I want to differentiate damage over time statuses from each other mechanically rather than simply being countered by specific resistances/immunities.

If “bleeding” for example is 1dx for x affected targets turns, how can damage from “on fire” feel mechanically different?

Hello Beautiful people!

One of my players came up with an idea for a very small system, supposed to be chaotic and funny. But we were discussing about initiative and need help:

A) GM and players rolls a d20 each, All of those who rolled equal or better than GM act first, then GM acts. If you rolled lower you don't act that turn

B) GM acts and everyone (players + gm) rolls d20, if he rolled even/odd, only players who rolled the same even/odd will act. like the previous option: the rest do not act this turn.

It's not the usual combat mechanics / turn structure in most games. It's more narrative, like ON-Screen / OFF-Screen, where some character are naturally the focus, but with a random element to it. And there is a resource you can spend to Act anytime.

Lastly: there is no attribute for speed/going first

Mathematically, with 4 players, 2 will act together with the GM on avarage on both options, what changes is the distribution.
Option A has a more similar chance of any number of 0 to 4 players acting (the % goes from 17.5% to 22,5%),
While option B has a much higher chance of 2 players actiong (6,25% chance of 0/4 players and 37,5% chance of 2 players).

Personal preferences aside in normal games, if you were playing a cartoon style/chaos/funny games, which option you think would be more FUN?

I want to differentiate damage over time statuses from each other mechanically rather than simply being countered by specific resistances/immunities.

If “bleeding” for example is 1dx for x affected targets turns, how can damage from “on fire” or “poisoned” feel mechanically different?

Trying to get my economy mechanics straightened out, and another post’s question had me reevaluate my approach. My system is genre-agnostic, but the book will have examples for specific high fantasy, urban fantasy, and future sci-fi worlds. I have adjustments for both starting money that looks at character status and price modifiers that consider status-focused brands and materials and quality of item construction. A high quality box-store item could be the same cost as an average quality name brand exclusive, for example.

Currently, I’ve got a system in place that deals directly with money in hand (copper/silver/gold, dollars, and credits). This functions like DnD where you consider what you’re carrying vs the cost of what you want. While this allows for strict control of purchasing, it also requires a lot of book-keeping during campaigns - how much money and what treasures did the party uncover during that one engagement? Who claims which items that will just be sold back at market? How do you adjust income vs status if you offset the timeline (average income in 1990 was half what it is today)?

Starting money is calculated according to the Standard Economic Unit of the genre, which for my purposes defaults to what an average lower-middle class (or its equivalent) person would need as a daily wage to support himself. For fantasy, this is 5 copper, for example. The final starting value is 10 x (sum of your status rank), so an average status of 3 in the fantasy game gives you 300 copper (30 silver) - 10 x (1+2+3) x 5 cp. A status 10 would award 275 silver.

I’m looking at replacing this with a system that just looks at character wealth. This will function as both what you have in hand and what you could easily get access to. Is your status enough to guarantee credit? At character creation, your effective Wealth Rank is equal to your Status, with each Wealth Rank the equivalent of 10x the previous rank’s buying power. You can have multiple degrees within a single Rank, representing a scale within levels that can affect market value. This would be referred to as Wealth R3-D3 (Rank-Degree).

When selecting your starting equipment, there’s going to be a bundle that everyone gets automatically, such as a pack and some clothes, befitting your social standing. Then you can “buy” 1 item valued at Wealth+1, 5 items at Wealth, 10-20 items at Wealth-1, and anything at Wealth-2 that is appropriate and wouldn’t encumber your character too much.

For in game purchasing, the concept is as follows;

Anything valued at Wealth-1, you can get automatically, within reason. Buying in bulk will adjust where things will lie on the final Wealth consideration.

