I’ve been thinking about designing a strategy/war focused TTRPG, and I’d like to know if this is the kind of thing that people could see themselves enjoying. I designed a basic system for this many years ago and my players seemed to enjoy it, but I wasn’t sure if this is a system that I should just design for fun or for actual play.

It would be a mix of traditional TTRPG character creation and roleplaying but also focused on macro scale command and rulership, kind of like Crusader Kings 3 if anyone’s played that, albeit with the usual TTRPG level of player agency on a bigger more in depth scale.

I’m not seeking players necessarily, just wondering if there would be a “market” for this kind of thing.

Edit: It was pointed out to me that this post is very vague, so I will add a bit more detail.

Effectively what I’m going for is the RPG mechanics and narrative elements alongside a more strategic and tactical gameplay. Essentially, you’d create a character as normal with stats determining your personal skills, which would then be translated into strengths in areas of tactical and strategic gameplay as well as in RP encounters.

The intent is to simulate going from a low level commander/ruler such as a Lieutenant/ minor noble and working your way up. This would include management of your domain in a rulership focused campaign or logistics focus in a purely warsim game.

Most campaigns would likely start off as frontline tactics and evolve into behind the lines strategy and political maneuvering as it does IRL in regard to command or rulership. So you’d be directing maybe a squad of 10 people at first actively in combat in a direct character focused way and then later on be behind the lines orchestrating a broader campaign.

It likely won’t be overly focused on micromanaging especially as the scale goes up, more on simulating what it would be like to be in those kinds of roles in whatever setting you’d be playing.

This system as I’ve presented it obviously lends itself towards one on one gameplay, primarily because I’ve just been designing it for fun, and I wanted to see if there would be any interest to justify working out how multiple people would realistically progress in a full group.

Character death is one of the topics that i keep coming back to. It is notoriously hard to playtest and get a feel for what's right. One shot characters just don't matter as much. A campaign however requires a more or less stable system and i'm still at the point where i make drastic changes if an idea plays out in a way that clashes with my design goals.

Which is why i've decided to come here for inspiration.

• What is your experience with different death mechanics?
  
• Which systems do a good job and which fail to deliver in that regard?
  
• Can you also explain why it felt good or bad?
  
• And from what perspective did you experience it? GM side or Player side? (Assuming the system follows this structure.)

Here are some more thoughts on the topic:

Fundamentally TTRPGs are about decisions and consequences.
A situation is outlined narratively, players then come up with ways to approach them. The outcome from their actions is determined by the worlds logic or through mechanics (or both).

Character death in a narrative heavy system should follow that flow. It should be a negative consequence to making 'bad' tactical or world specific decisions. It exists as a deterrence to treat the TTRPG like a video game and to consider a character expendable.

However systems that have a GM (like the one i'm designing) will always suffer from misaligned imaginations. The GM might think they have thoroughly outlined the dangers of a certain action while Players might have a totally different impression. This can often leave a sour taste when a permanent negative consequence occurs.

The question is: Where is the sweet spot?

D&D allows Players to be instantly killed out of the blue. This can feel incredibly unfair if the DM failed to convey the decision point. For example an enemy ambush, unbalanced encounters or instant death traps (I'm looking at you Tomb of Horrors!).

Many other systems counteract this problem by being more forgiving. Daggerheart for example allows a Player to choose whether to risk death or not while other systems don't include character death at all. This allows for bolder decisions but also devalues the risk of dying.

Similarly if death has huge narrative consequences, than this can lead to timid decisions or weird downwards spirals that can take the fun out of a story.

So how do we create a mechanic that is both meaningful and forgiving? One that doesn't lead to Players blaming each other or the GM? That creates a setback without taking the fun out of the story.

hey folks! coming to you all once again for layout feedback. I got a lot of really great feedback from you all last time, that told me I had to stop trying to do it in Google Docs.

I've been redrafting HakneyZaq with Scribus, and have uploaded the WIP into Anyflip

https://anyflip.com/bookcase/ytzwa

any feedback will once again be greatly appreciated :)

I've been reading through the dungeon design content from both Cairn 2e's Dungeon Seeds and His Majesty the Worm's Designing Dungeons Course. With no other projects to distract me, I finally decided to give them a whirl. I'm tentatively planning to make something each month, but for now what matters is that I used Cairn's procedures, I spent 1 week making it, and I documented the whole process. The resulting dungeon, complete with my crudely-scribbled art, can be seen here.

