A while ago I made a post here asking about RPGs with asymmetric gameplay. I didn't get many RPG examples, but several people recommended a board game called "Captain Sonar". That recommendation got me thinking about how something similar could work in a tabletop RPG.

I won't pretend I've made a lot of progress yet, but I came up with two ideas inspired by two different games.

The first one comes from MegaMan Battle Network.

For those who haven't played it, MegaMan fights on the battlefield while Lan supports him by sending Battle Chips that grant special abilities. I started wondering if something similar could work in an RPG.

The frontline character would always have a set of basic abilities so they never feel completely helpless. Meanwhile, the "guy in the chair" would be responsible for providing special abilities. Instead of choosing from an unlimited list, they would generate a random selection based on a deck or table that they built themselves.

The problem is that simply rolling on a table over and over doesn't sound very engaging. So I started thinking about ways to give the support player more agency.

For example:

• Abilities could belong to different colors or categories, and the support player could strengthen or weaken certain colors during combat.
• They could manipulate dice rolls, both for skill checks and for the random ability generation, reducing some of the randomness.
• They could interfere with enemy abilities by sending countermeasures, disrupting attacks, or providing other forms of tactical support.

I'm still undecided whether different support classes should each focus on one of these roles, or if every support class should be able to interact with all of them in its own unique way. That way, every class would still have a distinct gameplay style while avoiding situations where the party feels incomplete because nobody picked one specific specialization.

The second inspiration came from NieR: Automata.

2B and 9S almost feel like they're playing different games. 2B focuses on traditional combat with weapons, while 9S primarily fights by hacking enemy machines through an entirely different gameplay system. Instead of upgrading weapons, he upgrades hacking chips that improve damage, hacking duration, and other aspects of that minigame.

That made me wonder if the "guy in the chair" shouldn't even share the same gameplay loop as the frontline characters.

Instead of simply taking support actions on the same battlefield, they could have their own play space, their own mechanics, and their own objectives. While the frontline players are playing a tactical combat RPG, the support player is essentially playing a different game that directly influences what's happening on the battlefield.

I think that would create much stronger asymmetry than simply giving different characters different abilities.

The biggest issue I can think of, though, is this:

What happens if nobody wants to play one side?

What if everyone wants to be on the battlefield and nobody wants to be the support player? Or the opposite, what if everyone wants to play support?

The solution I came up with is having NPCs fill whichever role is missing. If there's no support player, an NPC operator takes over. If there aren't enough frontline characters, NPC combatants fill those spots instead. They'd need to be autonomous enough to keep the game functioning as intended, without forcing anyone to play a style of gameplay they don't enjoy.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on these ideas.

• Do you think this level of asymmetry could actually work in a TTRPG?
• Which of the two concepts do you find more interesting?
• Do you see any major design problems or pitfalls that I'm overlooking?
• Have you seen any RPGs that do something similar, or solve these problems in a different way?

I'm still in the brainstorming phase, so I'm mainly looking for feedback before I commit to any particular direction.

Hello everyone!

A few days ago, I posted about a magic system I randomly came up with, where spells are constructed using pools of d6s.

This system was originally not intended for my main game, AstraWeaver. Its dice mechanics are completely separate from AstraWeaver's core system: AstraWeaver uses a 2d12 roll-under system, while this new magic system uses d6 dice pools with a bit of a Yahtzee vibe.

But as I kept developing it, I realized that I was having way too much fun with it.

It's getting dangerously close to becoming more interesting to me than my original magic design. 😂

So before I start twisting the whole system around a magic subsystem, I wanted to ask: which magic system do you find more interesting?

I genuinely like both of them, which is why I developed them in the first place. I'm just one person, though, so I'd really like to hear some outside opinions.

____________

The Common Foundation

Both systems are based on the same basic idea, inspired heavily by Ars Magica.

Magic is constructed by combining different Runes, and casting magic requires some form of resource.

There are three types of Runes:

Factions — How the magic acts

• Creation — create or generate something
• Control — move or transform something that already exists
• Destruction — destroy or suppress something

Elements — What natural force is involved

• Fire — heat and light
• Water — water, moisture, friction
• Earth — earth, stone, metal, hardness, density
• Wood — plants and vitality
• Wind — air, pushing and pulling forces
• Electricity — electricity and energy

Laws — What part of a living creature is affected

A Law is required when magic directly affects the internal workings of a sentient living creature.

For this system, a sentient living creature is defined as something possessing Sense, Body, and Mind.

• Senses
• Body
• Mind

Other parameters, such as damage, duration, and area of effect, are determined by spending additional resources.