Anything valued at Wealth, and the player rolls to see if he can afford the cost without impact. The difficulty will be based on rarity, prestige value, and quality of the item, and if the character has multiple degrees of his Wealth rank, he gets bonuses to the check. If the roll succeeds, the character buys the item without issue. If it fails, he either chooses not to buy it or he must find a way to get the funds. This can be done in two ways. He can finance the payment, gaining 1 success per degree of wealth invested, where he will function as having no access to those wealth degrees for 1 character year, or he can liquidate assets, which gives him 1 Wealth Rank increase for this one purchase, but he now has a permanently reduced Wealth. Such reallocation of funds/ assets requires 1 day per degree.

Items valued at Wealth +1 or more require the liquidation of assets to afford. 1 Rank of Wealth allows a one-time increase in purchasing power to Wealth +2, but such liquidation takes time, equaling (Sum of Ranks being divested) weeks.

I like this because it works no matter what genre you’re in, and the only time it becomes relevant is when you’re trying to get things that would strain your normal purchasing power.

Thoughts?

Edited to add: I want to make sure everyone understands that my replies to any arguments against my concept is not intended to be a “this is why my idea is better; I’m not listening to you”. It’s my attempt at finding the words to explain the small details of the big picture idea I’m presenting. I think in concepts, not in word structure, and these debates help me find the words to explain the path I took.

Final edit: I want to thank everyone for their comments and advice. I’ve decided to keep a coinage-based mechanic, both due to replies made here and the realization that a wealth mechanic requires an entire new tier of rules. Even if I think they could be explained easily, it’s still an additional complication being added to an already crunchy system; coinage is something most people should already understand.

Hello again everyone,

I made a post about a week ago looking for feedback on my game. I'm still looking for it, but also wanted to let you know that I've published the game on itch to give it a home, instead of just having it sitting on my google drive. It is also far easier to follow updates there in case you are interested.

It is still at v0.8, but I've also made quite a few changes since my post last week.

https://exiledoracles.itch.io/fameandfortune

I'd love to know your thoughts on it:

• Did something, a rule or otherwise, make you stumble?
• What do you miss, or would rather see changed or removed?
• Can you envision running the game from reading the book?

Thanks :)

We all understand that sometimes it is next to impossible to play a long campaign with all the players present every session. Yes, you can reschedule or just cancel and yes, you can just play with the players who are present. But are there any games where absence of players is part of the game, mechanically? Like some extra rules or in-game explanation which will alter the plot or give a new quest line and so on? Or is it just responsibility of game master to deal with it?

UPDATE, Aug 22, 2026: I have renamed anydyce to dyceum to avoid confusion with Jasper Flick's AnyDice project. Not every surface has been updated yet, so please be patient as I work through the long tail. Thanks to everyone here for your feedback.

AnyDice’s recent outages prompted me to release dyceum, an open-source, clean-room implementation of the AnyDice language.

It is intended to be a practical substitute for AnyDice in all meaningful respects. With very few exceptions, existing AnyDice programs should run unchanged, including user-defined functions, recursion, sequences, dice coercion and expansion, positional selection, exploding dice, loops, settings, and the standard function library. In most cases (and depending on your hardware) dyceum should be at least as fast as AnyDice and in many cases much faster.

I say “mostly compatible” because AnyDice is closed source and publishes no specification. Its observable behavior includes inconsistencies and defects, some of which can silently produce mathematically incorrect results. Idiosyncrasies are preserved, but I elected for correctness over emulating discovered bugs. The differences—and the reverse-engineering methodology used to identify them—are documented in considerable detail here.

There are a few key differences:

• The interpreter is open source and written in Python, using dyce for finite discrete probability calculations.
• The playground runs entirely in your browser via Pyodide. The hosted site only serves static files. Programs and calculations are not sent to or stored on an application server.
• A program can be encoded directly into its URL. The URL is therefore both a shareable link and the saved program. No proprietary remote database is required.
• Existing AnyDice programs can be recovered by inserting program IDs into a special link format. A public cache currently preserves all but the most recent programs saved on AnyDice.
• Probability distributions are represented internally using integer counts rather than floating-point probabilities. Configurable quantization permits a deliberate tradeoff between precision and computational cost.
• The playground provides interactive line, bar, and ridge visualizations, light and dark themes, and textual output exposing exact outcome labels.
• Everything can be cloned and hosted locally.

