Hacks of One Trade

In my previous blog post, I explained that I had this game ready for May when I got a better idea to publish. Originally, this came to be (as most of these games have) through a conversation with other game designers. This one was about whether crafting belongs in the heroic fantasy-focused tabletop RPGs. I've entered the discussion claiming that it can, but in the end, I do agree that it depends on the circumstances and the story one wishes to tell. Either way, what came of it was the system below, which I quite grew to like. It's what Play It by Cheer! (released in May) was initially based on, but that game has evolved into something very different the more I worked on it.

I hope you'll enjoy this article, and have a wonderful day!

Hacks of One Trade

Players describe their craftsmen and their shared trade. Choose one specialization:

• Brisk. Adds +1 to Progress increases.
• Cautious. Can ignore a Steps and Progress reduction once per item.
• Prepared. Adds +2 to Progress before crafting.
• Stylish. Has cool equipment.

The GM describes a customer, their item, and its requested qualities.

The craftsmen list the planned qualities and get to work.

Qualities	Steps
4	10
5	15
6	21
7	28
8	36
9	45
10	55

Progress begins equal the number of craftsmen (max 6), Steps are found in the table above. Track them like this: Progress/Steps.

Craftsmen take turns working on the item. Describe how, and roll 2d6.

6+	Progress+1, and Steps-1 if the craftsman chooses to.
Otherwise,	Progress-1, and Steps-1.

If Progress ≥ Steps, the item is finished, possessing a number of qualities according to its final Steps number listed on the table (round down). The item is destroyed if Progress ≤ 0. Item can't be finished or destroyed without crafting.

Each craftsman receives coins equal to the number of finished item's Qualities. If they spend 10 coins on improving, they gain an extra specialization. Treat the Steps column as costs for further progression.

Love it or hate it, I really like this sequence from the first Hobbit movie. I don't care how exaggerated or unrealistic it is, it looks awesome.

The initial draft that this was loosely based upon came from Izzy, who wanted a crafting minigame. The biggest issue was, that he required tracking of three separate numbers. I couldn't help myself and took it upon myself to tweak his system by boiling two numbers into one and giving them a neat X/Y format that's intuitive. What isn't intuitive is that when we use this notation normally, for example, "2/10 flags found", we expect the latter number (10 in this example) to be fixed. What I've done is that I've allowed for this value to change too, and define how well the final product is made.

I like it when I have space in the 200-word TTRPG for player options, which is what Specializations at the start of the ruleset are for. Even better when I can add something silly, which in this case has to be Stylish. Because who wouldn't want to be "that one tailor with the coolest sewing machine", or "the carpenter who's using Mjolnir replica, no kidding!", right?

If there is a downside to this system, it's that you might have to come up with up to 10 qualities for an item and that there isn't much to say about progression beyond "it exists". Part of what made me rework Play It by Cheer! into its own rules system instead of a proper Hacks of One Trade hack is the fact that I wanted the musical qualities to come in opposing pairs that would fit. For example, instrumental vs. acapella is technically an opposing pair, but it's unfitting because you don't accidentally stop playing an instrument and start imitating it during the concert (or at least not unintentionally). It might be tough to come up with 10 qualities, and a lot of work to achieve them all, but I haven't really had time to playtest this.

That's about it for now when it comes to Hacks of One Trade. Just in case you're wondering about the title, it's a riff on the idiom "jack-of-all-trades". Hack can be somewhat synonymous with a craftsman (not sure if just a bad one or generally, it could work either way I hope), and it's meant to say that the players are all crafting the same kind of stuff: everyone is scribes, blacksmiths, basket-weavers, etc.

In the meantime, I'll see what I do for June. Yesterday I came up with an amazing game mechanic that I had to add to Runehack: The Asterist immediately, and I think it sparked my interest in finishing the ruleset once again. I'm absolutely thrilled about it and believe that for this one idea, the game was worth waiting entire months for. That being said, I hope to release a 200-word TTRPG for July as well, and right now I got this one gizmo on my desk that I might experiment with.

Pondering the orb is so 2021.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!

Play It by Cheer! (100th Blog Post)

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!

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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:

1. Announce a quality and if you're trying to roll higher or lower than your quality.
2. Roll d6+d12 and d8+d10, keeping the sum further from 10.
3. 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.

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).

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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!

"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.

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!