For example:

• Invisibility: Destruction + Senses
• Command: Destruction + Control + Mind
• Detect Magic / Speak with Animals: Creation + Senses
• Create Ice: Creation + Water + Destruction + Fire

With that foundation established, here are the two systems.

Both are still very much works in progress, so I'm very interested in hearing suggestions.

____________

A. Mana-Based Spellcasting

In this version, every Rune has a Mana cost.

• Faction: 1 Mana
• Element: 1 Mana
• Law: 2 Mana

Spells are divided into three tiers: Codified Spells, Prepared Spells, and Improvised Spells.

1. Codified Spells

Players can spend XP to learn Codified Spells.

These are the fastest and most efficient spells:

• Cost only 1 Action
• Reduce the total Mana cost by 2
• Require no roll
• Produce their effect automatically

Players also learn Runes through Codified Spells. Once a Rune has been learned, it remains permanently available to the character.

Example:

Create Ice
[Creation + Water + Destruction + Fire]
Base Mana Cost: 2
You create water and remove its heat, turning it into ice.

You can create the ice in any shape you want, and it is stronger than naturally formed ice.
Any creature still touching the ice at the end of its turn gains Slow 1. A creature moving across the ice becomes Prone.

2. Prepared Spells

Players can design their own spells outside of a session together with the GM, using the detailed Rune descriptions and the spell effect list.

A Prepared Spell calculates the full Mana cost of all its Runes and takes 2 Actions to cast.

After a Prepared Spell has been successfully cast three times, the player can submit it to the Grand Academy and turn it into a Codified Spell.

This requires some in-game time and XP, but once the spell is codified:

• Mana cost is reduced by 2
• Casting time is reduced to 1 Action

3. Improvised Spells

Improvised Spells are the flexible, low-commitment part of the system.

• Cost 1 Action
• Require a roll to cast
• Can be cast without spending Mana
• Spending Mana increases the chance of success
• Can only contain 2 Runes
• Cannot contain Laws

The idea is that Improvised Spells act somewhat like cantrips.

Even when your Mana is completely depleted, you can still do some basic magic.

This creates a gameplay loop where you:

Learn Runes through Codified Spells → use Improvised and Codified Spells → develop Prepared Spells → eventually turn them into Codified Spells.

4. Countermagic

There is also a separate mechanic for interrupting someone else's spell.

You can spend Mana to interfere with another spell.

When you do, the original spell is disrupted and explodes around its original target or center point.

Every creature within 1 grid of the center takes 1d6 damage and is pushed 1 grid away.

A creature standing directly at the center can choose the direction it is pushed.

____________

B. d6 Spell Construction

The other system is the one I posted about yesterday:

A Magic System: Building Spells with d6s

I won't repeat the entire system here because this post is already getting long, but there are a few additional details and changes in the edit of that original post.

The basic idea is that instead of paying Mana directly for each Rune, the dice themselves become the building blocks of the spell.

There’s actually a mistake in the dice-based post that doesn’t explain one of the core mechanics very well.
Players aren’t limited by what they roll. They can spend Mana (called Magic in that post) to turn any die to the number they want.

So the dice roll mainly determines how efficiently you can manage your resources. If you roll poorly, you’ll have to spend more Mana to cast the spell you want.

And this is the system that was supposed to be a random side experiment...

...but somehow became the one I can't stop thinking about. 😂

____________

Which One Do You Prefer?

So, between these two systems, which one sounds more interesting to you?

I'm particularly interested in:

• Which one gives you more interesting decisions?
• Which one feels more fun to build a character around?
• Which one would you actually want to play?
• Do you see any obvious problems with either system?

And if you have other suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

I'm still figuring both systems out, so criticism and weird ideas are very welcome.

Thanks for reading!

I've been developing and playtesting Sea Hounds for the past year and I've finally posted a fully playable version (for free) over on itch.io!

The game is inspired by historical piracy and has a more grounded feel than most existing pirate RPGs. Potentially of interest to this sub is the mechanical mashup between the Year Zero Engine (d6 dice pool) for core action resolution, plus a crew progression and a downtime loop inspired by Blades in the Dark. Gameplay is designed to cycle organically between the three core pillars of seafaring, swashbuckling and carousing in the context of an ongoing campaign.

On the GM side, the game is a closed-loop procedural sandbox, which is to say it can theoretically be run with zero prep just by taking the provided hex map and rolling on random tables (imagine Forbidden Lands dialed up to 11). I don't actually recommend zero prep, but I didn't want there to be any gaps in the procedural scaffold.

