I know a few of us are into TTRPGs and a few of us are into game dev, I think a TTRPG game dev thread will be pretty helpful.
Please post resources you have used (or made!).
My TTRPG is currently called Dungeon Fields which is kind of an unfortunate name for me, but people seem to like it. I want to make a Wizardry feeling d20 dungeon crawling game with a “road trip” feel. I’m going to be running my 3rd playtest tonight - so if you have any tips on how to make the most out of TTRPG playtests please post!
I like this resource on helping make dungeons. Cyclic Dungeon Generation by Sersa Victory. It’s helpful specifically for creating the structure around a dungeon w/ a lot of choices.
i have written two single player games, which aren’t released yet! one of them has its own thread here. i’m hoping to release that one in e-form this year, and if i manage that, a print zine containing them both next year.
the one that has its own thread is wonders of the open sky, a game about exploring the sky in the age of discovery. the other one is an appointment with the baron, about killing a landlord during a peasants’ uprising.
I have written two games for game jams that have been released, they’re both on my itch and they’re both free and good. I’ve also done some freelance work for friends, usually writing interesting locations.
Besides that I have dozens of works in progress in various states and I plan on finishing something again one day.
I don’t have a lot of experience with creating structure for narrative, but these seem really cool. What’s the approach? I think when I design things its always forces and counter forces that affect player choice as they approach a goal (self directed or not). How do you design things to keep it from going everywhere? Or does that not even matter?
I ran a third test session for Dungeon Fields. I’ll give a background on it as a game and then jot down my notes from the session.
Dungeon Fields started as a series of homebrew rules for Mork Borg and Shadowdark. The idea of encounters in a dungeon with diminishing resources is interesting to me. How do you solve problems efficiently and when do you back out? Outside of simplifying d20 games to a d6 game there are two “main mechanics”
Rerolls
Collaborative downtime procedures
Unlike most games rerolls are plentiful. I stole this from EZD6, but am looking at it from each “class”. Your stat is literally how many rerolls you get for Strength, Agility (Dexterity, essentially), and Arcane (Magic/Intelligence). There is a fourth stat called Willpower that is a combination of the less combat heavy D&D stats (Constitution, Charisma, and Wisdom). Willpower is used for that stuff, but it’s also used sort of like short rests. Spend a Willpower to gain rerolls in each of the other stats. If you manage to get to a place to rest can regain your rerolls.
Downtime is procedural to give structure to more role-play-y stuff. You recover HP, repair gear, etc. But you also eat monsters you killed, plants you found, and recount the adventure to everyone around the campfire. A lot of this is tied to the memory of the last adventure and I wanted to wrap it with something silly. The carrot for the more “gamery” types is/was an XP multiplier, but really the main value is for them to acknowledge the crazy things that happened on the way here.
There are a handful of other mechanics.
Combat turns are taken collaboratively between sides. The players mix their moves and actions to get into advantageous positions before doing their attacks (and rolling with advantage).
Everything is d6
Even attack rolls are d6. The target is the enemy Defense. Hitting the target deals a preset min damage, over is a higher mid damage, and 6 is a max damage
Advantage/Disadvantage is given out pretty liberally. Usually it depends on what kind of “positions” the players put themselves into. Rolling to get into a good position is key
There’s an abstracted Dungeon Gear item that is kind of like an item from Blades in the Dark. It takes up a slot and then comes out of your backpack as whatever you want.
Spells/Miracles are taken straight from Shadowdark and converted (this will change a lot)
The last thing is that the game is meant to be able to convert existing OSR modules pretty easily. Monster HP doesn’t need conversion. The d20 stuff converts nicely divided by 3. You get rid of most +1s and only care when it’s +3, +6, etc. AC is dicey, but yeah…
The other mechanics seemed to work out really well
Rolling was lightning fast and easy
Rerolls made people take risks even though they had the same odds as everyone else
Collaborative combat turns worked. It felt like drawing up fantasy sports plays. *Note: I want to emphasize ways to roll to get into good position.
Dungeon gear worked out
The things that need work
The flavor of just taking spells from Shadowdark (old D&D, essentially) was fine but made it feel boring?
Downtime and resource getting mechanics were mega fun but super broken mechanically. The value of having specially carved out role play time was pretty great, though. *Note: I’m unsure if rewarding XP to carrot players is right. Maybe other benefits like eating in Monster Hunter? Sorta like daily mutators from L4D or something but positive?
Skills and progression is just… meh. I also think that explicit skills might be at odds with OSR style “rulings not rules”. Like, “stunts” should always be doable and the odds for them just come from your stats. But gamers want the action menu for their signature moves…
I found this resource and it seems like a hub of really good content. Definitely is fitting the current zeitgeist so maybe your product will end up samey, but… yeah
if you’ve GMed, you sure do! You might not have experience making that structure explicit but trad RPGs are already structured around the GM saying something, the players responding, the GM responding in turn. It’s a conversational structure, and the GM facilitates the boundaries of that conversation. In my games (as well as the games I was inspired by when making them) the structure for how that conversation can proceed is made explicit. The key to making this work (for me) is known as the Czege Principle though that name is more of an in-joke for old rpg forum personalities than anything:
creating your own adversity and its resolution is boring
In other words, even with how freeform you can be in a primarily narrative game, you’re not just telling a story without any input from other players or the rules, that would be boring.
