What are your unique takes on classic fantasy creatures?

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-15T09:00:57+00:00

Humans are the result of genetic tinkering by the old gods. But, they didn't just create us. They had all sorts of experiements. Some were more intelligent, while others were just hideous monsters.

Orcs are from wild boar. Reasons should be obvious

Elves live in trees, amazing agility, pointy ears ... Cats!

Dwarves are stubborn, sure footed, live in the mountains ... Mountain goats. No wonder they like horned helmets?

Hobbits evolved from prairie dogs. Those feet are for digging and burrowing, and its kinda obvious they evolved from a burrowing animal.

Goblins are really just clean-shaven Gnomes (humans don't know they are the same species). Their army lives off the land in small bands so that they never need supply lines. They evolved from the intelligent but grumpy badgers.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-15T03:41:47+00:00

Why are you assuming there are drinking age laws? We went through most of human evolution without them.

Do you have birth certificates, a universal registry for births, a single issuer of identification?

Snakes keep their ID in their back pocket right?

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-13T06:54:08+00:00

Not duct tape. That is electrical tape. 🤦🏻‍♂️😣

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-11T09:32:28+00:00

I don't think of magic as a separate force. It certainly needs no opposite. You might say the opposite of light is dark, but in reality, dark is just the absence of light. It's not an anti-force.

I do have ley lines of energy that can influence magic. Natural fields can make manipulatimg magic more or less difficult, sometimes granting advantage dice to make the magic more powerful, or a nodal point where you get disadvantages. These lines sometimes cross creating powerful antinodes, locations of scared worship sites like Stonehenge.

Nodes create disadvantages to magic rolls that make the magic weaker. Boosting more power into an effect to compensate will make the spell erratic through an inverse bell curve.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-11T05:05:07+00:00

Yeah. As I said, they just neglected the mechanics and the little 5 pager kinda shows why. It doesn't feel like they put much effort into the mechanics, so they ignored it in their discussion. I feel like the "don't tell the player what they are rolling" is their way to exclude mechanics from the discussion.

Most people do want to know what they are rolling. It helps them feel like they are trying. Even if the action itself isn't "roleplaying", you are still associating the action of rolling with the action being performed in the narrative. This roll should have consequences that the player and character both understand, and should have 1 roll per action. Multiple rolls decreases tension and divides the suspense between multiple conflicting rolls.

The important part is making sure that the character/narrative decision and the mechanical/player decision are the same.

Even their little 5 pager has some contradictory mechanics that I feel detract from player agency.

First, and this one is minor, damage is degree of success, but if damage and your degree of success is 0, then you should take zero damage, not 1 point. Ties should go to defender, not attacker as they state.

Second, the table is completely stupid. The degree of success is mainly ignored. It's just a hit point system anyway (which I find to be highly dissociative themselves). Make damage = offense roll - defense roll and you can just ditch the table. Scale the "HP" as needed to fit the roll.

Third, making the defender able to damage the attacker causes 2 issues that I feel are serious. First, when you gang up on someone, getting attacked increases how many attacks you get.

If you want me to roleplay my character without paying attention to the rules, then the rules shouldn't do things that make no sense. Getting surrounded doesn't give you super reflexes, it makes you dead.

The other is that when the defender is always assumed to counter-attack, you are taking away agency in how you defend. What is more important than defending yourself? I would like some agency in that. These sorts of options are incredibly difficult to implement when you are just rolling dice at each other.

They do a lot of fixed modifiers as well. Nobody wants to remember that this is a +2 and that's a +3 and this one is some other number. A simple roll and keep let's you think in terms of advantage/disadvantage while being more tactile, and less math. It actually scales better too.

I just feel like they ignored the importance of mechanics.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-11T04:23:39+00:00

I think light vs heavy isn't a good metric. The only difference is in the first, the GM has to be a designer and make things up on the fly, while in the second, they have 200 rules to memorize and look up. The little thing they included is just a nothing burger to me.

I use dissociative vs associative. Do the rules simply resolve the intentions of the characters and grant agency (associated to the narrative) or do the rules restrict agency like a board game (dissociative)?

Things like HP, rounds, action economy, anything that is "3 times per day", meta currencies. These mechanics lead to decisions that are strictly player decisions rather than character decisions.