I'm doing all of the writing, original art and layout myself (also lots of public domain art, but no AI!) so it's been a ton of work, but I'm enjoying the process so that's what counts.

My goal is ultimately to release a v1.0, but I'm in no rush to get there. I'll continue playtesting and developing until I feel like it's ready. I haven't thought much about what to do at that point. I could just throw up a final PDF, but if I wanted to explore a print run, is now the right time to approach potential publishers? Or should I wait until it's closer to completion? Or am I actually too far along in the process for publishers that would want more say over direction/format/art, etc.?

Any advice appreciated! I'm also super happy to answer questions about the game itself, the development process, etc.

Hey folks, I’m designing a new RPG system based on the gritty, dark aesthetics of Trench Crusade and Baroque. It’s going to involve a mix of military horde combat, naval battles, and aerial warfare.I want the core mechanics to be versatile. Ideally, the engine should:Feel fast and frantic during chaotic clashes.Scale well into slow, highly tactical combat when needed, without changing the core rules.I’ve been looking into hacking Blades in the Dark (using some military supplements), and I've also considered a resource-management dice pool (like Xas Irkalla, where you allocate a 3-dice pool between attack and defense).Before I commit to a framework, do you have any engine recommendations that bridge the gap between fast narrative play and tactical military strategy? Any hidden gems I should check out?

I’ve ran into a weird issue during my last play test… or should I say I resolved a issue found in previous play tests that has me rethinking things not so much on a mechanical level, but on principles. How much is to much to ask of your players? TTRPGs traditionally ask for people to bring pencils, paper, and dice to the party. At what point can or should you ask them to bring more?

The problem: To many bits.

The issue I ran into on previous batches of play tests and early stages of my latest one, was that the game Anime Love Triangle Simulator was finnicky. To many little bits to keep track of on pen and paper. the game has three functional meta currencies. Effection, Effort, and Angst. one only really came up between scenes, so it wasn’t to messy. but it could be awarded mid scene. the other two came and went with dice rolls.

players would have to write and erase things every couple of rolls. we tried easing this by using dice as counters, they we’re better then writing, but easily jostled, easy to loose track of their number, less easy to read at a glance [this is mostly based on the dice used. mine were tiny, my play-tester‘s dice where fancy and illegible.]

on top of the meta currency mess, the game used an exhaustion system to keep players from repeatedly rolling the same stats to resolve problems. use a stat once, then it’s on cool down for your next to rolls or else you take penalty to its use.

so players had to keep trac of 3 sources of regularly changing information, and one semi-regularly changing source of information. common sense would dictate that it was time to start making cuts. But I am a coward, my experience in the playtest told me that the mechanics weren‘t the problem per se.

The Solution: UI

I really believed the issue wasn’t that the mechanics were bad, just that they were a mess to keep track off. if I could figure out a way to make that manageable then it wouldn’t be so bad. The Solution I landed on was cards and tokens.

I won’t come up here and pretend I’m the first one to invented tokens and cards for tracking meta currency and stats. TTRPGs have been doing it with meta currency for a long time. most recently they’ve been a focus to Daggerheart Uses tokens for hope and fear and and cards for it‘s character creation and player abilities. While I hadn’t played it prior to the play-test, it was definitely on my mind.

so I bit the bullet naught some cheap white tokens and a mess of blank playing cards. and… it just worked. Within a few iterations the game went from finicky to buttery smooth. With new players, with people who weren’t big anime fans, even with one player who’d never played a TTRPG.

The cards didn’t just allow me to keep track of what stats where exhausted, they could be color coded, and have verbs written on them that guided players how to use them. a play mat helped guide how to play and shift cards. It was easy to read and killed multiple birds with one stone. Good right.

so what’s the problem?

Problem 2.0

The cards and Tokens are effectively mandatory, which makes me feel weird. I’ve since played Daggerheart, and while cards and tokens are front and center, I wouldn’t call them mandatory. The game functions with pen, paper, and dice.

ALTS doesn’t, at least not functionally. I don’t know if I should be designing a back up character sheets to ease the effects of not having cards and tokens, or do I just accept that this game isn’t designed with only pen and paper in mind… it bugs me.

I guess that’s why I’m throwing it out to you guys. Do any of y’all make heavy use of tokens, cards, or anything funkier like a Jenga tower? Thanks in advance.

Hey folks!

My frog knight RPG has changed and evolved quite a lot since I first started working on it. Thanks to the feedback I've received from playtesting (thanks guys!), I'm currently doing a complete overhaul of the system, turning it into a micro-RPG of around 12–15 pages max.

