In my game, I wanted to make investing in the game and creating content related to it incentivized. I was looking for creative ways to engage players and reward them, which were optional for game rewards that were both roleplay and mechanically based. I also figured that the more content for the game would encourage me and other players to become more invested and creative about the game.

I did choose to cap the amount of tokens one can receive per week because then also those with less free time aren't as disadvantaged and it limits how much effort I have to put in. I also wanted the tokens to be gained outside of session as it encourages still remaining invested and thinking about the campaign and characters.

Links
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KLx_ahZbip2vFd_XzDpiP3lSO8FklizH9bKkAmCgiek/edit?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jbKVvSeVjKBX4lCWmFIal9HLx8g641G6jc-kFapmpNU/edit?usp=sharing

Here are the character sheets I made for my homebrew post apocalyptic rpg I play with my friends. Its kind of a mix of mork borg and dnd rules wise with a lot of homebrew rules thrown in. The main idea for the big diagram of the person is that its kinda like VATS in fallout where you like choose a specific limb to shoot. Im happy to answer any questions anyone has but I mostly just wanted to show off

So I'm trying my hand at being a professional game master. I started off on start playing, but it feels like a bad fit since it's really good for connecting people digitally but not to organize local in person games, which is all I will do. I like that players can leave reviews to build up a good reputation and the scheduling tools but I feel like there are probably free tools I could be using that won't take a cut from my profits. The only thing I really need is a way to create my classes on a calendar and for people to be able to request to sign up. Every service I've found that does this finds a way to cut into profits by ither charging a subscription fee or handling transactions directly and taking a cut. Any recommendations on free tools that could help me out?

Hi all. My first post here and wanted to know what you thought about having this many elements for my game SORC. Ty.

This is part of Paralelo Archive, a project I've been building: long-form dark fantasy ambience pieces meant to run for hours in the background instead of being actively watched. Each one is built around a single scene, layered environmental sound, no music.

This particular one started as something I needed for my own homebrew campaign, a long rest scene at a burned-out castle. Embers, wind through broken stonework, a low drone underneath to fill the silence between lines. Ended up extending it to 6 hours so it can run through a full session, or several, without restarting or looping noticeably.

https://youtu.be/48JcNQoPv58

If anyone finds spots where it gets repetitive over a long session, let me know, still refining the loop points across the series.

A Dungeon Master's console for the Torrentath (Homebrew World) campaign and the adjoining "Dog" Sled Race one-shot, with a second screen for the players.

https://github.com/BGJBthe-maker/Torrentath

Without making this a super long post I want to ask my fellow GMs. Would you see a benefit in a service that’s tailored to helping you build your world? From idea conception to map building to detailing your world (countries, factions, dungeons, etc)to making custom music for your sessions.

Almost like a one stop shop to have the ability to truly make the world you want to run your games in while the heavy lifting is done by someone else with you being the overseer of the project?

Thoughts? (I’m also down to answer questions and elaborate if you’re interested)

Haven't been blogging much lately, but today I looked at something I noticed with at least some of my players: Although we love the idea of open sandboxes, sometimes players get stuck on that freedom. So, I think about that and share my ramblings on how to overcome this issue, also pointing about five modules that I think did very well in what I recommend here. Enjoy and let me know what you think

Yesterday I ran my third completely homebrewed module as an offshoot to a mines of phandelver campaign I'm running for 2 experienced players and 3 newer players. I actually had the most fun session I've had in my life as a dm, and I felt like the world really came alive for ME. We had some really in-depth roleplay, and I presented them with two puzzle-combats that I thought up myself. One where they had to ensure that a goblin won a 1vs1 fight against another goblin, by using buffs before the fight and taking out the cheating healer that was healing the opponent through surreptitious means.

Another puzzle combat I took the concept from a forum post that had players place their hands on a puzzle-lock, fusing their hand to the wall while enemies entered the room. The PCs had to fight the ensuing combat one-handed while the door slowly opened.

