Mike Driver
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
AnasAbdin
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
d e v o n
Discoholic 🪩
Show & Tell
JVL
Keni
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
★
Janaina Medeiros
Xuebing Du
i don't do bad sauce passes
ojovivo
blake kathryn
we're not kids anymore.
seen from Peru
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@luuma-makes-games
DMsGuild (dnd stuff) / Sokobandito (puzzle game) / Altered Emerald (pokemon romhack) / luuma-makes-games.itch.io
I don't have a patreon cos I found that monetizing my hobby took the fun out of it - so if you like my work, and you want to see more, you can find some charities I love below the cut. Give to them, or pick your own!
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pokeemerald-expansion is at this point:
https://www.hackdex.app/hack/poke47
I spent a bit of time this weekend finishing up autobattling in the overworld for Poke47! Press A to let the mon following you roam free. Bumping into those helioptile and maractuses will also start you battling with them. (That's all the work of Bivurnum/HashtagMarky) In case you haven't been keeping up with the romhacking scene, pokemon emerald romhacking is fully just porting every modern game feature and mechanic onto the GBA. It is like running a bugatti engine out of a Fiat 500. This is all ported into firered too. Lmao
Hello friends! Have you written a rogue-like ttrpg? Is there a rogue-like ttrpg that you'd like to see more attention?
Please reblog this post and give it a shout-out! I'd like to see what's out there.
claim your star
*this is not to shame anybody. if you used to use chatgpt in the past but have stopped, kudos to you, this post still includes you. if you are still using chatgpt, then I guess I can’t stop you — but if you ever decide to stop using it in the future, you may then claim your star too
I've released the demo to my game. Here's it's trailer.
Play it now on Steam or Itch!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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One thing I will acknowledge about the whole "rules-light ttrpgs are more accessible" thing is that a lot of popular and rules-heavy games (Pathfinder 1e, for example) have a major issue with how many of those rules are complete dogshit.
Like. Good rules-heavy design with lots of character build options will give you a whole bunch of ways to express your character concept in the mechanics of the system. However. If the designers aren't good at balance, you'll find that the rich, flavorful set of options with compelling potential for building something interesting... will absolutely destroy your character's ability to engage with the game.
You see an option to build a Muscle Wizard who gains magic power through exercise and think "hell yeah, I'm going to be a Muscle Wizard" but because the designers fundamentally didn't understand the underlying math of their game, choosing to make a Muscle Wizard means that you're actually worse at everything than both a regular wizard and anyone with muscles. People who point out that the Muscle Wizard is poorly implemented and fails to live up to the fantasy are derided as "powergamers" for pointing this fact out.
If the game is "rules-light", your muscle wizard will tend to just be something you're making up to fill the flavor gaps where the mechanics describe absolutely nothing. Does that mean the rules-light game has better rules for playing a muscle wizard? No, because it doesn't have rules for that at all, which is easy to mistake for doing something better in a genre that encourages players to make things up.
OP I could not disagree with that last paragraph more. I played a tedious mess called mutants and masterminds, and a phenomenal game called Masks, and I can tell you from the bottom of my heart: a bad rule is so much worse than no rule at all. Rules create genre. The reason that rules light games leave a rules gap over the description of the player characters' power is because the characters' powers are entirely irrelevant to the stories and experiences that those games are aiming to facilitate. These games do not need rules for the mechanical gristle of a muscle wizard because they are not about the physical reality of being a muscle wizard, they are about the story of that wizard's internal turmoil, or the world as it changes around them, or about the wizard's relationships with other players. When reviewing them, you have to meet these games on their own turf. Only the adventure-wargame-sword-and-sorcery genre will try and point its lens upon a character's physical capabilities and quantify every last dreg of them. But this is not a genre where rules-light games belong! Don't make the mistake of evaluating TTRPGs according to the staples of a genre that they never aimed belong to. You are reviewing Dispatch and bemoaning the lack of a combat engine. Much love, and give Masks a try.