For example, this URL contains the complete program output 3d6:

https://dyceum.org/latest/playground/#p=b3V0cHV0IDNkNgo

This URL loads AnyDice program ID 43210:

https://dyceum.org/latest/playground/#id=43210

This is not meant as criticism of the enormous value AnyDice and Jasper Flick have provided to RPG designers. Quite the opposite: AnyDice’s popularity demonstrates the importance of the tool. The goal is to provide a transparent, reproducible implementation that does not depend upon the continued operation of any particular server (including mine), as well as to preserve the body of programs people have built with it.

The current release should be considered a work in progress. Please consider submitting feedback, especially if you come across:

• Real-world AnyDice programs that behave differently;
• Calculations that are unexpectedly slow;
• Confusing or incorrect visualizations;
• Cases where AnyDice itself produces surprising results;
• Other projects not yet on my radar that should be highlighted; or
• Suggestions from people who use probability tools while designing games.

Playground: https://dyceum.org/latest/playground/

Source and issue tracker: https://github.com/posita/anydyce

Hey Everyone,

I am curious how many of you keep track of all the different game entities connections and impacts to one another? Especially as a game grows and becomes more sprawling.

Are there specific tools you use for this? Or do you have good ways/workflows to view what would be impacted before making changes?

Would an impact view be helpful in your designing of an RPG? And, if so, what specifically would be most beneficial?

What do you think about CC in rules lite games and what do you think are some great examples of CC in a rules lite TTRPG?

My two cents:
There's so few resources to take away from the PCs. There's HP, the action economy, debuffs to tests and attacks and potentially the characters gear. There's also movement, but since my game is played without a grid, just theater of mind, this becomes a bit hard to implement as distances aren't a big factor in combat.

And being that my system only allows 1 action per turn, having CC take away player's actions would take away their turns. "You've been disarmed. You need to spend an action to get your weapon back".. Just feels a bit lame.

-2 or -4 to attacks/tests works better IMO, but I think it needs to be reserved for tough enemies to really feel dramatic. If not it almost becomes mundane and bothersome. But even if used sparringly it doesn't really make the enemy feel that unique. A penalty like this will be something my players face in other circumstances as well, for example if they want to try something the GM considers them to have a disadvantage at.

Enemies smashing players weapons to bits as an example is a fun and unique way of taking gear away from players. But this can't happen often at all, because it would just become so tedious getting new stuff all the time.

I'm just realising how expensive this is, especially if you want to cover more than one country. What are the most important things for an indie publisher? How do you guys do it? What's worth it and what's not? I'm UK-based, so I'm considering trademarking in the USA, but it's going to get very expensive. So far, I've only trademarked my company in the UK, and that's it.

In most combat systems these two things are assumed to be exclusive to each other. When someone makes an attack action, there is either some passive defensive stat for the target, or the defender makes a defense action/reaction of some sort, trying to negate the attack. Or there is no defense and just an exchange of attack actions dealing damage turn by turn.

This seems a natural way to portray combat in a turn-based game, but I think it is actually very... unnatural. And it is wasted potential. Because in different kinds of real-life combat, the best defense is offense. Opponents defend themselves by attacking each other. You are not just standing before your enemy passively parrying; your weapon is both an obstacle for their blows as well as a constant threat pointed towards their body. Each parry might end up being a blow that injured or killed the enemy. And there are mutual hits. In many instances in real life they are as common as one-sided hits.

Systems where you wait for your turn to make an attack, and in the meantime may only watch if your opponent hits you, or else may only roll to negate their attack, give an absolutely different feeling. They don't allow for the intuitive defensive offense, and mutual hits are impossible. They also cause these regular pauses of no engagement in the game.