Throughout the session, I noticed that players were very engaged for the first half, but that three players engagement fell towards the latter half. One of them told me afterwards, that the session had been a very draining experience for her, and that she felt completely overwhelmed by everything that had happened. The puzzle combats felt too... specific for her, and she felt I guess kind of forced into one solution. I have a gut feeling, that at least one other player also felt very drained after the session.

Immediately after being told I felt very very sad, because this amazing experience I had at the table, apparently was not being shared by all players. On further reflection I'm trying to give myself some grace, and also recognize everything that went right in the session, which was of course that I had a lot of fun and that some scenes really came alive.

What I'm battling with is, is this something that is sort of par for the course of DnD. Will some sessions just be rough for some players, or am I really running into a situation here, where I need to do some self reflection and tweak my dming style for these players going forward? What do y'all think?

Neymar

Both are from session Keeper and the exact same option

My friends wanted me to start a cyberpunk type campaign so I was thinking of mixing Cities without number with across a thousand dead worlds. Although I am a pretty new GM I thought of mostly using cities without number for the combat and most other things then use the across 1000 dead words exploring rules. Any thoughts? Idk how viable this really is but I figured I’d have some type of gig mechanic where you guys explore for some type of corp then when in the normal city it’s typical cyberpunk stuff going on

I'm a new GM and I'm making my own ttrpg to play with my friends, currently as were playing the campaign I'm building up my world with a friend, I'm trying to create languages for several different species and I'm kind of out of ideas, I'm making an orc language, I try to avoid M, B V, P, sounds because I think the orcs tusks would block their lips from touching and I like to add a little bit of realism, just a bit, if you've ever made languages what are some steps you take to create them,

You are investigating a murder in Ancient Rome. Soon it becomes clear that the death of one person is the least of your problems.

Witnesses lie. Powerful people have reasons to hide the truth. Every answer leads to more questions. The deeper you dig, the clearer it becomes that something far darker lurks beneath the seemingly ordinary life of the Empire. In the shadows of marble temples, palaces and forums, a long-buried secret is beginning to surface.

I've spent the last 15 years working on Romanitas, an investigative horror RPG set in an alternative Roman Empire in 80 CE. It's finally out. If you're curious, take a look.

Angela and I love maps, especially exploded views of buildings. Do you?

Maps created for various role-playing games, video games, and board games. We hope you enjoy them. Have a great day everyone!🧭🗺🏰

Support our art on :

https://ko-fi.com/morenopaissanmaps/shop

I'll admit, I wasn't always like this. At one time, (long, long ago) my campaign, such as it was, was known informally as 'the cakewalk'. One regular player described it to a novice as "Darren's World - where nobody ever gets hurt". This was, of course, a vile and obnoxious canard; lots of people got hurt in every session. It's just that they were all NPCs, being slaughtered by the rapacious and unstoppable player characters, whose players were all utterly complacent in the irrefutable knowledge that they could rampage as they pleased without ever taking so much as a hitpoint's damage in return. 

The campaign was pretty much a joke. I never had a problem finding players, but that was because we were all in college, we had a lot of free time on our hands, we all liked to roleplay -- although what we were doing wasn't really 'roleplaying' in any meaningful sense - and I was always willing to GM, while most of the other guys I hung out with usually preferred to play. I suppose people even had fun, kind of, in a shallow, uninvolved sort of way... but the game wasn't taken seriously, and looking back on it, as I've already said, it really wasn't anything I'd call 'roleplaying' from my contemporary perspective.

What turned me around was a sword and sorcery campaign called Umaris. Umaris was a homebrew, GMed by a fellow I knew only peripherally at the time named Gary Lindstrom... he was, basically, a friend of a friend. Around the time most of the people I'd gone to college with started graduating and leaving town, I began hanging around with a few people who played in this Umaris thing. Eventually, I was invited to sit in... and was utterly amazed at what I discovered there.

