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Into the Cess and Citadel by Feral Indie Studio

i'm at it again: here's a new game you can play with magic: the gathering cards that's not, like, the main one you might have heard of

I've got a stack of pre-written scenarios with defined pre-gens though, and they're all written as the jumping-off point for campaigns where the initial story transforms the character in some way, from "you survived this traumatic event that made your hometown alien to you" to "did you accept the power the Thing of Darkest Antiquity offered to kill the tyrannical nobleman or are you a regular fugitive? Because no one was getting out of that situation without taking an axe to that guy."

That latter one worked so incredibly well at a convention it gave me an idea for sequels and a novel.

hmm, yeah, i think in this case you have to ask 'what are you trying to get out of lifepaths' ? because if they're just small bonuses tied to anodyne biographical facts, i think it's clear that they'd be boring, right?

in my opinion, depending on what serves your game best, you have a few options:

just make them Bigger

you mention writing 'character-agnostic' ones, and i feel like that kind of defeats the point of lifepaths, right? the purpose should be to Produce a very specific life story. i always like random character creation tables more when it feels like you can be pushed in wild and strange directions you wouldn't have considered. for example, here's a few of the random Quirks you can roll in my cape game underside:

these were a blast to write because i tried to make as many of them--while still offering a lot of laterality to players who roll them to decide on the details or what they mean--big, weird swings that people might not necessarily make on their own.

2. make them interconnected

but maybe that's not the tone of your game, you're doing mundane modern day or low fantasy. that's cool--if you want to keep them small and mundane, just having them flow into each other would do a lot, i reckon. for example, the 'orthodox education' you give is pretty boring! but if you set the system up so that someone can go through lifepaths and have their character go from 'orthodox education' to 'sellsword', or vice versa, then suddenly you've opened up a well of intrigue for someone to sculpt a backstory around.

3. plug them in

a small 'ribbon' aspect to a lifepath that gives the PC ties to the world can go a long way. like, one big problem with the example you gave is that it basically never comes up after character creation. but if you add, for example, "alumni of the place you were taught are positively disposed towards you", or "you can always get room and board from a rich family by teaching their children", even though the numreical skill buffs will eclipse those boons in relevancy, the player who rolls this will suddenly have a way to engage with the world through this perk, constantly on the look out for other educated people, or rich families with children, or their old professor, and so on.

4. just don't do em

Tamiyo, Compleated Sage

A lot of D&D5e defenders on here like to claim that asking someone to learn a new system is "gatekeeping" somehow, but I'd argue that acting like one game is emblematic of the entire medium to the exclusion of people who don't click with that one game is way more meaningfully a form of gatekeeping, even if it's fully unintentional.

Moonshell: Fragments of the Heart, known outside of Europe and USA as Mirror Flower, Water Moon, is a 1998 action role-playing video game developed and published by Cabbagehead Games for the Morpheus PlayDeck. The game takes place on the mysterious Ghost Island, which was once prosperous and bountiful until the Broken Moon cursed it for eternity.

MOONSHELL: FRAGMENTS OF THE HEART is my speculative game guide for a retro adventure RPG about saving a cursed island from a heartbroken moon. It's inspired by games like Lunacid and King's Field.

The idea was to imagine a 'community adventure guide' made by some obsessive retro game circle. It's not quite complete yet in its Jam version. But there's enough of a TTRPG hidden in there to run a game of some kind. Hopefully, I have time to update and complete it the next few weeks.

I was wondering if you have any suggestions or advice on how to approach and digest a dense rules text to better internalize it. I'm very used to just treating the game like an open-book test, referencing it to find specific rules as they become relevant, but I feel like if I want to GM (if only because that may be the only way I can play some of these games AT ALL), that isn't gonna cut it.

Thank you for your work, regardless! I appreciate RPGs as an art form much more thanks to your posts. :)

No, you’ve pretty much got it, and if anyone thinks that makes you a bad GM, they’re the wrong ones.