Gon' Click

So there's apparently a movie in the cinemas right now. No, not the one about honorable thieves of Faerun. No, not the one about plumbers in the Mushroom Kingdom. Yeah, the one about a professional assassin. I have yet to watch it, but on one of the Discord servers I frequent, Steve Fidler of Vorpal Dice Press wanted to write a minimal game about it. Instead of giving each enemy their own turn, he figured that they should all have one turn. That's when I came forth with a suggestion... what if the enemies didn't get a turn at all?

After refining, shortening, and adding some more choices to the game, I think I can show you my next 200-word TTRPG for any number of players, no GM required! This one was a tough nut to fit into 200 words. I hope you'll enjoy it, and I wish you a nice day!

Those poor fools didn't know that surrounding you gives you the upper hand.
I couldn't find the source of this art, so if you know who made it, please let me know and I'll credit them!

Gon' Click

A team of badasses pursues justice, money, or something else. Each player's badass starts with a d10 Die representing their power that can Increase (max d12), or Decrease (min d6).

d6—d8—d10—d12

Battle begins. Everyone rolls their Die and sums it to get the Number that represents the number of enemies present. Players take turns clockwise, starting with the one whose roll was highest. On their turn, a player chooses to slaughter or recover. 

Slaughter: Roll the Die. Decrease if you rolled more than the Number, otherwise, reduce the Number by the rolled amount. When your Die is a d6 and it Decreases, you are incapacitated. Your turns are skipped until it Increases.

Recover: Increase or Decrease your Die.

If the Number didn't change, roll a d6, and add the result to it. If the Number is 0 or all badasses are incapacitated, Increase each player's Die and proceed to the next scene.

Variant: Target Acquired. When all players say so, or if all badasses were incapacitated, they face a single masterful combatant. The Number represents the target's power. Skip the d6 rolls that would raise it normally. Incapacitated badasses die. Killing the target gets you one reward Coin.

Clues and Hunches

Guess who made another 200-word RPG as yet another proof of concept? That's right, it was me. This time, it happened because I was talking with a bunch of other game designers a while back about modifying who gets to know what in the game. Gumshoe's way of solving it is fine, but I figured maybe there should be something more to it, so I suggested "secret tokens" that the players could spend to find some secret they think is in the present scene. Smoooze took that idea and improved upon it, both by naming it "Hunch", and by letting the player regain it upon a correct guess. This would make for a cool game mechanic in a mystery game, so yesterday I gave it a go.

Clues and Hunches

The GM defines the Domains their clues fall into. Players create one detective each that has:

• a name
• a quirk
• Domains from GM's list (minimum 1) and Hunches (minimum 1), the sum of both numbers is 6.

A detective gains a new Domain or Hunch (player's choice) after every third successfully solved case. The GM can come up with new domains as the games go on.

The GM must give a detective all clues in their general vicinity that belong to their Domain. Some information must be discovered through Hunches. When a detective suspects something is true, they can spend one Hunch by stating publicly "I have a hunch that...", following it with their assumed fact. The GM gives the detective their spent Hunch back if it's true. Spent Hunches are otherwise regained after the case.

If the GM allows it, a detective could possess supernatural abilities like speaking with the dead or lie detection. Such abilities count as two domains each.

GM guidelines:

• Come up with a seemingly impossible hook, and its logical explanation.
• Give at least 3 clues in detectives' domains for everything they need to know (including motive).
• Play the suspects and other NPCs.
• Avoid red herrings. 

Never had a chance to make these lengthy convoluted noir monologues that detectives give just before they get into describing how they got the case. But when she came knocking on my door, I knew that was about to change.
Commission: Detective, by chirun

• Example Quirks: neat freak, amnesia, never talks in first person, ...
• Example Domains: chemistry, history, geography, forensics, ...
• Example Hunches: "I have a hunch that there's a way to get from the living room to the garden without using the doors or windows obvious to everyone.", "I have a hunch that the victim was bludgeoned to death with a thing I've already encountered.", ...

I've had multiple arguments with folk on Discord about why I avoid putting Charisma into my games. With this Hunch mechanic, I think it would be fine to remove Wisdom (especially Perception and Insight, Investigation too to an extent) equivalents too. It's a statement Gumshoe makes already by showing that someone shouldn't have to roll to learn something crucial to the game's story.

