#TTRPGs

[anim-ttrpgs]

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.

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.

#disability #disability rights #disabled #leftism #critical role #candela obscura #eureka #eureka: investigative urban fantasy #ttrpg #rpg #roleplaying #tabletop #monsters #accesibility #blindness #autism spectrum disorder #autism awareness #autism acceptance #neurodivergent #adhd #ttrpgs #ttrpg community #ttrpg tumblr #indie ttrpg #dnd 5e #d&d 5e #vampirism #vampire #progressivism #lgbt art

[vforvalensa]

90s indie ttrpgs whip ass

#this is from a book called Superbabes: The Femforce Role Playing Game #ttrpgs #ttrpg

[quinnydoll]

being a GM is really fun because sometimes you can make your players go through some really traumatic Evangelion bullshit, but other times you can force them to go bowling for no reason

#lancer rpg #lancer #ttrpg community #ttrpgs #tabletop #tabletop games #ttrpg design

[saja-star]

I am obsessed with this idea

#gm tips #dnd #tabletop rpgs #ttrpgs #dungeon master

[eternalgirlscout]

the ideal GM/player dynamic is when one side says "here are some problems i caused" and the other says "thank you so much! i will make these worse" back and forth forever

#ttrpgs #winning tumblr roulette

[rathayibacter]

guess who made a wargame with thirteen thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine unit statblocks

#ttrpgs #:) #<- smile of unimaginable agony

[probablyasocialecologist]

Two ongoing digital games bundles are offering more than 200 tabletop RPGs (among video games, soundtracks, books and other goodies) in order to raise money in support of the Palestine Children’s Relief Funds. The Palestinian Relief Bundle is being hosted on Itch.io, while the separate TTRPGs for Palestine Charity Bundle is taking place on Tiltify. For $8, the Palestinian Relief Bundle is offering nearly 400 total items, 103 of which are tabletop RPG systems, supplements and adventures. Mapmaking game Ex Novo is joined by the paranormal gunslinging satire FIST: Ultra Edition, along with Takuma Okada’s celebrated solo journaling game Alone on a Journey. Weird and dirty iconoclast game about money, the mind and everything else, Greed by Gormenghast is also on this list and is well worth a look. And if you’d rather keep it cosy and introspective, Cassi Mothwin’s Clean Spirit will get the whole group taking care of their domestic homes. The TTRPGs for Palestine Charity Bundle focuses solely on analogue games, providing nearly 200 tabletop games for $15. A full spreadsheet of the included titles can be viewed here and includes Nevyn Holme’s Gun&Slinger, where one player embodies an occult cowboy while the second plays their sentient, magical gun. Wendi Yu’s Here, There, Be Monsters! approaches monster hunting media from the other side of the camera with a decidedly queer lens and unapologetic politics. Makapatag’s Gubat Banwa is a lush and dynamic collision of wuxia media, fiercely romantic and tragic melodrama all set against the backdrop and folklore of The Philippines.

#ttrpgs #ttrpg #indie ttrpg #palestine #palestine children's relief fund

[cryoverkiltmilk]

Two vital lessons from Brennan Lee Mulligan

Tabletop roleplaying games can immeasurably enrich your life.

There is no hill too small to die on.

#brennan lee mulligan #ttrpgs #d&d #Pathfinder #dnd #dungeons and dragons #dungeons & dragons

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Reason why you should play solo games :

You can play without having to find a day when all the group can be here.

#ttrpg #tabletop rpg #solo ttrpg #solo rpg #solo roleplaying #ttrpgs

[aurpiment]

I had a dream I was playing a TTRPG with a group of friends of a person i sort of knew, who all knew each other but who I didn’t know, and there was a complex mechanic for tracking your character’s emotional state which I will draw for you because it was insane. I don’t know what the game was about. They kept saying “it’s not hard, you’ll pick it up so quick.”

I have no idea how it worked, only how it looked

The other players insisted it would make sense in a few rounds

I don’t know what oonduh and eönduh meant. I think eo means horse in a tolkien language but this game was more sf-alien-politicking-themed than fantasy-themed

This was a card game with events and points

I don’t recall what character trait/ emotion i had chosen for my upper righthand quadrant. You could choose what to put in each quadrant

I wound up with two pegs in the Succumb zone for anger and asked “is that bad?” And the GM said “not necessarily” and that i could “flip it for a character choice” since she (my character) was 15

“Flipping succumb pegs” visually meant exchanging two red pegs for a slightly larger red lentil-shaped disc, and in gameplay meant… i have no idea what it meant.

