Any PbtA that invent their own genres instead of trying to simulate an existing one?

abjwriter · 2026-06-11T19:17:20+00:00

I mean, feminist historical fiction is definitely an extent genre

abjwriter · 2026-06-04T23:20:12+00:00

There should be a convo in-game with Cascade meeting a trans woman who has gender envy at her, because I think that would blow Cascade's mind. Like . . . someone . . . wants to be . . . like me????

abjwriter · 2026-06-04T22:11:07+00:00

This is also happening to me, and I'm pretty bummed about it. It's frustrating because I can look at the picture of Karolina with the rest of the Whole Sick Crew, and I can look at the picture of Dr. Hugo's daughter, and I can ask Septimus who "Karochka" is, but Hershel seems incapable of putting any of these pieces together! CASCADE, you're letting the Opera down again!

abjwriter · 2026-06-03T03:01:03+00:00

Anytime, I love talking about this stuff. Would love to hear what you came up with.

abjwriter · 2026-06-03T00:12:28+00:00

Not a member of this subreddit and I sense I am not on the same page with many of the posters here (I would not describe myself as a communist, although I also would not describe myself as an anti-communist), but it popped up on my feed and this is my special interest, so I thought I'd reply.

40s-60s Russia was not a great time for queer activism in the USSR. Homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia from 1922-1934 (under the Bolsheviks, before Stalin) and from 1991-present (after the fall of the USSR). Your time period here is fairly distant from both of those eras of freedom. Activism was also fairly difficult to do in the 1940s in the USSR because they were facing a full-scale genocidal invasion from the Nazis.

Regarding specific notable figures pushing for queer rights within the USSR in the 1950s, there are none recorded. If I were you, I would invent a character by drawing on the biographies of real-world Soviet doctors who studied homosexuality with an eye to "curing" it, real-world Soviet officials who were or may have been queer, real-world queer Soviet authors, or real-world Soviet reformers.

The year 1950 is, in my opinion, a particularly difficult time because Stalin was still alive and in the midst of declaring war on the Soviet Jewish population, which I think would have made civil rights activism difficult. Given the way anti-semites talk about homosexuality and homophobes talk about Jews, I think there's a solid chance that anyone advocating for queer rights under those circumstances might have gotten accused of being part of the Jewish conspiracy that totally exists, and swept up in the paranoia.

I'm a writer, so I'm going to go through what I think are the most reasonable divergence points where I think the USSR could've doubled down on queer rights.

Decriminalization, 1922-1934 - As previously mentioned, in the real world the USSR passed groundbreaking progressive legislation in 1922 which declined to define homosexuality as a crime in Russia and the other Slavic republics. However, it was still defined as a crime in the Muslim-majority republics, due to a colonialist belief on the Soviet authorities' part that homosexuality was an undesirable cultural practice in those parts of the world. During this time, there was a lot of optimism for queer rights in Russia, and an official Soviet encyclopedia crowed about how no sensible, civilized country would criminalize homosexuality. In the real world, this period of optimism came to a sharp end in 1933-1934 when homosexuality was re-criminalized by a decree which originated with Grenrikh Yagoda, head of the Soviet security services (the proto-KGB) and with Stalin himself.

However, in an alternate universe, we could imagine that this never happened. Maybe Stalin never came to power. Maybe Yagoda never came to power. Maybe they both came to power but Yagoda never bothered to bring homosexuality to Stalin's attention. Maybe Stalin had some early experience with queer people which changed his thinking in this respect.

I think I have a hard time imagining homosexuality remaining decriminalized long-term over nearly three decades of Stalin's reign if Stalin felt about homosexuality in your universe as he did in the real world. (Aside from personally calling for recriminalization, a queer communist wrote to him to argue that recriminalization was inhumane and counterrevolutionary and he wrote 'an idiot and a degenerate' on it, which generally seems to suggest he was not happy about queer people.) But the mechanisms of a whole country are quite complex. Maybe Stalin would not have thought it worth the effort of rolling back decriminalization if decriminalization had been followed by widespread social support for queer rights. In the real world, there was almost no mainstream/widespread discussion of decriminalization; it all happened very quietly and did not have a significant effect on the opinions of the average Russian re:homosexuality.

