Hi everyone!

I have a new Stress mechanic that is central to my system, and I'm wondering how people would recommend tracking it?

My current ideas are "tick-up dice" or a track of some kind(like a part of the character sheet)(although I'm unsure how to do it)

STRESS:

Replaces Exhaustion and half of Sanity.
Your Stress Threshold is equal to 10(?)+(willpower/10).
You gain Stress - “Exert” it - from numerous sources, including Critical Fails, and using most abilities.
When you reach your Stress Threshold, you begin Overdrawing. For each Stress you have Overdrawn, you gain a -1 to all your rolls.

Exhaustion:

At every 5(?)+(Willpower/10) Overdrawn Stress, you reach an “Exhaustion Threshold”.
For each Exhaustion Threshold you reach, you gain a negative effect, detailed in this table:

	Effect
1	-10 to ability checks.
2	Speed decreased by 2m.
3	All damage sources deal 1 extra damage.
4	Disadvantage on ability checks.
5	-20 to Willpower Checks.
6	Speed Halved.
7	Disadvantage on all rolls.
8	Hit point maximum halved.
9	Hit point maximum: 1, Fail all rolls, All attacks against the exhausted creature have advantage. Speed reduced to 0.
10	Death.

Sanity:

You can also gain stress from witnessing disturbing and incomprehensible things.
The general guidelines are as follows:

Type  - Detail - First Experience/Next Times
Major Injury - Mutilation, Severe Blood-Loss(Limb Loses All Health, or total below half of pool) - 1d6 Stress/1 Stress
Undeath - Witnessing a zombie or ghoul - 1d8 **Stress/**1 Stress
Semi-Personal Death - Someone you know but are not close to- 2d6 Stress/1d6 Stress
Minor Aberrant Being - Cryptid, Mind Controlled - 1d10 Stress/1d4 Stress
True Aberrant Being - Aspect of a Deity - 1d12+2 Stress/1d10 Stress
Aberrant Deity - A Full Eldritch Deity - 10d10 Stress

Of course you can gain Stress from witnessing a variety of things, at the GM’s discretion.

Removing Stress:

If you are below your Stress Threshold, you remove 1 Stress after a Short Rest, you remove 1d6 Stress after a Medium Rest, and all after a Long Rest, so long as you have consumed the right amount of food and water.

If you are above your Stress Threshold, you do not remove any Stress after a Short Rest, you remove 1d4 Stress after a Medium Rest, and 1d10 after a Long Rest, so long as you have consumed the right amount of food and water.

I've been playing TRPGs for a while now and also enjoy worldbuilding. Inspired by reading Dune and watching GoT/HotD, I was thinking about a medival fantasy TRPG where the players do go on 'classic' TRPG adventures, but also manage a lesser noble house.

What I had in mind was that it will expected that at least some the player characters are members or agents of such a house and that the gameplay (incl. adventures and resource management) are part of the drama and intruige of the politics of the world.

I really dig how in a more OSR/survival focussed TRPG like Forbidden Lands characters have more aspects to them then in what way they can kill people/monsters , and having core character aspects revolve around resource management, intruige and political drama seems really fun to me (which is also why I am exploring the possibility of designing a system around it rather than taking an existing system and adding more mechanics to it).

What are your thoughts on it? Are there games that do similar things already? Is it a fun idea/do you have any ideas of what elements of such a system might look like? Thanks!

I’ve been spending a lot of time in online creator communities lately, and a recurring conversation is people struggling to get useful feedback on their games.

Alongside that, I keep seeing versions of the same (very problematic) advice:

“Don’t listen to feedback.”
“People will only comment on the part of the game that interests them.”
“Trust your gut.”

I understand the instinct behind it. You should not blindly implement every suggestion someone makes about your game.

But I think this (very bad) advice comes mostly from amateur designers who do not understand the process behind game research (understandably so). It can make newcomers dismiss player feedback before they have learned how to set up a playtest that allows them to collect useful data.

It is such a crucial part of game development that I felt like writing about it, mostly to help creator folks in their exciting journey of making games others will want to play :)

The good news is that getting good at playtesting is just another skill you can practice and master, and it is one you really shouldn't sleep on! So I compiled a 3 points list for you that I condensed from years of conducting playtests for both my job in the video game industry and my indie experience.

Hopefully it will help!

1. Go into a playtest knowing what you want to learn

One of the biggest mistakes I see is trying to test the whole game (or huge chunks of it) at once too early.

If you sit someone down with your game and simply ask, “What did you think?”, you might get some interesting comments, but it will be hard to know what to do with them. You are asking them to react to an entire experience, with no shared focus. It's a hard thing to do!

Instead, go into each playtest with a specific question you want to answer. You should gently guide your players and nudge them toward a specific area of focus.

Maybe you want to know:

• Do players understand the core loop?
• Does this combat system create interesting decisions?
• Are players getting lost during character creation?
• Does this particular mechanic create the feeling you intended?

I usually think of these as hypotheses, but you don't have to, it can just be simple questions around how you expect your game to behave. You have an idea about how a system will work or feel for players, and the playtest is your chance to validate that your assumption is true.

The more focused your question is, the more actionable the feedback is likely to be.

2. Guide your players towards the thing you are testing

Once you know what you are trying to learn, guide both the playtest and the feedback session around it.