i totally forgot to mention it before (and i can’t remember if i’ve mentioned it on sb before at all), but i also have a very unfinished fighting fantasy-style gamebook in progress. it’s about a fighting tournament and has possibilities like going home in shame because you were scared of a mugger, or getting complimented by a cool female fighter after you spar with her
also i designed a simple 2d6 combat system that attempts to be slightly more martial artsy than that of fighting fantasy
Would people be interested in helping review my downtime procedures? It’s for cooking and ‘making art’. The cooking is more mechanically impactful immediately ala monhun, but the art is more freeform reflecting on the adventure as inspiration. It can come full circle re sales but also be quest hooks eg you make a song and attract a crowd in a tavern.
i had an idea for a game that every once in awhile i go “oh yeah i should do something with that” and poke at it for a bit
i guess i’ll say my idea is Tucker’s kobolds from the perspective of Tucker’s kobolds. Like there is a party of adventurers trying to invade the dungeon where your clan lives, for whatever quest they’re on, and your player characters (a party of the craftiest, wisest, ko-boldest kobolds in your clan) are trying to repel them by any means necessary e.g. scare them off, chase them onto the 2nd floor to die by harder monsters/traps, help them get their stupid treasure if it means theyll leave, murder them all if it comes to that. Just get them to stop bothering kobolds
So ideally the “dungeon” is a single floor map that would be a warm-up for an adventuring party and PC kobolds are using that space as an arena to get (at minimum) a fighter, ranger, thief, mage & cleric to fuck off
credit to Tulpa for the excellent title Tucker’s Deception which is the only surefire thing. that and the idea to nick some mechanics from Blades in the Dark
i thought of some simple stats i liked inspired by Apocalypse World – CUTE, CRAFTY and BOLD – but i hadnt really figured out much else
This is the in progress character sheet I’m making. The pips on the Stat dice represent resources for rerolls (or maybe special skill usage). D.Gear is a meta item that can be any generic dungeon delving item (a rope, a torch, crowbar, rations) to solve problems. It then stays as that item. The pips near the Spells & Miracles represent if a spell has been failed and can’t be used until recovery.
I’m kind of just blundering in here in a silly way without any background in the forum debate literature that I’m sure surrounds this but having never heard of this principle before, it seems kind of strange to me? I feel like anyone who’s played make-believe with dolls or action figures or the like as a child has probably had a good time doing this in some sense? Or like, if you enjoy writing fiction or plays, I think some people would imagine that activity in these terms. Certain kinds of simulation games can feel this way too i think (like if they’re especially “sandboxy”).
I suppose you could say like, in the context of a tabletop/roleplaying game though, if you want to involve more than one person especially, if one person is doing the whole, like, “dialectic activity” of the narrative by themselves or w/e, the other people are presumably their audience more-or-less and they’re not necessarily doing much participatory roleplaying, and for the person doing it, they probably feel more like a storyteller than someone playing a game I would imagine. In terms of like, single-player computer RPGs or CYOA books or whatnot, of course the computer program or book etc. is kind of like the GM. So um, maybe, driving the story all by yourself is boring if what you really want to do is play a roleplaying game, as such.
Something I will say too…I’m sure there are games out there like this already so maybe this is really obvious, but like, I think you can easily have a co-op sort of paper-based game where everyone is working together and have it still be both GMless and “game-y” if the mechanical rules present them with surprising problems to collaboratively solve in some sense or introduce shocking elements into the group’s collective tale or that sort of thing. In a way you could say PvE play in an MMO is like this, although rarely is that medium exploited for its raw narrative-generating potential explicitly as far as I’ve seen.
I read the two games you posted btw—I thought it was interesting that like, sort of along these lines I guess, I thought the first game (the mecha one) probably could also serve as a set of writing prompts for someone who wanted to write a short story or the like with the structure of a combat veteran describing their life during and after war, whereas the second seemed more like you would have to have other people there (although I wonder a bit at giving the players impetus to mess each other up ). Have you played either of them with other people? I’m curious to know how it went if so.
You are correct this principle primarily applies to multiplayer rpgs and story games, rather than to solo games or to writing. However, someone did come up with a corollary for those games:
when you create the adversity, you should not be sure you can solve it
that neatly makes the principle compatible with solo game design.
they absolutely cannot because the system determines the resolution of adversity, not the player (except as final arbiter of the rules in a solo game, but player-as-arbiter is a different hat from player-as-character).
I have! Both games went fine in playtests, though the mecha game needs more copy-editing.
this is the secret sauce that makes the game work as a comedy game, and what I stole from “The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen RPG”, one of the games that most inspires me overall; the rules are structured such that the storyteller can’t really be messed up by the interjections of the audience, and they actually make telling a story easier because now you have something to riff on
but having never heard of this principle before, it seems kind of strange to me? I feel like anyone who’s played make-believe with dolls or action figures or the like as a child has probably had a good time doing this in some sense? Or like, if you enjoy writing fiction or plays, I think some people would imagine that activity in these terms. Certain kinds of simulation games can feel this way too i think (like if they’re especially “sandboxy”).