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TTRPG Tuesday: Channelers Tasks for Second Playtest

Alright it’s another TTRPG Tuesday.  It’s late, I have to be up less than seven hours from now for hockey, and my wife’s coming down with something that I’ll probably catch in some form or another.  But let’s gooooo! So with Playtest Zero coming up in uhhh two days, I have to be realistic about what’s achievable by then.  I am close but not close enough to being able to have folks test out combat; and I still think having some pregen characters for that will help me do that.  The issue is I’ve jumped around so much that I don’t have those characters, or a character sheet; so since that’s the first domino, I’m focusing on that as the bit to playtest, and will take what I learn from character feedback to build and stat out my pregen characters, and the scenario I skeletoned out last week. I have split the original Channelers doc into a Devlog and a WIP for the system itself, and have started a little slide deck I can use to introduce folks to the concept.  Between now and Thursday evenin
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TTRPG Tuesday: Blueprint for Channelers MVP

It’s nine days til the next US-evening Playtest Zero.  I’ve worked on Channelers more days than not recently. Welcome to another TTRPG Tuesday. My goal by 3/14 is to have an MVP that can at least be tested.  An introduction to the game, some pre-gen characters for each of the belief systems, and a scenario to test out the double 3x3 combat grid.  I’ve just been writing down the random bits that pop into my head and are worth figuring out, but I should definitely start with what’s needed for the test and then work my way out from there. So let’s do that today! Test Scenario: The Numinous Spores The Charter calls upon 3-5 Channelers to address a manifestation of the Angel of Decay, an Aspect of the Chanterelle Spirit.  In Heron’s Call Bay, living creatures are wasting away and the scavengers and rot are flourishing.  Three incursion points hold the manifestation in place; binding or cleansing them will release the Angel’s hold on the aread. Incursion Point 1: Three sporestalkers and a fo

TTRPG Tuesday: Let's Do That Hockey

Yo uh is it another TTRPG Tuesday? I think it is! I said I’d bring something to Playtest Zero on Thursday, and you know what’s been rattling around my head? Well, Channelers still, and Cold Iron Company, but today in particular: this post on mechanics inspired by Blue Lock.  But I don’t want to make the Blue Lock fan game - I want to take an already insane feeling system and map it on a world I care more about - Tartans Hockey Live! THL is, as everyone knows, the narrative fiction podcast series that exists entirely in my head and various Google docs, following a ragtag team of players in the fictional Hockey Elite League, which includes games played atop a moving train, trapped in a time loop, or in the shadow of Goshzilla, the Great Lakes Kaiju.  While THL follows a specific cast, I think for this game (which I might call Outside Edges or WHEEL BABY WHEEL or the Top Shelf system) we’ll play a lot looser, somewhere in the middle of the “This Is An Insane Approach To A Real Sport” of

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for Alice, left for Cat) and thro

TTRPG Tuesday: Minimum Viable Product for WWDW?

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve put together a barebones introductory document for We Won, Didn’t We? and, well, I think it speaks for itself.  Check it out HERE ! This introduces the skeleton of the game, as well as walking through the steps; I’d say next up is a rudimentary character sheet, and maybe I can bring this to a Playtest Zero session and see what folks think of character creation within one of the starting Bulbs.  I’ve opened the doc up for comments, so if you have thoughts dear reader, fire away.  Brain fried, go read the doc, til next time!

TTRPG Tuesday: Beliefs as Roles

  Hello from high above the Rockies, as I make my way back to Chicago from Big Bad Con 2023.     This was my first con in five years, and only my second ever.     I had a better time at it than I did at GenCon, which I understand derives largely from this being an industry con vs a consumer show.     I made a modest number of purchases but it was easy to stick to the constraints of my limited luggage space, which was fine; shopping and new releases were not the attraction here.     Gaming, panels, and (as I soon learned) networking were. This con was certainly less overwhelming and I think my expectations were clearer and my FOMO much lighter, but I’ll readily admit that I had a lot to learn.    I misunderstood or made mistakes regarding almost every event I signed up for, including happy accidents like sitting in on the wrong panel only to learn a ton, or expecting a mending workshop to be about fixing one’s writing when the application was rather more literal, which was a fascinat

TTRPG Tuesday: Channelers, I Call It

Hello and welcome back! Another post? So soon? How? Why? Don’t question it.  It’s a TTRPG Tuesday. Today we’re revisiting the concept a few posts back where I proposed a magic system based on hosting spirits that consume you.  Since then I’ve attended my first Session Zero hangout, as well as a local TTRPG designer meetup here in Chicago, and have been very energized by the conversations I had in those spaces.  Session Zero in particular was great for iterating on the >1 minute’s worth of explanation I had for the magic system (which I’ve dubbed Channelers for the time being), which yielded many realizations, one being that this is inherently more horror-sympathetic of a system in feel and inspo than any of my usual stuff.  But the main exciting thing to come out of that convo, is Philosophies.  These stand in as classes/backgrounds, but have less to do with the combat role of a character (as the Spirits can shape that) and more to do with how the character views Spirits. Crucia