Ahoy, everyone! After nearly 7 years, the blog has finally reached its 100th post. This means that on average, there were 1.2 blog posts every month for you to read. On such a special occasion, I would like to make an announcement. I could talk about how I'm working on a Runehack: Fairy Heist update, or on an expansion and update for the D6 Feet Under, but there isn't much to be said on those topics until I'm done with them. So I'll keep the main announcement relatively short to get to the May's 200-word TTRPG quickly!
Youtube Channel
I'm starting a youtube channel that covers pretty much the same topics that I do on the blog: my personal musings on worldbuilding and game design. There are two major reasons why I want to do this. The first one is that audio content is easier to binge while doing other stuff, such as chores. The second reason is that I'd like more people to discover my content naturally. Unless I were to jam this blog with various Search Engine Optimizing keywords, it'd be hard to stumble upon it without being linked to it. And while I don't expect Youtube to be too kind to me by recommending my videos to thousands of people for no reason instantly, maybe the algorithm will someday give me a chance.
Now, I don't know how difficult this will be and whether I can keep it up. I find writing to be a lot easier than video-making. My main sources of inspiration are Worldbuilding Notes and Nakari Speardane, and there are likely plenty more sources of inspiration that I'm unaware of at the time of writing this. While my first reason is to make content that's audible, I'd still like to put some effort into it by providing at least some visuals. I'm not that good at drawing just yet, but hopefully, I'll work something out in time. And I'm afraid working out these visuals is going to take up the most time, along with editing.
The channel's name is Proph, the Prophecy Breaker. Those who are long-time readers might recognize the name. Those who know me on Discord know me by that name, so I figured I'll go with that. The PNGtuber avatar I'm using for it was drawn by my lovely girlfriend Arell.
So far it's just this video, but I'm happy because it's more than nothing. Now then, with the announcement out of the way, let's get to the game!
Play It by Cheer!
The music band is made up of each player's character. Their qualities start at 10's. Players can increase or decrease their musician's quality by one 12 times.
Low |
Quality |
High |
|---|---|---|
| Slow (Careful) | Tempo | Fast (Quick) |
| Calm (Subtle) | Intensity | Strong (Forceful) |
| Bright (Uplifting) | Authenticity | Dark (Empathetic) |
| Stock (Simple) | Creativity | Fresh (Unconventional) |
The concert crowd has preferences for high or low qualities that the GM can generate randomly, or pick based on a musical genre. Players must discover the crowd's preferences while performing based on their reactions. The crowd doesn't need a preference for each quality.
Players take turns clockwise. Turn steps:
- Announce a quality and if you're trying to roll higher or lower than your quality.
- Roll d6+d12 and d8+d10, keeping the sum further from 10.
- Three successful predictions across the group achieve the quality. Three failed predictions disallow achieving the quality.
The amount of crowd's preferred qualities achieved determines the concert's success. After sufficient success (determined by GM), the band members choose one upgrade (pedals, microtonality, etc.) that lets them add or subtract 1 to rolls on one specific quality.
The qualities can also be used when roleplaying outside of concerts. Use common sense.
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| I wasn't sure if I want to include the Pentakill or True Damage pic, so I figured I'll post both to highlight something about the game. It is setting agnostic, and it can work well for any world with music and audiences willing to listen to them, no matter if it's modern hip-hop, or fantasy heavy metal. Both of these are skin lines in League of Legends, owned by Riot. The top one is Pentakill II, made by suqling (Kat C.K.Y). |
Believe it or not, I've gone through at least two other ideas for music bands performing before getting to this one. The first one was more akin to D&D 5e combat, except the "damage" dealt was good quality notes and the goal was to add them up to some high number. The second idea was of just rolling a lot of dice, and finding "chords" (groups of identical numbers) and "riffs" (sequences of numbers that go in a row), and adding them up to get the quality of the music played. While those were okay, something felt off about them. It was just about gathering big numbers, and that was it.
The latest iteration started when an acquaintance of mine on a discord server I frequent wanted to make a crafting system. For a long while, I've theorized about making a crafting system that could also work for providing services. The premise was that to craft an item, one needs the materials, the tools, and the goal. The goal would be composed of several qualities that could be developed independently of each other. I created some ideas, kept working on them, and eventually made an entire crafting game. My plan originally was to make this crafting game my 200-word TTRPG for May, but it was delayed due to my Youtube channel preparation. I kept postponing the recording of the first two videos more and more, due to being busy and procrastinating on it. In the meantime, I started wondering how I could adapt the crafting game into a music one. My third attempt at a music-focused game however failed when I realized that I can't come up with any more than four pairs of qualities. I needed to pivot this.
On May 23rd, I woke up, thinking about how to do a dice graph with two bumps. I tried looking for one on the internet, but I couldn't find it. I was sure there has to be a way to do it, and yet my searches yielded none. Then, I remembered Brennan Lee Mulligan's houserule that I was told about recently, "Rolling with Emphasis". This method of his is meant to give the player an extreme result more often than the average one, being essentially an inverse of 2d10. I could feel it, I almost have the two-bump graph in my hands. And that's when... it clicked. "What if I roll 2d10 twice with emphasis?" That was it!
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| "Look at this braph!" Look, why bother just pasting here just the straight results if I can have a little fun with it? So what if the meme is dead, I loved wasting 10 minutes of my time on this. |
In fact, the secret to a two-bump graph is rolling multiple dice twice and taking the result further from their average. For Play It by Cheer!, I went experimental and decided that the rolls will be d6+d12 and d8+d10. Why? Because this way, the player can roll all four dice at the same time without getting confused about which d10 was paired with which. Another important reason is that both of these averaged 10, which is an easy-to-remember number (and hopefully easy to compare to).
If I had more than 200 words to spare, I would've added more stuff. Maybe how much money the players make, how many fans they have, maybe some way to classify instruments, definitely something about the kind of audience you attract when you get famous, and maybe more stuff. Maybe I'll include this in the big project I'm working on. Only time will tell.
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| Play It by Cheer could, in theory, be played without a GM or other players, you just need to determine randomly what are the crowd's preferences, perhaps after the first roll. Of course, without friends who are there to support you in your weak points, you'll have a harder time. Art by Guweiz |
Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!