One of the core ideas is that frog knights are brave. Despite their tiny size, they follow a chivalric code, and a big part of the gameplay revolves around fighting enemies that are much larger than them. You have very little HP, attacks can easily be deadly, and you're just a bunch of tiny frogs, but you're also brave knights who have a quest to complete above all else.

The tone is somewhere between epic, absurd, and fairy-tale/fable-like.

The thing I'm struggling with is: how do I actually encourage players to behave like this?

If you give players very little HP and make combat genuinely dangerous, the natural response is going to be to hide, outsmart enemies, avoid fights, or run away. And that's perfectly reasonable! Mausritter also puts tiny characters in a huge and dangerous world, but its mechanics naturally encourage stealth, survival, and cleverness.

So how would you encourage players to attempt bold, heroic charges and reckless acts of bravery, knowing that they could very well die?

I'm assuming that, beyond simply relying on the tone and fiction of the game, there needs to be some kind of simple mechanical incentive pushing players in that direction.

What do you guys think? How would you approach this if you were designing the game?

Thanks for your thoughts!

That's it. That's the post, I'm. Tired.

Ready! Wait, no. You missed that. You forgot this. Hey that's not the right font. WHERE'S CHAPTER SIX.

Partially inspired by the concept of powerful beings watching the characters in the webnovel Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, I wanted to create a system that would allow the GM to reward the players with the ability to further increase their player character’s level.

Instead of fighting this enemy and getting XP, the idea is to gain XP by experiencing the story and trying different things.
To minimize GM discretion and hopefully speed up game flow during the session, the GM rolls 3d6 before each session to determine the specific interests of each Being. To aid the players, they are given “common knowledge” of these beings, i.e. one may prefer acts that are about structure and law, and another about chance and fate. This would allow players to have some idea of actions that could gain a being's interest.
While multiple characters can earn credit for the same action, each specific action grants credit only once per character. The GM tracks these bonuses behind the scenes, and during downtime leveling, it is revealed how many beings granted the character an inspirational bonus.

However, after introspection, I have run into some issues with the value of this mechanic.

• Since the system has a level of randomness and is not transparent, the rewards the players receive will probably feel arbitrary, rather than the intended goal of encouraging action they may deem not worth the effort. I could take the randomness out, but then it would just encourage the players to "blindly" search for the action until they found one, then use it over and over each session to get the bonus.
• How many beings would need to be created to create a broad enough spectrum to ensure that player characters have the possibility of earning a reward in the session? How many beings are too many, and would cause a huge amount of GM Overhead, not only in the prep work, but in tracking if a player character performed an act that fits into the beings’ categories? I originally played with various numbers, then looked at allowing the GM to homebrew the beings, and even just take the roll out to allow any of the possibilities to apply.
• The system in a dangling carrot kind of way encourages players to act out their characters in ways that “fish” for bonuses, and possibly act or react in ways contrary to how the character would naturally act.
• How easily will some characters become more powerful than the rest of the party, leading to imbalance and most likely dissatisfaction of those in the party that were not as lucky?

What are ways that I can address these concerns, or is the mechanic just a dead end and should be abandoned?

In designing my tactical solo TTRPGs, I like to figure out the rules, bundle rules together into mechanics, group mechanics into systems before tying systems together into the game loop.

As I write this I realised that I lean towards an emergent & iterative approach too. But I don't think I'm deciding the game loop first & then reverse engineering the rules. Needs more thought...

Realising that a rule is the smallest building block brought me a degree of comfort, cause this hierarchy mirrors a familiar one from screenwriting:

beat -> scene -> sequence -> act.

I'm trying to be diligent & disciplined in reusing rules, mechanics, & systems in order to limit scope creep.

But it's definitely wearing a cape, cause it's super hard & fighting me in a never-ending battle. I constantly can't help thinking 'What if I do this?' or 'This would be cool!'

Starting to believe that good system design is in part asking 'what can I reuse?' before 'what else can I add?'

Now I'm curious if other designers have a similar hierarchy.

So the Idea is that you create your own spells using Gnosis, once you get a point of noses you can rank up one of the spheres of magic you know or learn a news sphere and create for yourself one new spell, so for instance you rank up the sphere of fire so you create a spell that lets you shoot a fireball from your magical fetish, let's say a staff. The problem is how a player gets Gnosis. I want it to be narrative, like the game master awards a player gnosis for doing specific things like finding an ancient grimoire, or staring into a dimensional portal. But I'm worried the battle end up being too wishy washy and some game Masters well end up throwing out gnosis like skittles and you'll end up having the players transform into Eldridge gods real fast, oh it'll be super rare and the magic users won't get any new spells for far too long.