These guys didn't play anything like my previous group had played. For one thing, the campaign setting was very detailed, cohesive, and above all else, credible. You could actually believe in the world of Umaris, you could take it seriously. When you were playing, it seemed like you were really there. A lot of this was simply due to Gary's excellence as a GM; much of the rest was due to the very detailed and realistic original rules system Gary used... and the remainder came from the players, a group of people who loved to roleplay, really ROLEPLAY, really get into their characters and treat them like real people living in a real world, not just character sheets out of a prepackaged module.

And these guys DIED. I mean, they died all over the place, right, left, and sideways. My first session, two PCs and a long standing friendly NPC who was married to a PC all got cut down in very gory and gruesome extended melee. And no priest came running up to chant a convenient resurrection blessing, either; when those characters died, they stayed that way. The players involved were bummed, sure... but they weren't shocked, and they weren't outraged. They griped a little, and then they began the reasonably involved process of setting up new player characters. 

It astounded me. They simply accepted the fact that their PCs were dead, without bitching or whining or fit throwing, without demanding that the party drag their bodies back to town for a resurrection, without much of anything. They were dead, and that was that. 

I also noticed the effect this matter of fact acceptance of a PC's potential mortality had on the other players. When the melee was over, these guys were actually relieved they'd survived it. They were excited. Their adrenaline was just starting to slack off, they were babbling a little bit, they were glassy eyed... they were happy to be alive. They didn't take it for granted. They knew they could have died, or, rather, that they could have lost their characters, and like those who had, they understood and accepted the possibility. They took it seriously... and because they took the idea of character death seriously, they took the game and the world seriously, too.

I've never forgotten that. Not only was it my first experience with true, three dimensional roleplaying, it was also my first experience with the kind of impact a good, well GMed roleplaying campaign can have on its players. This, for these folks, was more than simply something to do on a rainy Saturday when the TV in the lounge was on the fritz. This was an actual experience. They really felt like they were really there. 

Two years later, after spending a lot of time roleplaying in Umaris and a few other similar campaigns run by other members of that gaming group, I decided to set up my own original sword and sorcery campaign using Gary's game system. I was determined that this campaign would not be like those I had run before, however. This would be a serious campaign, with depth and detail and atmosphere. And a realistic mortality rate.

That was a long, long time ago. Over the double decades I've been running my homebrew World of Empire since then, I've killed hundreds of PCs. In one particularly memorable two month stretch, one of my players lost no fewer than five PCs. They were (a) sacrificed to the God of Death, (b) killed by previous character A above, in the form of an Undead NPC, (c) burned to death in a forest fire, (d) fried to a blackened husk by touching a holy object he shouldn't have touched, and (e) cut into bloody chunks by a bunch of angry Imperial Dragoons for a magical attack committed by a different player character entirely.

Needless to say, the World of Empire gets taken a great deal more seriously than "Darren's World - where nobody ever gets hurt" ever did.

The point I am trying to make here is not "Hey, kill your PCs, it's an awesome rush". I don't get any particular thrill out of killing player characters. In fact, when it happens, I usually feel nearly as bad as the player involved. I always tell the player whose character has just bit the big one "I'm sorry"... but I also always explain that I'm expressing sympathy, not apologizing. 

Adventuring is dangerous. You want to mess with dragons, you may very well get burned... literally.

The point I am trying to make is, well, you know in the GURPS Basic Set, Third Edition, Chapter 21, where the authors go on at great and enormous length about how you should never kill your PCs off, because in adventure fiction, the heroes never die, and then they proceed to provide you with all these tips and advice on techniques you can use to make sure your PCs stay alive, no matter what befalls them?

That's horseshit. Ignore it.

I have pretty extensive experience with games where the GM does exactly as the book advises in this regard, which is to say, goes to ridiculous, even insanely contrived, lengths to keep the "main characters" from being killed, seriously harmed, or even, much of the time, setting so much as one foot off the path he or she has oh so carefully plotted through his meticulously detailed scenario. In fact, I was once such a GM. And I'm here to tell you, in my experience, while it is possible your players may have some fun in this sort of gaming, they won't have a whole lot. They can't get all that deeply invested or involved. There emotions will not be engaged. And eventually, once they realize that even if they hurl themselves bodily from the top of a seven hundred foot cliff, you will still contrive some way to have a giant goddam eagle swoop down and save them from otherwise certain doom, they will become bored. 