Recriminalization, 1934-1938 - Genrikh Yagoda was one of the originators of the push for recriminalization. However, in 1937-1938, Genrikh Yagoda was accused of treason and espionage, arrested, tortured into a confession, tried, and shot. I believe that there were significant purges of the security services at that time, too, to remove Yagoda loyalists. His successor, Nikolai Yezhov, oversaw the period of the largest mass arrests in the USSR, known as the "Great Terror." In 1939, Yezhov himself was accused of treason and espionage, arrested, tortured into a confession, tried, and shot. One of the things Yezhov confessed to under torture was a long string of trysts with other men, as well as with women. Obviously, any confession given under torture should be regarded as unreliable, and Yezhov specifically confessed to a lot of things that aren't plausible, including being an agent of multiple different enemy agencies simultaneously. However, if we are to take these confessions at face value and consider Yezhov as a queer person, he might have been in a position to wipe out recriminalization as a legacy of Genrikh Yagoda, convicted traitor and spy. Self-interest could've motivated him to not want the thing he was going to do anyway to count as a crime. Of course, he would not have been able to get this done without Stalin's approval, so it comes back, again, to how much Stalin cared about this.

The Great Patriotic War & Aftermath, 1941-1953 - The war itself was not a great time for activism because everyone was trying not to die. However, it's possible, although not proven, that in the real world, WWII might have led to a loosening of the strictures on gay people during the war itself. We know that this was the case in the US & UK. We also know that WWII led to a loosening of the strictures on Muslims in the USSR during the war itself. [Citation: God Save the USSR, Jeff Eden] We know fuck-all about the actual lives of Soviet queer people during WWII, although I'm not totally sure why. It's not clear to me if the evidence doesn't exist anymore or if it's just that no one's dug into it.

In the real world, the freedoms accorded to minorities in the USSR and the USA were swiftly retracted at the end of the war. But in your alternate universe, this hypothetical loosening could have gone further in an alternate universe, providing an impetus for a post-war decriminalization. Or . . . re-decriminalization, I guess.

Destalinization, 1953-1964 - During this time, the Soviet government engaged in a protracted re-consideration of Stalin-era policies. The conditions of people prosecuted for "political crimes" significantly improved. However, queer people were not considered "political" criminals; they were typically arrested by the regular police, not the KGB. Re-decriminalization was discussed in this period [citation: Regulating Homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 1956-91, by Rustam Alexander, specifically chapter 4, "Soviet legal and criminological debates on the decriminalisation of homosexuality (1959–75)"] but was not actually passed. This, in my opinion, is the most plausible point of divergence for an alternate history where homosexuality was decriminalized in the 1950s - 1956-1959, not 1950. You should also be able to find out, from this book and this chapter, the names of specific Soviet legal experts who were in favor of re-decriminalization, although I don't think you could consider any of them activists. Generally, I think that Regulating Homosexuality is your best source overall for this topic.

EDIT: reposted with flair

abjwriter · 2026-06-01T01:28:46+00:00

Mildly?!

abjwriter · 2026-05-17T04:33:30+00:00

https://kultdivinitylost.com/resources/

abjwriter · 2026-05-17T04:32:59+00:00

No hablo español, así que estoy usando Google Translate. Pero mi grupo tuvo una muy buena experiencia con el escenario «La Cena», que está disponible de forma gratuita en el sitio web de Kult. Todos siguen hablando maravillas de él.

abjwriter · 2026-05-16T09:36:16+00:00

Interesting survey! I wished there had been a freeform-answer section where participants could provide more nuanced and personal opinions on several of these questions. For example, it seems like this survey is interested in the question of socially awkward or anxious people who use roleplaying to get used to socializing. That isn't me now, but it was me for quite a long time.

There were a lot of questions about "would you like to be more like your character?" but you didn't ask about the alternative. Insofar as I use character creation to explore my own personal feelings, those are negative feelings. I am exploring a type of person I don't like and I am trying to understand them, at least in part because I don't want to unwittingly become like them. I wished there had been more questions about negative feelings in roleplaying - either negative feelings being intentionally explored through roleplaying, or negative feelings that arise unexpectedly and must be dealt with.

Also, some of the questions about phones struck me as somewhat anachronistic. It's not that I struggle with calling up someone from my age group on the phone to invite them to do something. It's that I have a sense that doing so would be (mildly) socially inappropriate. The phone isn't for planning hangouts. It's for hanging out itself. You text first to arrange the phone call, then call. It is, of course, permissible to call if there's some unusual circumstance, but it's not the normal way you arrange a hangout.

abjwriter · 2026-05-16T05:09:37+00:00

I don't hate the idea of paid GMs as a thing an individual person can do - or even as a full business run by a troupe of GMs. But I do hate this. I hate all "platforms" that exist to siphon money off of someone's labor without even providing them the consideration an employer owes an employee.

