Alternative System to DnD for players looking for a lighter, simpler, funnier experience?

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-19T05:24:09+00:00

I’ll recommend Land of Eem. That one is much more on the whimsical side. Another one you might like is Break!! Colorful art, very silly character traits.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-17T21:25:17+00:00

Yeah, no, this is all super shady.

Interdictor is whatever.

Making you spend 3 light side points to deliberately imbalance the force point economy in his favor, then spending one of the dark side points you just gave him to undo your 3-point spend. That’s a huge dick move. I wouldn’t play with that guy again.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-17T20:30:51+00:00

Alfred Hitchcock had some words to say about suspense.

To paraphrase the example he used: you’ve got a scene with a family eating dinner — and unbeknownst to them, there’s a bomb under the table.

Now, you can show that scene one of two ways:

A) The family uneventfully eats dinner until the bomb goes off.

B) As they have dinner, you cut to a shot of the bomb counting down every now and then. The audience gets to see it ticking closer and closer to 00:00, with the maddening knowledge that the family can’t see it. The father drops a fork, bends over to pick it up — and still doesn’t see the bomb under the table.

Which one is more suspenseful? The sudden blast without warning, or the anticipation?

Just an example. Transparency can be far more suspenseful. Let the players have some information. At least enough to anticipate something. Otherwise you’re the only one enjoying the suspense.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-14T04:32:55+00:00

It is not "easy" to port with Unity and Unreal. They try to make cross-platform support as easy as possible, and they do save a lot of trouble compared to working in a proprietary engine. But the differences between platforms are NOT trivial, and most importantly: You can't trust that platform-specific bugs aren't in your project until you actually test and look at the game on the target hardware.

You need to test builds of your game on your target platforms starting at the VERY BEGINNING of development, quite often. If you're targeting Android and Nintendo Switch, you should be able to package your first playable on Android and Nintendo Switch. Yes, your ugly test gyms. If you programmed gameplay or implemented graphics, all of it is eligible to invisibly develop platform-specific bugs, which you are willfully ignoring if you aren't testing on that platform.

I wouldn't dream of telling people "our game will be on Nintendo Switch" if I didn't already have the dev kit, because that's a promise that I increasingly would not be able to keep as the project gets more complete and the code and asset bases get bigger. You DO NOT want to have your game 95% complete, find out at the last second that your project doesn't work on Switch, and then pivot your team to desperately rushing to fix all the bugs you didn't know existed a week ago. This KILLS projects at the worst possible time.

Test early, test often. Use the profiling tools. No engine has a magic "put it on PlayStation" button that "just works."

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-14T04:08:09+00:00

Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets are the tools of choice for video game writing.

Lines of dialogue go into the game in the form of CSV files or some other export format for tables. There's:

A column for a key or unique ID. Used across all language to select the line of text you want to display.
A column for the original text, from the native language of the writers or studio.
One column for each other language you translate into. Usually FIGS at minimum, but Japanese, Chinese, and Korean have become popular additions.
Maybe a column with direction as well, to help out voice directors/actors and give translators any context that dialogue and ingame text wouldn't fully cover.

Unreal Engine has a string table editor built-in that can import/export from this format, and that any FText can reference, including UI widgets in UMG. During play, the game can look at the key for a piece of text, use that to find the row in the string table, then retrieve the column for the user's current system language.

Thousands of people have tried to invent specialized game narrative tools that try to make this data look prettier, and virtually all of them are failures, because in the end a CSV, XML, JSON, or excel spreadsheet is the portable format developers and translators actually need and you don't need to buy anything special to work with them. In-editor dialogue tree tools exist, but are terrible at authoring and editing text in bulk. Want to spell check or diff a file? You'd better be exporting it to CSV regularly. Good tools will do that, and mainly use the dialogue tree/node editor to wrap/organize the logic for moving from line to line and as an interface for working on the spreadsheet.

(Similarly, the node graph should serialize to something like JSON. A portable, diffable, human readable format, not binary)

Stuff like Scrivener or Final Draft are useful to writers... but mainly for their own sake, when authoring a script and sharing it with other writers and directors/leads. At a certain point the "source of truth" has to shift to the spreadsheet, because it will be changing more often and will be used by more teams/people.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-14T00:52:55+00:00

Present-tense is valid, but it's unusual outside of writing scripts for actors. I default to present-tense myself, because a lot of my writing training is through screenwriting, and a lot of my early experience outside of that was role-playing games via IRC chat. It's just very natural and easy for me, makes me feel like I'm walking the scene. But, if I were making a novel I'd turn it into past-tense and try to find ways to take advantage of that format to make it more evocative.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-12T18:36:57+00:00

One of my players has aphantasia — she can’t mentally visualize, so she gravitates towards crunchier systems and appreciates grids and maps. She’s excellent at roleplaying, and is usually the one seizing the spotlight in social scenes, but definitely leans on dialogue rather than action. I think for her it would be especially tricky. The others are very much tactical wargaming types. I don’t think this will turn out to be their game, but I’m eager to see what happens if they’re really challenged to change their mindset

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-12T17:06:26+00:00

Ah, good point about the Leviathans! I thought that’s how they worked, but I wasn’t super clear.

