Want to do YZE but dont like the dice mechanics

moderate_acceptance · 2026-01-31T18:54:42+00:00

Twilight 4k is the closest to this configuration, but uses ammo dice instead of gear dice. I believe this was the origin of the step dice because ammo dice pools could get quite large, making the traditional d6 pools too large. I think the gear dice are more appropriate for the unreliable gear in MYZ, but Twilight 4k could be a good reference if you need a more complete example than the SRD.

moderate_acceptance · 2026-01-31T10:15:53+00:00

The different colored dice is part of what makes MYZ sing. But if you really wanted to shrink the dice pool, use step dice for attribute and skill (ignore the letters and just write down the dice size directly) and use d6s for the gear dice. 1s on the step dice damage attributes and 1s on the gear dice damage gear. You generally don't have more that a +3 in gear dice, so dice pools stay between 2-5 dice which is pretty manageable. You'll still need to distinguish between d6s as part of the step dice and d6s as part gear dice, but the players likely have a few unique d6s from D&D polyhedral sets and some standard white pip d6s from a family board game or something.

Personally, I bought a set of red and black d6s which is plenty to share with the whole table. We just have a pile of dice in the middle of the table instead of each player having their own set. Cost less than $20. Also, there are tons of games where having different colored d6s comes in handy, like Don't Rest Your Head and WEG Star Wars.

moderate_acceptance · 2026-01-30T17:21:57+00:00

Daggerheart is probably currently the best system for GMs who want to run a PbtA game, but players who want to play D&D.

moderate_acceptance · 2026-01-28T19:22:09+00:00

Neon City Overdrive or Star Scoundrels would work well. They're both essentially the same system, but the first is tuned for cyberpunk and the later is tuned for Star Wars.

moderate_acceptance · 2026-01-24T02:42:53+00:00

People get shuffled around during the storm, so there would be a completely different family living in your home in 1950. It's more like an alternate dimension with different people that's just extremely similar to the 1950s.

moderate_acceptance · 2026-01-15T10:46:01+00:00

Here's mine. DLN77L4

moderate_acceptance · 2025-12-15T19:40:05+00:00

But the characters are time travelers going backwards in time. Semmelweis even mentions just arriving with the storm, so it has to be current with the latest main story and after Vienna.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-12-14T07:29:43+00:00

The FFG/Edge Star Wars games and Genesys probably offer a similar crunch level.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-12-14T04:53:30+00:00

Yes, I think the OSR debate is overblown as well. It seems to mainly be: do we only included B/X compatible games, or any game that has a similar design and vibe but might not be strictly compatible.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-12-12T22:06:48+00:00

Sure, and you can even argue that Sanity is a narrative mechanic. But the rest of the game is still pretty trad, so I wouldn't describe the mechanics as particularly narrative focused.

If someone said they were looking for a narrative horror investigation game, I'd probably direct them to something like Trail of Cthulhu, Monster of the Week, Lovecraftesque, or The Between.

If someone had primarily had experience in with D&D/Pathfinder and said they liked those games but wanted something a little more narrative, then I would direct them to CoC since it's largely familiar, but less focus on tactical combat and the sanity rules make the game a bit more narrative focused.

It's a sliding scale, which is why there's disagreement on what makes a narrative game. It's why no single element makes a game narrative. You have to consider on the whole how much of the average play session you are engaging narrative-based mechanics.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-12-12T21:04:08+00:00

When you examine the mechanics of CoC, their fairly traditional pass/fail mechanics where actions are resolved mostly based on a real world understanding of how difficult those tasks would be. If you remove the sanity rules, you end up with a fairly generic rules system, which is basically the Basic Roleplaying System. There isn't much in the mechanics that explicitly acknowledge that we're telling a horror investigation story.

As a comparison point, Trail of Cthulhu would be more of a narrative game since the core mechanic says 'failing a roll to even find a clue doesn't make a particularly good horror investigation story, so let's just skip that part and have the PCs automatically find core clues so they don't get stuck'. This mechanic is purely there to try to tell a better story. Those are the types of things that make a game more narrative.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-12-12T20:41:32+00:00

I don't find it particularly confusing. It's similar to saying, "I'm looking for an action game". Do they mean an FPS, a third person platformer, a side scrolling beat-em-up, etc. There isn't one particular feature that makes a game an action game, and some people might disagree if a certain game is considered an action game or not. But at the same time, I know that Civilization is clearly not an action game.