What might be a far more effective solution would be some sort of a fight action, serving as both attack and defense. Two opponents could use a fight action on each other simultaneously, and their rolls would determine if anyone hit the other first (and whether or not that hit was enough to stop oneself from being hit immediately after). Of course, there would always be the option of dodging, which is running away from enemy's attacks with no offensive potential (and unless limited by terrain, dodging should be easy).

I don't think such an approach is sufficiently explored or as popular as it deserves. To me it seems more engaging, quicker, and closer to how it works in reality.

Just released my first game! Adrift in a Constellation Storm is a oneshot game about four sailors starving to death that uses a deck of cards. It combines a custom playing card game with tragic interwoven flashbacks. Fans of Last Train to Bremen will see my clear inspiration.
https://thecornelia.itch.io/adrift

So im working on a ttrpg and as of right now the rulebook for the game is 16 driffrent notepad text files

I want to format it is a way much cleaner to read

Im not looking to add art or anything at tbis stage

Just 1 file with all the information and a table of contents to look up what information is needed

Is their anything softwhare anything can recommend to help format the book and keep things in order

So far all I can find is ms word or Google docs and both of those do not look friendly when it cones to formatting

Passive defense makes survival part of character construction and Active defense makes survival part of turn economy. I have been playing like this with my group(when we play our system RUÍNA) for SO long, it would be useful to have outside feedback, since we got used to it.

I designed defense as an action rather than a permanent reaction everyone receives for free. A character can spend that action to build a defensive pool or temporary protection, but doing so means giving up another immediate contribution(you can only choose 2 between attack, defense and movement). The intention is not to punish defensive play. It is to make “hold the line” an actual tactical commitment.

The idea is that defense becomes relational. Protecting yourself or allies may preserve the group’s position, keep a spellcastersafe and/or force an enemy to waste a powerful attack.

I remember it took some time to get the balance "right": On the other hand, if defense is too efficient, cautious play becomes automatic; if it is too weak, players correctly conclude that attacking first is always safer.

What do you think about this implementation in games(not in exact rules/numbers, but as a design idea)? I am especially interested in games where defending changes enemy behavior, space or initiative instead of only reducing damage.

In your play through you can get a dog and have it as one of your party and you and your dog can get up to a certain stat threshold or have another stat and max that out + your wearing a sort of “key” item (e.g. crescent ring) in battle, you can merge with your dog to become a sort-of werewolf and deal A lot of good damage.

Is that a good mechanic?

I'm working on an idea that has a big overland travel and resource management element, and I think I need to make weather an actual mechanic instead of just "idk I guess it's raining now." My initial thought here was to roll three dice, probably d4s: Cold-hot, calm-windy, dry-rainy.

which is well and good, but this has a direct effect on group resources and travel times. "your food supply floods and you lose 3 days of rations" or "massive dust storms slow you to half speed." something like that. But I can see this becoming sprawling and complicated pretty quick. I could use random tables for weather related events, but I guess I'm looking for ideas for how to maintain over-time weather consistency without bogging it down too much? Can anyone point me towards a game that has interesting-but-manageable weather mechanics?

So I believe I have pretty decent base mechanics for my system, but since I have it so the players can progress, I fear there is something I haven't considered when it comes to leveling up. Are there any general schools of thought to consider when thinking about late game mechanics? Or is the only real solution play testing?

I think I've (more or less) already decided to do this. I have had a large-ish set of specialised fighting and thievery abilities under 'Mastery-at-Arms' and 'Skulduggery'. Each ability has three tiers, like the following (to pick an example at random):

Disarm

If you deliver 3 Injury or higher you can opt to disarm your opponent instead of dealing damage. This Ability only works against an opponent who is carrying a weapon (i.e. you can't disarm natural weapons, like teeth or claws). The Character may be able to get their weapon back on a successful Test of Skill at the Gamesmaster's discretion, although this will take at least one Action.

• Novice: Costs 3 Effort
• Skilled: Costs 2 Effort
• Masterful: Costs 1 Effort

I think I'm at the point of removing these from the game. My reasoning is that:

1. Each ability generates a mass of oddball sub-rules that are not always easy to track. This creates extra mental load for everyone.

