cerinslair

[cerinslair]

Journaling game that has to be played on a social media platform. Likes, replies, and reblogs all serve a gameplay function.

That's all I've got for now

#game design #you're cooking keep going!

[cerinslair]

You do of course understand that the reason most people prefer DND 5E is that it's one of the easiest systems to learn? Like I'm sorry it's all well and good to 'break up the cultural monopoly' but I have Dyscalculia and DND is seemingly the only tabletop system that doesn't consistently ask me to do a hefty amount of complex math. I've never given WOTC a penny but the reason I've primarily played 5E over basically everything else is it's the only system that was extremely easy to learn and completely self explanatory. (Also - I like elves and magic and shit.) You roll one dice to see if you can do a thing, you add whatever your plus or minus is, and then roll damage where appropriate. Easy. Meanwhile seemingly everything else is like "Okay so you roll two dice except sometimes it's four and then you take this stat and you divide it by that dice roll and then you add a number equivalent to the day of the week unless it's a leap year then you times that by three and if you get a prime number you can lift that coffee cup." Like have you ever heard of Villains and Vigilantes, for instance? It's fucking insane.Like I'm not saying I don't get why you wanna make this point? But I feel like I have to point out that most people who make indie TTRPG's don't seem to focus on accessibility when designing their systems and they are EXTREMELY intimidating for new players. And often, what people who are big into TTRPG's do is assume that because THEY fully understand this system and how it works, new players will too just as easily. The amount of times I've spoken to a GM, said "This sounds a bit complicated", and they've gone "No no no it's easy" and then described the most complicated set of rules I've ever heard is ridiculous.

Okay it sounds you’ve had a very narrow range of experiences with RPGs then because D&D 5e is on the higher end of complexity when it comes to RPGs and most indie RPGs are actually a lot less complex than D&D 5e. Like, Villains & Vigilantes is not the median when it comes to RPG complexity. There are systems even lighter than D&D out there. :)

#d&d #game design

[cerinslair]

Politely asking to see the drawing you did of a wheelchair user doing kickass moves like the cars and motorbikes on action movies

Absolutely you can, I made this for @cerinslair's Heart Heist book a while ago and meant to post it, but uh. I forgot lol

I still need to color it but for now enjoy mad scientist lady in her strange-matter-powered wheelchair. don't think about how the grappling hook works with the lasers. dont worry about it

#heart heist target audience #heart heist #friend art #spitblaze

[cerinslair]

Someone remind me later to write about scales of failure in game design

#game design

[cerinslair]

realities, maximalism,and the need for big book™️

some gubat banwa design thoughts vomit: since the beginning of its development i've kind of been enraptured with trying to really go for "fiction-first" storytelling because PbtA games really are peak roleplaying for me, but as i wrote and realized that a lot of "fiction first" doesn't work without a proper sort of fictional foundation that everyone agrees on. this is good: this is why there are grounding principles, genre pillars, and other such things in many PbtA games--to guide that.

broken worlds is one of my favs bc of sheer vibes

Gubat Banwa didn't have much in that sense: sure, I use wuxia and xianxia as kind of guideposts, but they're not foundational, they're not pillars of the kind of fiction Gubat Banwa wants to raise up. there wasn't a lot in the sense of genre emulation or in the sense of grounding principles because so much of Gubat Banwa is built on stuff most TTRPG players haven't heard about. hell, it's stuff squirreled away in still being researched academic and anthropological circles, and thanks to the violence of colonialism, even fellow filipinos and seasians don't know about them

this is what brought me back to my ancient hyperfixations, the worlds of Exalted, Glorantha, Artesia, Fading Suns... all of them have these huge tomes of books that existed to put down this vast sprawling fantasy world, right? on top of that are the D&D campaign settings, the Dark Suns and the Eberrons. they were preoccupied in putting down setting, giving ways for people to interact with the world, and making the world alive as much as possible.