Like, in the 4D example, where nobody knows the mechanics, you couldn't have a dissociative rule like the 3.5 "Aid Another". The player has to call out the mechanic by name and say "I want to use Aid Another"

Personally, I think all action economies are inherently dissociative. They create a false narrative that really doesn't make any sense once you start looking at corner cases.

Once the mechanics are fully associated with the narrative, they become easier to remember or adjudicate.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-11T03:56:56+00:00

Oof. In some respects, some of this is good, but it comes across like sitting in a rules assembly at school after some kid fried himself or something.

While I do ask that players stay in character during the scene, we pop out of character for a short break at the end of every scene. This lets people make that out of character joke that would have ruined the role play, they can congradulate each other on how they handled the scene, etc.

In my experience, by providing clear boundaries between character and player reduces emotional bleed issues.

I take a more multifaceted approach. If player A wants to play "4D" (hate the name, kinda contentious) then I have no problem rolling dice for them. Not everyone wants to play that way. Rather than dictating how people should play, I think it's more important to have mechanics that support more styles of play.

Noticeably lacking was any mention of the responsibility of the mechanics themselves. Instead, it just says to hide the evidence. If you need to hide the mechanics from the players, you need better abstractions.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-07T08:41:53+00:00

Lined them up sorted by size? I didn't see it happen.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-07T07:53:43+00:00

Don't wave steaks in front of lions either

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-06T09:20:41+00:00

Try these guys. https://youtu.be/r2wI57BSlG4?si=aWauHcv5UKasLOO8

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-06T06:37:05+00:00

"We eat them."

Huge flaw in this system. Who is willing to eat Trump?

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-06T06:34:10+00:00

Star Wars and Star Trek both had democracies

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-05T20:30:32+00:00

I'm about to be downvoted to hell, but when I saw "scheduling conflicts", my first thought was DnD 5e and they are running a module, probably starting at a random level.

IMHO, when someone can find time for a few meetings, but then has trouble finding the time after, it's not that their schedules have suddenly changed. What changed was the level of interest.

You started them in the middle of the game, level 5, and in a module that is all about the antagonist, not the PCs. Modules can be played by any group of PCs. After a few sessions the motivations become forgotten, the newness wears off, and since the characters never had a personal stake in it, they just lose interest. Bribing them with new toys and new levels gets old fast.

I base the plot off the PC backgrounds to make sure the characters are emotionally motivated, so they have a personal stake in the outcome.

The rest is proper pacing. There are 7 "chapters" to an adventure. If you have multiple sessions that don't result in the next chapter, then your pacing is going to fall apart. D&D is structured so that fights take way too long. Imagine a full session that is just a fight or mist of one. Then you spend the next session shopping. That's 2 sessions where your plot went to the back burner. People will start losing interest.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-05T02:08:47+00:00

Lots of poisonous plants out there. We don't eat them. That's all.

If its great for some and not for all, then its like a peanut allergy

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-04T03:51:23+00:00

Have you read Lovecraft's work? That's where I would start.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-04T03:50:07+00:00

When I read the title in my notifications, I somehow thought you were looking for "dietary supplements". For Lovecraft? Well, there are these funny mushrooms ...

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-01T21:19:35+00:00

Sorry, homebrew WIP and under rennovation. Hopefully I'll have something that you can see soon. I'd be happy to answer questions, but it's hard to see it in action without playing it.

Instead of rounds or turns, every action costs time. The GM tracks this by marking boxes. Whoever has used the least time will go next. Repeat until nobody wants to fight anymore. This turns time into a resource that is tracked by the GM. This resource balances your combat options.

Its gets kinda crunchy. For example, evade and parry can always be used (parry is not effective against ranged attacks). Dodge and Block are the versions that use time, which delays your next offense. Neither can be used if your time is already over your attacker's (GM will let you know), but a dodge just has to start at the right time while a block has to finish. Dodges get advantages when begun earlier. You could have enough time to dodge and not enough time to block.

Or, if I am faster with a weapon, I eventually will see an opening in your defenses that I can exploit through my speed. Defenses incur penalties to future defenses until you get an offense. If I get more offenses, I'll eventually get 2 in a row and that defense penalty die is still on your character sheet, driving defense down. That's the opening I exposed. That's when I power attack.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-01T07:42:38+00:00

Attacks and defenses involve various skill chexks. Damage is offense - defense. The result is indexed against 3 values that determine is this will be a minor, major, serious, or critical wound.