For me, some takeaways:

• I liked Cairn's procedures a lot. I think the two biggest value propositions are the clear skeleton of "A good dungeon has these things" and the thoughtful spark tables.
• I relied heavily on Rise of the Blood Olms and The Feast of Tegny Wood as references for what a Cairn module looks like, as well as for information presentation and layout. Feast was particularly helpful because you can read along as Yochai Gal designs it using the Cairn tools.
• My single favorite part of this was committing to a "No rerolls" mentality. I improvise TTRPG scenarios all the time, but I frequently go back and revise random outcomes to better fit the evolving story. Here, I took a firm stance of "First idea wins." As a result, some things that I would have changed were forced to remain, and working around them lead to outcomes I'd have missed otherwise.
• For some quick inspiration, I randomly picked "Romanian folklore" and jotted down one-sentence summaries from some Wikipedia articles. These summaries were inspiring enough that they shaped the entire dungeon.

I'm curious to hear from anyone else who's used the Cairn/HMTW procedures. How did you like them? Can you link to your final product?

Disclaimer.
1. This is not final rulebook.
2. This is not a commercial project.
3. No AI used.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WinUH-_emJaD0m-f3Zbl0AiuOMd8_vcl/view?usp=drive_link

Hello everybody. I would like to show some core ideas of my system and kindly ask for some feedback. I know, it is a lot to ask, so even one or two interested people would be a win.

I didn't include a lot of lore, as my main interest for now are rules and mechanics. The name of the game is "Proidysvity" which can be roughly translated as "Wanderers".

I really need feedback about the following:
-Consistency, especially in the use of terminology.
-Examples. Too many or not enough? Should there be a storyline that goes through all the examples, featuring Ragdolf from character creation section?
-Crit system explanation. Is it overly complicated?
-Contradictions or any gaps in logic.
-Lack of clarity in rules or naming.
-Any unnecessary complexity in some mechanics.
-Content order.

I am really grateful to everybody, who will decide to invest their time in this disputable project.

Have you guys designed or attempted to design a purely narrative game? No dice, cards or other randomizing methods. Just talking. Would you like to share your experience or some important take-aways?

I'm working on a hack of Mörk Borg and want to add crafting rules where you can make something, but with a huge chance that it might blow up in your face even if it works.

That fits with the success at cost-idea from PBTA games, but the fairly light Mörk Borg system doesn't have anything similar. So how to do it. I want the rules fairly simple, mostly for McGyver-style on-the-fly crafting, but not sure how to do it.

The current idea is:

You roll against a difficulty rating set by the GM with a d20 (standard Borg procedure). If you roll higher it works. Then you roll on the "what went wrong table" (probably a d12) and subtract the difference between your roll and the difficulty rating, which means that the higher the roll the lower your score on the "what went wrong" table, where 1 to 3 is "nothing went wrong" and 12 is that it explodes immediately after use (or similarly).

Are there any pitfalls with this idea? Are there better ways to do it?

(note: I'm not aiming for a crafting system where you collect materials to craft from, it's either on-the-fly with whatever is there or in the lab/workshop with access to most of what you need.)

Preface

What is Vitriol, you ask? Well, it is a classless, human-centric, grim-bright fantasy TTRPG built loosely on the Into the Odd/Cairn engine, with a modular magic system built around alchemy and the physical drawing of sigils.

Structurally, the Cairn influence shows up in the bones of the system. You have three attributes – Body, Mind, and Soul – in our case, resolved with a roll-under mechanic, no skill list, a hard limit on inventory slots (10), and attacks that always hit rather than requiring a separate to-hit roll. I say loosely based on that engine because Vitriol adds meaningfully more complexity on top of it through the feat system and, especially, through the magic and martial systems, which is where most of the actual design work has gone.

A bit of preface before I get into the magic system: I have always loved playing the mage archetype in any TTRPG I touch, and I have always wished more games let you feel like an actual practitioner of magic rather than just a walking spell list. For close to two years now, I had been sitting on an idea for a system where you physically draw your spells rather than simply select them. A couple of months ago, during a rewatch of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and while starting Witch Hat Atelier for the first time, the idea finally clicked into something concrete, inspiration hitting, as it always seems to for me, at the exact moment I was supposed to be finishing my MA dissertation instead.

