I suppose it's time to actually show people my work. Running Breathless is a game about being chased and dealing with problems along the way, sometimes not even your own. squidlord.itch.io/running-br… Maybe you're a psychic kid who's escaped from the hospital or the school for unusual talents. Maybe you've made the heist of your life. Maybe you're the worst kind of criminal scum. Maybe they're right behind you. Catch your breath when you can. Go to ground if you find someone you can trust or a big enough sucker. The one thing you're guaranteed to do? Run. Running Breathless is a TRPG for one to five players, GM optional, based on the Breathless SRD. Check it out. It's pay what you want, which means you can pay absolutely $0.00, and I won't be mad. In fact, I encourage you to do so. It runs pretty quickly, so you can even throw it up on the table while waiting for other players to arrive for your main game. It's fast, a little bit cruel, and you should have about 50-50 odds of getting away with it. Whatever it was you did. The chasers know.

You know, I've seen this attitude show up more than once on the Japanese side of TRPGs, and every time it makes my head hurt because it avoids the whole point of playing an RPG so hard it turns it into an entirely different experience, intentionally or not. But worse than that, it puts the focus on absolutely the wrong person in the world. Firstly, I'm an American. As a result, culturally, I am predisposed toward individualism and local personal responsibility. This is why we are generally okay with individuals having guns. Not the least reason being that tyrannical governments are generally undesirable and the means to stop them is something that you want. But also because local decisions are far more important than distant decisions. That is, the idea that I feel that I'm in a threatening situation and need to protect myself is far more important than the belief that the police will come and help me when I'm in a threatening situation. Likewise, I don't actually give a fuck what the scenario writer wanted. Do you know who's important to me when I am facilitating a game? That's right, the other people at the table. Why? Because they are sitting there looking at me and hoping that I will help them have a good time, just as I'm looking at them and hoping they will help me have a good time. Do you know who's not at the table? The guy that wrote the scenario. He has nothing to do with me. At best, he has some of my money. At worst, I gave him a download tick. That's it. That's our only interaction. That's our only overlap of responsibility. My responsibility is to the other people at the table, just as their responsibility is only to each other and to me. None of us give a rat's ass about the scenario writer, except with a vague sense of gratitude that they provided us a jumping off point to have our own fun. That there is critical, because the whole point of playing a TRPG is to actually play the game. The process of playing the game involves players making decisions as their characters in an effort to make a difference to the world, maybe in big ways, as in stopping a global catastrophe, maybe in small ways, as in protecting a dog who's just about to be kicked. If I, as the facilitator, step in to take away their ability to change the world in gross or subtle ways, I am removing their agency in a literal sense and totally obviating the need for them at the table. After all, if the scenario writer has told me exactly what is possible and how it must come to be, then what do I need players for? What difference do they make? What advantage do they provide? Why should they even bother to play the game if the players come up with a good plan which can be executed through the proxy of their characters and the challenges of the unknown are met by luck or good grace? Then why shouldn't I let them intervene in an NPC's death just because the scenario writer said no? Fuck that guy. Who cares what he said? The characters stepped up and met the challenge. Let them have the fruits of their success. Does that mean that they can change the end of the scenario? Fuck yes, that's the whole point of playing the game. Perhaps the scenario sets a potential outcome if the characters fail, and perhaps even the outcome can only be affected somewhat by character success. Okay, fine, but let them have their success. The players and I are at the table. The scenario author isn't there. I don't care what they think. I don't care what they think of the play. I don't care what they think of the characters. I don't care what they think of me. They can fuck themselves. The only thing I'm interested in is that the people at the table have a good time. That's my job, perhaps my only job within the context of playing TRPGs. I will go one step further than the argument that the original poster here is disagreeing with. They say that they disagree with the idea that "as long as it's fun, any kind of alteration is fine." I say, "Any kind of alteration is fine for whatever reason you want to. It doesn't matter. The scenario author has no power and shouldn't. Any kind of alteration is fine." If somebody shows up at your table and expects to have the same experience as somebody else did at their table just because you're running the same scenario, they aren't looking to play a game. They are definitely not looking to play a TRPG. Send them off with people of like mind with a copy of a screenplay and have them read from it around a table, because that's what they want to do. That will always have the same outcome. Everybody left will be grateful to be rid of them and have a better game for it. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

I know some people, not all of which live on this side of the planet, are interested in what Netherworld Haunted House looks like. If you needed some horrific inspiration for your next game, I might have some imagery here, including deep ones. photos.app.goo.gl/vibW3i5grC…

Sometimes, if you catch me in the right mood, I'll ramble about what I think some of the best indie RPG designs of all time are, and Microscope is always going to be on that list. Want to see someone play the edition that is currently being kickstarted? youtu.be/o1CL5cmEgXo Now there's a fair amount of Microscope First Edition play on my personal YouTube channel, but a lot of that was recorded over a decade ago. I am excited that there is a Kickstarter for a new edition of the game, which looks like it's going to be streamlined even more minimalist, which is kind of shocking in a game that didn't have dice in the first place or any other randomizer. In fact, it doesn't even have characters. Trust me, it's still a role-playing game. A very strange one, but a role-playing game. You should really check it out.