Hunches go one step beyond, boiling these situations down to their core: The player thinks there's something hidden or off here, so they want to see if their suspicion is correct. In a game where one rolls for these, and the player's suspicion is surprisingly accurate, what is the GM supposed to do? Do they punish the player with a chance of not learning what they should be able to learn? Do they let the player skip the roll completely? What if a player with low Wisdom makes these correct guesses way too much?

Drop the Wisdom (maybe even Intelligence), and give the players tools for learning information. Drop the Charisma, and give the players tools for controlling the conversation they have with the NPCs. And if someone brings up Strength to me again, saying "should I ask the player to lift a boulder in order to prove their barbarian can crash through the door?", I'll direct them to my response. Mental attributes are tricky, which is why I see their removal as more acceptable. That being said, I can see some scenarios where a mental attribute could still be viable.

Thank you for reading, and I wish you all a wonderful day!

Double the Zombies

Lately I've been pondering spicing up the core of most TTRPGs: the conflict resolution. Most of the time, it's a simple success or failure. Sometimes, a partial success and/or partial failure is added inbetween. Could there be anything more though? Well, through my weeks of passively mulling this over, I came up with one idea: every dice roll could influence something that's not related directly to your success or failure, instead perhaps influencing the situation you're in. It will be difficult to come up with something that could work this way for any setting generally, so I started by writing up another 200 word RPG as an example. It's supposed to be setting agnostic, despite relying on a term like "ammo".

Double the Zombies

Your characters are zombie outbreak survivors. Everyone describes their character and gives them 4 mundane items (10 of ammo counts as 1 item). You can only carry 4 items. Distribute 10 points across the stats: forcefully, subtly, quickly, carefully, boldly, cleverly. No stat can have 4 or more in it.

Roll 2d6 when trying to do something significant. Reroll one die and choose either result if a piece of equipment can help you. You succeed if the sum of your relevant stat and the rolled numbers is greater than the difficulty, or if you sacrifice an item in a relevant way, destroying it permanently.

Difficulties: 5 (easy), 7 (moderate), 9 (difficult).

If both numbers on the rolled dice are identical or players stall too long:

• A single zombie appears if there were none previously and it can reach the current location.
• The zombies overcome an obstacle that prevented them from threatening you.
• The number of zombies doubles if they were a threat already.

Roll 1d6 if zombies are too close to someone. On a roll less or equal to their amount, you get hurt that many times. You die if you get hurt 3 times.

 

What's worse than being surrounded by zombies? These zombies attracting more with their attention aimed at you.
Z, by iayetta83.

Is it a good game? Probably not, it's very minimal. in the scope of its rules and a ton of stuff is left out, like turn order or recovery from wounds. But my goal wasn't to write an exceptional game, it was to test my idea for a conflict resolution beyond success or failure with a written example. Honestly, if anything, the format of 200 word RPG is awesome at that: it allows the game designer to see if their idea could work in practice, assuming they're willing to cut some corners when making the idea into a Minimum Viable Product. Writing short games isn't easy to most, which is why I'd recommend giving this a try to anyone interested in game design. Whether it's a 200 word RPG, or a TTRPG that will take up exactly 1 page (and maybe 1 extra with optional+GM rules), it's worth a try. Or at least it works for me.

Either way, I look forward to seeking more unique conflict resolution mechanics. Until then...

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!

(Almost) Everyone is Harry

For months, I've wondered passively how I could write a TTRPG that feels like Disco Elysium, built around the idea of multiple voices in an individual's head, each of them great or awful at different things. Yesterday, I arrived home, and it clicked. In order to avoid having some players possess the "good skills" and some possess the "awful skills", how about everyone possesses two? And instead of having the GM interpret the detective's words and actions too, ... what if a player was assigned specifically that role? I've made some minor changes and additions since yesterday, but I can confidently say that this classifies as a 200-word RPG.

It's a hack of Everyone is John (turns out I wasn't the first to come up with this) and Lasers&Feelings. Everyone is Feelings? Or maybe a better title would be...

(Almost) Everyone is Harry

A game for 1 GM, 1 amnesiac detective, and any number of voices in their head. More voices means more chaos.

Each voice chooses two unique opposing characteristics of the detective to represent (one labeled First, the other one Second), and one number from 2 to 5 (including).

In the game, the GM describes each scene and controls the NPCs. The detective decides what their character does. The voices try to convince the detective player to use them in the current situation.