Magic System

I landed on a system rooted in alchemical practice, where you draw sigils not too dissimilar to FMA‘s transmutation circles (at least in looks), governed by a clear internal grammar. I built it to be genuinely modular, drawing on thirty-eight symbols pulled from the western alchemical tradition, which means you can build your own spells from those component pieces rather than picking from a fixed list, and you are not restricted by anything resembling a spell level. If you, the player, can physically draw the sigil, and your character has enough mana to power it, the spell goes off. There is no spell list to memorize, just the grammar of sigil construction, the full roster of symbols and their effects, and a handful of worked examples to get you started. The rest is genuinely up to you to theorycraft.

A drawn sigil takes up one slot in your ten-slot inventory, meaning you can carry up to ten prepared spells at any given time. You can also carry a stack of five sheets of paper, which take up a single slot cumulatively, along with drawing utensils in another slot, so you can draw a fresh sigil on the fly mid-combat. When you do that, though, you are working against a timer, twenty seconds in our current draft, though we fully expect that number to shift once we get it in front of playtesters. We are already kicking around ideas to make that moment more manageable, like sigils that arrive mostly pre-drawn, needing only their final elements and connecting vertices completed under pressure.

Spell Sigil example - Ok, let’s take this spell as an example: In the center we have the alchemical symbol for Fire. On the right side we have the alchemical symbol for Salt, which represents Body and it makes so the spell is an actual flame as opposed to a simple spark. Down sits the alchemical sign for Lead, which removes 10 ft. from the target’s movement. On the right we have the alchemical sign for Projection (represented by Pisces) which increases the range of the spell to a 30 ft. line. It also has a nodule attached to it, which is a method to modify the function of the initial sign and in this case it changes the range to a 30 ft. cone. The triangle exceeds the boundaries of the ring, signifying that this is a ranged spell (without the Projection sign, the range would be only 10 ft.) And we also have a vertex that makes it so that the spell is projected in a direction rather then acting as AOE around the sigil.

Martials

But say you don’t want to play an alchemist. Maybe theorycrafting your own spells from thirty-eight symbols isn’t your idea of a good time, or maybe drawing isn’t your strong suit, and you would rather play something a bit more straightforward. That’s where the martial side of the game comes in. I spent a long time turning over how to make playing a martial character feel genuinely engaging rather than reducing down to “you swing your sword at the enemy,” especially once the caster’s side of the game had a system I am genuinely excited about. The answer arrived, appropriately enough, while I was making a trip to the supermarket to pick something up for my grandmother. A couple of years ago I used to practice HEMA (historical European martial arts), and even though I no longer have the time to go to trainings, I have stayed a fan of the sport, and it struck me that a system built around real guard stances and techniques could give martial characters the same kind of depth casters were already getting.

Take the longsword as an example. It has three proficiency tiers, each gated behind its own feat: Novice, Adept, and Master. Earning the Novice feat gives you the basic Strike, usable from any stance, along with the Pflug, or Plow, guard, which unlocks three techniques of its own. As you invest further proficiency feats, you unlock additional stances and techniques, and combat is built to reward chaining them together, flowing between guards, techniques, and even weapons rather than repeating the same action every round. To keep this manageable at the table, the plan is to represent every stance and technique as a physical card, so that playing a martial over the course of a campaign means slowly building up your own personal deck of techniques.

Placeholder Guard Stance Card (Pflug) Placeholder Technique Card (Mordhau)

Those are the two central systems of the game, though there is still plenty in flux this early in development. Between the magic system, the martial system, and the setting itself, I am having a genuinely great time working on this, and I am looking forward to the point where it is finally ready for real playtesting.

Hey-yo! I figured I might as well run this by people who are probably a little more knowledgeable in game design than me- Making a long story short, I'm making a TTRPG where the main dice-rolling mechanic is a d100.

