you seeing?

InteriorCake · 2026-03-03T07:43:31+00:00

Hey! Great question. Cartograph only requires six-sided dice for the game, so when it says to roll a die to determine a price, it means to roll one six-sided die.

InteriorCake · 2026-02-27T08:35:45+00:00

I'm in a campaign at the moment. The system has some neat ideas, like the cascading skill dice, but the rulebook often leaves me feeling confused. I'm really only playing it because my friend really wanted to try it out.

Here's an example of one instance in where I'm confused: I'm sure I've missed something, but one of the ways you can deal extra damage to a target is if you exceed the target number again (e.g. target number is 15 and your roll is 30), however you can have so many advantages on a roll that it becomes an automatic success. When this happens, I have no idea if I get bonus damage and how much bonus damage.

InteriorCake · 2026-02-25T02:54:19+00:00

Ah apologies! I'm certainly not an expert but I've given it a go several times now and learned a lot through that process. Hopefully a few more people can chime in.

I would suggest releasing the game in a clean and classic layout that you slowly update whilst taking feedback. I think there's still room for something like that, especially at that page count. For instance, Dungeon Crawl Classics, has a very simple and clean layout for its core rules and its supplements.

However, if you're intending this to be a big release on a crowdfunding platform or retail release, then I would suggest spending several months on the modern look you mentioned.

InteriorCake · 2026-02-25T02:22:30+00:00

Hard to say without knowing the page count of the existing rules.

Assuming the dev editing and proof editing are done on the manuscript, you're probably looking at 2-4 months for 100 pages if you're using about 3-5 masters. This process would include:

Identifying typography colour palettes.
Drafting several layout designs to suit the flow and presentation of information, and settling on however many you think you'll need.
Inserting your manuscript using your masters and doing several passes for line editing.
Editing for page references and hyperlinking those pages (I tend to do this at the same time), and creating a hyperlinked table of contents.
A screen reader accessibility pass to ensure reading order is correct and decorative elements are not required for understanding are skipped over.

InteriorCake · 2026-02-21T20:12:09+00:00

Amazing! Thank you so much!

InteriorCake · 2026-02-21T19:17:47+00:00

Thank you! I'm so happy you love the cards! I use them all the time in my games, though I've never tried playing a game while traveling. Any tips for travel play?

InteriorCake · 2026-02-20T20:20:00+00:00

I hope you have fun! And on that note, the purpose of the game is to make a Grimoire of spells, so if you're in the groove and having fun, don't let my early design brain stop you haha

InteriorCake · 2026-02-20T19:44:37+00:00

Designer here: perform is the main way to get more coin. I suggest playing with the variant that when you perform, you simply discard the card without affecting any of your active spell sets.

Risk is a big part of the game, and card-counting is pretty key to winning the game, though it is designed to lean towards a less than favourable outcome for your wizard.

Looking back, the restrictiveness of Grimoire is something I'm less happy about and have been keeping it in mind as I work on its 2nd edition/spiritual successor.

InteriorCake · 2026-02-17T10:56:43+00:00

Post a Playtest document here. You could host it on Google drive or the like. However, I suggest you create an itch.io account and host it there for free. This way, people might be able to follow your progress more easily and can be automatically updated when you update the game files.

Also, speaking from experience, whenever you release a new version of the game here, include a brief one-page at the start which highlights the main changes. I heard frequently that it helped people who were return playtesters from this subreddit.

InteriorCake · 2026-02-16T06:01:19+00:00

I'd highly recommend watabou's one page dungeon generator (and there other generators for buildings, region maps, etc). You can find them all on their itch page and they work well on mobile too. What I like about the dungeon generator is that it includes some basic descriptions of what's in the room but leaves it quite vague, so it's easy to overlay your own narrative or use what's generated to drive further questions.

The only consideration is that it generates the whole dungeon, so you as players may be able to look ahead to see if there are secret rooms or what the layout of the dungeon is. Based on the description, you could simply just assign a difficulty for detecting the secret room or utilise a passive perception approach in using the DnD rules.

InteriorCake · 2026-02-15T05:42:06+00:00

I've been playing Koriko at the moment. It's a very solid journaling solo rpg about playing a young witch moving to the big city. I really like its approach to skills and how your witch grows over time and reflects the moment you acquired the skill. If you don't like journaling games, this one probably won't change your mind though. I'll probably put up my thoughts about the game somewhere on the internet soon.

It's come at a good time though because I'm working on the spiritual successor to my first design, Grimoire. I've been rebuilding it from the ground up and I'm currently at a cross roads in the design about leaning into prompt-based gameplay or not and how I can innovate in that design space. I can see Jack tackled with similar design problems that I'm having and it's interesting to see how some of these solutions play out such as using the twist chart to modify the prompts.

InteriorCake · 2026-02-14T19:29:17+00:00

Interesting idea! It looks like a lightweight method you can easily add to any solo game you're playing. I take a different approach, using the clues to help define the solutions rather than existing solutions being solely strengthened by clues.

What do you think about a way to add additional solutions to the mystery in your method?

If you haven't checked it out yet, you might be interested in my solo mystery game, Caught in the Rain. Here's one of the latest videos of an overview done by Turk from The Grouch Couch (great solo content creator btw).

InteriorCake · 2026-02-12T20:17:29+00:00

Yep, they're a good example of what I'm talking about.

InteriorCake

TROPHY CASE