#also tried my best to keep the ttrpg unnamed so that it could be system agnostic

[yuffi369]

Co-DM

P03 x GN!Reader

In which P03 realizes that, for as much crap as he's talked about for you not appreciating his game design, you may actually know what you're talking about, sometimes.

Since you'd managed to keep a back-up of Inscryption's files after... everything, P03 had managed to worm his way onto your computer system's drive. At first, he acted a lot more maliciously; accessing permissions to just about everything, your webcam, your microphone, any files... he looked through just about everything, and began to make moves to even take over your computer entirely.

You were smart, though. You'd managed to get to where the backup copy of Inscryption and all of its files were, and upon threat of deletion, he cooperated. He agreed to only hang around your computer and not tamper with any of your files, or compromise your computer's integrity, but he still wanted to hang around. You didn't mind this for two reasons; one, it did seem rather cruel to keep him locked up in the files with nothing to do, and two, you didn't mind the company anyhow, seeing as most of your friends were over long distance.

One evening, you'd decided to get some work done on a campaign you were running for your friends. The game was in two weeks, so you had plenty of prep time, but there were some maps you had to make, encounters to plan, and you had to figure out some plot ahead of where they were going. The next session would be taken up in the first half by traveling, so it was mostly technical things like potential encounters, which was probably your least favorite part of game writing. You didn't hate any part, necessarily, but your strong suit lied in the story parts.

You were so lost in your struggling thoughts, staring at the VTT interface with a stumped expression, you almost forgot P03 was there. "Hey, idiot, you going to move the mouse, or are you going to let the computer screen fall asleep?"

You blinked rapidly, sitting up straight. "Huh?" You looked down at the tiny P03, who was staring at you as he stood on top of your task bar. "No, I was just thinking."

"What're you even doing, anyway?" he asked, looking at the grid on the screen.

"Writing encounters for my next game session," you replied, scrolling through another webpage you had open where you had access to stat blocks available to you.

"You write games?" he said, incredulously.

"Oh, right, I haven't had a session since you've come around and started living rent-free on my desktop."

"What do you want me to do for money, use your graphics card for crypto mining?"

"No," you replied, curtly.

"Anyway, given your criticisms about my game design, I didn't think you knew a thing about game design." He crossed his arm over his body, rolling his eyes.

"This isn't exactly a card game," you replied. "It's a tabletop roleplaying game. It's based on war gaming, with roleplaying added in. So it's a mixture of tactical gaming and story-based gaming. Not quite a card game like Inscryption."

"Interesting," he replied.

He continued to watch you work- or, well, the more accurate words would be struggle to work. You tried, several times, to put down tokens on the map, only to take them back off after a few minutes of deliberation. Sick of watching you struggle, P03 hovered up to your cursor, dragging it around to get your attention. "Hurry up. I'm sick of the ambient work music you've had in the background for the last hour."

"Sorry, P," you sighed, genuinely feeling a bit bad that he'd watched you do basically nothing this entire time. "I'm not exactly the best at planning encounters..."

"Lemme help, then. Pull up the webpage with the stat blocks."

"Fine. But aren't you programmed to write for Inscryption, not this?"

"I'm a fast learner." He scrolled through the webpage, looking through the stat blocks. After looking over a few stat blocks, he pulled up a stat block for an undead creature, that had an interesting mechanic. "Here. This should keep your players from falling asleep."

You took one look at the stat block and shook your head. "No. I can't use that."

He looked at you with exasperation. "Well why the f#%& not?" he said, the little beep censoring his cursing through the speakers.

"Those are undead creatures," you explained, using your cursor to point at the stat block's creature type. "They're just traveling through grasslands. I can't justify a random group of these just showing up out of the blue."

"I dunno what to tell you. This stat block's probably your best bet for an interesting mechanic that's low-level enough to not kill your players. Maybe have them, I dunno, take a shortcut through a graveyard, or whatever."

"Shortcut through a graveyard..." you repeated, under your breath. After a brief moment, you bolted upright in your seat, pulling up your document and beginning to write at an accelerated pace. P03 probably clocked you at about 90 WPM at your fastest. Once you were satisfied with the narrative text you'd written out for yourself to read upon arrival to the location, you pulled up the VTT and began placing things all around the map, taking your time to make sure things were placed in logical, good-looking locations, making sure to add terrain in places for your rogue to hide behind and take advantage of. Finally, you put the group of undead creatures on the hidden layer to pull up later, and then typed out what loot was to be found in the graveyard as well as on the bodies of the creatures.

Once you were satisfied with your work, you leaned back in your chair, gazing upon the zoomed-out map with pride. "Wow," P03 let out a whistle-like beep, looking at the map with you. "Once you got started, that only took, what? An hour? I would've been able to make the fight really easy, but all that other stuff probably would've taken me the better part of an afternoon."

"Well, I mean, it does take me a while to write something good. But when inspiration hits, I sort of just... go, and don't stop. But I don't have those moments often, or at least not enough for my liking."

P03 turned and glared at you. "Take the damn compliment."

You laughed. "Alright, alright, geez. Thank you."

"Now, let's celebrate with a movie." He pulled up a window with a video player, ready to play the file.

You raised an eyebrow. "Where did you get that?"

"Downloaded it off yarhar.net while you were writing."

"P!"

"What? I scanned it for viruses, it's clean. What do you want me to do, pay for Netflix? With what money?"

You just laughed, shaking your head. "Let me go make some popcorn."

"And I'll... pull up a jpeg of popcorn, I guess."

#p03 #p03 x reader #inscryption #inscryption p03 #you guys liked the last one a lot so have another!! this time more modern/realism #this can be read as either platonic or romantic tbh but i'd like to think of it as 'roommates to lovers'-esque #inspired by the fact that i could feel p03 shimeji judging me as i wrote for my d&d game today lololol #also tried my best to keep the ttrpg unnamed so that it could be system agnostic #petition for p03 to Get a Damn Job