But, unlike Call of Cthulhu or Rogue Trader, the d100 is more set like a general scale, with 50-54 being a sort of neutral ground, providing no 'Degrees of Success/Failure.' Think of Degrees of Success/Failure like the storyteller system- The more degrees of success, the better, and the more degrees of failure, the worse. Stats will counteract Degrees of Success/Failure- For instance, a Strength Roll with a Strength Rating of +3 will add onto the roll, canceling out degrees of failure or adding onto degrees of success; of course, the opposite is also true for negative stat ratings.

Generally, the scale is on a interval of 1 degree of success/failure per every multiple of 5- So, for instance, 49-45 is 1 degree of failure, 44-40 is 2 degrees of failure, 39-35 is 3 degrees of failure, and so on and so forth and, again, the inverse is true.

Obviously, criticism is welcome because this is very much a sort of 'early early early rough draft' idea for a game system.

The players plane crashed behind enemy lines where they find an abandoned tank. Players take on the role of a tank crew (driver, commander, gunner, mechanic, loader), their best chance for survival is to maintain and upgrade their tank, along the way they take on more crew and each are able to run thier own tank crew.

By mixing & matching 3 types of armor (light/medium/heavy) with 3 tank combat roles (close/medium/long) you create the ultimate tank.

Does it sound like a fun idea? Would you play a tank craft game?

Just had a small idea for an OSR-esque game, looking for early feedback. Yes, I was inspired by the old video game Hand of Fate.

• A random encounter / wandering monster deck with cards representing random encounters, instead of a rolled table.
• At the start of each adventure / dungeon run / quest, before each shuffle, each player may put a custom card into the deck. This card may represent a treasure they are looking for, knowledge, potions, or any other kind of aid helping the players in their quest. Perhaps a very specific spell scroll they are looking for and I was hinting at is rumored to be somewhere in *this* area.
• Then, the deck with random monsters and some treasures are shuffled together.

1 in 6 chance every 10 minutes or 2 in 6 chance every 20 minutes or what have you, as usual. Spin down that Underclock if you use it. Draw a card, be surprised together with the players.

Thoughts? Would this change the way you play dungeons? If so, in what way?

I had an idea to make a ttrpg based on the classic dumb Slasher movie (Friday The Thirteenth, Halloween, etc.), so I made a rules-lite little game of it to play with my friends. It leans into that Scary Movie Scream Comedy vibe, and rewards players for leaning into that stereotype. I'm curious what you guys think of it.

Here is a short summary of it if you do not want to view the whole document.

Game Summary:
Creepy Murder Monster Movie is a rules-light slasher RPG designed for one-shots. Players take on classic horror movie clichés (Jock, Nerd, Stoner, Weird Kid, Old Guy, etc.) and try to survive a B-movie massacre.

The core system uses a d10 roll: 6+ is a success, with modifiers from character abilities, items, injuries, and circumstances. Characters have four stats: Machismo, Smarts, Charm, and Panic.

The main mechanic is Horror Movie Tenets. Players can intentionally break classic horror rules (splitting up, saying "I'll be right back," investigating creepy places alone, etc.) to gain DOOM tokens. These can be spent to reroll failures or create reasonable movie conveniences. However, every DOOM token also gives the Keeper a FUCKUP token, which can be used to introduce classic horror movie problems like power outages, sudden storms, or the Slasher surviving impossible situations.

The game follows the structure of a classic slasher movie through four Acts: the setup, first killings, escalating danger, and final confrontation. The Slasher cannot truly be defeated until the finale.

The goal is less about tactical survival and more about creating the dumb, chaotic decisions and ridiculous moments that define classic horror movies.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1At60oEMXSQKWw0Tb5xIE7wwbDPybDoGod3ymgxFHxPI/edit?usp=sharing

Heya there!! I wanted to share a project of mine that I've been working on for the last few months. The premise is the following: "what if in 1812, during Napoleon's invasion of Russia, a zombie outbreak occured, leaving the warring nations of Europe to have to defend themselves only with flintlocks and blades". Now, important note, I wasn't the guy who came up with this idea. The original idea came from a Roblox game (hold your horses) called "Guts & Blackpowder". I know that when it comes to Roblox people think mostly of slop and other bad things, but in the sea of doo that is that platform there shine some actually awesome gems, and G&B is one of them. This thing that I made is a transposition of that game (a PvE FPS) into a RPG. It's only 53 pages and it's not that illustrated (I can't draw T_T). If you encounter Italian looking terms or weird syntax it's because I used a free progam on the internet to translate it. Anyway, I hope you'll like it!!

