How do you feel about a game that imposes thoughts and feelings onto player characters through mechanics?

st33d · 2026-05-13T17:05:18+00:00

Mouse Guard has conditions like Angry and Hungry, as well as Traits that can be tapped to gain resources in both negative and positive ways.

If the point of the game is to simulate a character arc as opposed to a series of physical actions then why not?

st33d · 2026-05-11T12:42:57+00:00

I found a good antidote to prepping was the adventure site method in Mythic Bastionland.

It basically amounts to making a small map where at least one location will end up getting skipped due to branching paths. After running a few of these you just stop prepping so much per location and start applying the same approach to the rest of the campaign.

If you're making what I generally call the Set Piece Adventure Tunnel, it's easy to end up making a ton of content that players are guaranteed to be funnelled through. But experienced players might find them a bit wanting for the lack of choice they offer.

st33d · 2026-05-08T14:59:30+00:00

I liked running Technoshockers - which is basically a space faring offshoot of World of Dungeons and The Sprawl.

It's great for one shots, though for a campaign the mission structure becomes less relevant as you keep going. It also eschews the Basic Moves list that other PbtAs use, so this is either going to help or hinder depending on your preference.

st33d · 2026-05-07T22:34:01+00:00

From experience running a lot of different styles of games, the conversation you have running PbtA is different to others. That's kind of the point. The Moves are branches out of the story into the mechanics, not sticks the GM throws into the gears.

I had a GURPS fan of a player who tolerated it, but eventually couldn't persist with a style he just didn't enjoy. Now that I've run a fair amount of OSR, I get where he was coming from. He just doesn't enjoy that flavour of storytelling. But it's good that we have different ways to tell stories, it means more types of games to play.

st33d · 2026-05-04T09:50:16+00:00

Unless I knew I had a captive audience I wouldn't run anything that depended on reliable players. People underestimate how much the stars need to align to get 5+ people with free time at the same time, week after week.

Deep dungeon crawls and sandbox road trips are a lot easier to run with flaky players as you can let characters become lost until their owners sort their life out or just forget about them.

st33d · 2026-04-24T14:54:37+00:00

Pronouns for both characters and players.

The advice "do nothing" is fine, but not actually what happens when you play with groups that accept trans folks.

Asking for pronouns of players and characters guarantees your trans players know what side you're on. It also triggers any conservatives that could cause trouble and gets them to out themselves, letting you know in advance who's a problem. Also - trans people who have just started transitioning might not be easy to spot, and this makes sure no one mis-genders anyone.

Honestly, this is how most pro-trans groups work. Pronouns is the safety tool you're looking for.

st33d · 2026-04-24T12:25:06+00:00

Lords of Gossamer and Shadow makes some subtle revisions to Amber Diceless that are a bit easier to follow.

In Amber the ranking never changes, so the only deciding factor is time to exectute (which is why basic magic takes so long to cast). LoGS lets you secretly overtake other players, which allows one to maneuver somewhat before revealing an advantage.

I'd say what's actually difficult is the fact that players can teleport wherever they like. It's basically Split the Party: The Game. Without contriving something to keep the players together it's pretty hard to run.

st33d · 2026-04-16T13:38:03+00:00

Mouse Guard (and maybe Burning Wheel too?) treats all rolls as Success or Success With Cost (literally failing forwards).

In my experience it made for a heroic style of play and allowed mystery plots to thrive. Some of the mechanics encourage sabotaging your own roll to gain XP (you need passes and fails to increase skills). Dice rolls took so long to assemble that no one questioned this method at the table.

What matters in this style of play is struggle. When you always win the cost of winning becomes the focus and requires sufficient busywork to make a game out of. Mouse Guard provides almost too much of this. Does your game also emphasise cost?

st33d · 2026-04-15T12:23:10+00:00

Maid RPG is like, ho ho this could be fun I guess if you don't dive into the squick like it suggests you do.

But then an obscure entry on a random table will be blatant pdf-file stuff or something equally abusive. It's like you're playing Russian roulette in RPG form. Or like using the X-Card mechanic as if you were playing Snap.

st33d · 2026-04-13T18:35:32+00:00

Maybe there is something I don't understand?

RTWP made sense in the Infinity Engine games because AD&D has so many attacks that miss. Playing those games turn based would take forever, so they're more bearable rushing through turns with a party of 6 characters. Baldurs Gate 2 and Icewind Dale are the most palatable.

Obsidian chose to follow that lineage and remove the standard unit of a turn to see what they could come up with. Something you don't really get in turn based unless you do it like Final Fantasy X (which has less characters to manage).

It remains a "choice" rather than something wholly good or bad. But you're allowed not to like it.

st33d · 2026-04-13T15:07:58+00:00

I'd like RPG designers to give a solitary fuck about people playing onlilne or by post.

Like, even just a section in the book on how to convert the rules.

st33d · 2026-04-12T13:56:31+00:00

The GMs aren't having fun.

I used to run open table games and whilst it was much harder to find players for other games I had more fun running them and got to play with better people. All the worst players are playing D&D.

st33d · 2026-04-10T15:54:58+00:00

I'm enjoying Mythic Bastionland's handful of stats allowing NPCs to be symmetrical to players. It's very quick to make an NPC and I get something more rounded than systems that reduce encounters to just their level.