I always see a bunch of independent RPG producers getting up in arms about American tariffs and very little about American regulation, because they largely don't exist, but almost never about European regulations strangling business. geeknative.com/243712/atlas-… Yet here we are. Now I realize that Atlas Games isn't the behemoth it once was, but it's interesting to note that they haven't just reduced direct-to-consumer sales to the EU, but have completely cut them off. Brazil, I can understand because of necessity, but there's no way they weren't considering their response to the situation in the EU for quite a while. Fascinating stuff.

I don't want to sound like a shill, but if you were interested in Starforged, the sci-fi version of Ironsworn I go on at length about on a regular basis, you can pick it up from DriveThruRPG for $8 right now. drivethrurpg.com/en/product/… That is, in fact, a pretty darn good deal. That said, if you want everything, and I mean everything, for Starforged in PDF, you can have it all for $40, still 30% off, from Shawn Tompkins' store directly. tomkinpress.com/products/eve… Work out how much awesome solo, co-op, and guided RPG fun you want and can absolutely stand, and spend appropriately. Don't forget, if you just want to check out the system, Ironsworn alone in PDF is available for absolutely free.

I can neither confirm nor deny that I was responsible for any of this without actually being in the game and being hundreds, if not thousands of miles away. My psychic resonance may have possessed the players, however.

You ever get a weird urge to do something just because it sticks in the back of your head and it needed to be done? Yeah, I have no idea why I needed to do Keep Calm posters for Ars Magica, but here we are. For the record, I'm the Rego Corpus guy. I have a good friend who's all about the Creo Ignem. Her solution to every problem is "cast fireball." Personally, I just prefer to puppet people into stabbing themselves through the eye socket or something. You know, something subtle.

Sometimes I'm reminded that parts of D&D were really fucking cool. There was a time that even set an impossible task, like unify all of our settings into one metaplane system, the writers could pull it off. youtu.be/rW_gBBoXrRs Could this ever see the light of day these days? Absolutely not. It's way too edgy, way too cool, way too interesting, and the art is way too good. We got one solid video game out of it, at least. Planescape, like Spelljammer, was one of the really fascinating bits of D&D that never really kept its coolness, which even I have to admit I'm saddened by. Ridiculously complex and uneven? Sure. But you could literally mine it for ideas until the day you die and never have depleted all of them.

Sometimes you stumble over the right thing at the right time, and this bit on tile crawling from Cezar Capacie is the right time. What's tile crawling? It's sort of like hex crawling, except dynamically generated and on cards. youtu.be/PriQjApAXW0 This absolutely fits in with my usual exploitation of the Ironsworn: Delve and Starforged exploration systems, but it struck me that both @ChubbyFunsterGC and @td10rpg were doing things related to hex crawls and dynamic table generation recently. It might be something one of them might be interested in. Because sometimes I find interesting things. In this case, I'm also a huge sucker for 3x5 cards, to the point I always have a pack of them in my ready kit for RPGs. So, it slots right into what I'm already doing.

Okay, I admit, in the back of my brain I'm already putting together the stats for this thing.

I don't think I would let this work without some hint that the character should know a little bit of occult lore. After all, what are they drawing? Why are they drawing it? It's a great idea if it can be justified even remotely, but if it can't, I would say "You most certainly can try" in the exact same tone of voice that I would respond with if they said "I want to jump off this building and fly to Morocco."

#TTRPG #GameDesign Ron Edwards said system matters. Aaron Marks said premise does. Both are right, and both go wrong the moment they make it the most important thing. Everything matters. grimtokens.garden/Articles/E…

Well, that's it. The streams have been well and truly crossed now. All that's left to us is the end of the world. youtu.be/5QKeYse5GF8

#TTRPG #AI The machine scaffolds, edits, indexes, and announces. Judgment is a human quality. For now. Step right up: the whole pipeline, drawn out to the breaking point. (The title alone should get me VC funding.) grimtokens.garden/Thoughts/A…