I was having a wretched and confusing time at the table

#mt #dreams #ttrpgs

[charaznablescanontoyota]

hello website that likes fucked up houses. did you know that i wrote a gmless tabletop game based on house of leaves where you can create your very own fucked up house

it's called house. yes literally. the main mechanic is that you draw a map of a fucked up, sprawling, potentially never-ending house that grows as you explore it in-game. you draw from a deck of regular playing cards to determine the vibe of each room in the house. you might never escape! that's up to you. i'm not your mom

you can get it here and there's a 50% chance you already own it if you bought one of the big itch bundles during early pandemic. enjoy

#ttrpgs #house of leaves #haunted house

[ursamajori]

hey so we put your boyfriend in a tabletop campaign and now he has a martyr complex. yeah he got protective to the point of being self sacrificial due to his lack of self worth. we gave him a found family so he had something to live for but instead he’s just committed to being a human shield to keep them safe even if it kills him. sorry

#starspeak #ttrpgs #my campaigns #sorry cas. #tumblr boyfriend #edit realized i said human shield. cas is an elf. whoops #i love seeing everyone tag their ocs btw. brings me so much joy #special s/o to everyone in the reforged campaign checking to see if z’ress has been tagged yet #and naomi literally one second after this was posted commenting about ganymede. #btw this is about my own character if that wasn’t. clear.) #get obnoxious (oc tag)

[vexwerewolf]

The thing is, D&D is not a game.

I know that sounds insane, but hear me out: D&D is not a game, it is a games console. You don't actually "play D&D." You play "Dragon Heist" or "Tomb of Annihilation" or "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" or "your GM's homebrew campaign" or "the plot of Critical Role Season 1 reconstructed from memory" on D&D.

For quite a long while now - possibly literal decades - D&D hasn't even been the best games console, but it's been "the one everyone knows about" and "the one my friends have" and in fact it's "the one whose name is almost synonymous with the entire medium of TTRPGs," like how "Nintendo" or "Playstation" could just mean "games console" to people who didn't understand games consoles. They might not have heard of a "tabletop roleplaying game," but most people have heard of "Dungeons & Dragons."

For this extended metaphor, D&D is Nintendo back in the 90s, or Playstation in the 2000s. Sometimes you say "oh let's go to my house and play Nintendo" or "c'mon dude I wanna play Playstation" but you're not actually playing Nintendo or Playstation, you're playing Resident Evil or Super Mario Bros or Jurassic Park or Metal Gear Solid or whatever on a Nintendo or a Playstation.

Now, this metaphor is going to get even more tortured, but remember how when the PS2 and the original X-Box came out, they used a standardised DVD format, but the Nintendo console in that generation, the Gamecube, used discs but they were this proprietary tiny little disc format that they had control over? That essentially meant that it was really difficult to make third party titles for the Gamecube that did literally anything that Nintendo didn't want them to do, and also essentially gave Nintendo an even greater ability to skim money off the top of any sales?

So that must've seemed like a smart business decision in their heads. But the PS2 and the X-Box used DVDs. This was a standardized format which gave Microsoft and Sony way less control over who made games for their consoles, but that actually turned out to be a good thing for gaming, because it meant that the breadth of games that you could play on their consoles was massively increased even if some of them were games Microsoft and Sony didn't really approve of. (Also it's worth nothing that the PS2 and the X-Box could just play DVDs, which meant if your household was on a budget, you didn't need a separate DVD player - your games console could do it for you! This was actually a huge selling point!)

What Wizards are currently trying to do now is kinda-sorta the equivalent of Sony suddenly announcing that the PS5 will only accept a proprietary cartridge format they hold the patent on, will control the content of and charge money for the construction of. This possibly seems like it could be a moneymaker in your head because you hold market dominance (apparently the PS5 has 30 million units shipped compared to X-Box Series X 20 million units) and so many people make games for your console, but what it actually means is game devs and publishers will abandon your product. If it takes so much more work, the scope of what they're allowed to do is so much more limited and they're going to make less money off of it, they just won't bother. They'll go make games for the X-Box or PC instead.