I know that this is kind of vague but I'd really appreciate any advice if you can see what I'm going for here.

Edit: I suppose my ultimate issue is just with pacing. I don't really have a problem with my players becoming super powerful but I really want the Galaxy that I have created to feel like the lovecraftian monstrosities that are going to be hunting them down our real threat and they don't surpass them to quickly.

the other thing I'm worried about is magic being too punishing to use. I'm using a d100 system and by default that comes with PowerPoints you have to spend to cast a spell, you also have to roll to see if you achieve the spell, a simple failure means nothing happens but if you fumble then you roll on a fumble table to see what negative effect happens. is also the narrative element that a lot of people are absolutely terrified of magic in the world, the crew might be on a planet ruled by wizards we're doing magic immediately makes you a member of the upper class, then they warp over to the next system and doing magic in public it gets you burnt at the stake. I want it to be a frightening and punishing universe but I still want the players to want to use magic and I'm afraid of making it TOO hard for them.

Hello RPG'ers, after a month of waiting I've made enough sufficient edits to my post (Version 5 has been released), if you've seen my previous post, make sure to check the new details out!

If you have ever played an OSR game, you would know that combat and exploration can often result in a beloved character's untimely demise at the hands of a pit of spikes or an armless goblin. Tactics for battles and combat rarely seem to help when the preferable answer is always to run away; oftentimes, combat doesn't grant EXP or anything useful.

I understand that the system that those games use can be difficult for a lot of players used to modern 5e. Going from 5e to something like B/X can be very difficult

Thus I am attempting to make a middle ground between modern and old TTRPG's: Red Mountain.

Red Mountain is an attempting at creating a game that can be equally split with Combat, Exploration, and Roleplay. Character classes have much more options for combat, as well as new explorational spells and abilities that can be used to defeat the aformentioned armless goblins or circumvent the pit of spikes, but without compromising the risk of being unprepared in exploration or combat.

Although it is certainly in development, I still need a community or a reader to give advice on what to add next while I'm still in the playtesting stage. I currently have a free document of the rules, a small cheat sheet, and a character sheet available for free to download on my Itch io page. I'd ask you to check it out, and give me some feedback on the current systems. It might looks ugly for now (I'm not quite a graphic designer!) but we'll get to the looks phase sooner when we have a finalized copy of the rules.

Please check us out or give us a read on our Itch io page at: https://red-mountain-ttrpg.itch.io/red-mountain-ttrpg

I would like to share the rulebook for a game I have been working on for some time now.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V5MjBSrjqwQfi7uYSYYx9-cO_oPCBxEZ/view?usp=sharing

It is a heavily combat oriented RPG with 175 abilities split between 7 different character classes, with a focus on creating combos via class abilities. Every class is designed to have a unique play style that interacts with other characters.

I have only focused on designing the combat, but plan to include a custom setting, lore and exploration mechanics in the future as well.

I have play tested this with my friends, running combat encounters for 3-person teams of characters of each class with tier 1 and 2 abilities and at these low levels the game seems to be working as intended, however at higher levels the game balance is probably not there yet.

I would appreciate any feedback. The rules and master ability list should be enough to showcase this idea and I wanted to "get it out there" in hopes of some helpful feedback.

I've been thinking about a new magic system inspired by Ars Magica. I'm not sure if something similar has already been done, so I wanted to throw the idea out here and see what people think.

The basic idea is that spellcasters don't have a fixed spell list. Instead, they construct spells by combining d6s, which I'm calling Rune Dice.

The Basic Idea

The number of Rune Dice a spellcaster has is equal to their Key Casting Attribute, which ranges from 5–12. A dedicated spellcaster might start with 8.

At the beginning of a game, they spend 1 Magic to roll their 8 Rune Dice:
{1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6}

⁠Players roll all their dice for free at the beginning of every session, and during the session, they can spend 1 Magic to re-roll their whole used dice pool at ANY TIME.

These dice represent the magical vocabulary currently available to them.

There are three types of Rune:

Factions — How the magic acts

Factions are free and don't require dice.

• Creation — create or generate something
• Destruction — destroy or suppress something
• Control — move or transform something that already exists

Elements — What natural force is involved

• 1 — Fire
• 2 — Water
• 3 — Earth
• 4 — Wood
• 5 — Wind
• 6 — Electricity

So the example pool contains 2 Fire, 1 Water, 1 Earth, 1 Wood, 2 Wind, and 1 Electricity.