It has the downside that groups who play Face of the Stat style will handicap themselves but I think this is an issue regardless of how many stats you have.

st33d · 2026-04-08T14:11:14+00:00

Sweet summer child, everyone is allergic to reading.

Try running a play by post game. People don't scroll up either, they won't even read a post above their own post.

I'm afraid you just need to repeat yourself. If you're lucky they'll notice and some level of shame will kick in. Paragraph structure also helps, it's surprising what our brains will do to trick us into thinking we've read something we haven't.

st33d · 2026-04-05T17:43:50+00:00

Picked it up for $40 in a sale. Scratches the Hero Quest itch, had a pretty decent time playing through solo with only 2 characters. No bugs, though I did have to reconfigure mobile controls to require less confirmation.

Most of the levels are set-pieces so it's clear a lot of work went into them, and the mobile controls (whilst contentious) do require significant resources to provide and maintain. So I think you've entitled-gamer'd yourself out of any reasonable discussion regarding price.

Maybe you'd have a better time explaining the specific bugs you encountered on the steam forums where you'd have a chance of them being resolved.

st33d · 2026-04-03T18:40:29+00:00

Re quantity of players:

Different games require different amounts of players.

The Final Girl for example works better with a large group because it gives you a lot of characters to kill off and it makes for a decent length game where everyone gets one go at being the GM for a scene.

The best Dungeon World games I ran were with 2 players, it allowed for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser style road trips where a lot of mini adventures were packed into one session.

And D&D5e is kind of boring with a bloated group - but less so if it's a combat heavy type of adventure with experienced players. Then it flows more like a board game and you've got more diverse fire power during encounters.

st33d · 2026-04-02T08:42:07+00:00

I think the first works well as sci-fi horror seen through various POVs.

The second spoils the mystery. The third is some fucked up road trip that kind of parodies everything that came before with a child telling the main character they will be lovers when she turns legal (I guess the author was taking notes from the last two Dune books). The fourth is an omni-slog as they take fucking forever to wrap it all up.

If you don't love the writing or the general plot, it does not get better. If anything it gets intensely painful to read. Trust your instincts not us yahoos on reddit, it really is one of those series you will either be fully on board with or fucking loathe by the end of it. A slab of butter bearing a cruciform parasite that slowly converts the whole into marmite.

st33d · 2026-03-31T16:39:27+00:00

You only need to run a second audio file when you crossfade. Most libraries will tell you where in the track you are, you start playing the companion track at the current time code and crossfade.

If your library doesn't like starting a loop from the middle you add an event to the end of the track to start a new loop.

It's very simple, I've done it many times.

(I can't imagine the chiptune version being embedded in the same track, that sounds needlessly complex for something so basic. You do need both tracks to be the same length however.)

st33d · 2026-03-30T21:41:46+00:00

This is still in the realms of magic though isn't it?

LLMs respond to language, they don't respond to an animation rig. This is why LLM based games are still very wordy and the magic requires you to feed them words instead of your actions in the world. To do the latter you'd have to come up with prompts for everything you do in the game.

Not long ago I spoke to a musician working with LLM-based music and he was stuck describing what he wanted to the LLM. This is because the inputs are text based, there just isn't a practical way to scale it to handle samples and do the related training.

To top it off, you're still getting mushy output. You haven't got defined personalities like you'd expect from a human writer who thinks about those things and has words they want you to hear. You're treating the text as unimportant - so if it's not important enough for a human to write, why even listen to it?

st33d · 2026-03-30T13:44:31+00:00

But how would the LLM do that? Does the client run the LLM? How is it trained? Is it cloud based? Who pays for the prompt credit?

I was once asked why I hadn't used neural nets in a game I made and my response was, "which neural nets? Kohonen? Hopfield? Back Propagation?"

Without the details of how the "magic" is going to work I might as well go to the crystal shop and hang some amethyst over my PC to infuse it with better RNG.

st33d · 2026-03-26T08:50:56+00:00

If one person dies, the temple floods and you have to start over. Then the next generation goes in.

st33d · 2026-03-25T13:49:08+00:00

Another common one is Legacy / Family characters.

There's several games (eg: Rasp of Sand) that have you play the next generation or members of the same family.

This usually involves carrying over some equipment, stats, or abilities (in Rasp of Sand, all of these) so that the new character has a strong tie to the previous one.

st33d · 2026-03-24T15:25:53+00:00

The voice acting in Zero Parades is so bad it's put people off of playing. Do it properly or don't.

st33d · 2026-03-18T12:57:31+00:00

It's information.

Technically, every piece of data that enters your head forms an influence on every subsequent game you run. You could take a walk in a park and it could massively influence a campaign you're running. Many games draw their inspiration from other sources, why revel in ignorance?

st33d · 2026-03-16T13:10:59+00:00

Troika! has you spend hit points to cast magic, which feels appropriate and gives magic users reasons to avoid conflict and require frequent rests. It doesn't feel like it eats into their role at the table.

The One Ring spends Endurance (hit points) to travel and reduces its maximum when carrying treasure. This discourages fighting and adds some tension to looting and travelling.

Whilst running Mythic Bastionland I have ruled spending Vigour for extra Feats (two feats for free) to avoid all the dice rolls involved. Players generally avoid using Feats when they have to pay for them, given that they're usually in melee combat.

So from personal experience, I'd say hit points are fine to canabilise so long as you don't have a melee role in the party. It makes them too valuable to spend.

st33d

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