I'm a novice designer, and I built my game Trailhead as an intro to TTRPGs for my friends. Most of them have never played a tabletop RPG, and I spent a while looking for a game to try with them, but nothing quite fit the bill. I wanted something that's basically a launch pad into other d20 systems (but also give them a feel for other games too), with only the bare-essential rules.

So I made a rules-lite micro-RPG with three parts: a simple d20 resolution system with 4 stats, a Challenge system (a Success Track against a Timer), and a single resource called Grit that you spend to activate Experiences, like in Fate or Daggerheart. No skill lists, no classes. You can basically sit down create a character in like 5-10 minutes and start playing.

This sunday is the first time I put it in front of the friends I actually built it for, and I'm starting to doubt whether this was a good idea, or whether I've missed something major. Would you look at it and tell me if I've missed something here?

I've got this feeling it's somehow a) too thin and b) too complicated at the same time??? But I might also just be way too deep in theory land and should get off my butt and play it. IDK.

TL;DR: Made a game system for my friends, now I actually have to run it AND IT'S SCARY. Please send help.

PDF: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/stpiigi8y1udznuylbjo8/Trailhead_V0.14.pdf?rlkey=d6meuxvo4ufnxldpkmwyrabxk&st=reefuk0b

Hello Beautiful people!

I'm having trouble deciding. Right now i'm using A4 size, so anyone could print at home. Should I keep doing this? What is normally done?

Also margins and font size. I did a research and found 10.5 is good enough for many fonts. Any tips?

Note: I'm leaving most specific names out of this post except where relevant to a post project, number, or lesson. They'll be in the comments.

Table of Contents

Personal Background - Who I am, how I got here, and the failed channel and abandoned year that led to this.

Metrics - Real month-by-month traffic and download numbers, including the dead months.

Costs - What this has actually cost me, dollar for dollar.

Lessons - What worked, what didn't, and what I'd tell someone starting today.

Hi, my name is Zach Destael, and I'm a one person TTRPG studio (writer, editor, publisher, artist, website designer/dev, marketer, etc.)

I haven't been able to find real early-stage numbers (publishing metrics, sales, downloads, traction, marketing, etc.) for systems that went on to succeed. Most of what's out there is silence or a highlight reel. Since I just recently am starting to see a uptick in any kind of interest, this is my attempt at showing an actual first year. Not pretty, not favorable, just real.

Personal Background

I've built everything alone. For context, I'm a Full Sail animation alumni, I have an associate's degree in computer science, and I've GMed across 100+ systems (I've only been a player 6 times, total). I work on this daily, 3 to 12 hours depending on the day. Outside of this and my daughter, I don't have much of a social life, by choice. It's the most brutal and satisfying thing I've done, outside of fatherhood.

I started playing TTRPGs at 13, in 2005.

I spent 15 years building an original world, Eachrotia, never released publicly. It's the root of the multiversal structure my current system's setting(s) run(s) on.

From 2020 to 2023 I ran a TTRPG actual play channel (Urban Nerds United). It failed for the usual reasons APs fail. No hard numbers from that era.

In 2022, inside that group, I wrote a campaign called NintenDND, structurally almost identical to the module I'm building now, just using Nintendo IP instead of my own. I wrote it because the group was all gamers and I, at the time, hadn't played a video game in years. Researching it meant playing a huge number of games, and that's where I actually fell in love with them.

That research became the foundation of the system I eventually built: a tabletop system designed to function like a video game at the table, with mechanics like save states and power meters expressed through dice instead of code.

When UNU folded, I nearly abandoned the game too. It sat for almost a year. Coming back with distance let me cut what didn't work without being precious about it. The system as it exists now is what came out of that.

Around then I was also querying TTRPG publishers as a freelancer. Mostly rejected. In September 2025 I built my website, originally just a portfolio piece for that querying, not a launch. I was homeless when I built it. Stating that plainly, not for sympathy, just as part of the timeline.

Until my recent layoff, I was working 50 to 60 hours a week in a factory job as an electro-mechanical tech, and built nearly everything in my free time.

