• 13 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 21st, 2023
  • tissek@ttrpg.networktorpg@ttrpg.network•What do you use as map-making software?English
    2·
    2 months ago

    Inkscape enjoyer here. The vector based tech makes it not that limited to my skill at drawing but rather how I can manipulate the vectors and points. Make things thinner or wider, change a curvature etc. And nothing is set in stone. I’m using it for everything. World maps, region maps, settlements, dungeons. You name it. For dungeons (and inside locations) I gathered all my most used assets to save time.

    Some examples

  • tissek@ttrpg.networktorpg@ttrpg.network•Your most used RPG books and accessories?
    3·
    4 months ago

    Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn series. Delve I regularly use for setting up point crawls. Ironsworn/Starforged/Sundered Isles have great collections of random tables, I use the book thematically most fitting for the situation at hand. The core tables of Action, Theme, Descriptor and Focus all get heavy use.

    Kevin Crawford’s [SOMETHING] Without Number series have awesome tables as well. These however get more use when I need more detail. Prep stuff. Again most thematic book is picked first but I do have used Cites (cyberpunk) for fantasy cities.

    When I want to create background for “medieval fantasy” characters I pick up Burning Wheel and burn something up. Through that I get a good selection of relevant skills to sue (for flavor)

    Anything related to cosmos and mythology I say HELLO! to my growing collection of Glorantha material. From cult books to magic tomes and Atlases.

  • tissek@ttrpg.networktorpg@ttrpg.network•How much combats in your game ?
    3·
    1 year ago

    Depends on the system. Classical fantasy adventuring? Most if not all sessions. Adventure and Sword&Sorcery? Sometimes, half perhaps. Character drama? Very seldom.

    I look at how the system spends its page budget and use that as a guideline. If there is a chapter for combat, one for harm and recovery and one for combat magic then the system wants me to focus on those parts. Also I look at how the players/characters are rewarded and try to have each session hit several of those criteria. So if the only (reliable, non gm-fiat) way to earn rewards if through combat then you bet your sweet ass there will combats each session.

  • tissek@ttrpg.networktorpg@ttrpg.network•How does your favourite game ease the GM job ?
    5·
    1 year ago

    Both my favorite systems makes my GMing job easier and they do it in the same way - they give the players responsibility though their character’s goals to drive the game forward. And they have explicit rewards helping in this matter.

    Ironsworn (a PbtA) is the more direct of these. The characters swears vows and once they are fulfilled they get XP. Starforged, the SciFi version, adds more ways to earn XP through Bonds and Exploration. But we’ll stay with the base Ironsworn. The vows are essentially quests but what makes them different from just any random quest is the mechanics surrounding them. First a tracker to measure vow completion is created, then as progress is made it is filled depending on vow difficulty. Now this sounds fairly standard except the only way to mark progress is through triggering moves, primarily the move “Reach a Milestone”. Since Ironsworn is a PbtA the moves are player facing, it is the player through their character’s actions that triggers them. Second awesome part is those trackers, each being ten segments long. They aren’t automatically completed when they are filled instead there is move “Fulfil your vow” that states

    When you achieve what you believe to be the fulfillment of your vow, roll the challenge dice and compare to your progress.

    That is when the player thinks their character is in a position to have completed their vow they make a roll and see what comes out of it. It lets the player decide if their little work is enough (not much progress marked, high change of complications) or if they should work harder on it. Awesome pacing tool. Ironsworn is also made for GM-less play which gives so may tools to the GM they can almost go on autopilot.

    Burning Wheel has an awesome feedback loop called the Artha Cycle. The very short of it is

    • Player states their character’s beliefs (goals)
    • Player have their character try to achieve their beliefs possibly spending Artha (a player-facing currency used to manipulate rolls) to increse chance for success
    • Character earns progress in tested skills slowly increasing their proficiency in them
    • At regular intervals (often end-of-session) the players earn more Artha for their character’s progression on beliefs
    • Player states their character’s beliefs (goals)

    And so it goes on and on. Often all I have to do as a GM is to keep track of the world and put obstacles in the way of the characters, as in challenge their beliefs. With players working the system I often not only get stated what their character’s goal is but also what the obstacle is. Then all I have to do is play the world.

  • tissek@ttrpg.networktorpg@ttrpg.network•Which character concepts are less cool to play than they seems ?
    3·
    1 year ago

    Another thing that makes Oracle / Seer / Diviner characters difficult to GM for is that you need to know things in advance, where the adventure leads to etc. As one whose GMing style leans heavily into Play To Find Out that sort of characters is kind of counter to it.

    That said it is highly dependent of what the player want out of such an archetype. If it is a flavour for how the character solves problems I’m all for that. Touching an item to get a vision/impression for something (adventure) related to it go ahead. That is not too different to other ways of investigating. But the player who wants those powers to get “quest markers” or to completely negate obstacles (“hurr durr I have foresight so I’ve seen the ambush”) gets hard noes from me.

    Also agreeing with @dumples@kbin.social, D&D 5e Divination wizards are very well made and the divination spells work well in those kind of worlds.

  • tissek@ttrpg.networktorpg@ttrpg.network•How was your 2023 RPG season?
    3·
    1 year ago

    Wrapped up a Torchbearer campaign about this time last year and now a long term player have taken up the mantle and is GMing some Burning Wheel.

    Did very little GM-ing. Just some sporadic Blades and a few sessions of Swords of the Serpentine. Like the core of Serpentine but they have added on too many auxiliary systems for me to enjoy it. It doesn’t really know what it want to be - light or complex.

    Gotten into OSR adventures. Have no liking to the systems but truly love the adventure designs. It is the openness of them that calls to me, an invitation “here is the situation go wild”. And they seem so plug-and-playable, and descriptions seldom last longer than a paragraph, and there are tables instead of words, and hooks are listed without fuzz. Am I smitten? Yes!

    As the year draws to a close I’m starting up my first campaign in my native Swedish - Drakar och Demoner. Will sound so incredibly geeky to do roleplaying in Swedish. Corny deluxe.