Whenever I play any TTRPG, even ones I wrote myself and am therefore intimately familiar with, I also treat it like an “open book test.” I read the material all the way through beforehand, then keep the book open and reference it any time I am not absolutely 100% sure of a ruling. Not only does this make sure I get the rulings right in the moment, but it helps me memorize the rulings better too (this is why open book tests are actually better for learning than convention school tests too) and so the more I play the less I need to look things up.

The only reason this would be considered a bad thing is if you’re poisoned by toxic D&D5e and “actual play” play culture and expect the GM to be what @jburneko would call a “magician,” an entertainer more than a player or referee who is taking it upon themselves to be the game more than the game itself, and “keep the story moving” even at the expense of the gameplay. The magician never lets you see the strings, never pauses the “act,” and performs for an audience more so than plays a game with friends. The magician never expects the audience to commit to any participation beyond standing there and being amazed. The term A.N.I.M. usually uses for this kind of GM is “servitor GMing.”

“Well won’t that slow the game down and make it boring if you have to stop and look something up every five minutes?”

I have several answers to this question.

1: Imagine you’re playing a video game instead of a TTRPG for a minute. Would you rather have 15-30 seconds of loading screens every once in a while for a game that works perfectly, or would you rather have no loading screens but every time you pass a point that would normally be a loading screen, nothing is loaded and the textures are blurry and the collision bugs out and items despawn and so on? The game might even crash (this is your GM burning out and not being able to continue). Rulings made on the fly just because you don’t want to look something up (I’m not talking about when the rulebook doesn’t account for an edge case or something) can really screw the game up and lead to outcomes that really shouldn’t have gone that way, and makes it harder for players and GM to develop the ability to make informed decisions in play because the rules will not be consistent.

2: The more you look things up, the faster you are at looking things up, and often the more concretely you memorize the things you have looked up a bunch of times. So yeah maybe the first few sessions will have some stumbles and long pauses, but it won’t be like that forever.

3: Here’s the real secret. That thing I said about how I always keep the book open during a session and reference it constantly? I don’t GM that often. That’s me as a player. I know that the toxic play culture of the magician/servitor GM has deeply ingrained that only the GM needs to know the rules, but that’s not true. Players should know the rules, players should know the rulebook, and players should look up the rules. This spreads the burden of knowing the rules out around the entire table rather than relying on just the GM (who is already usually doing the most work out of the whole group).

If your players are adverse to learning the rules, try to convince them with the following arguments:

1: It’s just courteous. Like, the GM is already doing the most work, and the GM is presumably your friend, if reading a few chapters of a book would make it significantly easier for your friend to do something they’re doing for you, why wouldn’t you do that for them?

2: Even if they’re so selfish as to not want to read like 10-100 pages of text to make it easier for a friend to do something for them, in the vast majority of TTRPGs, players knowing the rules gives them much greater agency in the game. When a monster attacks, knowing the rules can save their PC’s life! If the PC is likely to get shot at, and the player knows how to identify “Cover” and being in Cover makes their PC less likely to die, they can position their PC in Cover before the bullets even start flying.

Of course both of these arguments rely on the players understanding that rules matter and make a difference to the play experience in the first place, and that the GM will actually enforce the rules rather than always bending them last minute to stop PCs from dying, both of which are counter to the zeitgeist of much of the hobby right now, but if you’ve got them to the point where they’re even going to consider another game at all, you probably already have a foothold there.

Oh and finally, for anyone who doesn't already know, there is a "tick" for more quickly navigating PDFs (that is not just CTRL+F).

Absolutely not. This pressure to “be in control”, “‘maintain the illusion” and “be a magician” style advice is precisely why people are terrified to GM.

You have one job as a GM at the table. ONE. Play your NPCs and other situation elements with the same earnestness as the players play their PCs. That’s it.

The “plot” is what happens when your toys and their toys meet and uncertainties between them are resolved via the game at hand.

You are not responsible for anyone’s fun.

You are not responsible for anyone’s entertainment.

You are not there to stroke the players egos or service their fantasies or “story beats” or whatever self-insert wish fulfillment BS they have projected onto their characters.