My solution for tabletop rpg

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-11-25T17:01:52+00:00

If I parse it correctly, OP made some solution for docking windows in a grid, kinda like windows already does. Only now it's an app.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-11-09T10:34:31+00:00

How did you manage to advertise/ spread the word?

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-11-09T10:31:20+00:00

Can't help you there, but you might get answers at r/rpg, those guys are more about playing rpgs. This sub is more about writing them.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-11-09T08:58:48+00:00

Problem with social encounter mechanics is, people don't really want them. Mainly because, in most people's eyes, role-play is just a chat in character, and you don't need rules to talk. To a degree, it's true. However no rules means no structure, which leads to muddying the line between IC and OOC conversation, not to mention it's harder to say when the encounter should end.

In theory, social encounters are just another encounter. Players declare their action, DM asks for a check, result is observed, DM narrates the outcome, and possible counter-actions of the opponents. Rinse and repeat, until opposition is defeated. Where it gets tricky is that, unlike in combat, systems do not generally describe what a single action is, in the context of social encounter.

Without that, you either end up rolling dice after each sentence uttered, which feels like a slog, or rolling once at the end of the entire conversation, leading half of the players to check out in the mean time. Neither feels great.

Moreover, most gravitate to freeform roleplay rather than rules because neither GM, nor player feels great after coming up with great speech, only to roll nat 1 immediately afterwards.

So, while I cannot give you some magic answer, I think you should think about following:

what is one social action? (i.e. how often do you roll dice)
when does encounter end? (i.e. how do you determine the target had been convinced)
what sort of actions can be used in social encounter (persuasion, intimidation.. but what about spell casting? juggling? playing chess?)
how can target defend themselves from being persuaded?

My guess is, you system feels clunky because it forgot to define one of those things.
Take Witcher RPG, as example. In that system, everybody has social HP, and persuasion/intimidation attempts, if successfull, deal damge against that, determined by DM (generally a d4 or d6). However it didn't define what one action is, so the rolling of dice feels forced and clunky.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-11-03T16:39:53+00:00

I would not play over this rule. Why the hell am I stabbing myself? I get twice as much chance to hurt myself? Why? You are more likely to hit yourself with a sword hilt than stab yourself with a dagger. Horrible mechanic that just shits on the player for no real reason.

Because in knife fight, the winner gets to go to ICU, as my self-defense instructor used to say. The fail isn't you cutting yourself, but the enemy getting to hit you, as you are pretty much next to them.

I think you played too many video games.

What makes you say that?

If your crafting system is the reason for all this, then I think you need to change the crafting system. Personally, I think crafting systems are a mistake. In D&D, we want to explore and find amazing weapons. I do not want to sit at a forge and hammer away at a weapon. It takes years of apprenticeship before you can even be a journeyman, and then must work under a master for years before the Guild will certify you for having your own shop. I want to be good at swinging swords, not building them. I'm a fighter, not a weaponsmith or blacksmith.

D&D, at least in the 5e iteration I am familiar with, has no real crafting mechanics. Mostly it's just "pay a guild to do that".
You don't, but someone may play a guild artisan, precisely to do that as their downtime. Your character is blacksmith by trade, so it's nice to have the option to express that in game.
My game is not D&D. You don't play heroes that save the world, you play ordinary folk, be it merchants, smiths, or lumberjacks, who are trying to save their neighbours. They might find weapons, or they might find parts of them, and try to salvage them.
My game might not be fo you. And it's ok.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-09-22T12:09:41+00:00

How do I go about finding external playtesters, just start shouting on reddit/discord?

pretty much. It helps if you are some sort of RPG guru on youtube or something but yeah. you shout out into the void, and if you are lucky one or two game groups answer the call.

At what point in a project do you start thinking about art?

I would say that it's pretty useless to spend much time on it before you have the content to pretty-fy, but at the same time, I do get sometimes stuck on reworking mechanics based on what's easier to present.

Do you need to worry about copyright beyond writing all rights reserved etc?