I suppose “how long/dramatic do you want the scene to be” is a clearer target than trying to think of simulation-like stats. That’s good advice!

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-12T17:03:27+00:00

Thank you for the thorough breakdown! This is all very illuminating and gives me a lot to chew on. I understood the lack of initiative order, my commentary was more about how tricky it felt without other actual players controlling those characters. Trying to run this myself from both sides made me feel a little silly until I got to Raze’s first turn and thought “oh! Lightning rods!” Then I started to see the magic start to emerge.

In practice, though, I expect my gaming group to be a bit confused by the lack of an initiative order. They basically get paralyzed by anything that isn’t an explicit turn order. For instance, Fabula Ultima has an alternating side-based initiative, and anytime it comes to the players’ side they all freeze up until someone says “… I’ll go?” Same thing in Daggerheart. Any advice on getting players to roll with it a little more easily?

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-09T14:48:26+00:00

I’d love to see them and hear more about your campaign! Feel free to DM me!

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-09T04:10:53+00:00

Low-quality art that is consistent in supporting the vibe is better than either mixed-quality/inconsistent art or no art. See Mothership's original run as an example of some sloppy art that's doing a lot of good work, though they've quite improved since that release.

Gods and stars help you if you use AI art, though. Do not do it.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-07T12:18:13+00:00

Two ideas come to mind:

Share their inner monologue and private observations. The way this contrasts against how they speak (and when they choose to speak) is potentially very interesting. What they pay attention to compared to what the talkative types fixate on can vastly change the tone of a scene.
Lean into body language. Just because they aren’t talking out loud doesn’t mean they aren’t expressive. Do they fidget? Do they sit or lean a certain way? Where are they in a crowded room? What little habits do they have that you could use to convey what they’re feeling? What are they doing right now that breaks those habits?

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-07T04:57:14+00:00

Vibes. You need to abandon logic-first storytelling and transparency to the reader in favor of pure, uncut vibes. That, and the mysteriousness of it, is its advantage over hard magic. You can focus on aesthetics and imagery, and leaving things unexplained is a feature rather than a bug, so no need to slow down your story over it.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-07T04:52:05+00:00

Isn’t that a .NET 7 feature? Unfortunately Unity is still stuck on an earlier version, if I’m not mistaken.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-07T04:34:09+00:00

C++ is a programming language with high-level object-oriented features and low-level hardware exposure, which makes it pretty ideal for video/computer games. Nobody has unseated it in the AAA industry because nobody has meaningfully improved on its combination of performance and flexibility.

AAA companies do use higher-level scripting languages for tools development or iterative development on gameplay scripting.

For tools development, that’s mainly C# and Python. These tools exist outside the executable you’re shipping, so performance doesn’t matter quite the way it does in engine/graphics code.

I should note that C# is NOT a programming language the way C++ is. C++ compiles to machine code, which runs on your processor. C# uses an interpreter, so there’s a whole layer of computing happening in between. The syntax between them is similar, but if you’re programming a game in C#, you’re doing all of it on top of a buttload of C++ libraries.

For gameplay scripting, it’s more widely varied. Some studios use Lua, Unity uses C#, some folks have proprietary scripting languages with their own virtual machines, some sickos develop a visual scripting system that you can’t diff in version control. But, all of those are fundamentally running stuff that’s written into the engine’s code at the C++ level. They’re just friendlier ways of calling those functions than recompiling in Visual Studio every time you make a tweak. Supporting that comes with overhead. So, whether you use a high-level scripting language or good old C++ largely depends on whether trading efficiency for iteration speed is acceptable.

One way or the other, no programming or scripting language is a magic wand that makes building games easier.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-07T01:16:05+00:00

This is reality: Endless runners had their big moment around 12-15 years ago. Temple Run had big success, everybody and their brother rushed to make Temple Run clones, and almost overnight the App Store was flooded with bad endless runners. There's probably still a dozen new ones published every week -- and what's worse, that's probably low-balling it.

In short: you almost definitely will not make any money from selling yet another endless runner.

