r/RPGdesign

This might be a dumb question but when do you start play testing? What are all the resources I would need to play test?

Something is wrong at the Gas N' Go. And it's time to clock in.

You play a gas station employee on the night shift. The gas station is haunted, or cursed, or maybe just very, very old. Your job is to stock shelves, ring up customers, and make it to dawn with your mind, your body, and most of your coworkers intact.

You will not always succeed. That's not always a bad thing.

Odd Hours is a cosmic horror-comedy I've been working on for about a year. v1 is out now — free, pay what you want.

You can build a character right now, in your browser. I just put a free character creator up at route9.games roll up an employee, and see what the station has to work with before you even download the book.

What's in v1: the full system, character creation in six steps, combat, rituals, nine creatures (Bathroom Cowboy, Self-Populating Lawn Gnomes, the Collector, the Dark God, others), three d20 random tables (Who Walks In, Behind the Counter, The Shift Gets Strange), and a starter adventure called Night Shift of the Living Weird you can run in one session. Standard and fillable character sheets included.

v1 is a free primer. It is complete and playable, not a preview PDF. A fully expanded v2 — with the town of Corrow developed in full, an expanded bestiary, more backgrounds, and the complete OM toolkit — will crowdfund later this year (hopefully)

v1 is the door. v2 is whatever comes through it.

Free at route9.games — character creator, plus Payhip, Itch.io, and DriveThruRPG download links all in one place.

Happy to answer questions about the system, the design, where the tone comes from, or anything else. Don't forget to lock the back door.

Hi
I'm currently working on a dice mechanic for a game I'm working on. The base mechanic is the dice pool system from Blades in the Dark (roll Xd6 and pick the highest, 1-3 failure, 4-5 partial success, 6 success).

The game itself is going to be my take on a character focused rpg, mostly about the goals of characters, their relationships and how they change. The major influence is Burning Wheel, with the goal of being a lot simpler and more suited to short-medium length campaigns.

What I'm adding is a "drop highest" mechanic that I call "burning a die". This can result from doing something without having the skill, being injured or through supernatural means. It's supposed to be more impactful than removing a die (so you can't simply offset it by gaining +1D from another mechanic).
To give an example, if i would roll 3d6 burn 1, i might roll 2, 5, 6, then "burn 1" aka removing the highest result -> pick the highest from 2, 5 -> Result is a 5 and a partial success.

Now what I'm struggling with is what to do with dice pools less than or equal to the burn value (Note: I'm not sure if there is going to be higher than burn 1, but for the purpose of discussing it, it's not too important). For example if I had a dice pool consisting of a single die and I burn 1 I think there are 2 options:

• 1: No special consideration, it will burn the highest and only result: This would result in it being impossible to get a success.
• 2: Roll an additional die and then take the lowest: This would result in there being no difference between having a dice pool of 1 vs 2 dice.

I have a tough time deciding which of these is more desirable. The first option means it's more impactful to have burn on lower dice pools. The second option leaves more of an option to "achieve anything", no matter the circumstances.

Has anyone experimented with this / Are there games that use that kind of mechanic already? And if not what are your thoughts about it?

"I don't like a d20 because it's too swingy."

"I prefer a bell curve to a flat distribution."

I've seen these sentiments a lot on here over the years. And oftentimes, I'm sorry to say, I don't think they make a lick of sense in the context they're presented.

Put another way, I think there are two kinds of "swinginess" and a lot of amateur designers mix one up with the other.

Swinginess A: the damage output of a weapon. In D&D, a greatsword does 2d6 damage, an axe does 1d12. The axe is "swingier" than the greatsword. Both weapons do roughly the same average damage, but the sword is more reliable. The axe is more likely to do either a tiny amount or a ton of damage. It's a bell curve (edit: the sword is a bell curve, not the axe, duh). I'm probably overexplaining this to you.

Swinginess B: the chance of success. If you have the same chance to succeed and fail, that feels swingy. If a tiny halfling has a decent chance to kick down a door, while a chonkassed barbarian has a decent chance not to kick down the door, we perceive that as swingy. A system where having ability or skill trivializes a related challenge feels less swingy.