one of my main problems with gubat banwa was trying to convey this world that i've seen, glimpsed, dreamed of. this martial fantasy world of rajas and lakans, sailendras and tuns, satariyas and senapatis and panglimas and laksamanas and pandai... its a world that didn't really exist yet, and most references are steeped in either nationalism or lack of resources (slowly changing, now)

i didn't want to fall back into the whole gazeteer tourist kind of shit when it came to writing GB, but it necessitated that the primary guidelines of Gubat Banwa were set down. my approach to it was trying to instill every aspect of the text, from the systems to the fluff text to the way i wrote to the way things were phrased, with the essence of this world i'm trying to put forward. while i wrote GB mainly for me and fellow SEAsian people, economically my main market were those in the first world countries that could afford to buy the book. grokking the book was always going to be severely difficult for someone that didn't have similar cultures, or are uninterested in the complexities of human culture. thus why GB had to be a big book.

in contemporary indie ttrpg spaces (where I mostly float in, though i must admit i pay more attention to SEAsia spaces than the usual US spaces) the common opinion is that big books like Exalted 3e are old hat, or are somewhat inferior to games that can cram their text into short books. i used to be part of that camp--in capitalism, i never have enough time, after all. however, the books that do go big, that have no choice to go big, like Lancer RPG, Runequest, Mage, Exalted are usually the ones that have something really big it needs to tell you, and they might be able to perform the same amount of text-efficient bursting at the seams flavor writing but its still not enough.

thats what happened to GB, which I wanted to be, essentially, a PbtA+4e kind of experience, mechanically speaking. i very soon abandoned those titles when i delved deeper into research, incorporated actual 15th century divination tools in the mechanics, injected everything with Martial Arts flavor as we found our niche

all of this preamble to say that no matter how light i wanted to go with the game, i couldnt go too light or else people won't get it, or i might end up writing 1000 page long tome books explaining every detail of the setting so people get it right. this is why i went heavy on the vibes: its a ttrpg after all. its never gonna be finished.

i couldnt go too light because Gubat Banwa inherently exists on a different reality. think: to many 3 meals a day is the norm and the reality. you have to eat 3 meals a day to function properly. but this might just be a cultural norm of the majority culture, eventually co opted by capitalism to make it so that it can keep selling you things that are "breakfast food" or "dinner food" and whatnot. so its reality to some, while its not reality to others. of course, a lot of this reality-talk pertains mostly to social--there is often a singular shared physical reality we can usually experience*

Gubat Banwa has a different fabric of reality. it inherently has a different flow of things. water doesn't go down because of gravity, but because of the gods that make it move, for example. bad things happen to you because you weren't pious or you didn't do your rituals enough and now your whole community has to suffer. atoms aren't a thing in gb, thermodynamics isn't a real thing. the Laws of Gubat Banwa aren't these physical empirical things but these karmic consequent things

much of the fiction-first movement has a sort of "follow your common sense" mood to it. common sense (something also debatable among philosophers but i dont want to get into that) is mostly however tied to our physical and social realities. but GB is a fantasy world that inherently doesn't center those realities, it centers realities found in myth epics and folk tales and the margins of colonized "civilization", where lightnings can be summoned by oils and you will always get lost in the woods because you don't belong there.

so Gubat Banwa does almost triple duty: it must establish the world, it must establish the intended fiction that arises from that world, and then it must grant ways to enforce that fiction to retain immersion--these three are important to GB's game design because I believe that that game--if it is to not be a settler tourist bonanza--must force the player to contend with it and play with it within its own terms and its own rules. for SEAsians, there's not a lot of friction: we lived these terms and rules forever. don't whistle at night on a thursday, don't eat meat on Good Friday, clap your hands thrice after lighting an incense stick, don't make loud noise in the forests. we're born into that [social] reality

