Thanks to everyone who voted and shared their thoughts! I combined the votes from Reddit and Tumblr, and the final results are:

https://preview.redd.it/qkvd8c9ob5ih1.png?width=702&format=png&auto=webp&s=09d0c310267645e234b817a6b0b532d106cfa54d

So the d8 dice pool wins with a clear majority!

A quick note on the Other category... some people suggested multiple different mechanics across their comments, and I counted those as separate suggestions. That means the 12 Other votes don't represent 12 unique people, if I had limited it to one vote per person, that number would be somewhat smaller.

Also, shoutout to everyone who used the discussion to share or talk about their own Zelda systems and adaptations! I treated those as soft promos and left them out of the vote calculations so they wouldn't skew the results. There were some really cool ideas in there, including Hyrule Borg (Ganon Borg), Zelda adaptations of Soulbound and The One Ring, a Knave 2e Zelda sandbox, a 2d8 homebrew, and of course the extremely on-brand 3d4 system.

Thanks again for all the feedback.

Over the years I've made several iterations of a Zelda TTRPG, and now I'm at a crossroads with which core mechanic I should go with.

The first option is 1d20 + skill + approach. You pick a skill and one of the three approaches, Power, Courage, or Wisdom, add both modifiers to the roll, and try to beat a target number. It's more familiar and gives skills and approaches their own numerical value.

The scond option is a d8 dice pool where you only use the highest die (My first zelda ttrpg was like this but with a d4). Your rating in Power, Courage, or Wisdom determines how many d8s you roll. Skills are binary, so you either have the skill or you don't. If you have the relevant skill, you roll with advantage and add one extra d8 to the pool.

The results would be:

• 1-5 is a failure
• 6 is a partial success
• 7 is a success
• 8 is a critical success

So if you had 2 Courage and the relevant skill, you would roll 3d8 and use the highest result.

Which one would you prefer for a Zelda TTRPG?

Disclaimer: This is not another TTRPG I am working on, just a mockup to apease my brain goblin.

The brain goblin is at it again, and now I find myself revisiting the Zelda TTRPG I made and ran as a small campaign for my friends a few years back (Yes, the same one that was available for download but now isn't).

This time I redesigned the sheet around a horizontal character sheet mainly used to track Hearts, attributes, stamina, armor, weapons, and inventory. Instead of putting every ability on the sheet itself, characters are built by choosing a Background, a Heroic Path, and a Tribe. Each one comes with a bookmark-style card that you arrange around the character sheet, as seen in the image, with the available abilities printed directly on it.

So a Hylian Farmer who became a Soldier is a completely plausible character, which feels in line with the humble beginnings of almost every Link in the series.

Equipment and gear would work the same way. Armor, shields, weapons, and special items all have their own cards with their attributes, tags, durability, and rules, so players can track what they have visually without crowding the main sheet.

Hopefully this will satiate my brain goblin for now.

I found some interesting leftovers from the cut Gizmotech class.

Its gear still exists in the files: a Gizmotech jacket, pants, helmet, shoulderpad, and banderole. From what I can tell, the jacket, pants, and helmet seem to have later become the Ark Suit pieces. There was also a ranged weapon entry called the Flamethrower, which looks like it may have been intended as part of the class identity.

I tried restoring Gizmotech as a playable class, but ran into several issues:

• The current class menu only supports the existing class slots.
• Adding Gizmotech as a separate class caused crashes.
• Replacing Mercenary with Gizmotech worked partially, but the UI still had hardcoded Mercenary references.
• The Gizmotech clothing exists, but some of it behaves oddly in the gear menu.
• The Flamethrower model exists, but its actual firing behavior does not seem fully connected anymore.
• Making it shoot by borrowing another weapon's behavior made it act like a gun instead of a flamethrower.
• Trying other fire or missile-style paths either broke the weapon or did nothing.

It is a shame that most of these things are baked in, and modding beyond changing a few values within the datatables is not really possible unless we properly rebuild or inject cooked Unreal assets, which I do not feel comfortable doing.

About a year ago I posted this proof of concept for a TTRPG rulebook that was just one offline HTML file:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1hp4ou6/proof_of_concept_a_fully_offline_ttrpg_in_a/

Since then I kept messing with the idea and ended up building the character sheet side of it too.

Visual demo here:

https://youtu.be/__bd3jfCA3c

This is not polished yet. Some parts are still ugly, some parts need cleanup. But it works.

The sheet runs locally as an HTML file with all its code inlined (mainly bootstrap and javascript), and it can pull stuff from the offline rulebook file I had made before. So instead of copying every class, ancestry, move, spell, item, etc. into the sheet by hand, the sheet can read that stuff from it.

So why am I sharing all of this?

Mostly because form-fillable PDFs do not really cut it for me anymore, and I wanted to see how much of the useful stuff from tools like Demiplane and D&D Beyond I could recreate without needing a server and complex databases that ultimately lead to needing subscriptions.

So this is mostly me sharing the experiment in case it gives other designers ideas. You do not necessarily need a platform to make an interactive character sheet for your game. Not every game needs that, obviously. Plenty of games are better as a simple PDF or paper sheet. But if you have ever wanted something a little more interactive for your own games, this is one way to do it.

I've been messing around with the idea of Biomutant as a tabletop RPG, and put together a quick mockup of what a possible digital character sheet could look like.

There are no finalized mechanics yet, though I'm leaning toward something dice-pool based. This is mostly a layout/design pass to see how the game's character-building pieces could translate to a tabletop format.

You might notice that Luck is no longer a core stat. Instead, Luck would become a pool of points you can spend to shift the outcome of rolls, including things like loot results. In its place, I added Acuity, which represents your ability to notice things, read danger, track details, and aim accurately.

I'm also playing with the idea of showing things like Perks, Mutations, Wung-Fu moves, Psi powers, gear effects, and class features as cards on the sheet. The goal would be to make character options easy to scan at the table without burying everything in long text blocks.

Still very early, but I wanted to see if the concept feels right visually before digging too deep into mechanics. What do you guys think?