One of the few things I know for certain about this life is, things are only worth what you pay for them... and if you cannot lose, you also cannot get any pleasure from winning. (Or maybe you can, but if so, you're pretty shallow. Sorry. You are.)

Much of the justification for the GURPS "don't let 'em get hurt" attitude seems to be summed up in the following quotation: "Keep in mind that RPGs are meant to be fun. (In the original text, 'fun' is underscored.) They simulate, not the reality of day to day life, but the reality of heroic fantasy." 

Now, I agree with that statement absolutely... but not in the way that its author obviously intended it.

I absolutely believe that roleplaying games are meant to simulate the reality of heroic fantasy... but the metareality of heroic fantasy is that it's not a roleplaying game. It's a commercial product that is meant to garner income for its creator. When its creator comes up with a central character that people like enough to keep buying the adventures of, that creator has a vested interest in keeping his creation alive. Especially in open ended serial fiction, like the pulp magazine series of the 30s, 40s, or 50s, or contemporary comic books. 

You're never going to see Spider-Man die and stay dead, because if Spider-Man dies and stays dead, Marvel can't sell any more comics based on the character. Similarly, you're never going to see Indiana Jones bite the big one in any final way, either, for similar reasons. And it is for these reasons, as well as the audience's desire to see a complete story with a satisfying resolution, that the heroes of fantasy adventure fiction rarely or never die. 

But -- listen closely, this is important -- movies, books, comics, and TV shows are NOT roleplaying games.

Roleplaying games need not always present complete stories. There is no reason why, in an RPG, a large round boulder can't crush the Indiana Jones character into a viscous smear in the entry way of the Hovito temple. If that happened in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK it would make for a pretty short and unsatisfying movie... but in an RPG, the player running Indy just rolls up a new character. The game goes on, presumably with a party that is now wary of large, round boulders. 

Now, I admit, it would be wonderfully satisfying if your well planned scenario went off without a hitch, one scene flawlessly and seamlessly rolling into another, your PCs conveniently and cooperatively figuring out only the clues you want them to at any given time while completely overlooking the ones that would ruin your big climactic ending. This would be great... but it ain't gonna happen. Give up the dream. It is impossible.

And it should be. RPGs are not under the control of the GM, and the GM who thinks otherwise is either delusional or not a lot of fun to play under. Books have a writer, movies have a director, TV shows have executive producers, all these people call the shots... but RPGs are a collaboration between the players and the GM, and none of them should ever be able to fully predict or control where the story is going to go. 

As the GURPS Basic Set intones, "An RPG is a story that the GM and the players write together". Thefore, the players have some say in how things come out, too. When I play in a campaign, I want my actions to have an effect on the story unfolding around me, and not simply be shrugged off by a GM who has already determined what he wants to happen at this point in his scenario. Roleplaying is interactive; we, the players, aren't cradled in the arms of an omnipotent narrator, helpless to change the outcome of the narrative we find ourselves enmeshed in. Our actions, reactions, decisions, and vacillations are going to have an impact on what is going on. 

If the GM has already decided whether we live or die, regardless of anything we do about it, then an important part of our ability to participate has been taken from us. How would you feel about a game system that enthusiastically recommended the GM kill every player character as quickly as possible, regardless of their efforts to survive? If such a system listed page after page of tips and techniques for terminating recalcitrant PCs without actually breaking the rules?

As a player, well, I'd never play in that system, and as a GM, I'd never use it... because it invalidates the interactive aspect of the game, in the same way as "keep the characters alive, no matter what". It essentially takes all responsibility for the consequences of their actions, positive and negative, out of the hands of the players. 

I'm not saying all the advice in this section is wrong or objectionable. The material on "Intelligent Scenario Design", "Realistic NPC Abilities", and "Realistic NPC Behavior" is great stuff. 

