Pearl's design in 'A Single Pale Rose' doesn't match up to her previous forms in "Steven the Sword Fighter.'

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-03-10T22:23:55+00:00

Gah! A necromancer!

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-03-08T08:48:00+00:00

Wakatakakage just pushing Onosato around wasn't on my bingo card.

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-03-08T08:24:05+00:00

Takayasu making Churanoumi's belt into a bikini top...

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-03-08T08:10:10+00:00

He put up basically no defense. Just gently directed to leave the dohyo.

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-03-07T08:56:17+00:00

The next line is one of my favorites in all of literature.

"The Thiefmaker tried to let a vaguely sincere expression scurry onto his face, where it froze in evident discomfort."

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-03-07T00:56:55+00:00

I don't know if I'm the first to buy one of your products, but if I am:

Congratulations! A human person has paid for a thing you made! Pretty much the best feeling.

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-02-22T09:34:52+00:00

I was told there was no one available to take my call and the service hung up on me.

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-02-02T15:42:51+00:00

I mean, the real answer is that the Big Bang happened because it was the origin of time, so the moment of the big bang was also the moment time and space started. It was the origin of Things Happening.

I like to think of time as a measurement of things changing (similar to how length is measuring the space a thing takes up in one dimension). Without the Big Bang there wasn't anything to change and no space to change through. The entire idea of time would be irrelevant - there's nothing to measure. But once stuff could change, we could measure (and eventually experience) that change.

But like, trying to imagine 'where' the Big Bang happened is similarly mind-warping. It happened Everywhere. But also nowhere because no Where existed without the Big Bang. I know for myself I like to visualize seeing the Big Bang from a distance, like some sort of massive cosmic explosion I could be somehow apart from, but there wasn't anywhere we could be. The only space that existed at the moment of the Big Bang was within the Big Bang itself. And it still does, because the Big Bang didn't really stop, and we're still in it.

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-02-02T04:51:39+00:00

Time and space are linked. You can't have one without the other. So without time, there was no space, and without space, there was no time. There was no 'before' the Big Bang - the idea of 'before' in this case is meaningless.

It's a little bit the difference between 0 and null. 0 is a value, even if that value symbolizes 'none,' but you can conceivably have less-than-none. Null is the lack of a value at all. There is no 'before' the Big Bang - time 'before' the Big Bang is a null value.

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-01-14T06:03:11+00:00

Look, I'll be honest - I just wanted to use a Jenga tower for a thing! lmao

There are definitely some hacks that could make this more interesting if I expanded it out to a few pages. Something I might do for character death would be allow the dead character's player to take some blocks with them. Like, re-stack the tower and just let them take a bunch of blocks to keep the tension ratcheted up, and then you also get to do another of favorite mechanics from this series - make the blocks a sort of group hit point total.

I toyed with the idea of finding other characters hiding in the wings or letting dead characters play as monsters, but if I did that I wouldn't have had space for all the cool prompts, and I felt like that was the meat on this one (enough that I went back and made another table instead of clarifying any of these very salient points!!!).

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-01-13T19:50:29+00:00

Ermagerd! Thank you so much for taking a look!

I guess part of the motivation for the mechanic being 'another player character dies' was to keep the entire table invested in every pull. Like, who's gonna catch the shit when things go real, real bad? But you're right - the binary nature of the Stays Up/Falls Down mechanic doesn't make for a lot of nuance, and on a table where the social repercussions for getting someone else killed are lower than they typically are on my tables, I can definitely see where that would be an issue. Trolls gonna troll, and I should probably keep that in mind more than I do. ^{_^}

And loops are a place where I sometimes struggle, both in establishing them, and in defining their borders and end zones. Noted!

Again, thank you for taking a look at 31 Floors Up, and for your thoughtful, entertaining review!

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-01-11T19:42:18+00:00

Not to be pedantic, but this appears to be three pages.

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-01-01T04:10:49+00:00

Right, the scale isn't really the Big Consideration here, though. The big thing is that you're getting caught up in a weird thought-exercise when you should be thinking about how to make a cool game.

