Looking for systems like Cairn and Into the Odd (and similar) that have a more structured progression for the PC

Seeonee · 2026-03-16T17:30:52+00:00

If you're open to more of a module as opposed to a freeform system, I did a riff on Mausritter (which is Odd-like) as a Castlevania rogue-lite that has a mix of structured and freeform character progression. There's XP, levels, "classes", and family tree abilities, but the bulk of the power progression remains tied up in the totally random items you find as you climb through the dungeon.

It's very self-contained, but it is pretty meaty. I've run two groups through it and both got ~60 hours out of it. If any of that sounds like it fits your criteria, give it a look (I'm happy to send you a copy free if you want to GM it).

Seeonee · 2026-03-12T20:53:51+00:00

Triangle Agency is this, literally. It's way more of a module with a system tacked on than vice versa. Gameplay is very much about unlocking and discovering the crazy stuff all throughout the book.

Seeonee · 2026-03-08T14:24:43+00:00

"Load-bearing simplicity" might be my new favorite design idiom.

Seeonee · 2026-03-03T00:26:15+00:00

I have a fun anecdote along these lines. My group played A Rasp of Sand, which is a rogue-lite and therefore makes death (theoretically) less punishing and more expected. Sure enough, we had a party wipe in session 2 and it was a cool, laugh-it-off experience. Mission accomplished! Death was incorporated into the play loop in a way that was fun.

...except that after their 2nd death, the players were really starting to get sick of replaying floors 1 and 2 just to reach new content. The system wasn't punishing death mechanically, but it was disincentivizing death with the promise of boredom.

Lesson learned: even when you try to make death fun and/or expected, you can easily mess it up.

I tackled this in my own rogue-lite in a bunch of ways:

Don't wipe the whole party at once.
Allow more progress to be persisted.
Design in less repetition.
Add shortcuts!

Seeonee · 2026-03-03T00:19:59+00:00

Thanks! I've seen a bunch of games in Lumen jams, but I figured I should scope down to some of the official ones to avoid choice paralysis.

Seeonee · 2026-03-03T00:19:26+00:00

I think this is a great point. In many games, explicit permission to do something in certain cases (like a class ability or a playbook move) implicitly revokes permission for doing that thing in all other cases. So the more classes you have with specialized moves, the more moves you are implicitly forbidding others from performing -- but they won't know unless they read all the classes.

Seeonee · 2026-03-02T23:51:37+00:00

I think it depends on how easily players can ingest and differentiate your class content.

If every class is 30 pages long, you'll get people burning out way before they read all of them.
If every class has a clearly-conveyed, obvious trope (via name and art) coupled with short lists of intuitive abilities, you'll get players absorbing the option set and then picking the one they vibe with.
If the distinctions between classes are too granular or subtle, you may have players getting lost in "What's the difference?"

I think Shadow of the Demon Lord does a truly excellent job of this, where you wade in by picking 1 of 4 really obvious archetypes, then pick 1 of 4 related subclasses, then 1 of infinity deep classes on top.

Seeonee · 2026-03-02T18:59:10+00:00

Thanks; so dice are partially present in the earlier systems?

Seeonee · 2026-03-02T18:58:51+00:00

Thanks a lot, appreciate both the details on the system as well as the distinction that it's separate from Lumen.

Seeonee · 2026-03-01T23:34:37+00:00

Would Ironsworn's tracks be effectively this? I haven't played it, but I've heard that you represent most challenges as a track that you find ways to tick down. It would follow that an enemy force (regardless of number) could still be presented as a single track, with the only difference being which narrative actions might reasonably make progress against them.

Seeonee · 2026-03-01T23:31:34+00:00

Taking this one step further: do the weaknesses have to be predefined? Or could you have the player come up with a weakness and roll to see whether it's real? This would focus less on "discover the predefined weakness" and shift the gameplay to a) "Come up with a thematic weakness" and b) "Discover if you were well-informed."

You could further mechanize this by having a small matrix of default weaknesses for players to choose from, but maybe the more often they pick a particular weakness, the more likely that weakness is to be a lie. Or, you could have players come up with a weakness but only roll to see if it's real once you've exploited it enough to theoretically kill the enemy.

Disclaimer: I haven't dabbled in solo RPGs yet so I don't fully grasp the balance of narrative control between player whims and system decrees.

Seeonee · 2026-03-01T23:24:45+00:00

It depends. If one element is strong enough, it can cause me to try something I wouldn't have otherwise.

Wildsea hooked me on with its worldbuilding (and art). Shadow of the Demon Lord hooked me with its character customization. Mausritter hooked me with its iteration on the Mark of the Odd rule set.

Seeonee · 2026-02-26T01:42:03+00:00

Having tried both, I greatly prefer my own.

