#RolePlaying | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

anim-ttrpgs · 23 hours

Text

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, and Themes of Disability, Mental Illness, and Criminality.

Back Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy on kickstarter before May 10th if you want to help a disabled person with limited ability to work pay his bills.

Verisimilitude, What Would a Person Do?

To understand Eureka’s themes regarding disability, mental illness, and criminality, you first have to understand its verisimilitude.

“Verisimilitude” is defined as “the appearance of being true or real,” and it is a big part of the core design ethos behind Eureka. It is a very realistic game.

We aren’t necessarily of the opinion that “realism” is a better design choice than stylization overall for RPGs, but it is a better design choice for Eureka, because we want the PCs to be very normal, believable people who make believable, organic decisions in extraordinary situations. No matter what anyone says, the mechanics of a TTRPG strongly influence what kind of stories are told with it, and what characters do in those stories. So if we want characters to make realistic decisions, the world they inhabit and interact with must be constructed of realistic rules.

Even though there is a small chance that they may be a supernatural creature, PCs in Eureka are still not fearless action heroes, chosen ones, or anything of the sort. They’re normal people with jobs, friends, and families who get mixed up in mysterious and/or dangerous situations, often against their will. They are fragile, vulnerable, imperfect, and they, largely, know it.

“Composure” is a mechanic that helps you know it too. I’ve given a deeper explanation of the Composure mechanic in the post linked here, but I’ll give a very very very condensed version in this post. Composure can sort of be thought of as “emotional/fatigue HP,” (and no, it is NOT “sanity”) it acts as a guideline for how well your character is handling the situation, and when it gets low enough, it starts to have serious mechanical effects as well, because a character’s stat modifier can never be higher than their current Composure level. Fear, hunger, and fatigue all lower Composure, and eating, sleeping, and bonding with one’s fellow investigators can all restore it, at least for normal people. More on that further down. All you really need to know for now is that when Composure gets below zero it starts eating into HP, so characters can even pass out or die from loss of Composure, and also one single bullet is enough to permanently cripple a character, and the rate of Composure loss during combat reflects how serious that is for the characters.

Grievous Wounds

It isn’t too uncommon for RPGs to have some sort of “flaw” system, whereby in character creation you can give your PC “flaws” or some kind of penalty, and usually get that balanced out by being able to add extra bonuses elsewhere, and these “flaws” may take the form of disabilities.

Critical Role’s Candela Obscura, the whole document of which is one of the most egregious examples of liberalism and toxic positivity I’ve ever seen in the TTRPG space, takes this beyond just character creation, and makes it so that if a PC receives a “scar” in combat that reduces their physical stats, their mental stats automatically go up by an equivalent amount, and proudly asserts that to make any mechanic which functions otherwise is ableist. I think you can probably tell what I think of that from this sentence alone and I don’t need to elaborate. Getting bogged down in all the failures, mechanical and moral, of Candela Obscura would make this post three times as long.

I actually do think that as long as you aren’t moralizing and patting yourself on the back this hard about it, “flaw” systems in character creation are a pretty good idea in most cases, it allows for more varied options during character creation, while preserving game balance between the PCs.

But in real life, people aren’t balanced. The events that left me injured and disabled didn’t make me smarter or better at anything—if anything, they probably made me stupider, considering the severity of the concussion! Some things happened to me, and now I’m worse. There’s no upside, I just have to keep going by trying harder with a less efficient body, and rely more on others in situations where I am no longer capable of perfect self-sufficiency.

Denying that a disabled person is, by definition, less capable of doing important tasks than the average person is to deny that they need help, and to deny that they need help is to enable a refusal to help.

This is the perspective from which Eureka’s Grievous Wounds mechanic was written.

When a character is reduced to 1 HP, which by design can result from a single hit from most weapons, they may become incapacitated, or they may take a Grievous Wound, which is a permanent injury with no stat benefits. Think twice before getting into a shootout.