Swinginess A is all about effect. Swinginess B is about the outcome. And crucially, Swinginess B doesn't care about the number on the die. It doesn't even care about whether you're rolling dice in the first place. It's entirely about (1) the success rate and (2) how abilities/skills/whatever modify that rate. These factors can be simulated with roughly equal probabilities using 1 die, 2 dice, 100 dice, or a deck of playing cards.

Dice	~50% chance of success	~30% chance	~5% chance
d20	DC11	DC15	DC20
2d10	DC11 (55%)	DC14 (28%)	DC18 (6%)
2d6	DC7 (58%)	DC9 (28%)	DC12 (3%)
100d2	DC150 (54%)	DC153 (31%)	DC159 (4%)
Cards	Red suit (50%)	Hearts (25%)	An Ace (8%)

Modifiers/bonuses scale the same but in reverse, so a +4 mod in d20 roughly equals a +3 mod in 2d10, a +2 mod in 2d6, and a +3 mod in 100d2. (It would take some doing to translate modifiers to playing cards, to be fair...)

What about dice pools? World of Darkness, for example, has you roll a number of d10s and count dice that turn up 7 or higher as hits. Is that less swingy than a d20? No, not necessarily: how many hits does it take to do something? That's the success rate, and someone on the internet has made a chart for this. (If you roll 5d10, needing 2 hits yields a 50% chance of success, 3 hits 30%, and 4 hits 5%)

What about multiple outcomes? Powered by the Apocalypse games, for example, often use 2d6, and have three outcomes: success, partial success, and failure. Having three outcomes in and of itself can make these games feel less "swingy" than a system that only has success and failure, because there is now a middle-ground outcome to smooth things out. But again, this is a different context than distribution of effect, like damage: the probabilities of the three outcomes doesn't depend on the die or dice you use. You can achieve similar probabilities with a d20:

Dice	Success	Partial success	Failure
2d6	10 or higher (17%)	7–9 (42%)	6 or lower (42%)
d20	18 or higher (15%)	9–17 (45%)	8 or lower (40%)

Obviously, the probabilities are not exactly the same, "translating" from 2d6 to d20 required some arbitrary choices on my part; I could have just as easily set success at 17+ (20%) and partial at 9–16 (40%). And the modifiers would also need to be translated (as in the above table).

But my point here is that a probability distribution's shape is not inherently "swingy" in every context. It is if you're talking about damage. If you're talking about swinginess in the context of a success rate, however, that is not determined by the shape of the distribution. That's determined by the designer—by you. Vincent Baker or whoever chose to make partial success equally likely as failure in PbtA, and a full success less than half as likely as either of these. Whoever made 5E chose to make most checks potentially achievable by anyone, via "crits" and the principle of "bounded accuracy." These are not statistical consequences of the shape of the dice being rolled. They're design decisions.

This is not to say that the dice you use in your resolution system don't matter. Of course they do. It would be absurd to flip 100 pennies to resolve an action in a TTRPG. It's fun to roll lots of dice on a table. But it's not always less swingy.

I have been watching and reading a bunch of stuff on game design as research for my own system since January, and I tend to come across the sentiment that Powered by the Apocalypse games are often seen as "Bad" Game Design (typically either here on reddit, or by a very opinionated creator like Notepad Anon, but he doesn't say why he doesn't like them, he just often goes "fucking pbta!").

I personally haven't played many PbtA games (just a few one shots in Monster of the Week, tho lots of Ironsworn & Starforged, but I don't consider PbtA, but more an evolution of it to where it is something different/ in between, like Shadowdark is between 5e and OSR, but that's getting too off topic), tho I have read few a couple, but I'm not sure what I'm missing.

The really only the main thing I can think of is that Gamist people and Simulationist people aren't a fan of Narrativist games (terms from GNS theory), so have some kind of kneejerk reaction to any Narrativist game. But surely there's more to it than that, no?

So, I figured I'd turn to Reddit to get Reddit to do what Reddit does: Please give me your (helpful, or trying to be at least) Unadulterated Reddit Opinions on why you think PbtA games are, or might be seen as, bad game design? Go ham in your responses (this is reddit after all...), but please try to give some reasoning instead of JUST vitriol.