Metrics

Website numbers, month by month, from GA4 and Word Press' Jetpack:

* Sept 2025: 9 views, 1 visitor (me, testing the site)

* Oct 2025: 69 visitors, 181 views, 11 countries. Started daily posting across X, IG, TikTok, YouTube. Social barely grew, I didn't understand hashtags or platform mechanics yet.

* Nov 2025: 14 visitors, 39 views, 5 countries

* Dec 2025: dark. 4 visitors, 9 views.

* Jan 2026: 167 visitors, 428 views, 36 countries. New social push, set up Reddit and Mastodon, properly connected Search Console and GA4.

* Feb 2026: 111 visitors, 173 views. Built a dedicated setting page, started creature content.

* Mar 2026: 52 visitors, 138 views. Went dark again. Ended public playtest.

* Apr 2026: 193 visitors, 363 views, 18 countries. Posted casting calls for an actual play series, no boosting. Revamped core rules based on feedback.

* May 2026: 148 visitors, 20 countries, minor boosting.

* Jun 2026: 119 visitors, 225 views. Launched DriveThruRPG (67 downloads) and Itch (13 downloads, 8 browser plays on an interactive map tool).

* Website downloads since January: 73. Add Itch (13) and DriveThruRPG (67), launched the same week, for a real combined total of 153.

Most of the DriveThruRPG traction, I believe, is from the system's name and the book's title landing on search terms with real volume and almost no competition. Not planned as SEO, both were named in 2023 and 2025 respectively, before I was thinking about discoverability at all.

The website alone took 5 months to reach 73 downloads. Two more storefronts nearly doubled that in weeks. Distribution mattered as much as content.

Effort and traffic didn't correlate the way I expected. October was my highest-frequency month and barely moved. April, almost no boosting, spiked higher. I don't know why, my guess for the April spike is the casting call, and it meaningfully raised my site traffic floor.

Costs

* Canva Pro: $20/month. The entire book was laid out in it, and i will probably continue to use it.

* WordPress Individual: $50/year

* Incarnate Pro: $25/year

* Affinity Suite: Free (already owned), I refuse to touch Adobe for likely the reasons most independt creators wont.

* TikTok promotion: $8 one-time

* LLC: $123 (Optional, don't recommend doing this before any income from your project.)

Lessons

* Consistency beats frequency.

* Hashtags: 6-7 per platform max, mix of high-traffic and specific.

I use creature content to hit the "Pokemon button" (#PokemonAlt, etc.) without using comparative language directly elsewhere, probably should more.

On YouTube Shorts, hashtags in the title help, and posting time matters (Wednesdays and Fridays, 4-7pm CST, performed best for me). Best performing single piece of content: a short documentary-style video about one creature. One paid TikTok promo: 4,000 views, 3 downloads. Vanity metrics don't mean anything for actual conversion.

* I presented this as a studio, not a person, for months on purpose. I wanted the work to stand alone. Still mostly believe that, but showing up as a person helps people connect in a way the studio framing doesn't. The studio framkn i believe made me seem more official/professional, which is kind of a double edged sword. The lesson here is, professionalism is important, but if you're one person building something, people will in general route for/encourage you

* The most loyal, knowledgeable people I've encountered in this whole process have been voice actors, broadly, not just the ones I cast. They've independently run more games for others than any platform I expected to generate word of mouth.

Advice

Don't build alone if you can avoid it. If launching an original property, consider building some presence on existing popular properties first rather than going in cold. Also, most people don't want to steal your idea. Everyone's inspired by something, and most creators want to make their own thing, not yours. Just get your work out there. Nobody can play your game if they don't know it exists.

Honestly, I expected more traction than this. I built most of it in private for years, and the version I pictured wasn't 153 downloads at month 9. I genuinely thought it would get more traction, but i think that was just arrogance from being too close to my own game.

Where it stands now: three live storefronts, real organic search positioning, a small international audience, and an actual play series in the works.