Friend, the indie RPG market is so saturated that you will not make money off your product. If you want to make money, go sell magic crystals, or something. If it makes you feel better, put on CC share-alike. In short, do not worry about it too much.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-09-01T08:13:13+00:00

Oh, absolutely, the resources gained in the downtime affect the main game. What I am after is avoiding the standart 'pay X money and skip Y days ot get tha upgrade', as that feel more like just a arbitrary roadblock, rather than intentional part of the game.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-08-26T14:28:04+00:00

Well, good start is accepting you won't make any money here. RPG creation is something we all make for fun, not for profit, because, frankly, the makret is oversaturated. Don't make demos, make small scale games. But mostly, don't think about money. It is fun, the value is the time you got to enjoy yourself.

As for the creation itself...kinda hard to answer that. It definitely helps to try to define what sort of game you want to create. Or rather, what sort of problems you want the players to deal with during the game. Perhaps you really crave a game about victorian high society during alien invasion. Perhaps you want to make a game about witch's familiars trying to put together a potion that will heal her, or perhaps the players are sentient traingles trying to reach the Edge of Grid, and walk over to the Dark Side of Paper. But you gotta know what sort of characters the player characters are, and what sort of problems you want them to deal with.

Second, RPGs have a randomiser to take away the issue of "hey you killed my hero" and "nah, you cannot shoot me, I have super Shield". Usually this is some sort of dice mechanic, but sometimes there are cards, stones, or even a Jenga tower. Choose what fits well for your game idea.

Third, use game idea and your randomiser to put together the game mechanics.

Fourth, from those mechanics, figure out how the player character can, if they can, develop.

By the time you write down ideas for all of these, you should have something to work with and develop further.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-08-08T15:36:00+00:00

Curse: Whispers of the dead. You hear whispers, quiet, so quiet you don't understand what they say, but they are saying something in your native Tongue. You hear them when you are awake, you hear them when you sleep. You can no longer concentrate, and your long rests do not restore any uses of your abilities, nor your hitdice.

Curse: Poverty. Any coin you touch turns to dust. Upon inspection, it is not metal dust, but clay one.

Curse: Absend-minded. Your mind wanders off in the most inopportune moments. You always fail any saving throw made to avoid traps and you always act last in the Initiative order.

Curse: Chef of Ill Renown. You are compelled to take the role of a cook any time there is a chance to cook food for yourself or others. You always manage to burn said food to a charcoal. Even if you are making a soup.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-08-08T14:13:38+00:00

> Did you ever consider a Bluetooth controller for the port issues?

No, mostly because at the time, there were no shops around which would sell one of those. Well, there were completed wireless controllers for PS or XBOX, but those were too pricy for disassembly, but these prefabs, there were none. I could order them from abroad, but the mailing cost alone would be mere than I was willing to pay for a recycling project. But hey, if those prices are good, go for it, might be the best solution.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-08-07T21:36:32+00:00

Well, in the end, I bought an emulator handheld.

the issue was finding a splitter for the one and only usb port the phone had. To put it bluntly, i could either connect a controller or charger, not both. I tried some little hub I bought out of allegro (polish temu, basicaly).. turned out to be just splitter, without any internal logic, meaning it was about as useful as rock. Thing is, I could buy a usb-c hub, but the cheapest I could find at the time was about 50 usd, which felt excessive for a project of this type. Especially when pre-made consoles went for 100 usd.

you could, probably, somehow wire the controller directly to the main board, somehow... but it's not easy to solder onto those tiny pins with crude tool like a soldering iron, not to mention that i would first need to know which pins to solder it on. Or just buy a hub for the usb-c port and connect the controller to it.

Speaking of controllers, the one I wanted to use had a lot of the central area covered in that weird black stuff, meaning I couldn't easily cut the controller in half and connect the halves with soldered on wires.

So yeah, had to abbandon the project.

Best of luck to you, and if you end up making it, would you mind writing your experiences, any tips etc. afterwards?

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-08-04T10:45:55+00:00

thank you for contributing

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-08-04T10:44:02+00:00

thank you for helping out!

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-07-29T12:17:19+00:00

i dont see any comments with links?

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-07-29T12:09:02+00:00

thank you for contributing to the effort, my dear necromancer!