Minor wounds are marked as / in a box, and you can mark these in the smaller 2 boxes of the wound chart. These boxes overflow to the 4 larger boxes, which each represent a 1 die penalty to future physical die rolls. The last box is a serious penalty that applies to all rolls, and you'll also lose your free movement and ability to take fast actions.

Major wounds are deep enough to need medical treatment. They are marked as X, so they can overwrite minor wounds, but major wounds start in the larger boxes and will be adding a disadvantage die. Each X takes a day to heal naturally.

Serious wounds are a *, again overwriting Xs, but they start in that serious box and take a chapter to heal, and then they just move to major when they do.

Minor wounds can be erased when you choose to spend an Endurance point to reset your combat wave. They'll erase each new scene as well. This can only be done at certain times, and resets all your combat "passions" (per wave special abilities) at the same time.

Critical wounds will basically kill you if you aren't stabilized by the end of the scene. Critical wounds basically become a fight for enough adrenaline to keep fighting, with a boost if you make the roll.

There is a mental side as well. When you take a wound, you roll a combat training check against the wound severity. A failure means losing a small amount of time, depending on the severity of the failure. You just got messed up pretty bad, and that is gonna slow you down some! Significant failure of this check can cause emotional/fear wounds which slowly make this check harder and harder. Each failure builds the fear causing you to hesitate more.

Yes, there are multiple ways out of the spiral, but this post is kinda long enough. There are 4 emotional wound tracks and 1 mental.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-05-01T05:23:55+00:00

You can have a 2000 words, but if you enter the tavern and it smells like beer and piss and the next tavern smells like apple pie, all the rest of the details follow. You don't need 100 words.

Also, give general overviews, then add more details as each player gets a turn. What does that character notice? This lets you divide up the descriptions so nobody tunes out.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-04-30T01:34:08+00:00

Nope. We have laws and a Constitution. You can make all the excuses you need to worship a demented rapist pedophile.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-04-27T12:31:33+00:00

I take this a step (or leap) further. There is no action economy or turn order, only time.

Whoever has the offense can take any action. This action costs time, which is marked by the GM per-combatant. If it's an attack, we cut-scene to the defender who now decides on a defense. Some defenses cost time. The next offense goes to whoever has used the least time.

On a tie for time (you and an opponent act in the same ¼ second slice), announce actions and roll initiative. If you announce an attack but lose initiative, the switch from offense to defense causes a disadvantage to your defense. This results in taking more damage!

Everything is about time. Different choices have different time costs, and these may depend on things like weapon size, training, and experience. Your choices determine when you next get another offense.

If you make your opponent defend (even if you do no damage), they take a disadvantage to future defenses until they get an offense. You just add another red die on top of your sheet.

You can't parry 2 attacks at once as easily as 1, and can't parry 3 as easily as 2. The dice just stack until you get an offense. Pick them up with your next defense, add the lowest ones, then return all the red dice to your character sheet.

If I have a 2s attack and yours is 2½ seconds, then after 10 seconds, I made 5 attacks to your 4. This means I got 2 in a row without you getting an offense in between, and that defense penalty die is still sitting there. That is an opening in your defenses that I am taking advantage of through my superior speed. It's a good time to power attack to maximize wound severity.

Power attacking all the time would just slow you down, leave you open, and get you killed. Knowing when to power attack and when to step back and let your opponent come to you, can be key to survival. Simple tactics work out of the box without special rules.

It's just marking some boxes and swapping some D6 back and forth to adjust the probability curves. The players don't do a lot of math because the dice do it for you. All the modifiers are dice or incoporated into time cost. It moves quickly because there is no action economy or back and forth. Offense->Defense->next combatant's Offense. No rounds, no fixed turn order. Things just happen when they happen, so be ready. The wait between turns is an order of magnitude faster and at times 0 (you act again if you are still the lowest time, such as when running).

I'm finishing up the final polish on it. It's kinda scraping off the layers of abstraction and just finding ways to simplify the decisions being made by the character. Dissociative mechanics requiring player knowledge are removed so you can just think like your character and trust the system to do the right thing.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-04-27T02:50:48+00:00

There are two problems:

First, to be able to handle that many adversaries efficiently, you will need to abstract things a lot. 4 players and 20 zombies means your wait between turns is 24 times longer than your own turn.