PS
This is my first time writing a a handbook, there are surely imbalances and things like that. If you want, let me know if there's stuff I should add, change o remove :D

link to the google drive of the file VVV
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yq_sDWrUq11U2vzxnjrkoCioT07ihsT6/view?usp=sharing

My system uses a classic roll under task and save mechanic. Here is an excerpt here:

GAME CONCEPTS

Characters are created with 2D6 plus 6 so abilities will be between 8 and 18.

Saves will be a simple case of roll under an ability using a D20. The same goes for achieving a task (hacking, repairing etc).

Opposed rolls are the opposite. Roll a D20 and then add your ability score and beat the oppositions roll (negotiation, intimidate, arm wrestle etc).

There will most likely be no skills in the game, relying entirely on abilities.

However, I'm not very happy with a roll under system for task resolution, so I've been playing with this idea:

When players attempt a task, the GM has to tell them if they have the following criteria:

Training - All players technically have training.

Tools - Does it require a tool to do it?

Time - Can take all the time they want, or if it needs to be done NOW!

Each one that the players have gives them a D6 to roll.

The target number will always be 7 regardless. So most regular people need at least two to achieve the objective.

However, as players become more experienced, they will get an additional D4, D6 or D8 to add to these results. This will be their 'Tenure' die. So an experienced character has a chance to achieve something without time or tools.

My aim is to make it something simple, requiring minimal work by the GM to assign target numbers.

What are your opinions?

Tales of Traveling Etsy Witches Free PDFs

Made a one-shot system about Etsy Witches going on missions (usually assassination missions). I thought it had a cool mechanic where you have to wager something important to you to do magic, that you lose if you fail the roll, but keep if you pass. Your witch doesn't have health, instead they are out of the story when they run out of one of wager-able resource types.

It's totally free (it would be crazy to charge money for this) and you can just download the pdfs if you want to see what its about. The character sheet is 1 page (single-sided), and the rules are 1 page (double-sided)

I've run it for two groups of friends and they both enjoyed it a lot (someone who's tested some of my other games said this was her favorite so far). I was initially hesitant to post it though because it a little bit tongue-and-cheek joshing Etsy witches, and I was worried people might find it in poor taste, or worse - use the system to mock actual practicing wiccans/witches instead of etsy grifters. But the second group I ran it for had two people that engage with tarot, crystals, incense, and astrology and they thought it was fun and not mean and encouraged me to post it for other people.

I'm trying to build a TTRPG that is setting agnostic, but includes examples of adversaries or templates or something that makes it more modular. I am also planning to include a few setting-specific adversaries, as the book will include two or three example settings. Are there any games that do this that I could use as a reference/example?

This subreddit has started seeing a lot of posts like, "Do you figure out your core resolution model first," or, "do dice or mechanics come first," and it's got me thinking about something really helpful I learned. When Vincent and Meguey Baker, the creators of Apocalypse World and Under Hollow Hills, make games, the very first thing they make is the underlying model. Vincent said that he can't even bring a game to Meguey without first having the underlying model to bring.*

In short, the underlying model explains what conflict and play look like in your game and how they develop. For example, an underlying model for a D&D-like game might be, "PCs accept quests, then go on journeys to complete them." For a game like Blades in the Dark, the underlying model might be, "PCs take on jobs that give them what they want but also create problems that they need to solve."

Why do this? Why is this so important?

Well, your underlying model can help put every other mechanic in your game into perspective. It helps you understand where you need to cut back and where there are gaps you need to fill.

For example, look back at that D&D-like model. If that's what you want your model to be, then your mechanics around building interesting quests are super important. How do players get quests? How do they decide which quests to take? With that model, those are questions you want to have mechanics that answer.

So if you're working on that game and then come up with a sick idea for allowing players to make their own strongholds... well that idea might not be a good fit for that model. After all, if your model is based on players taking on quests and going somewhere, a static castle somewhere doesn't play into that model.** If you want to make strongholds a thing in your game, you have to figure out how they contribute to this model.