What's next is a free starter adventure built to double as a teaching tool, labeled section by section as either narrative or standalone one-shot, with mechanics that unlock progressively rather than front-loading the whole rulebook. Structurally it's something like Kingdom Hearts' world-hopping meeting the standalone-encounter feel of Smash Bros: self-contained stories that connect into a larger arc.

Thanks for reading. Questions, insights, or anything anyome wants addressed that wasnt in the post, please ask tin the comments.

EDIT

There's been a lot of comments across all the subreddits I posted this in, and I don't have time to respond to everyone, but I do want to talk to most of you directly, because a lot of you have great insights, notes, and questions that I think we could all benefit from. To that end, I'm adding my Discord server link, where I've created a channel specifically to talk about the business side of the industry. I'm far more active there, and would love to talk shop or just shoot the shit.

Full disclosure, since blunt honesty seems to be my niche, my server is mainly meant for my community, and yes, I am partially capitalizing on the popularity of this post. I'd be lying if I said I don't hope some of you check out my work while you're there, but the main reason I'm adding it here is to give a more direct line to each other to keep talking about what I started with this post

https://discord.gg/s5uUDdN4rC

If you discover that a name in your setting already exists in the real world (it might be an almost unknown person in history or the name of a small city in a smaller country) what do you do? keep the name? invent a new one?

I’m working on a genre-agnostic system, but I’ve also got worlds in progress for high fantasy, modern fantasy, and near-future sci-fi campaigns. I’m writing a bare-bones chapter for each genre to introduce the world and intend to provide a few story ideas for groups who want to dive in without necessarily buying the expanded genre-focused books later.

When providing the story hook for a campaign idea…is it better to keep the concept entirely player facing, and let the GM create the full backend, or give just enough backstory to provide a framework for the GM at the risk of giving the players too much info?

Example using DnD’s Rise of Tiamat campaign:

The party enters a village to find it being raided by Cult of the Dragon soldiers. Can the heroes save the villagers? What were the Cultists after?

The Party enters a village to find it being raided by Cult of the Dragon soldiers. Can the heroes stop the cultists before they find what they need to resurrect Tiamat?

So, I decided to make a mech TTRPG based on classic mecha anime (and anime in general) for fun and part of the system is that your character and mech pick archetypes that give you beneficial and detrimental traits and abilities.

What I'm struggling with is coming up with more archetypes

Archetypes I have for characters:

. Reluctant hero

. Hotshot

. Newbie

. Pointdexter

. Icequeen

. Veteran

. Celebrity

Archetypes I have for mechs (these aren't the actual names, just using their playstyle names until I figure out names)

. Tank

. Ranged

. Melee

. Support

. Ambush

Any help would be appreciated, and if you're interested in viewing and maybe even playtesting when I have it all down I can give you a link to the google docs.

Hey folks! Need help deciding the name. If I had to explain the setting very briefly it would be:

"A Dark fantasy exploration RPG where adventurers explore anciente ruin left by a forgotten civilization in a new continent. Powerful relic are born from magical corruption, creating new creatures, cursed artifacts, and scars upon reality itself."

Which title best matches the description?

Which title would make you click?

And vote which seems the most interesting to you!

Ask any questions to help you decide.

View Poll

Edit: after some feedback, I changed the title

I've been working on a one-page RPG called Written and I'd love some feedback.

The core idea is that your character isn't defined by stats, skills, or classes. Instead, your entire character is a short description written in 10 words or fewer.

For example:
Orc poet haunted by songs of conquered peoples
Last dragon rider searching for her vanished mount
Clone soldier hunting original who abandoned the war
Doctor documenting transformation into something inhuman

Your words act as abilities, and taking damage can remove words from your character sheet, permanently changing who your character is.

The game is setting-agnostic, rules-light, and fits on a single sheet (front and back).

I'm looking for feedback on:
-Clarity of the rules

-Whether the dice mechanic feels intuitive

-Whether the word-loss system sounds fun in play

-Anything you might want to add.

I've published the first version below(free, of course). Any feedback, positive or critical, would be greatly appreciated.

link to file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1orRt_4DPIpCBam0kuayyCMPXWaztDgPl/view?usp=sharing

https://velitrpgs.itch.io/written-rpg