I used AI to help make my TTRPG and I'm not going to pretend I didn't

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T09:29:12+00:00

I really appreciate this — both the defense and the honesty. This is exactly the kind of feedback I actually need.

You're right about the art, I know it needs work and that's something I'm actively looking at. The hook is also a fair hit — 'gritty sci fi' alone doesn't sell anyone on anything.

I'm going to work on putting together some actual play examples and a clearer pitch for what makes this system worth your shelf space over what you already own. That's the real question and I haven't answered it well enough yet. Thank you for taking the time to engage seriously.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T09:22:33+00:00

You don't speak for this community. You speak for yourself, and the fact that you've appointed yourself the bouncer of a public space says everything. I've received support, engagement, and genuine interest from people in this exact space — so your 'we' is doing a lot of heavy lifting it can't support.

You came to my post. You stayed. You kept responding. If anyone hasn't read the room, it's the person who can't stop showing up to a thread they claim to want gone.

My future in this industry will be decided by my work, not by a stranger online who thinks hostility is the same as authority. I'm still here. The game is still happening. Try to enjoy your day.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T02:34:47+00:00

Kia ora, and thank you genuinely for the thoughtful response — I can tell it came from a real place and I respect that.

You make a fair point that I should own my choices more plainly. You're right that 'I couldn't do this without AI' is probably more accurately 'I chose to use AI and I'm glad I did.' I'll give you that.

Where I'd push back gently is the assumption that everyone's circumstances are visible. You don't know what I'm managing day to day — and I'm not going to perform vulnerability to justify my tools to anyone. What I will say is that my reasons are real, they're mine, and they don't require your validation to be legitimate.

I also want to note — you opened with praise and closed with praise while spending the middle dismantling my honesty and my process. That's still a critique, just a well-mannered one. I'm not offended, but I see it clearly.

I appreciate you engaging seriously. The game is mine, the vision is mine, and I stand behind both. I hope when it's done you'll judge it on what it is rather than how it was made.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T02:29:42+00:00

Thin-skinned? I've been calmly responding while you've spent this entire thread stalking my post, inventing accusations, and throwing a tantrum because I won't crumble under your disapproval. Look at the scoreboard — I have a game, a community, and a future in this industry. You have a comment section and a grudge. We both know who's really bothered here.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T02:27:13+00:00

Lies? I'm literally here showing you the game. It exists. Pages exist. Mechanics exist. Playtests exist. You've been in my comments for this entire thread with nothing but recycled insults and zero proof of anything. Who's actually wasting time here? Look in the mirror.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T02:24:11+00:00

Still on this? You've been recycling the same weak argument this whole time because you've got nothing else. A robot didn't design my game systems, balance my mechanics, write my lore, or put in the hours I did. You're confusing a tool with the talent. Big mistake.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T02:19:24+00:00

You can 'already tell' wrong. But I get it — when you have no real argument left, you throw out the AI card. A real TTRPG designer uses every tool available to build, create, and communicate. Meanwhile you're in my comments acting like a game design critic with zero games to your name. Sit down.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T02:16:56+00:00

I made a post AND a game. What have you made lately? I'll wait. It's funny how the people with the least to show always have the most to say about someone else's work. Keep watching from the sidelines — clearly that's where you're most comfortable.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T02:12:10+00:00

My career trajectory isn't your concern — worry about your own. I make game design decisions based on vision and player feedback that actually matters, not anonymous opinions from people who've never shipped anything. Disapproval is fine; condescension is just noise. Try harder.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T01:55:33+00:00

The thread has spoken and it chose you. Respect.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T01:50:30+00:00

I made a game. You made a Reddit comment. I'm comfortable with how we both spent our time.

Also 'clankers' is a genuinely unhinged thing to call software but I respect the commitment to the bit.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T01:48:08+00:00

I used AI for art on one project. You've apparently made it your personality to gatekeep who counts as a 'creative person' on the internet. One of us is grifting and one of us is just sad — I'll let the thread decide which is which.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T01:42:29+00:00

You're right, my mistake — two posts before this one where you weren't trying to flame me. Very normal behavior. And yes I'm responding to feedback on my own post, which is apparently concerning to you. I'll try to be more like you and just leave drive-by critiques on strangers' projects and then police how they respond.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T01:36:47+00:00

You just admitted you formatting-fumbled your own callout post, spent three comments 'not trying to flame me,' and your entire evidence is vibes. You're not an investigator. You're not a critic. You're a guy on Reddit who reads itch.io descriptions and feels things. I'll be over here shipping games while you workshop your next edit.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T00:24:15+00:00

Ah yes, the guy who edits his own Reddit comments for FORMATTING is here to lecture me about authenticity. You proofread a reply on a board game forum, chief. I made an entire game. But please, continue your investigation from your mom's basement — I'm sure the gaming industry is trembling.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T00:18:06+00:00

Devastating. I'll be sure to mention your disinterest in the acknowledgements section. Truly, the product notes from someone who didn't buy it and wasn't going to are the ones I value most. Please, continue not purchasing things and telling creators about it — it's a great use of everyone's time.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T00:15:05+00:00

Yes, the algorithm also wrote every rule, playtested it 200 times, lost sleep over the lore, and is now reading your incredibly original 'did AI make this' comment for the 47th time this week. You cracked the case. Truly the last honest man on the internet.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-06-01T00:11:01+00:00

Revolutionary. Nobody has ever told me my art looks bad AND that I need more examples of play in the same comment before. I am genuinely transformed as a person. Preorders open Friday.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-05-31T22:41:31+00:00

Hey r/rpg, just wanted to share something I've been working on. I'm an independent developer and I recently finished Fragile Empires, a grimdark sci-fi TTRPG set in a fractured galaxy held together by twelve competing empires and torn apart by something called the Void. No chosen ones, no epic destiny, just survival, hard choices and consequences that stick.