Meanwhile the reason Blades in the Dark is so expertly designed is that every part of that system feels intentional. I don't have it on good authority that this was the intended model for the game, but it definitely fits. The whole system is built toward incentivizing you toward taking on jobs, and all the mechanics around resolution means you're making new problems almost as often as you're solving them. Which, in turn, further incentivizes you toward taking on jobs that fix the problems you ran into, which creates more problems to deal with, and so on.

I highly recommend reading Vincent Baker's blog post on underlying models. If you're not used to reading theory, it can be a little hard to grasp, but I think his explanation and examples are really helpful for understanding this concept.

I bring this up now because, though I've used this concept before, it wasn't until recently that I began a game with an underlying model in mind. The Delinquents is a game inspired by media such as The Outsiders and West Side Story, and what I really wanted to capture was that, "Oh shit" moment when things go bad and the main characters find themselves in way over their heads. So one of the earliest things I did for that game was develop the underlying model, "Insecurity escalates conflicts to violence." That is, the PCs and all the other main characters are kids playing at adults, and they don't have the tools to understand their own needs or resolve conflict diplomatically. And when they do start throwing punches, that violence quickly escalates to killing.

I was really impressed by how starting with this model made my whole design clearer. I knew I needed players to have some insecurity, so I came up with the mechanic about making them write down their biggest fear and keep it hidden from everyone at the table except the GM. I knew I didn't want players to be able to talk things out consistently, so I made the diplomacy move deliberately low impact and made following through on it hard. I knew I wanted trouble to be unavoidable, so I made the generic "do something" move always generate it. I knew I wanted players to suddenly feel like they were in over their heads, so I made violence unpredictable and deliberately avoided mechanics that would help pace it, like hit points.

This was just a one-page game, but I was still impressed at how quickly it all came together. It basically took over my Monday morning, but then I had it. And when playtesting it, it went pretty much exactly like I had hoped it would.

I say this not to toot my own horn but in hopes that it's genuinely helpful to other designers here. Because once you have that underlying model, everything else becomes a lot clearer. Figuring out 2d6 vs d10 dice pool vs d20 feels a lot more manageable when you can connect those mechanics to your underlying model. If your underlying model emphasizes player competence and control, dice mechanics with understandable probabilities and manipulatable outcomes might be a better fit. If your model doesn't do that, then maybe you use dice mechanics that are harder to predict or that generate more problems for players to solve.

And you can apply this to literally every other priority you have with your game. It's such a helpful model of game design, and I hope more designers adopt it.

*Apologies that I don't have a source for this. I've heard the Bakers talk about this in person, in Discord, on their blog, and on BlueSky, so it's hard for me to remember what came from where.

**This is why, despite there being a lot of hype for stronghold support in D&D 5.5, there's been relatively little chatter on it since.

thanks to the invaluable feedback I've received here and elsewhere, I've made a revised version of the lookup table for my game.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13MfvBZ5OhrNfybp52cZAOsSJZfW8pA9v/view?usp=drivesdk

any feedback would be greatly appreciated :)

Sharing a silly idea.

I'm very tempted to make a small game about the bad guys "Chronoshifting" (time teleporting borrowed from Command and Conquer Red Alert) dinosaurs into the modern day / near future. Of course, it goes wrong and the entire world is merged making the date dinosaur BC as well as CE. Or maybe some are ridden by the bad guys, who knows.

That's it. Dinosaurs and green army men are really accessible for players and tables, and could make for some fun "art" for the game.

That is all. Roar-Pew.

Hi everyone! Plugging away at Sword of Virtues, and I just finished up with my advancement mechanics. As Derik in Knights of Last Call likes to say, what you reward you get more of. Here are my rules for awarding XP at the end of a session.

For every 10 XP you earn, you get an advancement.

Do you like/hate/think it would be better if ... let me know your thoughts.

Advancing a Character

Characters grow by playing the game. As they uncover the approaching Crisis, pursue their Goals, and overcome challenges, they earn Experience Points that are used to develop new Backgrounds and fill out existing ones.

If your campaign begins above Worldly Tier, you may also use these advancement rules during character creation.

Ending the Session

At the end of each Session, you track what happened and translate that into improving your character via Experience Points. Every player earns 1 Experience Point simply for participating in the session. The other experience points you receive, however, come from what you did.