Grievous Wounds don’t have to result from combat, they can also be given to a character during character creation, but not as a trade-off for an extra bonus.

“But then doesn’t my character just have worse stats than the rest of the party?” Yes, didn’t you read the above section? There is no benefit, except for the opportunity to play a disabled character in an TTRPG, and this character will probably have to be more reliant on the rest of the party to get by in various situations. Is that a bad thing?

Monsters

Just like mundane people in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, monsters are playable, because they are regular people. I’ve gone over this in other posts and also you can just read about it in Chapter 8 of the Eureka rulebook, but the setting of Eureka doesn’t have a conspiracy or “masquerade” hiding or separating supernatural people from normal society. They exist within normal society, and a lot of them eat people.

Most RPGs consider monsters to just be evil, they do evil for evil’s sake. RPGs that seek to subvert this expectation often instead make monsters misunderstood and wrongfully persecuted, but harmless. Eureka takes a wholly different approach.

There are five playable types of monsters in the rulebook right now, and it’ll be seven if we hit all the stretch goals, but for simplicity’s sake this post will just focus on the vampire. Despite them applying in different ways, the same overall themes apply to nearly every monster, so if you get the themes for the vampire, you’ll get the gist of what Eureka is doing with monsters in general.

I mentioned Composure above, and how it can normally be restored by eating food and sleeping. Well, vampires can not restore their Composure this way. They don’t sleep, and normal people food might be tasty as long as it isn’t too heavily seasoned for them, but it doesn’t do anything for them nutritionally. Their main way to restore Composure is fresh living human blood, straight from the source. To do what mundane PCs do normally by just eating and sleeping, vampires have to take from another, whether they’re happy with this arrangement or not. They do not, of course, literally have to, and a player is not forced to make their vampire PC drink blood, just like you don’t literally have to eat food, but they do and you do if you want to live in any degree of comfort or happiness, or else they’d eventually just sit at 0 Composure and not be able to effectively do anything.

There’s a reason that this is a numerical mechanic and not simply a rule that says something like “this character is a vampire and therefore they must drink blood once every session,” and that is to emphasize and demonstrate that the circumstances a person faces drive their behavior. In America, there is a tendency to think of criminality and harmfulness as resulting from something of an intrinsic evil, but in my experience and observation, people do not just wake up at like age 16 and decide “I think I’ll go down the criminal life path.” Through their life circumstances they have been barred from the opportunities that would have given them other options. People need food, food costs money, money requires work, work requires getting hired, but getting hired requires a nearby job opening, an education, an impressive resume, nice clean clothes, a charismatic attitude, consistent transportation, and so on. For people without, criminality is something they are funneled into, which becomes harder to avoid the longer they go without consistent access to their basic needs. The choice will be between taking money from others by force or trickery, or running completely out of money.

As the Composure counter ticks down, a vampire, or other playable monster, is going to encounter much the same dilemma. There is little to no “legal” or “harmless” way for them to get their needs met, even if they do have some money. Society just isn’t set up for that. And no your kink is not the solution to this, trying to suggest every vampire get into sex work is like one step removed from telling every girl she should just get an OnlyFans the minute she turns 18, or that women should just marry a man and be a housewife that gets taken care of if they want their needs met.

Playable monsters in Eureka are dangerous, harmful people. They were set up to be.

“Oh well then the vampire should just eat bad people!” You mean those same bad people i just described above? See this post for answers to all the other arguments people are going to make to try and absolve vampires of causing harm.

Society not being set up for that brings me to next reading/theme: Monstrousness as disability, and monsters as takers.

Mundane human characters restore 2 points of Composure per day just by eating food and sleeping, but vampires do not, they can’t. To restore their Composure they have to take from others a valuable resource that everyone needs to live and the extraction of which is excruciatingly painful and debilitating (blood). No one knows what happens to blood after a vampire drinks it, it’s just gone. Vampires are open wounds through which blood pours out of the universe.