The used voice rolls 1d6. It succeeds if the roll equals the voice's chosen number, if it's using its First characteristic and the roll was lower than the voice's number, or if it's using its Second characteristic and the roll was higher than the voice's number. Otherwise, the failure that it ends in is guaranteed to make at least one person feel miserable (quite likely the detective). The detective should enjoy describing their successes as well as failures in a stellar fashion.

A corpse had been hanging from a tree for a week now. You got so drunk, you forgot everything about yourself. You must find the murderer within three days.

Who knows, maybe this whole article was just a big excuse for me to upload this amazing gif.

Unincluded variant: Draw 2-4 of these to decide which skills get to speak up about a current situation.

Design of Runehack: Fairy Heist

Much like last year, this year I decided to join the One-Page RPG Jam. After a bit more than a week worth of designing and working on it, I've made my submission, a game called Runehack: Fairy Heist. I'd love to share with you some of my processes regarding how I've designed it. Enjoy!

Art provided by my wonderful girlfriend, Arell.

Theme

This year's theme is exploration, so my thoughts started there. I didn't want to hold on too tightly to the theme, as long as it would lead me somewhere interesting since the theme on this game jam is optional anyway.

The first thing that sprung to my mind when I read that word is all the mechanics for exploration in the D&D. Managing your food, traveling through the wilderness, avoiding getting lost, deciding how fast you're going. I tried to think of how to put a spin on that and came up with a concept for a game that I worked on for a bit until I lost interest in it. It would be a game about a religious pilgrimage northwards. It felt less like a roleplaying game and more like a resource-management strategy game. I might publish it nonetheless someday, once I figure out some good ways to weave roleplaying into it.

I tried to think of some interesting unusual spaces that one could explore next. The identity, the outer space, the myriad of worlds,… In the end, I was inspired by a wonderful video that has taught me a couple of interesting things. Among others, the one that caught my attention the most was that a home can tell a lot about a person. Sure I might not have conveyed that in the final product, but that got me thinking: who could be exploring other people's houses a lot? Since they were mentioned in the video, I was reminded of borrowers, but I decided to put a malicious twist on it: fairy burglars. Just regular burglars, but they are fairies.

Mechanics

Making the player characters this tiny has some interesting consequences. In the Timberhaven article, I talk briefly about the biology of the fairies. Their heights vary quite a bit in their terms, going from 6 to 17 centimeters. Curiously, that reminded me of the range of results one can roll on 3d6, from 3 to 18. I believe it's at this moment that I decided to use only d6's in this system. A height difference of 10 cm isn't that significant for humans, but it is very much so for the fairies. Immediately, I remembered the Lasers&Feelings and came to realize that this is the perfect opportunity for using the mechanic. Someone who's extremely tall is, after all, stronger than someone who's shorter. And on the other hand, someone shorter has much greater finesse and agility. Or well, they could in theory, but that's what I'm running with here.

I knew that I'd love to have this game take place in the world of Runehack, so the fairies would be using a couple of abilities with their runetech, most likely the runecards. I came up with a couple, kept tweaking them, and ended up with a total of 6 abilities. Thanks to the adjustments I've made, each of the abilities should be useful to the player even outside of the heists, mostly in social encounters. If I were to add more abilities, I would definitely do my best to make them work in both of these contexts. I'll definitely want to write an article on my thoughts regarding social encounters in the future.

Systemic Design

After some time spent working on the system and the rules behind the heist segment of the game, I came to realize something. I could turn this into a systemic game. I wanted to write an article on how to make systemic games for quite a while, but never really had the focus and motivation needed to do so. Perhaps subconsciously, I made this game systemic once I began using the phrases "can('t) see" and "can('t) hear" everywhere I could. How do the big folk become aware of the fairies? By hearing or seeing them. When can they hear them? When they do something loud, like flying in a neighboring room. I know that fairy flight is usually in media rather silent, but in this context, I decided otherwise to make the game more interesting. It makes sense if you consider these big folk to be highly vigilant of potential burglars, especially in a world in which they can be 10 centimeters tall. Once I started permitting combinations of abilities to work with each other, I knew that I've got on my hands a game that's systemic, and I was actually pleasantly surprised about it.