this is why fantasy is so important to me, it allows us to imagine a different reality. the reality (most of us) know right now (i say most of us because the reality in the provinces, the mountains, they're kinda different) is inherently informed by capitalist structures. many people that are angry at capitalist structures cannot fathom a world outside capitalist structures, there are even some leftists and communists that approach leftism and revolution through capitalism, which is inherently destructive (its what leads to reactionaries and liberalism after all). fantasy requires that you imagine something outside of right now. in essence read Ursula K Le Guin

i tweeted out recently that you could pretty easily play 15-16th century Luzon or Visayas with an OSR mechanic setting and William Henry Scott's BARANGAY: SIXTEENTH CENTURY PHILIPPINE CULTURE AND SOCIETY, and I think that's purely because barebones OSR mechanics stuff fits well with the raiding and adventuring that many did in 15-16th century Luzon/Visayas, but a lot of the mechanics wont be comign from OSR, but from Barangay, where you learn about the complicated marriage customs, the debt mechanics, the social classes and stratum...

so thats why GB needs to be a (relatively) big book, and why I can contend that some books need to be big as well--even if their mechanics are relatively easy and dont need more than that, the book, the game, might be trying to relay something even more, might be trying to convey something even more than that. artesia, for example, has its advancements inherently tied to its Tarot Cards, enforcing that the Arcana guides your destiny. runquest has its runes magic, mythras (which is kinda generic) has pretty specific kinds of magic systems that immediately inform the setting. this is why everything is informed by something (this is a common Buddhist principle, dependent arising). even the most generic D&D OSR game will have the trappings of the culture and norms of the one that wrote and worked on it. its written from their reality which might not necessarily be the one others experience. that's what lived experience is, after all

*live in the provinces for a while and you'll doubt this too!

#gubat banwa #filipino

[cerinslair]

im adopting the ‘dark jock’ aesthetic. i’m going to lurk around crumbling old institute buildings in a black tanktop with a skull on it and a backwards ballcap and i’m going to get dark academia people to write my essays for me while i call them nerds and doofuses and prep for the big dark football game

#heart heist target audience

[cerinslair]

It's actually kinda funny that the connection between minotaurs and labyrinths manifests in such a way in D&D that they have the ability to find their way out of any maze

When the original capital M Minotaur's entire deal was that he was trapped in the labyrinth

#worldbuilding

[cerinslair]

Someone in one of my puzzle game communities is launching their TTRPG about card game anime: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/double-summon-games/perfect-draw-a-ttrpg-about-people-who-play-card-games @theresattrpgforthat check it out! I'm not sure I've seen a TTRPG with this kind of premise before, and I'm interested to read about the mechanics :)

#Perfect Draw #to play list #indie ttrpgs #indie games

[cerinslair]

Costume Fairy Adventures

Costume Fairy Adventures is... well, its about fairies, who wear costumes, and have adventures. Ok that's not ALL it is, but that's a good bulk of the game, CFA is a fairly rules lite and simple system for running games about whimsical fey getting into weird shenanigans using weird costumes they made or found lying around, character creation and gameplay are both very simple, and this game is a biiit more niche than my usual spotlights, but I guarantee this one's good.

#costume fairy adventures #indie games #indie ttrpgs

[cerinslair]

There's a tendency among tabletop RPG designers to want to analyse everything that's wrong with tabletop gaming culture as an emergent property of the mechanical structures of the games themselves, such that people would stop being jerks to each other at the table if only our games' rules were structured "correctly". I'm not going to claim I've never fallen prey to this way of thinking myself, but ultimately every game designer must come to grips with the fact that we do, in fact, live in a society.