This is a special need, something they have to take but cannot give back. Their special needs make them literally a drain on society and the world.

Even in so-called “progressive” spaces, there is a tendency to consider takers, people who take much more than they give back, such as disabled people, as something that needs to be pruned, with the mask over this being the aforementioned total denial of the fact that disabled people take more than they can give.

In this way, vampires and other playable monsters are, inarguably, “takers,” but in positioning them as protagonists right beside mundane protagonists, Eureka puts you in their shoes, and forces you to at least reckon with the circumstances that make them this way, as well as acknowledge their inner lives. You have to acknowledge two things: That they are dangerous, harmful people who take more than they can give, and that they are people. Because they are people, Eureka asserts that they have inherent value, a right to exist, and a right to do what they need to do to exist.

One final point is that of monstrousness as mental illness. Mental illness is a disability, one pretty comparable to physical disability in a lot of ways, so all of the above about disability can apply to this metaphor as well, but there are a few unique comparisons to make here.

It’s not the most efficient, but there are a couple of loopholes deliberately left in the rules that allow vampires to restore Composure without drinking blood. Eureka! moments can restore Composure, and Comfort checks from fellow investigators can restore Composure.

When I was writing the rules for how monsters regain Composure in accordance to these themes, I came to a dilemma where I wasn’t sure if it was thematically appropriate for them to be able to regain Composure in these ways, but ultimately I decided that yes, they can. It works with themes of mental illness, which is mental disability.

People with mental illnesses may have the potential to be harmful and dangerous, but study after study, including my own observation, has shown that mentally ill people with robust support structures and agency allowed to them to handle tasks are much less likely to enact harm, be that physical violence, relational violence, or violence against the self. So that’s why I kept that rule in for playable monsters. Being able to accomplish goals, and having friends who are there for them, makes the harmful person less likely to cause unnecessary harm.

I couldn’t really figure out where to fit this paragraph in so I’m sticking it here right before the conclusion: Vampires are especially great for this because they’re immortal, and because they always come back when “killed.” They can’t be exterminated, they aren’t going away, there will always be problem people in society, no matter how utopian or “progressive.” They’re a never-ending curse, who will always be a problem. The question is how you will handle them, not how you will get rid of them.

In conclusion,

Eureka is as much a study of the characters themselves as it is the mystery being solved by the characters. It is a harsh, but compassionate game, that argues through its own gameplay that yes, people do have needs which drive their behavior, many people do have special needs that are beyond their ability to reciprocate, and failure to meet the needs of even a small number of people in a society has high potential to harm the entire society, not just those individuals whose needs are unmet.

And Candela Obscura sucks.

Back Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy on kickstarter before May 10th if you want to help a disabled person with limited ability to work pay his bills.

youtube

If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

You can also support us on Ko-fi, or by checking out our merchandise!

Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

21 notes · View notes

lackadaisycats · 1 year

Photo

Varasta - a luck deity. Some artwork I did for The Delver’s Guide last year!

#delver's guide #beastworld #dnd #5e #anthro #art #fox #character art #lackadaisy #furry #roleplaying #tabletop

16K notes · View notes

shinsources · 3 months

Text

USEFUL SITES FOR ROLEPLAYERS

Thought I'd make a list of some useful websites for those of us who enjoy roleplaying and what have you here on Tumblr and whatnot.

roleplay formatter: Made by the awesome @rpclefairy. I honestly can't recommend this one enough. Great for adding color, changing the font size, and the whole shebang with bold + italics + underline + strikethrough. 10/10 always use

fsymbols + emojipedia: These are both great for making your tags fancy and whatnot.

alt codes: This is genuinely great for teaching you how to make the symbols with your keyboard for everyday use so there's that. It's especially useful if you and/or your muses speak a second language so that's a bonus.

text color fader: *marge vc* I just think gradient effects on text is neat. *end marge vc*

list of colors (wikipedia): Has a list of an infinite number of colors and their hex codes. Very useful if I do say so, myself. But that's just me.