☕️ ttrpg game design
i have lots and lots of thoughts on ttrpg design so i'll just drop one that i think a lot of new designers should take to heart quickly: imagine the person you most want to be playing this game, and design it around them, not around the most evil antisocial sickopath possible who plays only to frustrate and annoy their alleged friends
gurps lite 1 star
Whenever I feel like I have written bad mechanics I remember that gurps is only 20 years old and think wow. come so far. here is a snip from Gurps lite 3e. 32 pages "lite". One of the 32 pages they simply couldn't afford to cut from core is page 5. (ominous music plays)
If you are pretty, people treat you better at all times. it a modifier.
If you are very pretty, people from the opposite gender treat you far better at all times. another modifier.
If you don't match median weight you can't put yourself as "above average" pretty.
this bullshite takes them an a4 page to explain
Gurps lite if you can simulate anything please simulate me exploding yourself with my mind oh my god
i know this means absolutely nothing to most people but basically all of the little web game things I've made recently (angels in automata, hex plant growing game, d.a.n.m.a.k.u., life music, sudoku land, the metroidvania style map editor, etc etc etc) are all entirely self-contained individual client-side html files that can be downloaded and run offline and have literally no libraries or frameworks or dependencies, because i'm an insane woman who enjoys hand coding my input handling and display code from scratch in vanilla js and having it all live in one single html file with the game logic and the page structure and the page style all just living and loving together side by side in a universal format that can be run by any web browser on any devixe. i'll even include image files as base64 data-uri strings just to keep every single asset inside the one file.
the sudoku one is gorgeous and a really intuitive way to play sudoku
i also really love the hexplant one
(reaching the purple aquare with the three exlamation marks is how you 'win' this game)
this is going Around again and it is always funny to me when ppl tag it "need to try this later on my computer" babes you don't need to wait they all work on mobile too <3
A Design Manifesto for TTRPGs
I thought I'd put together a big repository of the rules I try to abide in making and running games, and why. In every genre, it all boils down to one thing: player decisions are listened to and built on. I really like the splitting of the genre into narrativist roleplaying / narrativist storytelling / gamist / simulationist. Thinking about games in these categories has really helped me understand the design intent of games - even when I don't vibe with them fully! It is always worth thinking about what you're aiming at and the beating heart where the fun comes out. Here's what I pick up from each of those genres.
Roleplayer
(PBTAs and Blades in the Dark. Masks) GOAL of the GENRE: Make it fun to play your character exactly as they would behave. Reward players for embodying a predefined character.
Players want the game to be listening to them, so the repercussions of their actions are the only important bit.
Force players to love and care about one another's characters.
Provide a dispute arbitration mechanic besides killing one another, otherwise playing a "bad character" becomes an act of selfishness.
Jumping through a hoop is more rewarding when the hoop is small. This is the secret sauce behind PbtA "moves".
The paradox in the genre: behavioural incentives inherently restrict a character's personality to a predefined rail. What if a player's character is more complex than the playbooks allow for? How do you reward them?
Storyteller
(Asher's Ridge, The Quiet Year, Fiasco) GOAL of the GENRE: Create the best story together. Reward good ideas by building on them.
Focus in only when success is interesting, failure is interesting, success is possible. Gloss over rigmarole. The repercussions are the only important bit.
Get the Villain on the board ASAP.
Use rules like a framing device. Arrange the frame to generate a story.
If you take out all the rules, the first rule of the game ("you are playing in this setting with these style of characters") must be fun. The title of the game "slugblaster: kickflip over a quantum centipede" is a game in and of itself. Aim for that!
Give out a ton of information constantly and keep the world recapped. For example: plot twists don't work in a format with months in between setup and payoff. Nor do longterm mystery stories.
The paradox in the genre: a strictly narrative storytelling approach will eventually create a writing tool, and that's not a game! I own a toolkit for fixing writer's block, which is a list of prompt tables, starting sentences, "oracles" and so on. You can't just call that a "solo journalling game". It's worth including a way to win, and a reason to play on.
Wargame
(Lancer, DnD 4e, DnD 5e, Draw Steel, Betrayal Legacy) GOAL of the GENRE: A really awesome puzzle or combat encounter. Reward players for their own personal smarts or system mastery.
