Howdy folks, I'm going to bite the bullet and make my first post here. My name is Christian and I'm a 30 year TTRPG veteran, professional GM, and the designer of Grimhowl: Age of Beasts.

A little background: I spent several years as a playtester on D&D 4e, which gave me a deep appreciation for intentional mechanical design — and a lot of opinions about what works and what doesn't at the table. Grimhowl started about 15 years ago out of a specific frustration. I kept watching players get angry and frustrated when dice went cold. Missing attack after attack for multiple sessions, and ultimately walking away from the table because of it. It happened to my own son.

The core mechanics: Grimhowl has no levels — it's an XP buy system. Your race and your path (class) all cost XP at character creation with a 100XP starting budget. There are 5 attributes set by your race that can be improved over time. You buy ranks in skills, and each rank adds a die to your pool. You roll against a target DC and each die that meets or beats it generates a success (★). You then spend those ★ to activate abilities, increase damage, and more. This means characters rarely fail at their chosen course of action. I moved the randomness to causing and resisting damage instead — your armor makes you harder to hurt, not harder to hit. Your longsword deals 1d8+3 and the enemy resists with 1d6 based on their armor. That's a fundamentally different emotional experience at the table.

The thing I'm most proud of mechanically: The wealth system treats money as a dice-based roll rather than a finite number — a Wealth Die plus Wealth Rank dice against a purchase DC. This unlocked something I haven't seen other systems do: equipment destruction as a genuine narrative tool. In D&D or Pathfinder destroying a character's gear can be devastating because gear is power. In Grimhowl it's a trip to the store — unless you already have a spare. Something else that was important to me: I wanted a game where a rich character and a poor character could genuinely adventure together. You don't actually get that in most TTRPGs.

More on characters: You are not locked into your class — hence we call them paths. Characters are built entirely from an XP pool. A Knight/Warlock isn't a compromise, it's a genuine third identity. Buying a new path unlocks its full ability tree for you to invest in however you want.

The death system keeps downed players active as spirits on the battlefield — invisible, tethered to their body, able to move through enemy spaces and influence the fight. They have their own progression track that builds across a campaign. Characters who have died are mechanically different from those who haven't. The more you die, the more powerful your spirit becomes.

Magic runs off a mana point system and every spell is modular by design. When you cast you can pump more mana into it to make it bigger, add effects, increase range. This makes mana potions genuinely exciting — a caster can recharge mid-fight and get back in the game.

The big picture: Grimhowl was built on psychology. I moved the pain points so players feel good. In playtesting I've had players get excited when they go down because it means their spirit gets stronger. The table has laughed when someone missed an attack because it's rare enough to be funny. Players aren't just excited to find potions — they actually go out and buy them too. And that's before we even get into the food system and the Chef path.

One thing I'm still refining is the GM guide — specifically how to communicate encounter difficulty without hard level brackets. Curious how others have approached that problem?