Edit: to be clear, I don't share this sentiment (I don't feel I have enough knowledge to even have an opinion on it, so I'm asking to get more information)

Going straight to the point, I like magic, so I want to make a game all about it to play with my friends (no plans yet to make a wide release).

For around 12 years I've come up with a systems of 3 Fonts of Energy & 3 Methods of Use of such energies. While not original and pretty cliche, those are:

• Light Energy (Strongs Ideals manifested into Order, Dominance & Truth. The domain of Celestial beings. When too much, becomes Tyranny)
• Shadow Energy (Deep Desires manifested into Freedom, Fantasy & Impulse. The domain of Cthonic beings. When too much, becomes Chaos)
• Void Energy (Complete Openess manifested into Flow, Growth & Expansion. The domain of Fey beings. When too much, becomes Decay)
• Method of Determination (The use of the Body, Actions and the Self, often dealing with identity)
• Method of Zeal (The use of the Spirit, Words and the Group, often dealing with morality)
• Method of Intuition (The use of the Mind, Thoughts and the World, often dealing with creativity)

The Energies = a spectrum with Light & Shadow on opposite and Void on the middle

The Methods = a rock, paper, scissors type deal, where Determination overcomes Zeal, Zeal overcomes Intuition and Intuition overcomes Determination

When combining both, it makes a 3-axis graph in the shape of a d8 tha maps out a person's connection to magic, but I'll not use this more sciency stuff in my game, its more so becasue I like graphs myself.

My plan then is to pick these trios and map out a 3x3 Matrix of Magic, by combining an Energy with a Method to create a category of magic for each combo. Its very similar to something like the Alignment System from D&D, but I don't want to just call each one something like "Determined Light" or "Intuitive Shadow".

For example, since Light = Dominance & Determination = Action, Light + Determination = Evocation Magic or something like that, a type of magic focused on using raw power to resolve problems, be it pure healing, pure strength, pure resilience or overwhelming elemental usage.

Considering all this, what could be good names for types/schools of magic in this context?

Is it better to have physical and magical damage target the same defense value or separate? Currently my system issues a single defense value and damage is calculated as Attack Roll - Targets Defense = Damage. Magic resistance within the system already works in tiers such as Fire Resist 5, Cold Resist 2, etc. I want to keep combat simple and easy to understand. Is there benefit to having two separate defense values or should I use the single value?

Hi there,

I have been working on a d20-adjacent homebrew and going back and forth on the classic armor debate. Figured I'd share where I landed because I'm not fully convinced yet and curious if anyone has tried something similar.

I have read extensively around the old dilemma of armor as AC or armor as DR and came to the conclusion that I am not sure I like either.

The DR problem is what's been bugging me. It looks fine on paper until you run the numbers. Take a character with 10 HP facing a 1d10 weapon. DR 0, they die in roughly 2 hits. DR 3, maybe 4 hits, fine. DR 5 and suddenly it takes around 20 hits to kill them. The curve just falls off a cliff because you're shaving off most of the average damage and even if you implement a minimum 1 damage per hit rule means you still technically get hit, just for almost nothing. An army of goblins becomes a joke. That's not what I want.

Plain armor-as-AC doesn't satisfy me either because once something hits you, the armor might as well not exist.

So here's what I've been turning over. Let's start from the assumption that HP isn't literal health, it's your trained capacity to stay in the fight. The HD 10 veteran doesn't have ten times the blood of a first-timer, they just have decades of conditioning that lets them roll with hits that would floor someone else. That is what HP scaling is modeling. Given that, armor should extend that capacity, not reduce each hit.

The idea I was implementing is that armor gives you a pool of bonus HP that drains before your real HP. Heavier armor gives more HP per Hit Die but reduces your Dex contribution to Defence, so you become easier to hit but harder to grind down. Full plate might go from +8 AC flat to something like +4 AC and 4 HP per HD. At HD 1 that's 4 extra HP, barely anything. At HD 10 that's 40, which is a real buffer.