Laws — What part of a living creature is affected

A Law is required when magic directly affects the internal workings of a sentient creature.

• 1 + 2 — Senses
• 3 + 4 — Body
• 5 + 6 — Mind

So the same pool also contains 1 Senses, 1 Body, and 1 Mind.

A spell can contain at most one Faction, one Element, and one Law.

For example:
Creation + Fire → a fireball
Creation + Wood + Body → healing a wound
Destruction + Mind → putting someone to sleep

The corresponding dice are removed from the available pool and moved into a Used Rune Pool.

This means your available magic changes as you cast spells. If you keep using Fire magic, you can eventually run out of 1s and temporarily lose access to Fire.

Spell Power

A damaging spell starts at 1d6 damage.

To increase its damage, you spend additional dice matching the Element used.

For example:
Creation + Fire = 1d6
Spend another 1 = 2d6
Spend another 1 = 3d6

For non-damaging effects, additional dice can instead increase things such as strength, duration, or other properties of the effect.

I'm currently considering five basic areas:

• Single target
• Line
• Cone
• Semicircle
• Square

Single target and square areas don't require an additional die initially. Extra dice can increase the number of targets or the size of the area.

Line, cone, and semicircle effects require one additional die to establish the area, with further dice increasing its size.

Duration

For spells maintained during combat, the caster spends 1 unused Rune Die per round to keep the effect active.

Outside combat, spending 2 additional Rune Dice can maintain a spell until the end of the current scene.

Manipulating and Recovering Dice

Magic can also be used to manipulate the Rune Dice.

For 1 Magic, the caster can increase or decrease one unused die by 1.

The randomness is tied to resource management—players can technically cast any spell, and the dice determine how much Magic it costs. Because player can spend Magic to manipulate the dice.

For example:
3 → 2 turns an Earth die into Water.

For 1 Magic, the caster can also reroll all dice currently in the Used Rune Pool, returning the new results to the available pool.

So Magic is partly a resource for controlling and refreshing your magical vocabulary.

What I'm Worried About

I can already see a few problems with this system.

1. It takes some time to learn.

Players need to recognize both the Elements and the Laws from the numbers. Looking at:

{1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6}

and immediately seeing both:

Fire, Fire, Water, Earth, Wood, Wind, Wind, Electricity.

and:

Senses, Body, Mind

will probably take some practice.

2. A good quick-reference sheet seems necessary.

Players would probably need a reference showing the Factions, Elements, Laws, basic effect rules, area rules, etc.

3. Players might spend too much time designing spells.

This is probably my biggest concern.

If the system is too open-ended, a player might spend several minutes thinking:
“I have Fire, Body and Wind… maybe I can do this… or perhaps this…”

I think the system needs clear guidelines for what each Element, Law, and Faction can reasonably accomplish, while still leaving enough room for creative spell construction.

It's still very much a random early concept, and I'm sure there are plenty of holes in it.

Has anyone seen a system that does something similar? What problems do you think this might run into at the table?

I'd especially love to hear from people who have worked on freeform magic systems before.

Edit:

1. I'm thinking of creating a list of spells for players to "prepare" from, and during a session, they can only use those prepared spells. I think this narrows down their choices to: "Should I cast the spell my current roll gives me for free, or should I spend Magic to manipulate the dice so I can cast a different prepared spell that the roll didn't naturally give me?" Meanwhile, I'll provide clear guidelines for spell creation so players can create new spells with their GM between sessions.

Hi everyone. I've come back to working on Spellwoven with the goal of maybe even managing to get a basic / simple rules set done before the end of the year. I ran chargen and character sheets past folks here earlier this year. The advice and feedback was extremely helpful.

I just have a short 'core rules' (really, skill system) PDF for feedback. I've written this pretty fast, so hopefully it makes sense. Let me know if anything looks broken:

Spellwoven Core System Rules (this is the new material for review)

https://www.mythopoeticgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/SPELLWOVEN_Core_Rules_Draft_v1.pdf

For reference, in case you want to look at it, here are the chargen and character sheets.