Action Economy

Let's talk about the big folk and the turns. While a fairy can move twice and perform one act on their turn, the big folk can move four times and perform three acts, to depict the stark difference in scale. In order to make it a little easier for the fairies (pun not intended), I've added a free option for them to retreat to a hiding spot within their current area, making it feel fair once again (... pun intended). The big folk have to first search a hiding spot, then try to catch a fairy, and then either hold it in their hand, or imprison it. Once a fairy is captured, that's it - they can't do anything until someone else does something to free them. Every big folk on the map can hold 3 fairies at most, but there's a trade-off: The Distract ability has a 1/day use, in which it can make someone fall asleep. No rolls involved, it costs 1 credit, and just like that - the big folk is asleep, and all fairies held in their grasp are free.

Enemy Variety

Fitting rules onto a single page is very difficult, but luckily the rules permitted me to add variant rules, GM side rules, and lore on the second page. One of the sections I wrote in there described the variants of the big folk, most of the Runehack's sentient species. While in this case I left the human as an exception with no special abilities (to let the GMs start off easier), the rest each has some way of breaking the players' routine.

• A dwarf can automatically sense the presence of others in the room, as long as they touch the same surface. This means that some of the obstacles can be searched by a dwarf without expending any additional actions on it.
• An elf is immune to the ability that would make him fall asleep, rendering him as both a dangerous foe to be captured and not let go by, but also an ideal opponent for heists which involve only one big folk.
• A goblin is capable of crawling through passages for fairies only. Figured this would be the easiest one to explain for the goblins.
• An orc can either move or perform one extra act on their turn.
• A runebot can detect the presence of other runetech devices (such as the runecards that the fairies use their abilities through), and they can also manipulate them through their access to the Mistweb.
• Finally, while they are not a single sentient race per se, I figured I'd give a bit of a spotlight to the arunic folk, who are by this game's rules immune to all illusions and telekinesis provided by the fairies' abilities.

I'm quite satisfied with the options I provided within my ruleset, and the curious interactions. I feel like I'll keep getting surprised with this system, especially if I continue expanding on its abilities. I hope to publish a supplement that would contain more abilities for the game, as well as several maps that a GM could take wholesale or adjust before using them in their own games.

I've already been shocked a couple of times with the rules interactions that are built into the system, and I want to actually run a campaign in it. In the meantime, thank you all for reading, and have a wonderful day!

Design of Runehack: University's Pillars

Ahoy! Did you notice the school year is starting again? And so is the university? Or maybe it did already. I don't know, it seems to happen at different times all around the world. Anyways, while working on the next Runehack city article, I got distracted, wrote, and published a one-page RPG for One Page RPG Jam 2021. Runehack: Univerity's Pillars is a game taking place in the Avurai University and it's all about balancing your life by choosing and stacking dice representing the opportunities you've got over your time spent studying. While I could describe all of the rules, or add yet more rules to the mix, I figured I should try to talk for once about how I've designed them. The game is freely available on itch.io through the link above, so if you want to, feel free to check it out and download it as a PDF. Let's hope this won't be too chaotic.

I've wanted to write a dice-stacking RPG for a long time. Making towers out of the dice was something that I always found neat since it's something of a meme in the D&D community for players to do while bored. I also wanted to make a school game, where the player has to make decisions about their personal life, and how they invest the time they spend there. One day, I had a bright idea of combining the two.

The lore article regarding Avurai University was entirely written before I conceived of this game, but there were some cool things to latch onto. For example, three semesters (trimesters?), each of which lasts three months, for a total of four years of study. After a lot of time spent deliberating, I figured I'll make the player earn one extra die for every month that passes. And, coincidentally, that was a very good choice.

How many pillars? I wrote down some ideas, combined some, and ended up with three core pillars that sounded good enough to me:

• Self, which stands for improving yourself by exercising, working on your passions, and caring for yourself,
• Contacts, which stands for your friends, family, and potential romantic partner as well,
• and School, which stands for your performance on the exams, lectures, lessons, and extra-curricular but school-related activities.

There was a small problem though. I didn't have enough dice to test it out. So, I went to a local gaming place, where I stacked dice for about an hour or two. Fun fact: To play this game optimally while being sure you'll never run out of dice, you would need 4d4 (or more if you somehow manage to balance d4's on top of d4's), 38d6, 36d8, 36d10, and 36d12. The highest towers I made were 11 dice tall each, most of them below that but usually above 6 dice.

I thought about whether that's a problem or not, did some maths to see what the final numbers should be. There are 4 years of 9 months, for a total of 36 dice to distribute into three pillars. This means... at least one would have to have 12 dice.

