Skip to main content

TTRPG Tuesday - Fevered Ramblings about The Company

Well, I’ve got a lot of Kamen Rider energy brewing in my head but it’s not ready to coalesce into playwriting just yet (ANY TIME THO BRAIN), so how about I do a little checkin on The DOLLY Extraction for a TTRPG Tuesday? How about it? How? I dunno, truly.

So much as I wanted to deliver a finished product all on my lonesome, the cold hard truth of this is that I’m trying to write for an RPG that I’ve helped edit but haven’t ever actually played myself or even seen played.  I can picture and plot out ideal player/gm experiences and come up with some interesting mechanics, but I may have run into a wall, one that is partially just - you know, pandemic doom fatigue jesus christ I’m so tired and I’ve drawn out all my rituals and habits for so fucking long and for WHAT - and partially a ceiling on how far ideas and guesswork can take me without playtesting, a schedule of deadlines, and client directives/feedback.  That was a big part of me losing steam during my work on the misbegotten John Silence RPG.  I knew even less about what I was doing there, of course, and my God was it ever bad news that I’d really only read DnD and DnD-adjacent RPGs back then, but I think a big part of it was that all the voluminous interesting ideas in my brain floundered in a limbo of indecision because I couldn’t feel or find my place in the collaboration.  I didn’t know where my work stood in relation to the broader project, and I received no guidance, so to be frank, I mostly checked out and then rush-squeezed out some (but not all) of what I’d promised once a deadline and a look at the other writers’ work suddenly materialized.

But this doesn’t need to be a grievant post-mortem - that’s only useful in terms of identifying what to avoid and work against for the present and the future.  I think I should just doodle out the encounter wheel thing that determines which Shepherdess is encountered, maybe spend a Mechanic Monday plotting it out, spend some time in Paint or Word sketching out the map of the decks, and then reach out to Logan for a calibrating session.  Yeah.  That might be useful, and enjoyable.

And oh MAN it’s not applicable/useful for this scenario but I just got a KILLER idea for a mechanic where the players start a mission with fairly normal parameters and objectives but something unexpected happens (an Event, or it has a random chance of happening each turn), and their myconid spores / memetic worms / hypnosis is disabled and then the GM gives them their actual briefing, from before they got mind-controlled.  And that mind control has the potential to kick back in, at which point the GM should continue to answer questions and treat the scenario as though they never gave them the second briefing.

Potentially it’s an escort quest? And the “prisoner” or “VIP” is the one who’s mindcontrolling them, editing their perceptions and memories? (Shades of Jessica Jones’ Purple Man here, something to watch out for) 

If the mind controller can control their memories, maybe they have a bag that perpetually has “several” healing kits, and a bunch of enemies that they seem to dispatch easily, but they also keep accumulating Itch tokens - tracking their real, unhealed physical damage, which they don’t become aware of until the mind control is broken - because none of the healing kits are real, but several of the enemies are.

Maybe whatever neutralizes the mind control doesn’t neutralize it for all of them, so they individually may drop out of the mind control, at which point the GM takes that player (or those players) into another room (real or Zoom) for a sidebar.  And part of the information gained in the sidebar is the knowledge that if they act overtly against the mind controller, the other party members will be turned against them.

Wow so I wandered way off-topic, but not off-genre.  What a weird TTRP Tuesday.  Tune in next week for - something else!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: I'm A Hack, Is What I Am

Hey welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! Tuesday technically ended 51 minutes ago as I begin to write this, but who gives a shit.  It’s been a while and I feel like I need to get a post out. Today, let’s look at hacks - I’ve written settings, adventures, classes, monsters, and modules for other systems before, but I’ve never done a hack; it’s one of those things where I’d have no issue with someone doing it with something I wrote (game design-wise; playwriting-wise I’d be a bit stroppy) however! I have been advised that it’s a good starting point for folks who have never built a system from scratch, so maybe it’s a worthwhile exercise to embark upon.  So what system would I want to hack? Well, this is just first principles basic concept stuff, but since Aaron Lim’s the one who suggested I look at a hack, I’m going to take one of his systems: SPEEDMECH. MASKS & BELTS Implementing the tactical turn-based combat of SPEEDMECH, Masks & Belts is a game of Driver moves and form-cha...
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Campaigning

  Hey it's TTRPG Tuesday, let's see if I get something written before sleep overtakes me. I'm still on that Channelers kick, but today I want to talk about a possible campaign path: The Magpie Offensive.  I see this as a military campaign where the PCs are conscripted, volunteers, or mercenaries for an army that is marching to quell Spirit threats and unite the region under a protectorate. There should be free RP sections as interludes between missions, and missions should be chosen by the party.  The army ensures loyalty with intangible rewards as well as artifact items. NOTE: This whole thing is being designed with the Rascal article on militarization in ttrpgs in mind. What is the thrust of the campaign? It's fundamentally one of conquest.  How do I encourage characters to question their presence and their complicity? How much interpersonal violence is an acceptable price to pay for environmental justice? How can party composition affect all this from jump? H...
Post a Comment
Read more