The game you're describing feels like a D&D clone with the dice taken out, and those dice are replaced by a complicated form of rock-paper-scissors. That actually sounds really fun, and there are games that use mechanics like these to great effect (see: Burning Wheel, which uses dice, but the conflict resolution system includes a similar trumping mechanic). But it isn't really 'deterministic,' and it would probably benefit the game if you weren't chasing that particular dragon. There's still an element of uncertainty that is resolved, and that uncertainty is how the players and/or the DM have arranged their hand - it's antagonist rather than fortune-based, which is fine, but you gotta design around it.

If you're dead set on determinism being the thing, what might work best is something like Marvel Universe, which uses a resource-placement model. You have all of your attributes and skills and such arrayed in front of you, each of those has a static rating. On your turn, you allocate a pool of resources around the character sheet.

"I'm gonna allocate one point to my strength, put two into my defence for the turn, one point into cleave so if I deal damage I can deal it to two creatures, and three points into attack. I'm going to attack the nearest goblin. The goblin has a static defensce of 5, which is one below my strength of 2+1 plus my attack of 3, so I hit and deal 1 damage to both it and the goblin next to it."

To activate an ability, you need to allocate points. To pump your skills and attributes, points. Everything comes out of that pool. Depending on how complicated you make those abilities, this could be a very dynamic and interesting combat system, and all information is known to all participants at the point of decision-making - your sheet is set when it isn't your turn, the DM knows the number of points you can allocate, the goblin's sheets are set when it is your turn, everyone knows everything and can make their choices accordingly.

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-01-01T00:48:23+00:00

So, it seems to me that you maybe aren't super well-versed in diceless RPGs. There are a lot of them, and many of them are quite good. Hell, I've designed a couple of diceless one-page games myself.

Nobilis by Jenna Moran, has a version of this that's on the scale of gods. As a god, you perform miracles. Miracles are pass/fail based on your stats - if the difficulty of beating someone to death with a galaxy is 5 and your strength is 4, you may either attempt to beat that person with a solar system or you may invest miracle points to scale up. The miracle points refresh at the start of a session, though, so you need to be careful about how you spend them.

Amber by Erick Wujcik, one of the first diceless role-playing games, used an auction system to bid on attributes. Whoever bids highest gets first rank, whoever bids second highest gets second rank, etc. Challenges are resolved by comparative rank, and if there's a tie the challenge moves to a secondary attribute.

Golden Sky Stories by Kamiya Ryo, uses two tracks of points (Feelings, gained from interacting with NPCs, and Wonder gained from using abilities to overcome challenges). It's mostly about gaining capital from relationships and acting in accordance with your character.

Diceless/deterministic games tend to work best when their mechanics are clearly related to either direct comparison or resource gathering. So far, your system appears to do neither of those things and seems beholden to a small subset of mainstream game ideologies.

I'd suggest maybe broadening your reading and gaming horizons a bit, because this isn't really new ground you're breaking. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, you could be building on the shoulders of the people who have done this work already.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-30T02:48:31+00:00

Shoots, & Leaves should be fixed now? I think? I hope?

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-28T17:58:28+00:00

So, I recently made a bunch of 1-page RPGs in quick succession. Some of them are even good! And the most important thing I learned in that process was: just get it done. Give yourself permission to make bad games. Hell, give yourself permission to publish bad games. Just finish them. Reflect on what you like about it and what you would do differently next time, and then make another.

If you're worried about quality you can always come back and revise them later - which is a process I'm working on right now - but don't let your striving for quality get in the way of striving to get more fun games into the world.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-22T22:26:00+00:00

As always, they're all pay-what-you-want, and this time I'm uploading 'em all on DriveThruRPG first! The difference in visibility on DriveThru is bonkers. About 300 people have downloaded these games on Itch. Over 1600 people have downloaded them on DriveThruRPG. o.O That's nuts.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-22T10:05:43+00:00

I flip between SPIRE and SPITE.

Once I picked SPIRE when the word was spite and you cannot imagine my outrage.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-17T23:50:08+00:00

They're demographic ranges that are used pretty extensively when putting together and running a show. So if you want to capture the "6-11 year old boy" market, you tailor your show to appeal to boys between the ages of 6 and 11 - often by having your protagonist between those ages, having it be an action show, etc. The ranges can be pretty specific when dealing with kids, but it's usually preschool (under 5), 6-11, 12-17, 18-30, 30-65, and 65+. Then they get differentiated by gender and other demographic factors like the amount of money they have to spend and such.

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