Provide a toybox of different subsystems to optimise. Reward players for their own skill, and for their mastery of your system.
If you don't let players build a simple or suboptimal character, building a complex or optimised character has no meaning.
Players build characters as self-expression and skill expression.
Gambling and risk is thrilling.
If there's something you can "win" at, that's really compelling.
The paradox in the genre: the greatest wargame of all time is chess. However, anyone playing a TTRPG as a wargame wants more than they get from chess. Chess is better off without RP elements or a cohesive setting. Pure wargame focus will produce a game that is better off not being a TTRPG. But when the illusion of storytelling drops, and it just becomes a battle, the meaning behind the game is lost! What a paradox!
Simulation/Survival sim
(OSR, Mausritter Minecraft RP servers) GOAL of the GENRE: Create an alternate reality sandbox that you can feel, immerse yourself in, and reshape. Reward players for surviving.
Players drive the story so the story must not exist without their input.
If the world doesn't happen in the background, the choice to not address its flaws has no meaning. The repercussions are the only important bit.
The paradox in the genre: it gets in the way of story beats. You can't write an episode of Grey's Anatomy by designing and staffing a hospital. Designing and staffing a complex world is an inefficient and cumbersome way to generate stories. The best way to guarantee an oil lamp will not run out at a dramatic moment is to track how much oil is left in it. In short, trying to evolve a story from a world build and a physics engine will evolve a weaker story.
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TTRPG School: Required Reading
This is an alphabetical list of writing on tabletop games, video games, games broadly, and a few adjacent topics. It is required reading. I am not agreeing with anything by having it on this list. Some of the works feature bibliographies and links to other works which they are referencing or in conversation with. Read those if you can. There are works I wanted to include on here but have been taken off of the internet, and I was unable to find them elsewhere beyond my hard drive.
You should read the following (just one a day or one per week, and maybe write a little personal response to it):
About Games and Beings Serious & Why Do Things Have Outlines, Bateson - https://garadinervi-repertori.blog/post/639473512034222080/gregory-bateson-1972-metalogue-about-games, https://garadinervi-repertori.blog/post/166320033101/gregory-bateson-why-do-things-have-outline
Against Procedurality, Sicart - https://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/sicart_ap
Anti-Canon Worlds and the UVG, Rejec - https://www.wizardthieffighter.com/2019/anti-canon-worlds-and-the-uvg/
Avoiding Inapt Discussions in RPGS, Prescott - https://blog.trilemma.com/2023/07/avoiding-inapt-discussion-in-rpgs.html
Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character, Bowman - https://www.nordiclarp.org/2015/03/02/bleed-the-spillover-between-player-and-character/
Blorb Principles, snan - https://idiomdrottning.org/blorb-principles
Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice, Rutskarn- https://www.chocolatehammer.org/?p=5773
Don’t Incentivize Ethical Behavior, Siew - https://slowlorispress.com/post/742713305722961920/dont-incentivise-ethical-behaviour
Game Design is Mind Control, Crane & Sorenson - https://genesisoflegend.podbean.com/e/episode-21-%e2%80%93-game-design-is-mind-control/
Homo Ludens, Huzinga - https://merton.bellarmine.edu/files/original/b0899cfad820ab8ad7033952b7a022ba1d7cab9d.pdf
Inevitable Architecture, Woods - https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/inevitable-architecture/
Libre Baskerville Jam - https://itch.io/jam/libre-baskerville-jam
Morality Play, Pokey - https://myfriendpokey.tumblr.com/post/183941596800/morality-play
Moralizing and Manipulating in TTRPGs, IdleCartulary - https://idlecartulary.com/2023/09/02/moralising-and-manipulation-in-tabletop-roleplaying-games/
New Simulationism, Sorenson - https://samsorensen.blot.im/new-simulationism