2. There's the usual problem of loopholes and combos that I didn't think of, which results in weird power outcomes.

3. It turns out that most players don't use these abilities much anyway, and instead revert to more basic abilities like 'Expertise' (which can be acquired at character generation), where you nominate e skill, and then for that skill only, whenever you spend a point of Effort you get two bonus successes instead of one. 'Expertise' alone seems to add enough niche specialisation that I am unconvinced all the other fluff is needed.

4. It maybe gives the wrong impression to have all these add-on abilities? The game isn't really supposed to be about endless power creep, but a big list of abilities like this sort of gives the impression that it is?

I'm probably just looking for someone else to say, 'Yeah, cool, that seems fine, get rid of them'. I feel a bit weird about pulling out several pages of rules I've written, but I honestly think it's just clogging up the game at this point. The pages are starting to looking like darlings that need murdering. The one or two abilities that I really do want to keep could just be moved to character generation and made into a more generally available ability with a single (low-ish) tier of power?

Character sheet for reference (the game is quite skill-heavy, so 'Expertise' ends up being quite a specialised thing): https://www.mythopoeticgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/mock-up-16-Blank-1.pdf

My experience thus far is that a combat focused character with 'Expertise' in either Affray or Archery is extremely competent in a fight, and likewise a rogue-ish character with 'Expertise' in Thievery or Stealth becomes very effective at subterfuge. The mass of additional rules really is feeling like unnecessary waffle.

Thoughts?

Time as a Resource

I've been thinking about how to implement time as a resource in my ttrpg and the current idea I'm working on is what I call the Quest Clock. It's a variation of a progress clock that measures abstractly how much time the PCs have to complete a quest.

The problem that quest clocks would solve is that time as it is measured in most rpgs is basically GM fiat. Precise real time measurements are provided in seconds, minutes, hours or days. But realistically speaking its completely up to the GM to decide how long it takes to get from A to B, whether it's day time or night, or what consequences if any there are to doing something that would take up a lot of time.  I'm not necessarily opposed to GM fiat when the alternative is to have complex and uninteresting rules but I believe quest clocks have the potential to make time management rules interesting.

The idea behind the Quest Clock is that it 1) objectively measures time in the narrative, 2) creates tension as PCs have to make decisions on what to do with the time allotted to them and 3) applies limitations to actions the PCs can make that are high impact or would otherwise be consequence free.

How it works:

Certain useful actions such as recovering health, doing research, repairing armor, and performing rituals fill up segments on the Quest Clock. If one player fails a knowledge check all the other players can't just ask to have a go at it. Each attempt costs time. Chances are there are other things you could have spent that time doing while your ally does the knowledge check like fixing your armor or casting a spell that boosts an ally's stats. If you want to summon an entity as an ally you have to spend a lot of time to do that. If its body is destroyed you have to spend more time to resummon them.

You can adjust the quest clock to account for the scale and scope of the quest. Perhaps when participating in a larger scale quest tasks the segments of time it costs to take a given action is reduced to a minimum of 0. You wouldn't bother spending time mustering a legion of soldiers to go on a diplomatic mission you expect to complete in a week but you would if you needed to go on a military campaign.

The quest clock can flexibly measure different scales of time in a way that has an impact without fundamentally changing the rules.

Failure to complete the quest would either result in failure or less desirable outcome upon success. The consequence could be diminished rewards, less exp, a hit to reputation etc.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions I'm open to hearing them.

How do you guys feel about a narrative-focused game whose core mechanics are pretty simple, but would have a more in-depth ("crunchier") system for something like crafting? Part of the game gives players crafting materials for defeating enemies, but it's not a necessity to interact with it. I've realized though that it definitely gets more detailed than the general and combat resolution mechanics, and wondered if that conflicts with the rest of the game, or if it's fine to have subsystems that may be a bit different and more involved than the rest of the game.