The pool only counts for attacks that roll against your AC. Fireball, traps, poison, a fall: straight to real HP, no buffer. The reasoning is that when something targets your AC the whole active combat system is running, your body, your training, your armor positioning. When something bypasses Defence entirely that system never engaged, it's a different kind of harm entirely. Crits and sneak attacks still drain the buffer though, they just cost more from it.

Recovery: when you spend a Hit Die to recover, you refill the armor buffer too. Scaling is linear which is the main thing I like about it versus DR. Twice the HD, twice the buffer, no cliff.

What I'm not sure about: does tracking two HP totals actually add overhead at the table or does it play fast enough that it's trivial?

Should shields give a small buffer of their own? And does the "only Defence-targeting attacks" boundary hold up at the table or does it generate constant edge case questions? Do you have some edge cases in mind?

Has anyone run something like this?

Thanks a lot to everyone!

I like the idea of crafting in games and have done a bit of research on how other games play it out, and recall back to when I tried crafting in certain games. A lot of really good ideas exist for the idea on how it's crafted, but not much goes into how the item requirements are obtained or gathered to make it feel engaging. Some interesting stuff I learned about:

Apocalypse World tries to create a journey out of gathering what you need, either by finding a specific component, a certain person to help you, or you invest a ton of time or gold during the journey to finally make it. Which is good for 2/3 of what it tries to do (because I hate long time sinks or trying to look for downtime just to try crafting).

Ars Magica is very in depth with its game and basically boils down to very in-depth creativity on every aspect, so you can turn even crafting into its own journey if you wanted to, similar to Apocalypse World, but with less tables.

There's a good bit of monster harvesting books and supplements made for various TTRPGs, a lot of which get extremely specific for the parts you can harvest off of what creatures, what they are used for, and a bunch of lore details on how the parts are either prepared or described. These can be very engaging and great for world building if you dedicate the time to understand them and play with them, but it can lead to a lot of bookkeeping and research required to figure out what can drop what if the supplement doesn't already include that.

What I found most interesting of all comes from Meikyuu Kingdom

It's a JRPG that swaps between kingdom building and dungeoneering. It's very much a rigid and simple game with a set premise, but what I really liked about it is the generalized item drops you get from defeating monsters and looting chests. Unlike most monster harvesting books, the drops are categorized into abstract materials such as wood, iron, meat, info, etc. Crafting as well as some kingdom mechanics take the idea that you need X resource to make it, and if not you cannot do it.

I really like the idea of abstracted material drops. Not only can you fiddle with names to fit into almost any setting, but you can skimp on GM work by having drop tables or lists for each type of encounter players might have. Golems might drop wood, ore, or monster essence. Beasts might drop hide, fabrics, or essences. Robots can drop cybernetics, metals, and energy cores.

You give players a bunch of materials they can use to make stuff, and depending on the setting and how much of what they are getting, you can supplement missing supplies through vendors at a price, include rules to convert one item type to another (Kind of like a 3:1 or a 5:1 ratio), or have scrappy players just use what they can to make any items they can with the available materials. Not only that, but giving players more resources and just a few finished items that top off dungeon loot or help them progress really pushes them to engage with the system if they want to make the most of what's given to them.

Or they can just sell it all and buy stuff, more power to them lol.

What's everyone's opinions on monster drops, harvesting, and general consensus on crafting rules and mechanics in the TTRPG space?

To be clear, if the one thing you always wanted to do in your life is to create a dark fantasy OSR-adjacent gritty lightweight survival horror RPG, more power to you, go ahead and live the game design life of your dreams. I’m proud of you and please keep on what you’re doing.

Just after reading the same pitch over and over for the last few weeks now I want to talk to the one person in the back of the room who is not making that game right now. If you are currently making literally anything else, even if it’s a d100 Call of Cthulhu with the serial numbers filed off about Starbucks baristas who discover the true meaning of the third place, please tell me about it or even better, post a link to the game.

Thank you and I love you (more than the guy with the yet another OSR-in-vibes but none of the rules game, but they don’t have to know)

Hi @ all!

I'm wondering if there was or is any word about any sort of 3rd party license to publish supplements for Outgunned? I came across some games, which either have their own rule system, or are made with e.g. Savage Worlds in mind, but imho could easily be adapted to OG.

