#ttrpgs

[saul-tortellini]

#hobgoblin #pathfinder #pathfinder 2e #ttrpg memes #ttrpg #ttrpgs

[maxophone]

TTRPG Support for a Free Palestine

Posted April 26th, 2024. Offer available until post is editted to reflect otherwise.

I’ve been trying to think of ways I can do more to support Palestine that is sustainable for me and uses my skillset. Although I am an artist, I personally feel that since I have a smaller platform than some, offering random drawings in exchange for donations would cross pollinate too much with my own self promotion, which feels inappropriate for me. Plus, it’s a pretty saturated niche. However, I have only a hobbyist interest in TTRPGs, and so far I don’t think I have seen anything like what I will be suggesting here.

Ways I can support your TTRPG campaign (any system) in exchange for your generous donations to Palestinian fundraisers and foundations:

Creating Google Sheets spreadsheets for character sheets, or other procedural trackers

Helping you populate hexes for wilderness crawls or design dungeons

Brainstorming campaigns and oneshots with you

Creating descriptions for items, locations, backstories

Formatting homebrew rules documents, or other setting/notes documents

Organizing your existing notes

Creating random generators or numbered lists

Doing research into TTRPG systems or supplements and writing summaries for your convenience

Assistant GMming in general

Running one-shots or limited campaigns for you and your friends

Making playlists for your session

Please reach out directly in my DMs if you are interested and let’s work something out! I will scale any work I do with your monetary contribution to Palestinians and the Palestinian cause. Examples of some of my spreadsheets and generators below the cut. Appreciated if you share your discord info to talk further. Boosts appreciated especially from tabletop gamers!!!

Examples of my work —

#ttrpgs #dnd #ttrpg community #table top games #dungeons and dragons #dnd community #osr community #osr gaming #osr ttrpgs #I can’t donate much money regularly myself because I do not have a stable income and i am largely dependent on family

[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