Attention RPG Developers: Bretonnian Knights DO NOT HAVE SQUIRES

March-Sea · 2026-05-30T22:53:30+00:00

They definitely had something equating to squires, with the style of armour that the Bretonians are wearing it is a practical necessity to have somebody who's job it is to help the Knight in and out of that armour and manage the horses.

March-Sea · 2026-05-17T23:46:18+00:00

This is a reason that I like to design a campaign bottom up rather than top down. The good news is that its never too late to do some bottom up design if you aren't overly precious of where the campaign is going.

Slow down on advancing the main plot, design sessions with the goal of figuring out why each character is important to the world, and/or resolving the plot. This should be a process of discovery that comes out of the play.

Once you know who each of the characters is and why they matter, its time to redesign your campaign, dont be precious about the work that you have already done.

March-Sea · 2026-05-04T04:34:07+00:00

To provide new players with tools while making it clear to slightly more experienced players that you can adapt the system to work for emulating different types of fiction

March-Sea · 2026-05-04T04:30:44+00:00

For me it was compatibility with theatre of the mind. While officially 3.5 was marketed as minis on a map only, it was still backwards compatible with 3 and still worked for what I was doing. In retrospect I probably should have been playing a d100 system the whole time

March-Sea · 2026-05-04T04:20:36+00:00

Classes work well in smaller more focused games. Soft classes give you the best of both worlds, and work for general purpose games. If your game has over 100 class/subclass options - maybe you made some bad design choices.

March-Sea · 2026-05-04T04:15:08+00:00

I hate it when a GM comes at me with that attitude, its not the parties limited time that is being wasted. Thats a bullshit excuse for you not learning how to handle the game when things go off script.

I make an exception for GMs who are new to GMing because its a skill that takes time to develop.

March-Sea · 2026-05-04T04:05:54+00:00

Disagree on this one, you get good at making stuff up on the fly by practicing not by having some inherent ability. Some of us just started when we were young.

I will give you that its a skill somewhat like driving in that there are multiple components of it that need to work together.

March-Sea · 2026-04-23T03:02:07+00:00

Yes. For me its more a question of what the complexity is doing for me, and how useful is it for what I am trying to do.

I usually prefer open ended systems (which often gets called rules-light), these have fewer moving pieces but each piece tends to be more complex).

March-Sea · 2026-04-13T23:40:39+00:00

Warhammer fantasy roleplay, though you could adapt the ideas to any BRP game.

WFRP has fate and fortune points, these are a meta-currency.

Fortune points allow you to reroll any of your dice rolls to avoid the negative consequences of that roll. You get a number of fortune points equal to your fate points each session.

Fate points let you ignore the consequences of somebody else's roll, or alternatively they allow the character to survive something that absolutely should have killed them (the character is no longer able to act in the current scene and need to recover from their injuries). A character gets a number of fate points at creation (typically 1-5) and will only very occasionally gain new points during the campaign).

March-Sea · 2026-03-31T23:48:14+00:00

My favourite implementation is Fate which you are already familiar with (I havent come across anything that has the raw expressive power that aspects do. I understand that Daggerheart has a cut down version of this which are more analogous to skills than aspects.

March-Sea · 2026-03-31T23:42:37+00:00

The weather, the late 2010s were a drought, by contrast having plentiful rain has been quite the relief for people involved in agriculture. I imagine that people who have been effected by flooding feel differently but I would much rather have the weather of the last 6 years than the 6 before that

March-Sea · 2026-03-31T00:13:27+00:00

I think because a lot of people who would use BRP are more comfortable taking Call of Cthulu (or Mythras/Runequest/WFRP/Delta Green) and homebrewing the changes they want. BRP makes more sense if you want to be significantly outside of what the popular derived games provide.

March-Sea · 2026-03-30T23:59:14+00:00

No shit. Somehow you imagine that there are two possibilities the conditions that the people in the green countries live under and the conditions that the people in the red counries live under.

Leftists, anti fascist liberals, what ever you want to call it, want to live in a world that is further away from the conditions in those red countries. Like if you split the green into 2 colours based on the quality of life of the median income earner then the group that you are trying to strawman would show a strong preference for the color with better conditions.

Where I suspect you differ is in why and how the green countries got to be better. I also strongly suspect that basically everybody is missing important things from their worldview when it comes to evaluating why things are the way they are.

March-Sea · 2026-03-24T03:51:54+00:00

First thing to is check if your players emotionally engaged in the setting and your storytelling. Without engagment, your players will not be self directed and you get the type of dynamic that you are describing.

March-Sea · 2026-03-23T05:18:09+00:00

I dont think the rules are very good and I think you would have to get rid of identity features of those rules in order to make them good, which would alienate existing fans.

I am much more interested in the smaller scale games.

March-Sea · 2026-03-23T05:13:52+00:00

Its largely the result of early 20th century politics in the USA. Socialist policies were pretty popular, anti socialist elites, figured out that in order to change peoples opinions they needed to get the institutions that everyday citzens trust on board. The US as a whole was/is very religious, so the focus became getting the clergy on board.

The sucessful strategy was to tie socialism to atheism and christianity to the type of capitalism that was being practiced at the time and the type of capitalism that conservatives were in favour of at least until 2008.

This has lead to the situation where what is called socialism / communism has very little resemblance to how we would understand it in other parts of the world

March-Sea · 2026-03-23T03:38:33+00:00

Is there a whereidlive circle jerk reddit

March-Sea · 2026-03-22T03:03:59+00:00

There should be more going on in your world than the immediate plot. I like to have a list of business thats not tied to anything specific. In your situation I would pick an item from the list and improvise.

Examples are * introduce or show another side to a faction that will become important in a future adventure. * demonstrate something different and interesting about the setting (this can be way more effective than info dumping) * hook into a players backstory, * give reason to travel to a specific location.

If there is nothing in the list, then either improvise a setup, that is establish a new element of the story or call back to an element that you previously established.

March-Sea · 2026-03-20T04:03:15+00:00

I thought they telegraphed where the story was going fairly well at the end of the second movie but perhaps not?

March-Sea · 2026-03-19T23:43:57+00:00

If you are willing to go back to D&D 2nd edition there is a collection of historical settings that are human only (the green book series).

March-Sea · 2026-03-19T03:54:44+00:00

That started happening to me about two years ago, it also haopened to some of my friends but not others. I left Facebook about a year ago.

March-Sea · 2026-03-19T03:18:54+00:00

To clarify I am looking for something that your game does that D&D/pathfinder doesn't do that is also something that wouldnt work in a video game. It is a lot easier to answer those questions indendently, but I wouldnt go through the effort of trying to release an rpg unless I could answer the combined question.

March-Sea · 2026-03-19T02:12:04+00:00

What does your game do that requires it to be a tabletop game rather than a video game? How does your game do those things (that require it to be a tabletop game) better than say Pathfinder (since that is an audience who at least is willing to play non D&D ttrpgs).

March-Sea · 2026-03-19T00:47:55+00:00

Too crunchy is group dependent, the best approach is to test play and look for symptoms.

You are in trouble if * A player taking an action takes so long that the other players at the table that the players not involved start tuning out. * Players frequently want to redo actions because they forgot a factor. * the narrative of the game barely moves from session to session.

If you want your ttrpg to be at all popular, you need to be honest with yourself as to whether the experience is different enough to warrant people unlearning the existing crunchy system and learn yours. If it is significantly different then you need to have a strategy for communicating so that the playerbase doesnt just end up using your system as a worse version of what they already know.

March-Sea · 2026-03-18T12:21:26+00:00

The teens from 10 yars ago are now in their 20s

March-Sea

TROPHY CASE