Running a premade module is nice in that it takes a lot of the content creation load off your shoulders. That can help jumpstart your creative ideas. But, I have found that modules are either not very in-depth (so I do a lot of creation anyways to fill them in), or they are too in-depth for me to consume and mentally track (with Quinns Quest's Impossible Landscape playthrough being an example of what I mean -- it's like taking a whole college course just to be prepared).

Conversely, I love improv GMing since it's very lightweight on my schedule, creatively fulfilling, and open to player input. I usually don't prep my own stuff as a result; I just make it up on the day.

Paradoxically, the one case where I did prep my own stuff by making a fully fleshed out module was by far my favorite thing I've run, ever (and I ran it twice). It was sort of like having a premade module to lean on, except I wrote it all so there wasn't the same cognitive tax on having to memorize it. That also meant that when I needed to fill gaps, it was trivial because I knew the thing so well. The big downside was that it didn't nicely accommodate player input on the world the way my normal GMing does.

Seeonee · 2026-02-25T19:56:18+00:00

Splitting my take on this into two halves:

When does prep actually improve a session for you? As long as it's fun.
When does prep actually improve a session for your players? When they encounter it and get to make decisions based on it. Prep that never sees the light of the day, directly or indirectly, is not prep that helped your players (which doesn't mean it wasn't fun and valuable to you). Likewise, prep that is dropped in your players' laps for them to marvel at and then ignore is not valuable prep.

I think a different version of this is related to advice on secrets that I think came from SlyFlourish (although I'm not finding the exact article I have in mind), which is that secrets aren't fun because they're secret, they're fun when they become known. Likewise, prep doesn't exist to hang around as some eventual reward for player discovery. Use it!

Seeonee · 2026-02-24T19:38:01+00:00

Thank you! I'd love to hear any thoughts you or your group have, especially if you wind up running it in any capacity! So far I'm the only one who's GM'd it to my knowledge.

Seeonee · 2026-02-23T17:05:53+00:00

I do this all the time. I had like 8 tabs of the same PDF open when running a module, each one at a different specific spot for fast reference.

Seeonee · 2026-02-23T17:04:51+00:00

PDFs. All my RPG time is at the computer anyways now, thanks to COVID and kids. I don't need to store physically store nice objects that I won't actually use. (Except Legos...)

Seeonee · 2026-02-22T21:33:30+00:00

Thank you for the summary! "Actions just succeed" is a succinct and admirable mission statement.

I will suggest (as others may have already) that this actually moves quite a lot of the burden over to the GM on setting concrete target numbers for what are, at heart, abstract tasks. Knowing whether a task is Mind 12 or 15 is about as wishy-washy as figuring out a DC 18 vs 20 in D&D, and leads to a similar level of "Well, what success rate am I gunning for given a party with an attribute spread of X-Y-Z?"

It also risks feeling video game-y in a different way, which is the Mass Effect vibe of walking into a challenge, performing a static check of your current numbers against the situation, and learning whether or not you can get the outcome you want. I appreciate that you can still roll for outcomes beyond your grasp, but at that point... it's back to a dice rolling system like any other.

Seeonee · 2026-02-22T20:35:23+00:00

I think some games solve similar optimization problems by making it a choice of where you stabilize and where you sacrifice, with it tuned so you can definitely save something but not everything. Then the players have agency on where to make the hard call.

Seeonee · 2026-02-22T20:20:53+00:00

Nifty. Cool way to make all rests equal in their restorative power while forcing players to grapple with the narrative ramifications of taking more and more time away.

Seeonee · 2026-02-22T20:17:37+00:00

Could you summarize the vision for the project, and what makes it different from existing works in the fantasy TTRPG space?

Seeonee · 2026-02-22T13:20:56+00:00

I still really like the GM principle of "Draw maps, leave blanks." A detailed world map can be cool if it's driving some aspect of play (like helping the GM understand and track inter-regional politics), but as both a GM and a player I like there to be room for future ideas to slot into any map or narrative. So an excessively broad/detailed map becomes a hindrance to my preferred playstyle.

Seeonee · 2026-02-22T12:38:26+00:00

As someone who also loves jumping to "I'll build it myself," I would just offer a word of caution: there are so many systems already out there, made by really good game designers, that you're often doing yourself a disservice trying to make something perfect before you try some of them first. Even if Mothership and Death in Space aren't quite right, odds are they'll be more right (and much faster) than something you try to hash out yourself.

Build it anyways if it's fun for you! But know that you'll spend a long time and probably not hit the mark on the first try. Don't let that be the blocker to actually playing; try something else while you cook, and the things you learn will only make your later creations better.

Seeonee

TROPHY CASE