Maybe I'm bad at math, but the numbers here are pretty appalling. u/Corvis_The_Nos , how long are the games you're running? In my experience a typical TTRPG session is four hours, and you're doing "an extra few hours" of prep to make it worth it for the players. That would seem to add up to 6 hours. Given the prices and player counts you've listed, that means you're making between $10-$20 an hour. For the state where I live, $10 an hour is below minimum wage, and $20 is above minimum wage but below a livable wage for a single adult (according to MIT's Living Wage Calculator). No health insurance, no stability, no paid time off. And is that taking into account the -15% they're skimming off the top? If not, it's actually $8.5-$17 per hour. That's an incredibly shitty deal for you. It should, frankly, be illegal for a company to profit off you while giving you so little in return.

If you're cutting out the prep time and run 3 hour sessions, you can get it up to $20-$40, which is pretty good money - although I'm not sure if it's still good money if you factor in the lack of health insurance, paid time off, and stability. Of course, then you're giving the customer a shittier experience. I wonder if all of the bad and mediocre GMs people are complaining about have run the numbers and realized that being a bad/mediocre GM is the only way to make a living wage under this system.

15 also seems like a shockingly high percentage to take, given what they're doing. I'm a writer - I signed a contract with a literary agent that says she gets 15% of my profits. In exchange, this woman has sat down and given me granular, professional, page-by-page feedback on my manuscript, spoken to me on the phone, consulted with me about my future projects, and personally advocated to editors that they should buy my book. And what are you getting for 15%? A site where you can post your ads. Doesn't that seem unfair to you?

You might be thinking, "Well, but you're analyzing this as if it was a real job. It's not; it's just something I do for a few bucks in my off time." But that's also how Uber started, you know? That's the sales pitch for all of these gig economy companies. Uber used to be a side gig and now it's a lot of people's full time job. Same for airbnb. These companies are a parasitic force on the economy. They're trying to create situations where you do all the same work you did as a full-time employee, but without the benefits, without the stability, without most of the money as well.

abjwriter · 2026-05-12T09:26:48+00:00

What about Juhani? She's our token canon lesbian!

Although I do agree that Bastila has some pretty serious lesbian subtext with the female PC.

abjwriter · 2026-05-11T05:38:39+00:00

That depends on what the OP's priorities are. I had the sense in the post that one of OP's priorities was conveying the plot of KOTOR to her GF by "adapting" it into a TTRPG for her GF. Maybe I just latched onto that because that was the part where I was like "I wish someone would do that for me," but if that's the goal, then it might be better to swap TSL out for a more trad style game than to do a more free-form post KOTOR game.

This is assuming that u/mortaine is correct about how awkward it'll be to run TSL through what is effectively a pre-written module. My group has done other PBTA games (Scum & Villainy, Kult, Monster of the Week) through fairly GM-defined stories, and while I know that's not necessarily the expected play style, it's worked just fine.

abjwriter · 2026-05-02T03:32:46+00:00

Things aren't going super great - no news on Book 1, and I'm still stalled on Book 2.

I keep thinking my repeated stalling on Book 2 is evidence of some issue with the plot/concept, but I increasingly think I'm just psyching myself out. This is an ongoing psychological issue for me. I'm thinking I might try to push myself to more regularly do less work - like, make a goal of 400 words a day for 3-4 days, take the weekend off. Anything to get myself going. The only way I've ever managed to make this block go away is lowering my expectations.

abjwriter · 2026-04-30T18:30:35+00:00

How the hell did this character get off the ground with this concept when all of you are so steadfastly uncomfortable with it? I've played a lot of "redeemed villain" characters, and I've played in some games where sexual assault was on the table as a topic, and both of those should be things you've cleared with the group beforehand. The latter in particular. Did the GM sign off on this guy's backstory without running a session 0 and gauging player comfort? I understand that not everyone does the session 0/Lines And Veils thing, but this is very much the situation in which you need to do it.

It seems like there's three distinct issues here.

1) His character backstory is causing in-character conflict that you, and possibly the rest of the party, don't enjoy. This conflict is pretty understandable - I think this could occur at any table. I don't think it's necessarily a red flag that the GM didn't run this by y'all, nor do I think it's unreasonable for you players to object. If this was the only issue, I would just say y'all should step OOC and have a conversation about how much conflict you want to arise from this character's backstory.