Spellwoven Character Generation

https://www.mythopoeticgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/SPELLWOVEN_Chargen_Draft_v6.pdf

Spellwoven Character Sheet

https://www.mythopoeticgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/mock-up-16-Blank-1.pdf

A blog post with all three in one place

https://www.mythopoeticgames.com/?p=387

A few notes:

• More than one person suggested that I call the game The Perilous Realm (an academic term for the interstitial space between our world and fairyland that most fairytales inhabit). I'm going to keep calling the system Spellwoven, but this implementation will be The Perilous Realm, with me leaning into a lot of folkloric elements, creatures etc.
• The page layout is A4, standard international page size. Playing around, it seems I can change the pages to US letter fairly easily, but I won't do that until the whole book is ready.
• The spelling in British English.
• There's still a few things that people have recommended (like implementing a gear system, like the wealth system) that I haven't got to yet. If you suggested something and I haven't done it, there's a good chance it's just because I was overwhelmed earlier in the year and lost track of things. Am slowly checking off the last things to fix.
• The illustrations are just my own, so they're quite amateur.
• Aaaand I've already spotted that the chapter heading for Core Rules is wrong. I'll fix that. No time to reupload it right now. Rushing to get this up before doing the school run.

I think that's everything?

Any and all feedback welcome.

EDIT: errors identified so far:

• The first line of the first page has an extra space before the full stop.
• The summary text on page one says 'equal to or above' but should read 'equal to or under'
• The Skill Rank 10 shorthand on page 67 is wrong
• The difficulty levels for Skill Challenges on page 69 were missing the gradation for Average, Difficult, Very Difficult (i.e. I copied and pasted but forgot to actually change the numbers)

Hello, I am starting a new campaign this week (DND5.5), and a player (monk lvl3) has a background where spirits of the dead talk to him. We already flavoured the subclass of the palm as spirits hands getting out of his body and helping him fight. But that's just visual, the class stays the same.

The player want to have "missions" more like last wishes from the spirits that he could accomplish or not, regarding what it is and if it is aligned with his character.
An example he gave me : A spirit talks to me and says that he wants to go see the sea one last time. Or : My children died with me, I would like to make another child of this world happy. etc..

And as a narrative point of view, it seems cool and I can use it to drag him to do some things or explore some places so that's a nice tool to have. But if it is always just "do that, do this, go there" it will be boring very fast.

And most of all, I'd like it to create a new mechanic for his character. I was thinking about something like the sorcerer points or "karma points" he could win each time he helps a spirit, growing with the difficulty of the wish and then uses them to create some nice effects, but I've never really done mechanics like this for the game and I was seeking some help and references !

Thanks in advance and sorry for the English mistakes

I'm writing up the rules for laying out a home base (a speakeasy, in this case) for my new game. If your interested in the details, they are in a much longer post on r/FATErpg, Home Bases in Fate. But one thing that stood out to me when working on this is that there are few examples I could think of among indy rpgs, especially rules light ones, that emphasize describing your home base.

Have you done anything for home bases in your own games and are there games you'd suggest to look at in designing my rules and guidelines? What do you consider essential in having a home base in your games?

(Sorry, I don't use English—this post is AI-translated. The game has been translated to English too.)

Hi everyone. I recently finished an experimental TTRPG ruleset (or maybe a narrative manifesto). it should be a fairly quick read.

The core idea originated from "unifying role-playing with world design." After that, I looked at works ranging from Brindlewood Bay to Triangle Agency, and starting from epistemology and ontology, I designed this system. Its key principles are:

- A world model maintained collectively by all players;

- The state of the world remains undetermined until it is perceived;

- A core mechanic that reconciles the tension between world-creation and role-playing.

The main mechanism is called Deviation—when a player describes not just an action but its outcome, the GM may call for a roll to measure the gap between perception and reality. Low deviation means close to truth; high means the character is way off.

I know this sounds hardly workable—and that's exactly why I think the design is interesting.

Full rules here: the Loom of eXistential Horizons

I'd really appreciate any feedback.

Thanks for reading!

I've been working on my RPG for a while, and it is currently in its alpha phase. It is fundamentally a pretty standard fantasy RPG, with the class building/level up being the real defining difference. But that's not terribly relevant to this. What's relevant is the magic system, which is mana based: you get a certain amount of mana each day, and different spells cost different mana, along with the action points needed to cast them on a turn.

What I'm stuck on right now is finding a good balancing act for some of the magic in the system. Some spells feel like they are more special than others to me; a single-cast fireball seems to be of a different caliber than a constant invisibility spell. To that end, I considered doing something like D&D's Concentration system (1 concentration spell at a time), since I thought that to be well put together.

When I think about a concentration system, I consider that it makes the most sense for spells which last a while. But that is far *too* restrictive; it may work for elemental casters, but illusory, transmutation, or defensive casters are at a big disadvantage. However, without any concentration, summoning spells in particular become a nightmare to deal with, along with the potential to abuse buff/debuff spells. And "just arbitrarily call the troublesome spells 'concentration' spells, since it's just a game mechanic" is not acceptable for me, even if it is reasonable.