On Romantic Fantasy and the OSR, Manola - https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2015/07/on-romantic-fantasy-and-osr-d.html
Playing to Win, Maz - https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html
Revisiting GNS, Baker - https://lumpley.games/2025/04/07/revisiting-gns/
Rules Elide and its Consequences, Sinclair - https://web.archive.org/web/20230401204032/https://cohost.org/jared-sinclair/post/1211889-rules-elide-and-it
Sinistar or: How to Play Games Wrong, Joel - https://youtu.be/OFbhDs_8k1A?si=DGo4y1U3xr_8Qq0z
System Does Matter, Edwards - http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/system_does_matter.html
Systems of Relation, Dragon - https://possumcreek.medium.com/systems-of-relation-c3b27fc4cc99
Ten Manifestos, Harmony Zone - http://harmonyzone.org/ManifestoJam/TenManifestosForGroupsOfNoPeople.html
The Artist is Absent: Davey Wreden and the Beginner’s Guide, Danskin - https://youtu.be/4N6y6LEwsKc?si=DMFViwSTOOa4W6PY
The Big Three, Sorenson - https://memento-mori.livejournal.com/175828.html
The Forms and Fluidity of Game Play, Nguyen - https://gamephilosophy.org/pcg2014/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C.-Thi-Nguyen-2014.-The-Forms-and-Fluidity-of-Game-Play-PCG2014.pdf
The Hidden Art: Slouching Towards A Critical Framework for RPGs, Laws - https://web.archive.org/web/20080625014524/https://www.rpg.net/oracle/essays/hiddenart.html
The Impermanence of Art, Bissette - https://web.archive.org/web/20241114224733/https://cohost.org/chrisb/post/2011604-the-impermanence-of
The Monomyth Thread, Libre, Kazumi & Udernation - https://bigstuffedcat.itch.io/the-monomyth-thread
Thinking About Formal Incentive, Marcia B - https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/2023/09/thinking-about-formal-incentive.html?m=1
What are assumptions about how to play an OSR adventure that you think might not be commonly held as desired?, Scrap Princess - https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/LinksToWisdom/What_are_assumptions_about_how_to_play_an_OSR_adventure_that_you_think_might_not_be_commonly_held_as_desired%3f
What is a Game?, Suits - https://web.archive.org/web/20061010064123/http://www.stsintl.com/articles/whatisagame.html
What Should We Do With Our Games?, LeMieux & Boluk - https://alt254.itch.io/what-should-we-do-with-our-games
I put this list together in response to seeing a lot of the same arguments and discussions happening in regard to system-matters discourse, and it’s thinly veiled offshoots. The original goal was to ask people to understand both sides of the discussion and the reasons for pushback against both sides. After compiling, it now comprises more than just history and the goal is simply education and the sharing of ideas.
Hope you get something from it,
Snow
Tabletop Trick or Treat!! 🧁
My… that's a lot of leaves on one costume! Is that a rabbit under there?
Let's go with… a trick!
(A Trick: Hype up a designer that you love, talk about why you like them, and tell us why we should check them out!)
The odds of me coming up with a designer whose work I love that you haven't come across, Mint, seem slim to none, so instead I'll shout out a designer who is not only very good at what she does but also genuinely lovely, from the times we've chatted.
Rori Montford (of Montford Tales) is a name you should be familiar with if you've delved at all into the solo-journaling side of TTRPGs. She's the author of Dead Letter Society (a game about vampires writing letters to each other) and The Almanac of Sanguine Paths (which adds werewolves into the mix in a similar format). She's also recently crowdfunded Asher's Ridge, a paranormal drama TTRPG (think Twin Peaks, The X-Files or Stranger Things) set in the eponymous fictional town of Asher's Ridge, making use of letter tiles as a core mechanic.
Her two solo games make excellent use of tarot and are incredibly evocative - while I haven't made a tarot-based game yet, I will definitely be referencing them when I do. And, as a sucker for interesting mechanics, I love the idea of making use of letter tiles in a TTRPG.
Oh, also she does all the art for her games and I will be forever jealous of the map of Asher's Ridge she made:
And, I mean, look at these!
(I actually have a copy of the right hand whale, it's above my computer as I type this!)