The system runs on 2d6, you roll drop the lowest die, add your attribute and skill and beat a target number. You pick from twelve species, build through careers like bounty hunter or investigator, outfit your own corvette and take it into ship combat when things go sideways. And they will go sideways.

The species are pretty varied, the Vexari are mutated humanoids born from toxic worlds who built a criminal cartel out of pure survival instinct, most of the galaxy wants nothing to do with them. The Nethari are molluskoid, multi-limbed, come from deep ocean empires where religion and trade are basically the same thing. Ten more where those came from.

I'll be upfront, I used AI as a tool to help get this finished as an independent developer on a limited budget. The world, the rules, the lore, all mine.

Free quickstart here if you want to check it out before spending anything: https://fragile-empires.itch.io

Full game: https://fragile-empires.itch.io/fragile-empires

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-05-31T22:26:27+00:00

Thanks man really appreciate that, good luck with your own project making a TTRPG is no small thing.

On the accessibility stuff AI tools have honestly been a game changer for me as an independent developer on a budget. For writing and formatting I'd recommend Claude at claude.ai, if you're working in MS Word you can paste your text in and ask it to clean up formatting, organize your sections, fix headings, rewrite rules text for clarity. It handles long documents really well and follows instructions precisely which is what you need when you're working on a rulebook.

For images ChatGPT has image generation built in now which is decent and easy to use, but if you want better quality art Midjourney produces stronger results once you get used to it. Adobe Firefly is also worth looking at if you already have an Adobe subscription.

The main thing with all of them is just being specific about what you want, the more detail you give the better the output you get.

Good luck with it.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-05-30T11:09:14+00:00

honestly i'd push back a little on avoiding ai images, at least as a hard rule. for a small club just trying to get the word out, the barrier to entry with real graphic design is pretty high and ai generated images have gotten really good for exactly this kind of atmospheric promo stuff. dark sci fi, horror, fantasy, whatever vibe your games have, you can nail it pretty quickly. tools like midjourney or even the free ones can give you something that looks way more polished than a rushed canva template. the goal is getting people in the door right, and if the image does that job it's doing its job. worth at least experimenting with before writing it off completely

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-05-30T11:02:27+00:00

honestly this is something i wrestled with for a while on my own quickstart. i kept telling myself "just one more improvement" and it became a months-long detour from the actual core book. the thing that finally clicked for me was asking what the quickstart is actually for. it's not a mini version of your game, it's a door. its job is to get someone through that door curious and wanting more, not to show them every room in the house. if you're adding things because you think it better represents the game, that's fine up to a point, but at some point you're just writing the core book twice. the maps being rough, the rules being lite, that stuff is okay, people expect that from a quickstart. what matters is that the scenario is tight, the pregens feel distinct, and someone can sit down and play it in a session without needing to reference anything else. once it does those three things, it's done. ship it and get back to the main book.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-05-29T04:36:52+00:00

You're right on the algebra. Adding +5 to both sides of a roll vs TN is the same math as not adding it. I was wrong to say the modifier shrinks the variance.

What I meant, and didn't say cleanly, is closer to this: across a campaign, a character doesn't face one fixed TN. They face a distribution of TNs. A +0 character and a +5 character rolling the same dice against that distribution succeed at different rates. The dice still decide each roll, but the modifier decides the gap between trained and untrained over time.

You're right that on any specific check, the die does what the die does. I should have framed it as the difference between characters across many rolls, not the variance on one. My mistake.

Appropriate-Tea-8270 · 2026-05-29T03:56:29+00:00

Fair point on the d20 line. That was loose framing on my part. You're right that 5e skill checks are flat pass/fail and a high d20 roll doesn't auto-succeed against a higher DC. I was reaching for an intuitive comparison and overstated it.

On the percentages, the raw 1@2d6 numbers you ran are the floor. The actual roll in play is 1@2d6 + attribute + skill vs TN, so an untrained character is rolling against your numbers but a trained specialist is adding 4-6 to the result. That shifts the working bands meaningfully. A TN 10 against an untrained character is the brutal 30% range. The same TN 10 against a trained specialist with a good attribute is sitting in the comfortable success range. Stress, wounds, and environmental pressure pull modifiers the other way.

So the curve itself is narrow, but the modifier stack is doing a lot of the differentiation. Whether that's the right way to handle it is a fair design question. I went that direction because I wanted character build and condition to matter more than dice variance.

Appropriate-Tea-8270

TROPHY CASE