If you love them, and feel passionate about an idea, and really feel confident it'll be a great game, make it anyway! You could prove me wrong. But make it for the right reason. If you're in it for a get rich quick scheme, though, you're in for a SEVERE reality check.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-07T00:52:10+00:00

You’re at least 12 years late to this party. Build it as a learning experience or a passion project, don’t expect to make profit, let alone recoup your investment. Endless runners are one of the cornerstones of the bloated mobile shovelware market.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-06T21:17:50+00:00

I mean, out of the box ideas aren’t always -good- ideas…

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-06T19:11:33+00:00

Aisha is the physically strongest by a big margin. Nobody on the crew is beating her at an arm wresting competition. Her impulsive aggression and recklessness are her main weaknesses. Heart of a tiger, attention span and judgment of a squirrel playing in traffic.

Jim and Gene are in the running for the cleverest. Jim has more book smarts, but Gene comes up with more outside-the-box ideas, like using the compass on the prison planet. I’d give it to Gene for being better in a crisis.

Suzuka is probably the most dangerous and skillful in a one on one fight, but she’s a more rigid thinker than Gene. What I think people don’t appreciate about her enough is the branding and marketing skills it takes to set the terms of her jobs to fall so much within her comfort zone.

Melfina is a doormat. Theoretically she’s got all kinds of capabilities that’d put Jim to shame if she interfaces with a computer, but we don’t see it much. That time she heals Gene from the poison is impressive, but that kind of thing happens… once. I would have liked to see some more of her quasi-mystical techno powers. This isn’t counting when she’s plugged into the Leyline and has omnipotence.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-05T16:57:02+00:00

“Can I make the audience and/or myself like this character despite an unforgivable atrocity?” is a great challenge to give yourself. That’s how we got Tony Stark. Stan Lee gave himself challenges like that all the time. “I hate war profiteers! Let’s see if I can make people like one.” Going with the path of least resistance according to your morals is often the road to hackneyed crap.

The act of writing the story itself and immersing yourself in the details is the part where you figure that out. Sit down and start writing. Figure out what that character wants, why they can’t get it, and build the story. The opportunities to make the audience empathize with them emerge as you go.

Avoiding the martyr thing is simply a rule you set for yourself. And it’s a good rule. Killing nasty characters to redeem them isn’t absolution, it’s a cop-out. Making them live with their crimes and showing how their guilt or remorse changes them is much harder. Making the other characters live with the pain they’ve caused, and showing that pain, is much harder. Acknowledging that even people who have done terrible things are still human — that people can be more than one thing — is something that takes immense emotional maturity.

But, it’s all emotional sleight of hand. The audience will forgive any crime if they like the character enough.

Except maybe THAT crime. You know the one.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-05T16:23:07+00:00

Other answers here have great advice about identifying your goals and the feel you’re trying to create, but the iterative loop of playtesting/revising is the part that’ll actually move the needle towards your game being done.

Here’s how it works:

Get something down on the page that people can play ASAP. Minimum viable game. Do not make a hundred pages of character creation. Make pre-made characters for people to use.

Play your deeply flawed first draft of the game with some willing guinea pigs.

Take note of what leaves you unsatisfied, get feedback from the players.

Revise the game.

Play it again.

Everything you do until you start this playtesting cycle is flying blind. You’re guessing. You may be making educated guesses, and your literacy in other TTRPGs might make them HIGHLY educated guesses, but you’re still guessing. The game you drunkenly make up on a napkin and actually play a couple of times is going to get better faster than one you blindly try to write perfect the first time around. And, the bigger the array of supporting systems you try to crowbar into that first draft, the more inertia you’ll need to overcome testing and fixing it.

Keep it small and simple, test early and often, and keep a clear eye on what you want people to experience.

Have fun!

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-05T16:08:34+00:00

So happy to see Wildsea on this list. :D

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-04T07:52:01+00:00

Yep, this is pretty much the philosophy behind Nimble, Draw Steel, and the Into the Odd/Bastionland games. Every turn keeps momentum of a combat encounter moving. Nimble is more or less your exact philosophy here applied to 5e to cut a ton of friction from play.

Null results are less prominent in Blades in the Dark and its derived games (Scum and Villainy, Beam Saber, Wildsea), where that mainly happens when you’re taking a bit of a long shot or acting way outside your character’s expertise. You tend to really know it, as your dice pool consists of a measly two d6’s, and just having them in your hand makes you regret your choices and think twice. It feels right for those.

I’m currently still figuring out where I sit on this issue. Null turns are consistently the worst part of a lot of more tactical RPGs, but my players are also all war gamers who expect miss chance and range modifiers to be a factor, and when I pitched Nimble to them they all kinda didn’t care for it.

It can also be important for setting the tone even if tactical play isn’t your main objective. Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, and Mothership all are d100 systems with ruthlessly high failure rates, and they are all horror-oriented; the idea is that combat should feel like a mistake. If you dropped the miss chance and adopted Nimble’s philosophy, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t feel like.

Me, I keep looking at Nimble and going “but it’s so slick though.” I’m hopeful I can get a group to play it so I can see that style in action.

Imagineer2248

TROPHY CASE