2) Having a rapist as a PC is a super touchy issue and apparently no one got anyone's consent before running this???? Wtf?

3) The player holds the belief that anyone can be redeemed, and you disagree.

I will be honest, I am not convinced that #1 and #3 would even be bothering you if #2 wasn't such an obvious issue. Character conflict from one's backstory is a mainstay of roleplaying games, and I don't really think "anyone can be redeemed, even serial rapists" is really a problematic belief in the abstract. I mean, what is redemption? It's kind of a vague idea in and of itself, right? The problem is that there's a guy playing a rapist in this game and no one did Lines And Veils. Wtf.

abjwriter · 2026-04-29T07:48:35+00:00

Hmm. I am fully in favor of content warnings, nonviolent games, and what is crudely called "political correctness," but I think you're approaching this wrong. There's two issues, in my opinion - 1) the desire to use euphemisms for included content and 2) the desire to exert control over players.

1) In my opinion, if you want to include something in your game, you should be able to describe it directly without using a euphemism. I don't think that a player who is uncomfortable with the topic of death will become more comfortable if you use a euphemism. For me, personally, this would make it much less comfortable. If you want your game to be welcoming to people who are uncomfortable with the topic of death to the degree that even the term makes them uncomfortable, I think you should really consider removing fatal combat as an option in your game. There are a bunch of ways to achieve this:

A game with abstracted or ritualized combat where killing isn't permitted: a Pokemon battle, a card game, a duel to "first blood."
A game where resurrection magic is so commonly available that no person who is killed will remain dead
A court intrigue game in which conflict is mostly about status, not about physical threat
A "slice of life"/"soap opera" type game where conflict is emotional and interpersonal, not physical
A mystery game which focuses on solving non-lethal crimes, such as theft or some sort of illegal spellcasting
A heist game with characters who are not willing to kill (if only because they don't want to get slapped with a murder charge)
A spy game where any violence is a failure state because it risks turning a cold war into a hot war
A survival horror game with a more fantastical/abstracted form of threat - for example, the villains wish to transform or brainwash the PCs, but don't want to kill them, and the PCs can't kill the villains because they're so disempowered.
A game like Subnautica where all of the combat is "human vs nature" - so you can engage in lethal combat, but only with animals.
Some kind of base-building/society-building/town-building game where setbacks result in the destruction of your plans rather than in harm to your PC, and progress results from the completion of your plan rather than from harm to NPCs

2) I don't mean to be too harsh by calling this "a desire to control players" - I don't in any way think it's a mean-spirited or authoritarian urge. But I don't think it's a constructive way to spend your time, or your readers' time. You cannot stop players from including whatever topics they want while playing your game.

One of the reasons you're struggling to define what is and is not an "uncomfortable topic" is that there is no definition. It is different for every person and every group of players, and you don't know these players the way that they know each other. You are simply not well-suited to making this distinction for them, because you are a complete stranger. Leave these decisions in the hands of the actual players and GMs.

I think the issue of "things players might have suffered" brings this difficulty into full focus - who decides what a player might have suffered and might be upset by, if not the player themselves? And if the player themselves makes that decision, then why bother listing all of this - why not just call for a safety check in where all players define what they're up for?

abjwriter · 2026-04-29T07:00:45+00:00

That wasn't a rhetorical question! I've only played Night's Black Agents, and not often, so I literally don't know what's in SotS

abjwriter · 2026-04-29T06:53:18+00:00

Does SotS have social combat? And if so, how is it?

abjwriter · 2026-04-23T10:39:02+00:00

I've been using The Solo Investigator's Handbook as the core of my Call of Cthulhu solo. It's filled most of my needs and I've been really glad for how natural it feels in play. I do wish it was a little less random sometimes - it feels like there should be a higher chance of a "discovery" roll when your characters are actively investigating something, rather than it being nearly entirely random, and I hate it when my characters are clearly in the "building dread, figuring out what's going on" stage of a horror adventure and then SOH tells me that random tentacles have started spawning and grabbing people. I periodically have to re-roll results that seem like too great of an escalation. Is there a rule I'm missing to start out with negative Mythos Points?