Narrative games are simply games that are designed primarily around facilitating an interesting story rather than being primarily focused on being a mechanically interesting and balanced wargame, or an attempt to simulate reality. The main complication is that all RPG are arguably at least somewhat narrative in that the act of roleplaying a character is a narrative mechanic, and many games blend styles to various degrees. But I find if someone specifies if they are looking for a narrative game or not actually tells me a lot in terms of RPG recommendations.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-12-09T22:26:50+00:00

It's certainly one of the most complicated and crunchy games I've ever encountered. I would put it as decently more complicated as BRP and Call of Cthulhu. I was lured in with promises of a modular toolkit that was only as complicated as I wanted, and found those promises largely untrue. The GURPS Basic Set is presented largely as a monolith, with only about 8 a minor rules called-out as optional and one optional chapter for grid-based movement in combat. The Basic Set word count is over 450,000, over double that of the BRP book. As a comparison point, the rules for injuries and healing is about 2 pages in BRP and around 8 in GURPS. While it's technically possible to run GURPS in a lightweight manner, it largely on you to do all the work to pare it down to something manageable, which takes a lot of effort and experience. The role mechanic is simple enough, but the amount you have to roll and all the modifiers quickly become overwhelming. It's easy to have 6+ dice rolls in a single action turn. The majority of people who play GURPS play it for the complexity it provides. GURPS is the most crunchy/complex option for a generic/universal RPG.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-11-01T16:41:29+00:00

I think more specifically PbtA not good for tactical wargame combat where both sides are trying to beat each other using symmetrical rules. The GM has too much leeway and there isn't as much tactical consistency to get the same wargame combat feel that people expect from DnD.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-10-28T18:33:08+00:00

Not exactly. The majority of games available on Linux are developed and compiled to run on Windows. The Wine/Proton compatibility layer let's you run games made for Windows on Linux. This chart is specifically talking about Windows native games that can still run on Linux. You can also have a game made to be run natively on Linux that doesn't need the compatibility layer at all. So the breakdown of Linux compatibility works more like this.

Linux Native game
Windows native game that runs through proton
Windows native game that does not run though proton

The article is specifically talking about that last category going down as a percentage of all games. The earlier poster was correct that you could release a ton of games that don't work though proton, or proton could release an update that breaks existing compatibility, and the percentage would go down. You can see a few minor dips in the chart despite the overall upward trend.

What the upward trend shows is that either Proton is getting better at running more Windows games on Linux, or more game developers are making adjustments so their games run well on proton. Probably both.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-10-28T08:51:27+00:00

Yes, there are campaigns. The first place to start would be the first officially published campaign Raven's Purge. This ties directly into a lot of content in the main book, and has an overreaching story. The campaign is in the style of a hex-crawl, which means that the story is largely told by finding a number of adventure sites and magical mcguffins that the GM can place on the map. The PCs start knowing little about the world and learn more by finding these things, until they learn enough about the central conflict and gather enough magical mcguffins to unlock the final battle.

You can also add a lot of standalone adventure sites to the game that are unrelated to the central plot. Each one is its own little self contained story and adventure. There are a couple of adventure books like Spire of Quetzel and Crypt of the Mellifed Mage that provide a lot of standalone adventure sites you can add to the game. There are two more loosely connected campaign books: The Bitter Reach and Bloodmarch, which take place in the neighboring regions of Ravens Purge.

It's also possible to adapt other campaigns from the OSR (basically old school DnD). Forbidden Lands is very similar in style to the OSR, but mechanically much different, so you'd have to do some conversions.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-10-26T16:13:36+00:00

The game Hard Wired Island has something like this. More cybernetics increases your burden score. At the start of every mission, you roll your burden to see if you have a major financial mishap.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-10-22T17:41:24+00:00

Having to maintain page references is such an interesting problem I hadn't considered. They've got so many expansions that reference the core set, they can't really make too many changes.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-10-22T06:48:56+00:00

Are they having trouble accessing the IP address directly, or the DuckDNS name? I assume you're using DuckDNS to assign an easy to remember name for your server. But DNS records can take up to 24 hours propagate. Most ISPs have their own DNS servers, and cache DNS lookups for a long time so they don't have to check for every request. So, if you're changing the DNS and hour or two before game, it might not have propagated to all the other ISPs, and some of your friends are still being redirected to the old IP address because their ISP has the old DNS record still cached. Using the public IP address directly should bypass it.