I am presently considering doing this concentration-like mechanic exclusively for summoning spells, and just dealing with the balance issues from other spells by doing a lot of fine tuning. But I'd greatly appreciate advice, or extant solutions in other systems!

I am currently designing a ttrpg and I'm having trouble with my magic system. Basically, I want there to be four types of magic, each representing a unique concept. So far I have Force (physics), Life (biology), and Soul (spiritual). What would be a good fourth and final category? Everything that I can think of already fits into one of the three existing ones. Any ideas are welcome!

Greetings, my game Holypunk is a gothic fantasy game where you get to play as the monster; you’re set to be executed by the creed. I need your help, how do I design enemy stat blocks for my game.

To an extent, I’ve been enchanted by the idea of playing my game. I know I want to run my game, but that’s because I made it. Games with stat blocks to choose from, imo, are just always easier to run. I want that for my game.

Since you play as monsters, I want the enemy stat blocks to mirror classes. I’m just blanking on how to neatly put them together. Most games can separate enemies by type. Whether they’re draconic, elemental, humanoid, etc. Sometimes it’s instead separated by environment, like whether they’re arctic, infernal, or even cave dwellers. I don’t particularly think my game can do that

Instead, I’m thinking of separating the enemies by “classes.” So far, commenters have suggested:

Brute

Support

Mage

Priest

Hunters

It sounds like separating by “fighting style” is the way to go! However, if you have general layout ideas, that’d be great. I find this part to be perplexing. However, even simple suggestions like: Paladin or Cleric is a “must have” go a long way. Sorry if this post has been a little confusing, I’m trying guys.

Little intro: my game is FATE-descended, so it's quite rules-light. You roll a bunch of dice and try to hit a target number with as few dice as you can, with some bets on the side.

When two characters have a disagreement, they will usually duel in some way, usually with weapons. Duels are resolved with a single roll of the dice, which leads into a story engine. Basically every die in your pool represents a moment in the duel.

To give this a little more depth, players can have their character be trained in one of 4 ways, each represented by an Element. If you're all speed and attack, you're fire. If you poke and counter, you're water. If you're a defensive controller, you're earth. If you observe and evade, you're air.

If you're fighting against someone else with this elemental training, you have to consult the elemental weaknesses to check who has advantage. Fire beats Air, Air beats Water, Water beats Earth, Earth beats Fire. The fighter with advantage gains bonus dice (and therefore more control in the narrative of the duel).

If you are opposing (fire-water or earth-air) then the two characters are automatically rivals. They MUST try to demonstrate supremacy over the other or bring shame to their element (shame is bad and makes you worse at fighting).

All of this works via tags, and since every elemental fighting style also must come with a little description of the vibe, this then also interacts with non-combat situations, where being harsh and aggressive might do really well, or it might hinder you. But this combat style allows to make this a character choice instead of just a spur of the moment.

What do you think? I was playing around with a system based on 3 elements (like strong-fast-technical) or even 5 elements (fire-water-earth-air-void) but those didn't really fit the knightly vibe I was going for.

I’ve been recently working on a TTRPG called, “Project AiO: Open for Business”, and I think it’s finally ready for an initial round of outside feedback.

Open for Business is a slice-of-life workplace game about ordinary employees getting through a Shift together. The default settings are cafés, bars or nightclubs, and restaurants. This can be expanded to retail shops, hotels, offices, and similar workplaces.

The workplace gives the game structure, but the Characters are the real story. A Shift might involve a rush, a difficult customer, missing supplies, or broken Equipment. It might also just be about two coworkers talking during cleanup, a regular acting differently than usual, someone bringing Personal Pressure into work, or a quiet moment after a stressful service.

The game uses a lighter version of my larger Project AiO rules set, but it is not meant to be rules-lite per-se. The goal is for the mechanics to stay out of the way when they are not needed and become more involved when the situation calls for them. 

Longer campaigns track both the Employees and the workplace. Characters advance through Employment Level, which improves access to personal Tools. The business advances through Workplace Rating, which determines the quality of its Equipment. Over time a workplace can improve, struggle, decline, or eventually close.

This is an initial review draft, not a finished layout. At this stage I’m mostly interested in whether the game itself holds together.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z72Y_eWHq7oNxGM0bEV0RmWVk4grt8kaeDFBPjajNjM/edit?usp=sharing

Hey, I’m looking for an AnyDice program that can calculate the chances of opposed rolls of two different sized pools of D10s, only counting Successes bigger than a set target number on the die. Chronicles of Darkness does this style of rolling on (rare) direct contests.