screencapped.net: Great for getting all sorts of screenshots for making icons, GFXs, promos, and whatnot.

fancaps.net: Also great for getting all sort of screencaps for making icons, GFXs, promos, and whatnot. My only complaint is that it's a little annoying to navigate so here's the proper links to movies, tv shows, and anime.

photopea: Great if you can't afford Photoshop and/or don't like using GIMP.

hakuneko: It's not so much a website as much as it is a program. You can download manga, comics, webtoons, doujinshi, etc. for making your icons, GFXs, promos, and whatnot. It's also just a great way to read stuff and catch up on everything.

Feel free to reblog and add more. <333

#roleplay resource #roleplay help #roleplay community #roleplay #roleplaying #rpc #rpc help #rp help #rp resources #rp resource #roleplay resources #rp

3K notes · View notes

one-time-i-dreamt · 4 months

Text

I was on Tumblr and saw one of those old ask blogs where the person running the blog roleplays as a random character, except the character was me. The only post I can even remember was me saying I was apparently from Ukraine.

#dream #roleplaying #Ukraine

1K notes · View notes

whilomm · 21 days

Text

redoing poll bc i forgot some shit

the poll mostly about character creators with humanoid options, like your typical make your own char RPG. define stuff like "idealized" however you like

(if the answer is "well its complicated it depends on the game and...", choose whatever your favorite/most fun option is)

#buzzy #polls #games #roleplaying #rpgs #rpg #poll #character creators

520 notes · View notes

superectojazzmage · 8 months

Text

My Baldur’s Gate 3 hot take is that debates about whether or not Emperor Balduran is trustworthy or or not are a waste of time because a great deal of the point of the character — narratively and gameplay-wise — is that he’s an extension of you. YOU interpret and decide on his personality, nature, and choices the same way you do with your Tav.

If you want him to genuinely be the flawed and odd-thinking but ultimately noble and heroic “token good Mind Flayer” that he presents himself as, then he will be like that simply because you treat him as being such. He’ll be trustworthy and dependable, totally truthful about only wanting what’s best for Baldur’s Gate and about wanting to free the Illithids from Elder Brain control and make ceremorphosis a consensual choice, while also being open to compromise in the name of forging bonds. He’ll be the unlikely hero who, with you by his side, uses the Stones to destroy the Absolute and save his beloved city.

If you want him to be and treat him like a backstabbing, manipulative liar and potentially dangerous monster who is at best disconnected from basic reality, at worst a murderous narcissist trying to bend you to his will, then he’ll act like it. His interactions with be tense, snappish, and uncomfortable. He’ll threaten you, make unreasonable demands, never compromise, and try to assert control over the party while making clear that your alliance is one of convenience and necessity. And ultimately, he’ll either betray you and defect to the Absolute’s side because he can’t control you or, at your urging, hijack things and use the Absolute to take over the world.

His past is designed to be interpreted in massively different manners depending on what kind of person you want him to be. He killed Ansur either out of justified self defense because Ansur wouldn’t admit that Balduran was still himself beneath the changed form, or because Ansur was trying to stop his evil plans. He dominated Stelmane’s mind because she was a bad person and he wanted to turn the Knights of the Shield into something good, or because he’s an evil manipulator who dominates those he can’t charm. He withheld information from you because he was being cautious and wasn’t sure if you were going to be an ally (like your party members), or because he was manipulating you by making himself seem more sympathetic. He never freed Orpheus and doesn’t want to free him because as an Illithid he rightfully fears a Githyanki Prince and that freeing Orpheus will allow the Netherbrain to control him again, or because he’s an malevolent bastard who knows that Orpheus would ruin his plans. It’s up to you to decide.

He can change tune on a dime, make self-contradictory choices and statements, abruptly do things just because of something you decided to say because you wanted to see what would happen. Just like you do as a player, because he’s as much your PC as Tav. It’s why you get to customize the form he appears in your dreams with. The Emperor is good or evil or whatever depending on what you WANT or MAKE him to be.