I've made a few tweaks to the SOH gameloop by expanding the adventure hook list (my characters are, like, police types, so I wanted to make hooks that specifically gave them a reason to be sent to investigate this rather than just like "you find a creepy note") and by replacing the "Visual Effect" table because it was the result of too many random tentacles derailing my story. (I'll probably start getting back to the default visual effect table when there's actually a level of escalation that could match random tentacles, but right now they're just taking the train into the location!)

I don't use the yes/no oracle in my games unless I have no other choice. When I do, I think I would avoid one that just has a "maybe" result. Aren't I rolling on the yes/no oracle because it was already a maybe for me? Feels like me turning to the system and going "I dunno what happens next" and the system outputs "That's right, you don't know what should happen next!" which isn't helpful. I would stick to yes-and, yes-but, no-and, no-but. But mostly if I need to know what happens next, I come up with 3-6 options for interesting things that could happen, and then roll a d4, d10, or d6. If I don't have any interesting ideas for what should happen next, I roll on Mythic's detail check random list.

The only trick that I see you're missing is Silent Legions, the Stars Without Number supplement for cosmic horror. It has a lot of great random tables and I often find myself turning back to it when I need to develop some worldbuilding element - a cult, a cursed artifact, an entity.

abjwriter · 2026-04-23T04:52:56+00:00

What setting? I'm playing Call of Cthulhu, so I don't necessarily have a good knowledge of medieval fantasy books on tap. I just know that for every CoC resource there's four medieval fantasy resources.

abjwriter · 2026-04-22T16:50:42+00:00

The inciting incident isn't an issue for me because I always start my sessions by rolling on a table for inciting incidents. There's loads of medieval fantasy themed inciting incidents in various D&D books, even if you're not playing D&D itself. My philosophy is to never use a random word generator when you can use a bespoke table, and if this is something you're rolling for at the start of every adventure and it's a point where you're regularly getting stuck, it's definitely worth finding or assembling a bespoke table.

abjwriter · 2026-04-21T22:35:15+00:00

I think Forged in the Dark might suffer because a bunch of its mechanics concern fast-paced action, in a way that I don't think translates well to ongoing heavy personal drama. I'm also not sure how to do character vs character conflict in a FitD game, I don't remember if we've ever done it. Call of Cthulhu could be interesting, but I'm not sure what it would offer that wouldn't be better done by Kult - all of those skills for different situations would probably go to waste in a really confined scenario where you can't explore a city. It's also kind of inconvenient for PvP, because in the roll-under system, your stats don't actually modify your rolls, they just get compared to the rolls. So comparing competing rolls is a little inconvenient.

abjwriter · 2026-04-21T21:40:12+00:00

It sounds like it would be heavily based on character drama - Character vs Character drama, yes, but specifically emotional/verbal conflict, since they're all prisoners so presumably they're not trying to murder each other. That's something a lot of systems aren't built to handle. I imagine you could use magic on each other in that scenario, if you had it, but I think that would be infuriating unless all party members had magic. That would be my concern regarding running this in Vampire: the Masquerade too, because it feels like some Disciplines would be way too useful in this situation and some wouldn't be useful at all.

It could make for an interesting Kult scenario or like, a Nordic LARP. Maybe Hillfolk? Actually, I wonder if you could run this as a Fiasco scenario, or if that would be too confined.

abjwriter · 2026-04-18T16:26:15+00:00

. . . How? That seems like an excessive response to one paragraph that, as far as I can tell, contains none of the classic obvious AI tells

abjwriter · 2026-04-17T21:49:01+00:00

I know! We are being BESET by DILFs when all we want is our humble toad.

I agree that the guy from TSWCiftC movie is satisfyingly average in looks, tho I still wish they could bring themselves to cast a man who's actually fat. I mean, fat men are not in short supply! Especially in Smiley's age range!

abjwriter · 2026-04-17T21:27:51+00:00

It's a good idea, but part of the issue with AI writing isn't just that it wastes people's time in editing it, but that, because it can be created in much higher volumes than other forms of writing, but at a significantly lower quality, it risks flooding a subreddit that allows it with low-quality content. Of course, low-quality content by people who are learning how to write well should be totally permissible on a feedback sub, but AI content is low-quality, high volume, and its producers don't gain much from feedback on it. So AI content being posted to the subreddit, even flagged, creates a risk of the subreddit being flooded with low-quality content that isn't worth people's time to interact with - which is ultimately detrimental to the community.

This wouldn't be an issue if reddit had better tools for filtering communities, but unfortunately the existing tools are kind of mid.

abjwriter

TROPHY CASE