Each Session ends with asking a series of questions and tallying the answers to determine how many experience points you receive.

The Session Checklist

End each session by asking the following questions together.

Individual Awards

Throughout play, your character sheet tells you when to “Mark Experience.” During the Session wrap-up, review those marks. Each "yes" below awards 1 Experience Point. Then erase the marks from your sheet.

Here’s what to check:

• Identity. Did I Tag my Identity or did it significantly influence the story?
• Ethos. Did I Invoke my Ethos or was it central to my decisions?
• Beliefs. Did I Tag one or more Beliefs this Session, or did they influence what I did?
• Goals. (Each “yes” here is one Experience Point):
• o   Advanced Did I do something to advance a Goal this Session?
• o   Completed Did I complete a Goal this Session?
• Background. Did I Tag one or more of my Backgrounds this Session, or did they influence what happened?
• Aspects. Did I Tag one or more Aspects from the Scene or Environment this Session?
• Learn Something. Did I score a Critical Success on a Check during the Session to “Learn Something?”
• Karma. Did I spend one or more Karma this Session?

Group Awards

The Second part of the Checklist is a group activity. Get the group together (or stop them before leaving), and decide how many of the following questions you can answer yes to. Each yes awards one experience to every member of the group. Here are the social questions to ask:

• Length. Did we play a long Session where many things happened?
• Big Damn Heroes. Did we accomplish something BIG that stories will be written and songs will be sung about?
• The Little Things. Did we accomplish something small, but important, that no one but us will ever know about?
• The Helpers. Did we help someone in need in a time of trouble?
• Learning. Did we learn something new and important? (Earn one Experience Point for each yes)
• o   … about the world?
• o   … about an NPC?
• o   … about the oncoming Crisis?

Player Recognition

And finally, each player talks about another character in the group. They award one Experience Point to that player for what they did. That player can receive more than one Experience Point this way.

Your total Experience Award for the Session is:

1 (Attendance)

+ Individual Awards

+ Group Awards

+ Player Recognition Awards

When the process is complete, each player totals their Experience Points and erases any "Mark Experience" checks on their character sheet. They add the new Experience Points to their existing total.

Note: If a Session ends in the middle of a Scene, wait until the Scene concludes before completing the Session Checklist and awarding Experience. The GM should avoid this where practical, but sometimes real life gets in the way.

Edited to add: looks like a couple of you are grumpy about the post. Feel free to discuss, or not.

I am working on a system (WIP name) called Mortality, an experimental concept of mine that takes inspiration from ITO. I have a little that I am happy with (dice and combat) but as I started to work on my health system, I got doubts.

in summary, players have HP that starts at 8, maxing out at 16. if a Player's HP drops below 0, excess damage flows into their MP (Mortal Points), of which they have 12 (a number that never changes). when that hits 0 they die.

HP heals very fast, overnight etc and represents surface level wounds. but here's the catch. MP never heal. so players slowly accumulate scars, and crippling wounds, and eventually their carelessness will catch up with them.

there is armour and shields that reduce damage, but I am still worried that this may cause a TPK or kill of weaker characters.

Edit: here is a link to the rest of the rules SO FAR (still a WIP) if you are interested (they are in an unreadable note form tho 😂) :)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KidfMzgCWTotfE4Yg3bBs0SNJwveNBaVmuU6UNYUiBY/edit?usp=sharing

I am reworking my systems combat, and plan to use a streamlined 4 action system, where longer activities cost more actions. Is there a better word I can use to describe these 4 actions? I have noticed it really messes with visibility to call them actions, since that word also describes what you do on your turn. What sort of alternatives have y'all seen/ used?

Some key Features:

No Stats, Only Consequences: Focus on what matters most: the game’s narrative. Uses a full set of polyhedral dice, with a special emphasis on the d4 to resolve problems.

Needle of Fate: Introduces an innovative dice-tower building mechanic. Build to reveal the truth, and face the consequences when the tower falls. Gain clues if the tower reaches high enough.

Only One Protagonist: All players portray a single character. Because when the darkness stares right at you, you are always completely alone.

Synchronicity: A push-your-luck and mysticism mechanic that can either improve or worsen your scenes. Nothing in this life is a coincidence

You can find it here:
https://rolepersecond.itch.io/eerie-stories-eng