1K notes · View notes

allthewitchesrpg · 1 year

Text

Hi everybody! I made a game called All the Witches!! I really wanted to make something magical for the queer community who have struggled with the creators of certain worlds being jerks. It’s an original TTRPG system with some cool deck building mechanics exploring the diversity of witches in fantasy. It would mean a lot if you checked out the Kickstarter here!

The Kickstarter ends this Saturday, April 15th at noon EST!

#ttrpg #dnd #dungeonsanddragons #d&d #indiettrpg #boardgames #witches #witch #tabletop #indie ttrpg #ttrpg design #signal boost #signal b00st #roleplaying #kickstarter

2K notes · View notes

dungeonmapster · 26 days

Text

Public Release Link

This ruin was once a remote community tucked away in the hills along the ocean shore, but has long since fallen into disrepair. The locals prefer not to speak of the place, but the corpses burned and hung as a warning to any others that approach. The sad tale of this place may not be of great concern however, as new residents have made use of the place and its disturbing reputation...

patreon

243 notes · View notes

myfandomrealitea · 6 months

Text

Omegle is dead. RIP to a generational gem.

For those of you who used it for fandom roleplay, EmeraldChat is a good, similar alternative. You can add interests in the same way, and there are additional options like sending images and saving chats.

#omegle #fandom #roleplay #RP #marvel #stray kids #DC #music #roleplaying #sephiroth speaks #myfandomrealitea #not discourse #stranger things

455 notes · View notes

tonksxmagicalxroleplayxmemes · 10 months

Text

#roleplaying #roleplay #rp meme #rp #inbox meme

1K notes · View notes

europaprisonmoon · 1 year

Text

I’m releasing a TTRPG supplement

Kind of says it all, really. Brought to life by the illustrations of the talented Kate Lucas (https://skeejeedoodles.carrd.co/), the supplement is on sale now at: https://hyrune.itch.io/the-goblin-market Hey folks. My name is David, I’m a queer games designer and writer from Ireland. In the autumn of last year, I was made redundant from my job of eleven years, and taking a look back over that time I realised I’d lost time. I’d lost so much creative spark that previously drove me, and in a fit of frenzied, caffeine-fuelled panic inspiration, I got to work making something. I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs for many years, both as a GM and as a player. As a GM, I’ve occasionally struggled when players go off the beaten track - you haven’t lived until you’ve stared blankly around the table, trying to think of a name for a random NPC you didn’t anticipate at all, having your eyes land on a coffee cup and proudly declaring their name is “Uhhhh... Muggsley.” If you’ve ever been in a position where your players are shopping, and you’ve had to quickly drum up a string of shopkeepers and vendors on-the-fly, this book might just help you. The Goblin Market is a system agnostic collection of over fifty merchants, monsters and even stranger things which can be dropped into your campaign to add weirdness and magic for your players: retired river gods, escaped nightmares, tea merchants, vengeful dragons seeking to raise an army to defeat tyrannical princesses, off-duty demons, magical roboticists, mystery cults, accidentally immortal witches, and more besides. Each entry details a merchant and the items they both buy and sell, but also contains a number of plot hooks (over 140, last time I checked) so you can give your players sidequests to investigate. Each vendor can be dropped into your game on their own, but also exists in a setting of their own - a setting where each market stallholder invokes and involves other entries and merchants as rivals, romantic interests, family members and possible eldritch accomplices from the days before the Moon was born. It’s a living, breathing place, and I’ve loved writing it so, so much.

#ttrpg #rpg #tabletop #d&d #homebrew #roleplaying

2K notes · View notes

anim-ttrpgs · 1 day

Text

youtube

An absolutely incredible review of the beta version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy by review Willy Muffin on youtube, complete with visuals and actual analysis!

I'm going to also add to this post a comment that I left on the video, offering further insight into the design intentions of the game, though the comment might not make as much sense if you haven't watched the video yet.