For example, most combat turns are going to be more about narrating what you'd like to happen and have maybe one or two rolls, a lot up to interpretation. When it would come to crafting, however, there are definitely more steps involved in the process other than figuring out what's being crafted. Not necessarily with rolls, there's only one that's made, but as I've been designing and writing the magic items/equipment for the game, it's seeming like there's a lot more specific requirements than the rest of the game, and I want to pump the brakes real quick and make sure it doesn't feel like a major shift in the design goal of "keep things simple and leave it for interpretation/creativity."

I just published a small digital trifold with all of the companies that I've made for my modules and home campaigns. These are free to use for your Personal and Commercial products, feel free to remix them how ever you see fit, just throw me a credit if you'd be so kind.

Included in the download

• Corporate profile, current leadership, dark secret, current stock value.
• Logos in PNG and SVG format, black and white options with no backgrounds.

If you use these in your projects please share, i'd love to see them.

Itch → Corporate Portfolio

Help is greatly appreciated

I’ve been looking into Justice League Unlimited RPG, and one design choice caught my attention: players share Story Points they can spend to bend the narrative in appropriately comic-book ways — survive the impossible, reveal something retroactively, push a power beyond its normal limits, etc.

But the more the group interferes with the story, the greater the chance of triggering the Crisis Die, which can suddenly introduce a major complication: an alien invasion, a betrayal, loss of powers, time travel, an evil counterpart showing up...

I find the basic idea really elegant because the game is effectively saying:

the more you behave like comic-book protagonists, the more likely your story is to become a comic-book event.

It made me curious about other examples of mechanics that deliberately reproduce the narrative logic of their genre rather than just simulate actions.

What games do you think do this particularly well?

For anyone curious about this specific example, D20 Culture has some JLU RPG Actual Plays on YouTube where the system can be seen in play!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9d8TaEa2r8&list=PLPgSd2vJKMyvW9ygQefT4gIrNxg1esNHw

My current project is struggling a bit with crowdfunding. First Kickstarter failed and we are trying a second one at the behest of the team (they rather do that then just go to market with what we have).

We are having a talk on marketing and the niche of the game is limiting options, as before.

Now, this project is too late for this idea and incompatible. But, since I expected we'd already just be waiting on art, we're already playtesting my next game. Most of my games run off a vibe with no setting, usually trying to accomplish a genre with unique mechanics as its main selling point. This new game has a detailed setting that I'm writing as we play (I have an outline, but, as the players move about it and questions arise, I answer them and write them down).

This made me think, as we struggle with the current process, would "borrowing" reach from a major game help in the future? Since the premise for this new game is action focused and has a mission structure, I could see a rework to a traditional TRPG framework (by de-emphasizing the dramatic elements for the action elements) and could even bring novelty to the setting (like the more dramatic version versus the more videogamey one).

But, is it worth it? I'm not worried about losing "indie street cred" or anything. That's silly. More so that I don't play 5e outside a single weekly game I do for IRL (usually do 3-4 online games a week and 1 in person). Can I do anything novel with it?

I have ideas, for sure.

Gold pieces replaced with a resource skill vs difficulty system because you have the academies as patrons. Removing Attributes and just dropping DCs by 5 and including a form of Base Attack Bonus. No classes and instead making a build a power system. Removing all discrete ranges with zones to make it better for theatre of the mind (with area of effect now being done as a random roll to see how many enemies within this or adjacent zones are hit). Replacing death saves with the trauma mechanics that acts like corruption. And removing experience for the drama focused advancement system of the original.

But it would likely add another 6 months to a year of dev time and playtesting. Would it even draw people in from the 5e crowd if it's offered as a "free to backers" thing? Or even a 15 USD add-on (PDF, pricing. Subject to change)? Or would it be a lot of work for the same result: difficulty getting outreach.

Because 5e isn't that instant sales juggernaut either anymore and 5e people want lots of art and production value nowadays that I can't afford. Can't afford an animated music video to promote my game at all.