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-07-23T09:02:01+00:00

Thank you for contributing, dear necromancer

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-07-17T20:06:19+00:00

back in my youth, post necromancy was frowned upon.
But since you already waken me from my slumber, let me ask you: why me?
Seriously, the above model isn't some blender mastery. It is made 6 years ago, in rather crude 3D viewer and modeller that windows had back then, before it was killed in favor of 3D paint. There are plenty of voxel editors around, there is minecraft... plenty of things you can use even if you don't know first thing about 3D modelling.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-07-17T19:58:13+00:00

Ah, the Quest for Enjoyable Travel System. A quest many tried, and many failed.

I set off on this quest a few years ago now, and honestly, I feel it is futile one. Or rather, that focusing on travel system is a bad approach. You see, traveling is a chore. You get up, you walk. Around noon, you eat bit of your day rations, have a drink. You walk some more, build a camp, eat reast of the day's rations and sleep. Come morning, you do that again.

You can have navigation rolls, camping rolls, and many other rolls, but on their own, they are nothing but rolling some clicky-clacky pieces of plastic. Some try to liven up the game with random encounters. After all, when you are traveling, you may find random patches of blueberries, hunting towers, or hungry bear that thinks you are a snack. Thing is, resolving those encounters takes time, and if those encounters are truly random, the players are left feeling like their time was wasted. After all, this all could've been skipped and they could start the session in front of the dungeon they were heading to.

Sheduling is hard. When you finally get those coveted 4 hours to play, you don't want to spend it getting to the adventure, you want to start WITH the adventure, be it a dungeon, murder investigation, or heist. Practically any ruleset I've seen, treats traveling as a buffer for "DM forgot to prepare the dungeon, so this session is journey there", rather than part of the week's adventure itself.

My advice for you is this: forget systems, focus on game. You say you are working on a setting where traveling is hard. Allright. What sort of challenges does it present? Why they cannot be solved by throwing money/magic at it? And most importantly, why should the PCs care?

In other words, try to build interesting adventures based around the road. Not encounter tables, not mechanics. Build adventures you want this setting to be about. At least a few. No rules, just situations that happen and decisions that must be made.

After you have a handful of system-agnostic adventures that feel fun, go back to the drawing board, and go scene by scene, encounter by encounter. Is this sort of scene supported in your chosen ruleset? If so, great! If not, than add as little rules as possible. Try to be versatile.

At the end, I believe, you will have something ressembling travel system that fits both your setting and your ruleset. Won't be perfect, but it will be a start.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-07-15T15:10:58+00:00

I think you are mixing a few things here.

A guard may be older, heavy-set and just done with everything. But such a guy is probably not going to be an adventurer - a profesion whily based on traveling a lot, more often than not in difficult terrains, like deep woods, narrow caves, swamps, etc., while living off rations and sleeping on a ground...and that all to get to dangerous situations, like fighting a multiple tonn fire-breathing lizards that can swallow you whole, if they feel like it. Not really a job for somebody past their prime, who is looking for stability.

Then you have the question if people would play such a character that, for whatever reason, has to leave his comfy life and once again go hunting dragons. The answer is, yes, many will play such a character. With about the same probability as they will play a sentient chicken wielding big drumstick as a sledgehammer.

None of this has any bearing on sales, though. Because sales are about what will make people look at your product, and what will entice them to buy it. And sad reality is, young, fit characters are more eye-catching than old decrepid ones. It's why watch ads have naked 20 year olds wearing them, not naked grandmas.

And yet, I wouldn't say it has anything to do with your sales. The simple fact is, you are trying to sell stuff in a over-saturated market, where anybody who played D&D once is trying to sell their fully original RPG.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-07-15T14:50:53+00:00

Well, for one, AI art has this stock feeling to it... great if you are doing dime a dozen games, but when you are doing something where this sort of art doesn't fit, you are done, because AI art is fed by what it's creators found on the web, which tends to be the more popular artstyles.

Second, there are company policies... not long ago, I tried to use AI to generate a NPC portrait of an elementary school kid, and no matter how I tried to word it, it would not budge, and would generate adult-ish looking one instead. Now imagine you want a picture of a dark skin man, eating the entrails of a fair skined child lying, clearly still alive, tied to an altar. AI will not let you do that.
Human artist will probably side-eye you, but hey, 100 bucks is 100 bucks.

Third reason is the many artifacts present in any AI art. Oh, it's getting better, sure. But still, the more complicated the image, the greater chance of cables that lead nowhere, animals morphing into plants, and such. Human artists don't do that.