[cerinslair]

this is less a specific complaint about dnd than it is about a mindset that very obviously permeates dnd and other similar games, but it's really telling how much gm advice is based around the idea that the gm is a babysitter and the players aren't expected to make their own experiences fun

maybe a lot of it comes down to how bookish communities tend to view conflict as something that only arises at the absolute last possible moment where it can be resolved, but no amount of saying "remember that the gm is a player, too" will ever fix a table that hasn't also internalised "remember that all players share responsibility for their collective experience"

[cerinslair]

fuck tolkein and fuck dnd for being the originator and modern popularizer respectively of the race science tropes that have glued themselves parasitically to the fantasy genre and refuse to come off

#racism #antisemitism #a lot of my college final project was about this topic

[cerinslair]

PSA

You. Yes, you. The person who just read or perhaps watched Dungeon Meshi and is toying with the idea of running a similar campaign in D&D.

Before you do that, consider checking out RELIC. It's free, much lighter in terms of rules, only 42 pages long, broadly compatible with most Old-School D&D material (including modules and bestiaries) with little to no conversion required, AND it has pretty cool built-in mechanics for cooking and eating dungeon critters.

#relic #dungeon meshi #👀

[cerinslair]

When I make a post about a cool indie RPG that I like and it breaches containment and a bunch of normie tabletop people start reblogging it and tagging it #dnd and it's legitimately one of my biggest tabletop pet peeves but also I don't wanna be an asshole about it because it's a good thing that they're at least looking at something that isn't D&D

#yeah...

[cerinslair]

Me: "hey game developers, especially AAA ones, are getting laid off en-mass and it's awful for our industry" Gamer: "well I only play INDIE games and the problem with AAA games is they are creatively bankrupt"

Me, slamming my fists on the table like a baby: "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT THIS IS ABOUT A BUSINESS PROBLEM PERPETUATED BY CAPITALISM NOT A STATEMENT ON CREATIVE DECISION MAKING"

[cerinslair]

From the article:

NASA has released a free, original tabletop role-playing game, and it’s one part educational experience and another part sci-fi/fantasy epic with magic and dragons. The crux of The Lost Universe, the organization’s first TTRPG,involves a mystery: What would happen if the Hubble Space Telescope disappeared? It’s a simple premise and one that hides the complex backstory underscoring the events of the role-playing game. Without getting into the weeds, the game takes place on a planet called Exlaris, which was once thrown into chaos when a black hole moved too close and kicked it out of its orbit. The planet has since gone back to some degree of normalcy and is now almost completely dedicated to academia. In one city, a scholar named Eirik Hazn made a spell to connect with Earth to study the Hubble Space Telescope, which has famously collected data on black holes. However, the spell and telescope are stolen by a dragon, and researchers working on the project have been disappearing, so the players — Earthlings who worked on the telescope at NASA who were brought through a portal to Exlaris — have to save the day. The official 44-page gameplay book is available to download for free on NASA’s website. You can play it in a party with 4-7 players, but you may need to fudge a few things to graft this narrative onto your TTRPG system of choice. The book says it’ll take around 3-4 hours to get through the adventure.

#NASA #ttrpg #to read

[cerinslair]

🪷PEACE AND LOVE USED LIKE A BLADE WILL CONQUER⚔️

If you haven't yet, you can try out the Martial Epic Fantasy Tabletop RPG skewered through by Southeast Asian story and lore GUBAT BANWA for free with the quickstart! A fantasy take on what a Southeast Asia looked like before the rise of modern borders and categorization!

GUBAT BANWA'S FREE QUICKSTART and MUSANGHARI, a GUBAT BANWA MODULE have both been updated. Want easy ways to get into Gubat Banwa's system and setting? Check them out!

Quickstart:

Musanghari on Itch

Musanghari on DrivethruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/422021/Musanghari

Additionally the game has been given a Patch 1

I always say that I can only personally reckon with these things, Southeast Asian past, directly through Fantasy because so much of is it lost to us and it is a false venture to found a National Consciousness from Pre-colonial Cultural Artifact so Gubat Banwa is a violent revelry of the things we've lost and the things we know we've lost, the connections removed to us, the similarities severed through borderline and empire. Everyone is welcome to join the feast! Also we should be having our Backerkit set up pretty soon!

#gubat banwa #indie ttrpgs #indie games #filipino