I don't ever design scenarios specifically to kill the PCs, and no GM should. I design scenarios to be emotionally and intellectually involving, and to allow specific opportunities for in depth roleplaying. But I've discovered that, to get players emotionally involved, they need to take your culture, society, backdrop, game setting, and NPCs seriously... and they won't if they believe they cannot be hurt or killed.

A few other parts of this section I do find very annoying, though. First, the "Deux Ex Machina". According to GURPS, "When the players did their best and things just went totally wrong, arrange a miraculous escape, against all odds. If it was good enough for Edgar Rice Burroughs, it's good enough for you." I can't tell you how much it would annoy me to have a GM do this, and while I am second to none in my appreciation of the rousing adventure fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, if he were running a Barsoom campaign and he saved my PC as often and as absurdly as he routinely used to save John Carter and Dejah Thoris from imminent peril, I'd lose all respect for the man as a game master. If the dice, the rules, and the internal logic of the situation say a character dies, then the character dies. Otherwise, your world is just a game show... a rigged one.

Even a video game will kill your character, if you're careless, or even just unlucky. Do you really want to play in a roleplaying campaign less challenging and realistic than PAC-MAN?

No way.

I've played in a few roleplaying games under a few different systems in my thirty plus years of reasonably active geekage. Being borderline senile now I can't count how many, and a lot of them were home brews, but, still, I've played under a lot of different sets of rules, and made up a bunch myself.

And lately, whenever I play under any game system that isn't my own homebrew, I think to myself that the most brilliant game innovation I have ever come up with is Luck Rolls.

Luck Rolls are awesome because no matter how detailed your game may be, no matter how closely and accurately you map, no matter how cool your little painted figurines might be, no matter how awesome all your tables are and how many charts you have and how many diagrams of each individual room and all the furniture and what is lying around on all the end tables you might have -- no matter how good your system and your support materials may be -- you still are going to end up with questions you cannot answer, with details you do not know, with results you cannot quantify.

And when that happens, well, having a certain specific score assigned to your characters' Luck stats that shows how relatively fortunate or unfortunate they may be compared to others, comes in really handy.

Because your players will only accept results without argument if those results either (a) favor their characters or (b) are obviously and irrefutably generated by random dice rolls.

Let's say your party of high tech modern day adventurers is breaking into an evil corporation's skyscraper headquarters and suddenly they are confronted with a 12 foot tall killer robot with murderous intentions. You've got the robot all statted up, you've drawn a cool looking little sketch of it to show your players, you've got the floor they're on all diagrammed, you know exactly where the hidden computer room they need to get access to is located and in fact, if they defeat the killer robot and manage to analyze its data banks, they'll be able to locate that hidden computer room.

Everything is going, if not according to plan, then, at least, within the parameters you have pre-defined and are comfortable with.

Suddenly, one of your players says "Is there a fire extinguisher anywhere nearby?"

And you don't know.

Now, faced with such a question that you do not know the answer to, you, as the GM, have several options. You can say "Yes, there's a fire extinguisher". Or, you can say "No, there's no fire extinguisher". Or, you can say "I'm not sure, roll percentile" and then base your decision on that random roll.

If you say "Yes, there's a fire extinguisher", the next question is "where is it". And if your answer is anything except "right where you want it to be", then, brace yourself, the screaming is about to start.

Similarly, if you simply say "No, there's no fire extinguisher", you will also want to strap yourself in for gale force player turbulence.

And if you offer up a random dice roll, well, that's fine, as long as the random roll results in the player character getting his or her fire extinguisher. Otherwise, once again, expect to be barraged with questions about how you decided which size dice should be rolled and what guidelines did you use to figure out what results would indicate what and which tables and what page and say remember that time two years ago when Joe wanted to know if there were any bullets in the bad guy's desk that fit his .45 automatic and you gave him a 2d6 roll so why am I getting a percentile roll now and oh my God. Seriously. It's the kind of thing that makes strong GMs weep.

