#elfgames

For me, the draw of playing an RPG is in adopting the persona of a character and seeing how they mesh with the imagined world, treating that world as a real place. Putting that in the frame of story can nudge the concern of play from engaging with the world organically to engaging with it as a narrative canvas; in terms of "what makes a good story?" or "what is narratively satisfying?"

Humblebird's Infinite Monsters is a high-concept monster generator with an emphasis on behavior: what the monster does, and how it relates to the rest of the world. Choose from a dozen or more answers to questions including:

Where does the monster live?

Why does the monster exist?

What drives the monster to do what it does?

How does the monster spend its time?

Humblebird’s Infinite Monsters is a monster generator and not a bestiary. Because of its scope it requires the user to fill in the details, including any mechanics, and can't be used to generate monsters on the fly. Instead, use it to generate your own bestiary ahead of time, as well as iterate on existing bestiaries and monsters.

Features:

System and setting agnostic

Supplements other monster generators and bestiaries

Suggestions for generating monsters for different genres

Internal links for convenient navigation between table of contents, trait tables, and trait descriptions

Lately I’ve found myself talking with different people about how to pick a RPG system, or how to design a RPG system for a particular setting. There’s obviously loads of approaches to this question; here’s my answer, in the form of five questions. Jared Sorensen put forth three questions that get to the heart of RPG design, John Wick (not the Keanu character) added a fourth, and I’m gonna add a fifth.

What is your game about?

This isn’t about the specific setting. There’s a lot of games out there that do people with superpowers wearing their underwear outside their clothes and punching people, but those games will generally have different things on which they focus.

Dungeons and Dragons is basically about going into unusual locations, killing the things that live there, and taking their stuff. It’s so much about that, it’s in the name! Star Wars: Edge of the Empire is about people who live on the fringes of society (smugglers, bounty hunters, mercenaries), and the tension between the obligations they owe to powerful people and their dreams of living free and easy. Monsterhearts is about teenage melodrama with supernatural powers, about what life is like when your body is changing and relationships at school are getting complicated, about having to hide who you really are because you don’t think anyone could possibly accept you.

Sometimes a game doesn’t do a good job of communicating what it’s about. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad game, but it makes it harder to get useful answers to the rest of the questions.

How does your game do this?

Whatever your game is about, there need to be rules elements to support it. D&D has tons of rules about creatures you can kill, the stuff you can take, and the locations you can go to do this. Edge of the Empire has a few different ways to leverage PCs’ obligations, either as “heat” (Jabba wants you mounted on his wall), notoriety (I’ve got a bounty on my head in ten systems; are you sure you want to cross me?), or even a way to get resources (if you do this for me, I’ll owe you one). Monsterhearts has “Strings”, narrative currency that represent emotional leverage one person holds over another, and “Darkest Self”, the part of yourself that you’re ashamed of and keep hidden, and sometimes comes out to play at the worst time imaginable.

How does your game reward this?

You can have all the mechanics you like, but if the players never have any reason to use them, then they’re not really playing the game, are they? D&D incentivizes players to kill creatures by giving out XP for killing them and allowing the XP to be exchanged for more powers to use. It encourages players to take their stuff by, well, offering interesting stuff to take and use. EotE incentivizes players to manage their PCs’ obligations by tying them in with reputation, resources, and threats. Monsterhearts lets PCs avoid death by becoming their Darkest Selves, removing all damage taken in exchange for the risk of doing something unforgivable.

How do you make this fun?

There’s a lot of different ways that a game system can be fun. Some people really like devising the best spell selection for their wizards, or claiming top status in the high school power plays, or turning a trap against the bounty hunter who set it. Other people enjoy managing the resource expenditure of a D&D battle, solving supernatural mysteries, or outwitting Imperial bureaucrats. In my experience, good RPGs pick a handful of play styles to specialize in, rather than trying to equally reward every possible approach to the material.

How well do these answers match the players’ expectations?

First pass at a list of Action Ratings for Advanced DNGN FKRS / Dwindeltol.

The game is going to be FitD-ish, as DNGN FKRS is, with a cruftier skill list. (Despite BitD calling them "actions," I still think of them more like skills in my head). I've divided them into categories of four, but the divisions are imperfect. Break in the Craft section is kind of more of a Shadow action. "Drink" in Labor and "Deal" in Craft are both kind of really Social actions. And what's the difference between Drink and Consort, functionally?

Of course, a little overlap is normal for a FitD. And even desired since I'm thinking of borrowing FoRKing from Burning Wheel.

Important Principles:

Every action must be active. If a player is rolling the dice, their character is doing something in the fiction of play.

Absolutely no perception or knowledge actions! The closest thing is Research, which still requires going somewhere and doing something.

Questions?

Keeping the principles in mind, is there anything that feels like it's missing?

Mucking around with a starship sheet partly inspired by Starfield. But also inspired by every piece of space opera fiction I've ever seen.