To use another computer metaphor, D&D is Windows - it might not be the best system but it's the system most people are familiar with and so it gets the most stuff made for it, but there's is an upper limit on the bullshit people will take before they decide fuck it and get an Apple or learn how Linux works.

TTRPG systems are a weird product because you're not selling people a game, you're selling people a method to play a game. All the actual games are created by the community - even prewritten campaigns needs to be executed via a game master. Trying to skim money off the community will mean they'll eventually give up on you.

#open gaming license #dungeons and dragons #ogl #ogl 1.1 #opendnd #wizards of the coast #one dnd #d&d #dnd #tabletop gaming #tabletop roleplaying games #ttrpgs

[sprintingowl]

This Discord Has Ghosts In It

It doesn't get talked about enough, but This Discord Has Ghosts In It is a rad example of how you can adapt game design to your surroundings.

Basically, This Discord Has Ghosts In It is a digital larp. It's Phasmophobia played by chat. Your group creates a discord server to function as a haunted house, then you all explore it, building new 'rooms' out of channels as you go.

Some players take the roles of ghosts, and are muted but can affect the environment in the haunted house.

Other players take the roles of explorers, and can talk, but the ghosts are all listening.

Discord wasn't built to be gamified this way, but that doesn't matter.

As long as you can guarantee consistent behavior from a thing, you can build mechanics off of it.

Anything in your environment can be turned into a game.

And in this particular case, it's a really good one!

The mechanics lend themselves well to the kinds of pacing, limited communication, and untrustworthy setting that any good ghost story needs.

#ttrpg #ttrpgs #indie ttrpgs #tabletop #ttrpg design #ttrpg homebrew #this discord has ghosts in it

[public-trans-it]

A lot of people talk about Actual Play podcasts giving unrealistic expectations for TTRPGs (Surprise! Trained Actors improv differently from your average player, and even for indie APs, playing for an audience is completely different from playing among friends)

But I absolutely think that watching other people play CAN inspire new ways to play, in a way you can’t really get elsewhere.

It wasn’t until I listened to Friends at the Table and listened to how Austin Walker narrates the games they play that I considered the potential of treating a TTRPG less like the kind of collaborative improv we normally treat it as, and more like storyboarding.

The major difference being: Austin regularly talks about ‘the camera’. It is practically its own character with how much attention it gets.

“So I’m imagining this like one of those shots where everything kinda freezes in place, and the character is still moving to show the out of body experience they are having right now, and when the scene cuts back, these are the parts that are different.”

“Oh yeah, you open the box, and it’s like that scene in Pulp Fiction. Where we just see this golden glow from what’s coming inside. Your characters know what’s in there now, but I have no idea, we haven’t gotten to that point yet. We will come back to it.”

“Okay you see this symbol, and your character wasn’t there for it so they don’t know what it was, but we the audience can immediately connect it back to this one cult we were dealing with.”

At one point just blatantly goes “Oh man, actually should we change it to this, for a better thematic parallel to what happened in that other session? That might be a really good resolution for your character.”

It’s such an INCREDIBLE example of what you can do by treating the fiction so casually, and like the work in progress it actually is. Genuinely one of the best GM practices I have ever seen, and something that very quickly became a tool I make heavy use of in my campaigns.

The story isn’t a finished product, and it turns out treating it like a draft instead of a finished product makes the game able to do SO MUCH more cool shit.

#it’s SUCH a good way to narrate! #AND it’s system agnostic! AND it makes GMing a far more approachable practice!!! #TTRPGs #Friends at the Table

[jonnywaistcoat]

Hey all, been an intense few days, and realised I haven't actually posted here about the fact the crowdfunder for The Magnus Archives RPG by the incredible Monte Cook Games is live RIGHT NOW.

It's going amazingly well, far beyond what we could have predicted, and I'm so excited by it. It looks amazing and I'm so psyched to see how Monte and the team bring the Archives to the tabletop. As someone who's been roleplaying since the 90s, Monte's work has obviously been a big feature in my gaming life, so you'll have to forgive me if there's a slight fanboyish tinge to how I talk about the project!

Check it out here!

#the magnus archives #ttrpgs #monte cook games #its all rather exciting isnt it