That does not mean telling people what to say, or trying to get them to agree with you. It means making sure they actually spend time with the part of the game you are observing, then asking questions that help you understand their experience of it afterward.

A healthy playtest dataset is a combination of written observations and collected answer to targeted questions.

You do not need to treat every part of the session equally. If you are testing a particular mechanic, spend most of the time observing that mechanic. Skim past the parts that are not useful to the question you are trying to answer.

Then, during feedback, keep bringing the conversation back to your hypothesis:

• What did you expect to happen here?
• What made you choose that?
• What was confusing?
• Did this feel like the experience the game is trying to create?

You should still leave space for open feedback at the end. Players may notice something important that you were not looking for.

But focused questions come first. Otherwise, you can end up with lots of feedback that is not bad, just unrelated to the thing you currently need to understand or improve.

3. Learn how to turn feedback into action

The final skill is learning how to interpret what players are telling you. And that is the hardest part my friends.

Players are experts in their own experience, but they are not necessarily experts in diagnosing your game or designing its solution. So when someone says, “This was boring,” “I didn’t get it,” or “I wish there were more options,” do not treat that as an instruction to implement exactly what they suggested.

Treat it as evidence.

Your job is to work out what created that feeling. Were they bored because the choices were too obvious? Did they not understand the rule because the explanation was unclear, or because the game did not give them a good opportunity to use it? Are they asking for more options because the existing ones do not feel distinct enough?

This is the loop: build something, test a focused question, learn from what players experienced, then decide what to change next.

You will not always get it right immediately, and that is fine. The point is to build the habit of turning player experience into a clearer next experiment, not of blindly following every suggestion, or dismissing feedback altogether.

Conclusion

Playtesting is not just getting a few people in a room and asking whether they liked your game.

It means being deliberate: deciding what you need to learn, creating a session that helps you learn it, and getting better at turning player experience into useful next steps.

You do not need a huge budget or a research lab to start practising it. You just need to be deliberate about your testing process and start honing those skills like any other.

If you are curious to get more insight or support to push your project forward, I run a small Discord community for my players and other game creators where we support each other. Come make games with us:

https://discord.gg/bccguBGupu

And if you are wondering who the fuck I am and why I'm rambling about making games, here is my Linkedin profile -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/aramtab/

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.

I’m a young brazilian person looking to work in game design specifically for tabletop RPGs and board games. I have a good amount of experience reading existing game systems and books on the subject, but I’m not sure how to actually break into the job market. I don't know what courses I should take to boost my resume, or if there are even specific college programs for this. I could really use some help thanks in advance! :D

Hi Everyone,

Sorry if this something you see too much of, but I have finally opened up access to my tool tomewright.com where you can easily make print friendly documents (character sheets, DM sheets, any other document you could need).

I would be happy to have open communication with users to get a better idea of what things are/aren't right.

It will be an ongoing and evolving thing so if you have any ideas please let me know or if something isn't quite right for you.

Happy designing :)

Basically the title. I'm aware of Zweihander and used to make content for it back when the community content program first started, and I'm aware of Sledgehammer. I've been out of the scene for a while though, so idk what else has sprung up since.

The issue I take with Warhammer is its mechanics are pretty baked into its setting, but the d100 core I love as my favorite resolution mechanic.

Zwei is generally more open-ended, but still a clone of it and still contains a lot of the weightiness I'm not a fan of.

Sledgehammer was a boon of a find, but its almost too light.

I've been developing and tweaking my own homebrew system for several years over several vastly different iterations. I'm wondering odd anyone knows of any systems out there able to scratch the itch without having to make my own.

D100 roll-under, rules light but not abysmally so. Preferably no setting with tied-in mechanics. Fantasy preferred, but not against sci-fi.

I'll be crossposting this between r/rpgcreation and r/ttrpgs, so I'm also cool with sub suggestions too.

I've submitted my entry for this year's One-Page RPG Jam on Itch.io and am excited to share it with all of you!

Echoes of Discord is a bleak, rules-lite TTRPG about a world devoid of harmony. The dead have risen from their graves and feast on the living. You play as a Virtuoso, and your objective is to protect the living and put the dead back in the grave using your melody, and/or die trying.

The game is free to download and play. I've released it under the CC 4.0 license, so anyone can hack it and adapt it to their hearts content. I've also provided a printer friendly version to make it more accessible.

Let me know what you think!

How can I add sample

So I've been playing with the concept of perception in my game. The mainstream traditional games generally tend to use perception skills to symbolize how sharp your senses are. On the other hand we have games where you perceive something if you know what to look for or what you're looking at, like a magician being able to spot a sleight of hand because they know how to perform it or a warrior being able to tell what kind of weapon was used to off someone because they've seen a lot of that in the battlefield. I like this approach a lot more because it gives more uses to a wider scope of skills while avoiding situations where someone like the Ranger notices something wrong with a potion because the alchemist had a low Investigation/Perception score, but I ran into an "issue" where, for example, the skill to disarm traps would be the same skill to find hidden traps and the skill about making concoctions with plants would be the same skill to find those plants. This will make me either ask for two skill rolls of the same skill to represent different situations which could feel "same-y" or merge the rolls into a single roll which could be underwhelming the different stages of the process for a given task. I'm struggling to find the right balance while keeping the concept and would appreciate some insights!