But wait! I did include a way for a player to remove a die. While that is true, it's also extremely rare - this chance is 1 in 36. In other words, it would happen on average once per four years of study. By the way, getting a d4 has the same chance, and that die serves as a nice way of preventing a player from progressing further in one pillar due to some critical problem. Anyways, even with one die removed on average, that's 34 dice.

This was a hard problem to overcome, but in the end, it turned out to be only a matter of mindset. It's fine because I'm emulating here a flying university that expects the impossible out of their students. Only fifty students finish the fourth year from each of the faculties, and that's assuming their test results were good enough. Who knows, maybe with enough training, there could be players who can reliably stack 12 dice. If I did 11 with little to no training, others can surely do better with training.

Believe it or not, in the beginning, the rolling worked very differently. The player rolled once to see which die they get, and each die could go into one, two, or three pillars. I originally wanted to make separate tables for every group of events, but... that turned out to take up too much space on the precious single page I could use. I know I could have technically used two since One Page RPG expects you to print the paper from both sides (at least I think?), but I liked the challenge better this way. After reworking how the core dice rolls work though, everything became much more clear - instead of making a lot of events based on choices players could make, I could just... randomly generate the options that a player has to choose from. Another quirk that turned out to be a good thing for reworking was the rolling of "scores" for the summaries of study years. Originally, you had to roll these at the end of your school year. Which meant... you had to take apart your beautiful tower, roll the dice, add them up, find out you have no romantic partner nor social life, and then put the tower back together. Using the rolls from the events instead turned out to be a much better idea, plus impactful for the player.

Alright, there's that! It took me surprisingly long to actually get back to this article, because... well, I've revived an old project of mine. You might even get to see a preview of it sooner than you'd expect.

Thank you for reading my rambling, and have a nice day!

Slasher Oneshot System

 Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone!

The topic of this article is something I've wanted to do for almost a year, ever since I've run my Halloween oneshot last year. But only recently did I get inspired to try to make it into a system of its own. Originally, it was a D&D 5e hack, created to trim 5e of any unnecessary fat. I figured I could do better, and so I've turned it into its own system! Some hints of 5e are left in there, but I don't think it makes the system any less valuable.

Why right now and not on Halloween? Because I was busy, and I didn't have inspiration for that beforehand. If you want a funny reason, it's because I'm a programmer, and programmers tend to mistake DEC25 for OCT31.

Hopefully next year I'll get something more thematic for Christmas, and maybe even other holidays. Thank you all for reading, and enjoy your time spent with those you care about the most, regardless of what time of year it is. Have a nice day, and see you next year!

(Now let's see if my embedded file is going to work...)

My 200 Word RPGs

Hey there! Long time no see. Well, kind of.

I've got to be honest about something. Despite all the iterations on the D&D worlds I've done in the past, I got burned out once again. I might write an article on that later, but tl;dr of it is "too much magic". So I've been lately browsing minimalistic RPGs, while also trying to make some.

For the last three years, I have participated in the 200wordRPG challenge. My games were far from popular or good, but it was a good exercise for me since my homebrews tend to have overly wordy features. A limitation of 200 words is surprisingly confining, yet something that doesn't feel like it takes a long time to write. Besides, it takes even less time to read. Unfortunately, this year the challenge has been canceled, meaning I would either have to wait until 2021 to post these, or I may as well just post them right now to share them with you all.

So the plan is simple then! I'll post each ruleset, and then give my design notes, as well as anything I couldn't manage to fit into the rules. These are my three 200 word RPGs that I made.

(Note: Only the Deviants one is a submission of mine. While I could share the other two, I doubt they're worth your time.)

Deviants

Deviants is my last entry so far, and it's a Lasers and Feelings hack inspired by videogames like Prototype and inFamous. It's assumed to be a superhero game, where the player characters are superpowered individuals, each controlling their own element. The big catch here is that the more injuries you sustain, the harder it is to use your powers until you run out of those. It also uses a choice of a roll between 2d6 and 1d12, because I feel like if you're rolling a die in a system like this, some variety can be nice (although either of the options is optional). When it comes to my goal of making a very simple superhero game that's light on rules and even has some worldbuilding, I think I succeeded.

What do you mean "video isn't made up of particles"? Oh well...
Enjoy your power, by Supermare

On the flip side, this system would be super easy to break by choosing your Power to be 2, and choosing a superpower that is useless for most situations, like controlling magma since few cities are near to an active volcano. This way, you could be an average schmoe-Joe who's good at everything, which is certainly a flaw of this system.