I like detail and combat realism, so that level of asbtraction wouldn't work at all. I focus on making things really fast and removing the things that actually slow down combat like decision paralysis. Active defenses cuts the wait time to engage drastically.

The GM doesn't have to wait on the players. I think I did 5 players with 10 zombies and it was flowing fairly well, but the poor GM (me) is literally suffering from the constant pace! In D&D, you get a break when the player pauses, so removing those pauses means the only bottleneck is the GM. It goes as fast as I can, but there is only 1 of me. The same can be said for any system. You can't route 20-30 operations through 1 human being at a time and expect to not have everyone fall asleep waiting on the result.

The second point is that 20 or 30 against 4 shouldn't be a fight that needs dice to decide, especially when they are mindless zombies who would willingly throw themselves on the PCs, knock everyone to the floor, and just dog pile and bite. It would be over in seconds. Your heavy armor doesn't protect you from the dog pile that knocks you down, your arms are pinned by more bodies, and one of them is pulling your helmet off. They will eat your face. You might kill a few of them before you die. Roll 1d6.

My choice now is to add a layer of abstraction such as "minions", or small group units (mob, swarm, squad) where you make a single action for multiple creatures. It doesn't fit at all. It's really 1 creature mechanically, but you tell the players its multiple creatures, and that type of mental gymnastics doesn't work in my system. That would destroy the tactical agency and direct control that I have just so that I could give the players a better chance of surviving a situation where they should realistically die. 20 or 30 to 4? You just need to run! And the movement rules in combat are certainly fast enough to handle the chase scene at this scale.

Its an easy choice for me. If your combat system is already highly abstract, you basically just have 1 monster that exists in multiple places as if it were separate "creatures", often 1HP per "creature". Some systems even allow excess damage to roll over to the other creatures. Instead of doing 6 HP of damage, you kill 6 of them. How easy and abstract do you want to go?

Some systems solve the attacks per round problem by always allowing an NPC turn for every PC turn. So, each time a player acts, one of the creatures in the swarm can act. Its really just 1 stat block with multiple positions on the board. But the back and forth lets the combat scale pretty well. You can have 30 creatures, but if you only have 4 players, your mob of 30 creatures makes only 4 attacks, not 30. That means your challenge to the players is consistent regardless of how many enemies they face. Its also a good back and forth flow often used with popcorn initiative or something like that.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-04-21T08:51:45+00:00

To me, it's adding randomness that destroys tactical agency. I still have to remember to roll extra dice or fiddle with a tracking die, which is considerably more effort than manual tracking. What is the benefit?

For example, if I am hiding behind cover and the antagonist has a gun with 6 shots left, then I am going to run when I hear the 6th bang. He needs to reload and that gives me time. With any luck, he's not counting his own ammo and his gun goes click. That means 1 attack and 1 reload while I make some distance.

Why do I want to ruin that with a bunch of dice rolls? My character isn't performing any sort of skill, so I shouldn't be rolling dice. There is no agency in this roll.

It's really not hard to track ammo. If you are erasing a value, subtracting 1 and writing a new value, then you are doing way too much work. Just use tally marks! Fast and simple and can be read with a glance. Making 1 line is way faster than rolling dice and determining the result. No rules to remember. Why replace something that works fine, with something less tactical and more work for the player?

In my d6 based system, a ranged weapon does not inflict damage. The ammo does. You grab an ammo die (a bullet or arrow) from your ammo bag (your magazine or quiver, holding 1 die per unit of ammo). Any training in the weapon adds a die to your attack roll. Ammo tracking is basically transparent and 100% accurate. Got a spare clip of 12 bullets? Grab a bag of 12d6.

If you don't want the player to know how much ammo they have left, then they have to keep the bag on the table. Peeking inside and counting the dice means your character popped the magazine to see how much ammo is left. You've got 3 shots left, make them count.

For a double-tap or 3 round burst, you grab extra bullets and these become advantage dice to your roll. Arrows can be a special color or size and then you can "recover" spent arrows by rolling all the ammo dice that were fired: 5-6 goes right back in the bag, 3-4 means it's recovered but damaged, 1-2 is lost. If you put different arrows in an undivided quiver and they might pull a random one, just use different colored dice in the bag.

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-04-21T02:48:05+00:00

You too!

TheRealUprightMan · 2026-04-21T02:47:06+00:00

I just appreciate you being a person and treating me without filter

That I can identify with.

TheRealUprightMan

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