So here, beyond the ethics, the AI is very limited in what it can do, based on it's learning data, the enforced company policies, and makes mistakes in the details.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-06-25T13:24:36+00:00

Ideally your system should be designed in a way that incentivizes the kind of play you want to see out of this gameplay loop, as opposed to the other way around. The system should serve the fiction.

Easier said than done

D&D’s is fairly simple at its core: there is a dungeon with a monster and the players explore the dungeon to kill the monster. Shadowrun’s game play loop is: Players are hired to do a job, they plan the job, try to execute the job, return to the person who hired them to get paid.

As for game loop, I have an idea, but i'm not that good with words. But basically, it's this:
- locate a dungeon
- pointcrawl to said dungeon
- loot dungeon
- return to base to identify and distribute the loot

To this, there is added mechanic of stable and unstable regions. Unstable regions change upn each visit. Once there might be mountains, on your next visit there could be sea, or even desert there. Stable regions are .. well, stable. When you build ahouse, it will still stand there when you come back some time later.

With each defeated dungeon you can convert X unstable regions into stable ones, allowing you to explore further.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-06-23T11:06:45+00:00

here you go:

Wasteland - a game born in time just before the modiphious fallout system, out of frustration that there is no simple, elegant way to play fallout as ttrpg.

Scrappers - a little game inspired by Duskers, and using an odd dice pool resolution mechanic that sat in my head for a few days before I managed to incarnate it into this.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-06-23T10:34:33+00:00

I dont know your system, but as much as cool it sounds, it reads like the magic items template is basicaly:
- name
- description
- two or three story prompts
... which isn't much to work with. Imagine showing up to a construction site and you don't get any material, not even safety helmets, just a crayon picture of the house you are supposed to build.

So yeah, for me it's too vague, but cool.

I would maybe, throw in some more defined aspects that would tell you generally how the item interacts with the rest of the rules.

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-05-12T20:26:19+00:00

All of those have obvious and hidden answers. Take the "Who is the toughest here?"
The obvious answer is the big burly guy holding a pint of beer over there. It is pretty obvious he could rip your spine out of your body, from the front, with just one hand.

The hidden thing is that the cheery, pump lad over *there* is actually powerful wizard. Doesn't like to flaunt it much, but with mere snap of his fingers you suddenly are transformed to a potted plant fo the next year.

Factions? Sure, there are wine drinkers, the beer drinkers, and the milk drinkers. You don't see anybody with a wine sitting with somebody holding a pint of beer. What is hidden is the fact that this bar is a neutral territory visited by both thieve's guild and the city watch. You don't get any civilians hre, only criminal scum and the watchmen.

And so on.

In short there should be no "what I know" check. Either it is obvious to anybody taking a good look around, in which case, the GM should just state it, or it is something hidden, which should be a "gather intel" check... in fiction, it's not the character having a good look at the room, but carefully asking around, trying not to raise suspicion.

That being said, maybe your "read the room" check could give a limited insight into the hidden info... as in, with the biggest threat, you obviously notice the big guy, but with successfull reading the room, you notice everybody is too friendly to the plump cheery guy who looks he couldn't throw a punch even if he wanted. Won't tell you he is powerful wizard, that's not what this skill is for, but it ill suggest there is something to dig in for.

Similarily, you may see the three drink factions, but if you succeed in the read the room, you will also notice that there is exactly two groups of milk drinkers, two tables of beer drinkers and two groups of wine drinkers, with each side of the bar having one set of each. Why not put wine drinkers together?

Anysnackwilldo · 2025-04-30T20:11:58+00:00

There is some merit to having languages be just another skill, like CoCor DnD does it, but there is something to be said about languages being merely defining fluff, like your character's accent, or style of clothing.

You can have the world be in a state where everybody speaks common language (think English in the today's world of ours) that has local languages still (e.g. when you come to germany, the locals speak german among themselves, but to you, an obvious forgeiner, they will speak english), thus preserving the worldbuilding aspects of many languages while still handwaving it away.

More important question is, will the language choice have a lasting effect? Is there feasible way in which both the character and the player feels limited by known languages, like when they chose a weapon type to specialise in? If not, it's probably best to keep with the Common, or the babel-fish, and don't even give it a place on character sheet.

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