Overall, it's meant for short superhero games with an extremely easy character creation process and some assumptions regarding the setting. I'm not surprised that it won nothing, especially seeing how much competition there was last year, but I'm kind of proud of it nonetheless. If I had to fix anything, I would probably remove the "sleeping for 8 hours" line, because it's too wordy and unnecessary for this game. I would probably use those words to ask the players to choose something that's commonly found in their environment if I figured out how to use few enough words for that.

Shifters and Robots

I know that Among Us is all the hype lately, but this game was really made way back around June. The premise of this game is that there are two shape-shifting aliens blending into a group of robots, trying to find each other. It's a hidden roles game akin to Mafia, One Night Werewolf, Bang!, Town of Salem, or indeed Among Us, but with a twist. All roles are hidden, so the shapeshifters will have to try not killing one another, and instead if possible figuring out who the other one is. If they manage to reveal their own role and challenge the other shifter, they get an instant victory, otherwise at least one must survive until everyone else runs out of bullets. Because unlike most hidden role games where players have to vote who gets eliminated, here that responsibility is in the hands of each player. Anyone can choose who gets eliminated, but only once. Do you save your bullet and run a risk of someone being randomly eliminated, or will you choose to do so right now?

Design-wise, I wanted to make a different-feeling hidden roles game, where the majority is more antagonistic towards the minority rather than how it usually is (for example, with the few mafiosos knowing each other and eliminating the majority of players). The whole formula has been boiled down to a bare minimum so that the variants could try out something experimental, so I'd say this is pretty nice.

This one was actually even playtested, and I must say it's a surprisingly fast-paced game. I could see this catching on if I played it more often with more groups of friends. There are even four variants that are not mutually exclusive included to bring the challenge up for the entire group. Now you have two bullets, and/or an unknown number of shifters to look for, or need to make fast decisions. And while "mandatory cardboard robot heads" sounds like a joke, it could make a hidden roles game that much more challenging to play by obscuring everyone's faces.

I would recommend the trial music from Danganronpa for the faster version, and once the game is over, listen to some Porter Robinson, but that's just silly ideas.

Twists and Tales

The last 200 word RPG, for now, is Twists and Tales. It's an experiment on my side because I found the idea of having diceless RPGs neat and wanted to try my hand at making a minimalistic one myself. The gist of it is very simple: when you try to do something, anyone can try to make you fail, and you need to thus expend points in order to succeed in the thing you were trying to do. It's super generic, the GM is optional, and anyone can make you spend points, possibly regaining points if it's an in-character hindrance. I feel like with some testing and maybe even changes, this one would be great for online environments, where die rollers are not always readily available, as well as for beginner groups or groups that just seek a simple storygame RPG.

My goals of having a minimalistic general use GM-optional diceless RPG have worked, but it comes at a cost. The ruleset is pretty bland, which makes it open for any scenario but at the same time, some people want it to work for something specific. The three stats I'm still not so sure about. And overall, this game promotes an adversarial gameplay loop where the player characters are encouraged to be douchebags to each other, getting even rewarded for it. It could be great for drama, but I'm afraid of this ruining friendships. Then again, I have very little experience with storygames and drama RPGs where players are encouraged to play against each other, so I can't tell for sure.

The one thing to tinker with is the numbers. Currently, the scene goes on until either everyone agrees, or you run out of all the scenes. You can regain points other than Twists, but not Twists, which means that you get at most 10 x number of players Twists that you can use on various complications. In a 4 player game, this would be 40 complications for a single scene, spread across 4 characters. At the same time, the minimum number of complications would be 20 - if everyone expended one point at the same time, plus the one left out person also expends their points on things. If I had to compare it to a system I'm familiar with, in D&D at 5th level as a martial class you make 2 attack rolls on each of your turns, let's say you get attacked twice, and the combat lasts 3 turns. This translates to a total of 12 "Twists" to resolve, just for one character. Which makes me feel like I'm on the right track here.

That's all I had to share with you all for today. I hope to get back to the Villainous Cookbook, got a couple of villain ideas on the back burner ready to boil sometime soon, as well as some other ideas for articles. Life just has a way of keeping me busy, which means it takes me a long time to type all this out. I just had these games ready and wanted to share them somewhere, so I figured I may as well share them here with anyone who reads this.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!