Since SWADE lost some (most?) of it's spotlight/momentum nowadays, plus for me was superseded by Outgunned, I wonder if there maybe is something rumored on 2LM side?

From what I've read they are quite proprietorial when it comes to their games, which e.g. hinders translations (normally done by partnering local publishers), so I'm quite pessimistic about the topic, but I'm still curious if someone has heard anything :)

Why I got here: I've run/"translated" the setting from another system which is similiar to SWADE, imho, and I felt quite happy about the openness of 2LMs Director's Cut system (or in my case: Fortune system) to do so. And think it's a missed opportunity from 2LMs perspective. Plus existing expansions for Savage Worlds, but older editions, could have a second chance by the "freshness" of Outgunned...

Any thoughts? Insights?

Currently in the process of sorting manufacturing for Gilmoril: Technogothic Nightmare. We had some initial thoughts on what to do with the book, and worked with multiple manufacturers on the best way to handle them.

However, I'm curious to know what other players and GMs have found particularly interesting/creative/useful when it comes to the design of TTRPG manuals.

Stuff like bookmark ribbons, included tear-out pages, folded map posters, or the like. Anything at all that comes to mind!

(Please feel free to gush about your favourite layout/designs as well, it definitely counts as an important inclusion in TTRPG manuals)

What's your opinion on creating a dedicated place to discuss your products?

I don't really think I have any following, and if I do it's tiny, but if someone felt the urge to ask or contribute anything, I guess it would be nice for them to have a place to do that. If nothing else, a place for me to update about new content.

But it also feels a bit stupid and presumptuous, and would probably be dead most of the time.

How have you guys handled this situation?

Feel free to share your space if you have any aswell!

I'm a big fan of Daggerheart using 2d12 over 1d20. Having a good and a bad die gives you automatic levels of nuance in every roll with changing the underlying math overly much.

To be clear, if the one thing you always wanted to do in your life is not create a dark fantasy OSR-adjacent gritty lightweight survival horror RPG, more power to you, go ahead and live the game design of your dreams. I'm proud of you and please keep doing what you're doing.

It's just that, after reading the constant pitches of unique and innovative designs, I'm looking for something more familiar, something to rest my eyes on, and I want to see where the design space is heading. If you are currently making a Darkest Dungeon inspired game, I want to hear about it. If you are making a Goblin Slayer game? Tell me! An OSR game with a really unique and innovative encumbrance system? I'm all ears!

In particular, I'm curious most about how you handle the following mechanics:

1. Encumbrance (Do you use slots? Actual pounds? How much money can a PC carry?)
2. HP/Wounds/etc (Do you use straight HP? Wounds? A mixture?)
3. Torches/Lighting (Do they do something else other than let you see? How long do they last? And so on)
4. Equipment (Do you use piecemeal armor? Can I wear a special armor set?)
5. Magic items and rewards (Are they random? Do I know about them as a player? Can I set out in search of the Holy Avenger or Flametongue?)
6. Time/Recordkeeping ("You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept", so, do you use Dungeon Turns? World turns and so on? Or something else?)
7. Scaling (Do you plan for the PCs to be low-power forever? Or, given enough time and cunning, can they escape the goblin-infested dungeons?)

So this is really interesting. I created what i like to call Origins, and it was actually inspired by something i saw breifly here in reddit.

The goal was to help players imagine thier characters on a deeper level. It comes as no shock to anyone whose played a TTRPG before that some characters are more... intimate than others. in that, if a character dies, or becomes important to you then its usually because you know that character on a deeper level.

some systems fix this through creative prompts, i.e. "Where did you grow up?" "Do you have any family?"

Essentially asking you to write a backstory through one-sentence prompts, that you can then smash together for a somewhat decent backstory. this works, but.. i wanted something different.

## Origins

Origins is about playing through those formative moments the actual backstory beats that create your character. the concept is to help you establish a characters "voice" through interactive one-shot modules tied to the backstory of the character.

For this i didnt really create a mechanical system to add on to my TTRPG. its more or less a guide, on how to execute the work in order to make this useful.

bsically you can read it like this: "playing 3-5 one shot mini adventures of your characters most formative moments. BEFORE the campaign starts"