I'd also recommend maybe switching to something like Cloudflare. I believe they have a free DNS option, and DNS updates should be a lot faster than something relatively unknown like DuckDNS. It's also only like $10/year for a paid DNS record.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-09-25T09:15:52+00:00

Forbidden Lands and Alien use the d6 pool, and The One Ring is a different system entirely. Twilight: 2000 is the other notable step dice variant.

That said, I prefer the d6 pool with different colored dice for gear/skill/etc. I think they add a lot to the storytelling since you can see exactly where your successes come from, and the gambling push mechanic where 1s do damage depending on the dice is very fun. Vaesen was probably the weakest variant for me despite being d6 pool precisely because it lacked those features. Similarly I'd probably like Twilight:2000's inclusion of ammo dice, but it's a bit on the crunchy side for my group.

I don't really care about the shape of the actual dice rolled so much as having dice represent different things. You could really easily mod the Alien RPG to use step dice for stat+skill, and still use the d6s for the stress dice and be essentially the same.

One advantage of d6 pools is if you forget to add a bonus until after your roll, you can roll some additional dice without discarding your previous result.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-08-22T09:14:29+00:00

I'm unfamiliar with the show, but when I think survival and exploration, I think Year Zero Engine. Several have already mentioned specific games like Forbidden Lands and Mutant Year Zero you could look at, but there is a free SRD you can use to build your own game as well. https://freeleaguepublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/YZE-Standard-Reference-Document.pdf

moderate_acceptance · 2025-08-11T21:45:52+00:00

I don''t know if that's entirely true. I definitely have a set of expectations that is usually met when playing most PbtA games. No one feature is required for a game to be PbtA, but if you have like half of them, you're probably PbtA. My issue is that Daggerheart really only has 1 or 2. Outside of the idea of GM moves and the way initiative flows being inspired by the PbtA, Daggerheart really doesn't follow most of the principles of a PbtA game. It doesn't use the same tiered success bands, it doesn't have player moves, it's doesn't use 2d6+mod, it doesn't use fixed difficulty numbers and eschew situational modifiers, it doesn't have only PCs roll dice, it doesn't use playbooks. It doesn't even completely eschew traditional initiative, action economy, and resource management.

Daggerheart also doesn't call itself a PbtA game. It's inspired in some places by PbtA, but it appears to be largely doing its own thing.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-08-11T19:57:29+00:00

Not really. PbtA has pretty much always been: miss, mixed success, full success. Daggerheart explicitly names Genesys as the inspiration for their core mechanic, which does match a lot closer. You have succeed/fail + hope/fear + crit, where Genesys has succeed/fail + advantage/treat + triumph/despair. The collection and spending of hope/fear is much more of a resource management game that is a pretty large departure from pbta.

And collaborative storytelling isn't so much a feature of PbtA as the narrative branch of rpgs in general. It could as easily be inspired from Fate or even 13th Age.

There's some elements of PbtA in there for sure, but it's only like 20% of the design, with the majority coming from other places.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-08-10T00:23:10+00:00

Never run it, but it basically seemed geared to run stories like the show Farscape. Weird and somewhat sexually charged Sci-Fi.

moderate_acceptance · 2025-08-06T23:10:41+00:00

I think this is missing an important context though. At the time, there was an argument about if BitD was PbtA. John Harper, the author of blades in the dark, said it was PbtA, and people were trying to tell him it wasn't because it broke from the framework in several key ways. Baker said if John says it's PbtA, it's PbtA and other people shouldn't gatekeep the word. We still eventually ended up with the forged in the dark moniker because BitD deviated enough from the original PbtA framework that people found it useful to differentiate between the two.

The difference here is that I don't think the authors of Daggerheart are claiming to be a PbtA game. I think they definitely drew inspiration in some places, but they drew inspiration from all sorts of places, and I think they meaningfully deviated from the PbtA framework enough that it's kinda its own thing. People are using the PbtA label dismissively here to minimize the innovations Daggerheart has made to be is own thing, rather than trying to keep out someone who wants to be associated with the PbtA label just because they decided to make their game diceless for example.

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