Hey, lead writer of Eureka here, first of all I wanna say how good and professional this review is, it’s almost indescribable how it feels to see our project taken so seriously and given real analysis, complete with visuals and everything! We would be super impressed and happy with it even if you didn’t like the game—but luckily it sounds like you loved it hahaha

I’d also like to address a few things throughout the video, not as arguments or rebuttals, just further developer insight for everyone

Re: “Urban Fantasy.” “Urban Fantasy” is basically just another term for “modern fantasy”, just a fantasy story that takes place in the 20th or 21st century and deals with the intersection of contemporary life with the supernatural, and it might be an Americanism, or even a Southern-ism, since it has a lot of connections and origins in the living folklore of New Orleans, so I shouldn’t be surprised it isn’t a term everyone is familiar with. Just think of it as the kind of genre where instead of the vampire living in a secluded scary castle, his name is Phil and he’s your roommate haha. What We Do in the Shadows, Shadowrun, and the World of Darkness games are all some other good examples of “urban fantasy.”

Re: Scooby-Doo. Oh we would LOVE for you to run a Scooby-Doo-like wacky mystery with Eureka. Even though the main tone is dark and gritty and noir, we did intentionally build it so that it could run more lighthearted stuff as well! There’s even a few Scooby-Doo references to be found throughout the text, and if we hit a certain stretch goal on the Kickstarter, we’re going to be adding a bunch of Scooby-gang-inspired traits, including the option to play a Talking Dog!

Re: Combat being the largest section, even larger than Investigation. First of all, that’s kind of an illusion that is the result of the game being unfinished. I have a tendency when I write rules to use really long sentences, overexplain things, repeat myself, etc, and that dramatically bloats the rules text and page count, but that’s why we have an editor! She goes through after the fact and trims most of the fat off my bloated writing style to make it flow smoother and read faster, and take up less space. The PDF that was read for this review has had the Investigation chapter copy-edited (and cut down in size by about 25%!), but the editor hasn’t gotten to the combat chapters yet, so they still have a hugely inflated page count. When she’s done with them, you can expect each combat chapter to also be cut down in size by about 25%, so they won’t be nearly so large a chunk of the book.

Secondly, I’ll explain our reasoning for why the combat chapters and advanced combat rules are such a big chunk of the rules text, it’s intentional design which I will now explain. If anyone still doesn’t agree with that design, that’s fair, and that’s why we made the Basic Combat Rules an option.

The reason that the advanced combat rules are the default, and the reason they exist at all, is because it incentivizes and rewards Investigation. If combat is super deadly, it makes Investigation, snooping, and spying more appealing than kicking down the door and getting your head blown off. But of combat is super deadly, it also needs to be very deep and tactical, because if it’s deadly but shallow, then there’s no player agency. “Combat starts, roll some dice, okay your guy is dead.” That’s no fun. So by adding rules and modifiers for cover/elevation, distance, the difference between a pistol and an assault rifle, etc. we make it so that not only is combat its own high-stakes puzzle, but make it so that when the PCs HAVE to engage in combat, all their investigation can really pay off and save their lives. Spying on a building to find out the number of goons stationed there and how they are armed helps you plan and assess risk, stealing the blueprints to the building helps you know how to get the drop on the goons, and know the best places to attack from so that they are stuck out in the open and you are not, etc. and having rules for those things means that all the PCs’ snooping and planning makes a real mechanical difference in whether they live or die.

That’s just my opinion though, and one of the biggest reasons WHY we decided to write the combat with as much depth as we did.

Anyway, thank you again for this review and analysis of our project, our Kickstarter jumped up by about ten more backers in the evening when this video went up after several days of no new backers, and we have to assume we have this video, and all of you watching and reading this, to thank. You’re really making our dreams come true. :)

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is kickstarting from right now until May 10th! Back it while you still can!

youtube

If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!

You can also support us on Ko-fi, or by checking out our merchandise!

28 notes · View notes