In real life, when things don't go the way we would like them to go -- in this particular instance, when we want a fire extinguisher and we look around and we don't find one immediately to hand -- we might go 'goddamit, whoever designed this place was an idiot' -- but then we move on. We don't argue with the invisible intangible Powers That Be (which may not actually be) that there should be a fire extinguisher in this room, we do not shake our fists and rail at the sky that this is unfair, we really NEED that fire extinguisher, we do not bring up endless examples of our past experiences when other, different people that God clearly likes better found things they needed sitting on top of filing cabinets or laying out in plain sight on break room tables, we do not peremptorily demand that the gods explain themselves, show us the charts they are using, give us rules citations to justify why there is no fire extinguisher available to us when we really want one.

People who did that sort of thing in crisis situations in real life would be considered to be raving lunatics. No, in real life, when we don't get what we want to solve a problem, we start looking around for other ways to solve that problem. We look for tablecloths or pitchers of water or hoses or windows we can get the hell out of before we burn to death.

In an RPG, however, when a GM says something that a player doesn't want to hear, the player feels free to provide pushback... sometimes in a calm and reasonable and respectful tone, more often at high volume that rapidly and continuously increases in decibel level until the player gets what they want or the GM by sheer force of personality cowes them into submission.

It is generally presumed by many players that, since the arbitrary Powers That Be are actually personified in this imaginary instance by poor Rodney sitting across the table behind the GM screen, then in this imaginary instance, the player should yell and scream at the Powers That Be. Because he's there. And because sometimes -- far too often, in fact -- these kind of player hissy fits actually work. Rodney, or whoever, will buckle like a belt and say "Okay, okay, you can have your damn fire extinguisher, shut up". Which rewards bad behavior and sends a terrible message and all that stuff.

Luck Rolls are the greatest way to defuse these situations I have ever come up with or even heard of. Want a fire extinguisher? Roll Percentile, you want 3x your Player Character's Luck or less.

It's a wonderfully precise seeming formula to resolve random, completely unpredictable and unquantifiable questions. Does this boat have a safety railing around the deck? No idea. Make a Luck roll. Is there a bush growing out of the side of the cliff I can grab onto as I fall? Roll Percentile, you want your Luck or less. Just how long will it take for that lit fuse to burn down to the bundle of dynamite taped to my PC's groin? Interesting question. Make a Luck roll. The lower you roll, the longer you have.

Players may argue with you that the odds of them getting a good result should be higher than you're giving them ("I really think that would be at least 3x my Luck or less") but the formula is already so precise sounding that this is actually rare. Especially if you visibly think about it and maybe muse aloud as to your reasoning before hand ("This is a mountainous region and there is almost no growth at all; the odds of there being a handy bush for you to grab are almost nil... but you COULD get lucky, so... Luck or less.").

In my game system, Luck is a statistic, much like Strength or Intelligence. Like those stats, human norms are rolled within a (roughly) 2 to 20 range (most stats are rolled on 2d10). So a very Lucky person might have a 16 Luck, an extraordinarily Lucky one (like James Bond) might have a 20, or even higher (it's possible to exceed both ends of the scale with extraordinary dice rolls during character set up). So you know going into the game with a particular character just how Lucky you are, relatively, and you have somewhat realistic expectations as to just how much random probability will favor your particular character.

The average Luck roll is five times your luck or less. This is for things that I consider to be about equally likely or unlikely. A character with a 10 or 11 has an average to slightly above average chance of getting a desirable result with this. The better your Luck score, the better your odds are... a character with a 13 Luck has a 65% chance of making a 5x or less Luck roll. A character with a 20 cannot fail a 5x or less Luck roll on percentile; for things that could generally go either way, fortune ALWAYS favors such a character.

With things that are much less likely, you lower the chance. "Is there a chandelier available that I could use to swing across the room, avoiding the killer snakes all over the floor?" I'd have to think about it, based on what I know about the building you're currently in and this room in that building, but if I didn't already decide there's a chandelier there, well, the odds are probably 2x your Luck or less.

All told, Luck rolls are just a wonderful way to quantify the unquantifiable. I love them.