Check out her portfolio for more of her incredible art!
movies where someone hears an important message only once and retains all the details….
girl if that were me, we’d be fucked. I have to reread emails like 4 times.
if it were me having to repeat my dead father’s instructions on destroying the death star:
I was in a college psych class, and the teacher was doing some kind of exercise about memory, patterns, and retention. He began with, “for instance, if I asked you what number the first letter of your name is in the alphabet, you wouldn’t be able to tell me right aw–” “Ten,” I said. “What?” “J. J is ten,” I said again. He stared at me. “I happened to learn it while looking at the alphabet when I was five or six, and it just stayed in my brain,” I told him. Then we did an exercise on retention. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and then I’m going to send you out of the room for five minutes, and when you come back, you have to repeat as much of the story back to me as possible.” He told me a long and meandering story with no plot or structure, just a random series of events, place names, actions, etc. Then he sent me out of the room. I looked at the wall for a while. He called me back in five minutes later, stood me up in front of the class, and asked me to repeat “just as much of the story as you remember.” Apparently while I’d been gone he’d been telling the class about how eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable because people don’t remember things well after a certain period of time. So I told his story back to him– not verbatim, but certain phrases were exact– and watched the consternation in his face as I accidentally blew up his (valid! and extensively studied!) lesson about how bad people’s retention is. “It’s like a song,” I tried to explain to him, and the class. “Or a poem. Every part of the story has a little tag to remember it. I looked at the chalkboard while you were saying this part. My leg itched while you were saying that part. A chair squeaked during the next part. Then I just have to come back and go over all the sensations that I had while you were” “Sit down,” he said. I sat. Turns out I’m Autisms Georg adn should not have been counted
ADHD version: A friend asked, on a field trip, why I knew the scientific name for Caltha palustris, “Well, we did that [one week long] field ID course [three years previously] and we saw it in one of the bogs”.
This, I was informed, is very much not a normal reason to remember the scientific name of a plant for the rest of your life.
It took me five whole years to learn when my partner’s birthday is.
I can remember specific details about games I played over two decades ago that I have not played since.
I once forgot it was my birthday. On my birthday. And when my sister (Who lived several hours away) jumped out of hiding and yelled happy birthday, I looked around to see who she was talking to.
In an away day when I started my job, we were split into groups of about ten and told to do a team exercise. We had all the parts necessary to build a knex model of a helicopter, and in the other room, we could look at a finished model, one at a time. But you didn't have to send everyone - in fact, each time you sent someone to look at the helicopter, it was a two minute penalty. The model had about 100 pieces. As people began to plan how to approach this task, and how sending in the minimum was the ideal, I piped up "I reckon I can just do it". When I was a kid I liked lego and I stuck out. I talked to myself and I kicked my legs and I fidgeted and chewed nails and laughed at distracting, awkward moments. Part of me liked things to be in my own vision of orderliness, and liked to get lost in the clear, rigid logic of construction toys. Everyone said "sure" and in I went to the room. Like a boxer dropping training weights, like a dog let out of the cage as it comes home from the vet, a kid walked into the room with the helicopter and dropped twenty five years of meticulously accumulated social norms at the door, turning his little mind towards the model only. Pacing, stimming, flicking hands left and right. A whirl of half-finished sentences like an incantation. It took me two trips: one to get the overwhelming majority of it correct, and one to fix the errors. Other teams learned important teambuilding lessons about how to manage conflicting accounts between multiple people. My team learned that, when designing a teambuilding task, it is important to account for kids who like lego and stick out. We won.
Any old guard DND homebrewers be warned that GMBinder is on the absolute blink. I can no longer reset password which could well mean a lot of my OG versions of my older work are lost permanently! If you manage to get into your own account, back everything up asap.
Hi! Release has gone incredible so far. We've got 3 big new things: First, 2 new Playbooks! The Vatgrown Girl , who's never known life outsi
1.2 of Girl Frame is out, with the Vatgrown Girl, the Frantic Handler, and an updated How to Play section
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Indie TTRPG fans be like "my GMs are always open"
This move does a good job of showing 2 things I like about the design of Girl Frame (lesbian mech rpg):
The "XP" system (Permissions) is an in-universe resource that your Handler gives your characters. I think diegetic XP is pretty cool
The Handler is considered a player by the text, and so other characters and their own choices can change what 'GM moves' they have access to
