Taylor Lane Games

I've been studying and comparing travel rules between ttrpgs

It's really interesting how 99% of ttrpg travel rules are very directly descended from the rules of Outdoor Survival

Within the OSR and D&D, pointcrawls and what I would term "de-abstracted travel" are the only normal alternatives

Random shower thought: it's odd to turn based multi roll combat and NOT give players the ability to attack the AC, attack to-hit bonus, and etc of enemies + buff their own AC and to-hit

Which would seem to either imply a lot of teamwork or something like 4+dex mod actions per turn

what are the pros and cons of each system? I haven't read them

during the session, you don't have a story with beginning middle end. you have events that happen

in ttrpgs, story is what happens after the session is over, when you're remembering it and bringing order to it so you can tell it to other people (who generally do not care and wish you would talk about something else)

"what happens to the political economy of the valley after you kill the dragon in the mountain that overlooked it?" is obviously a way more interesting question to me than "what is the exact blow-by-blow of killing the dragon?"

so i write rules to answer the former, but not the latter

what ttrpg campaigns are y'all in right now? System and description?

Kill Clerics, Become Warlocks Ditch bland clerics. Make divine magic rare, pact‑bound, and dramatic—one miracle per god, high stakes if you fail. Turn clerics into warlocks.

@elmc.at what prompt did you use to write this

elmc.at/kill-clerics...

I can tell that it's chatGPT, but I'd be interested in knowing what prompt you used

I think that the easiest way to make any NPC or group of NPCs feel instantly knowlable and yet interesting is to know it by its archetype:

+ archetype
+ desire
+ unexpected element

You don't actually need anything else

(Credit to Joseph Manola for that last one)

I think that my mental model of Fighter as a class owes more to anime and superheroes than it does to western fantasy fiction. I suppose that that's sort of interesting?

the most common game design mistake in ttrpgs is not knowing what a session is supposed to look like

the most common failing as a player in a ttrpg is not knowing what to do next

these are two sides of the same problem

Please remember that confusing 600s Europe and 1400s Europe is the same time gap as now and 1225

Hey, would anyone like to read over the classes in my OSR game -- Triptych -- and tell me which ones they would and would not want to play, and why?

Okay so you're just a crazy person. This is because he wanted to burn a book? I have no clear idea who this person is or why I'm following them, but I'm definitely not listening to you.

i don't think that that paywalled article is about nazis and i don't see any connection between that person's account and nazism. while i hate naziism as much as anyone, you've proven absolutely nothing about anything.

That's not a kebab shop and that's not Turkey.

Lone Wolf Fists: Acid&Steel Introducing Hell and Robots to the world's foremost Punch Game

@budsrpgreview.bsky.social could you message me? I'd like to talk to you about my friend Joel Clark going on your show to talk about his kickstarter?

www.kickstarter.com/projects/lon...

this specific version, only

did you read the screenshots from the original post I made or did you not read the screenshots from the original post I made

tbh, i'm not sure that i like elves being playable at all

> Race-as-class reduces a given ancestry to a stereotype

No, the point of race-as-class is that (within that context) there is no way in which an elf or a dwarf can be treated as an analogy for any real-world ethnic group. Look at the two racial classes -- which real-world ethnic group are they?

Race and class separated, or race-as-class?

(examples of race-as-class provided. Race/class separation would just have Race --including human-- be sources of Advantage on some rolls)

P.S.: I really do not like this Elf class I wrote

I design stuff, sometimes OSR

No, but if you promise to write a review of it on itch, I'll give it to you for free

SNa-TLECS: System-Neutral and TurnLess Easy Combat System by Taylor Lane

I've written a bunch of them?

This one is system neutral

taylor-lane.itch.io/a-system-neu...

a drawing of a lock with a screwdriver in it ALT: a drawing of a lock with a screwdriver in it

imagine a RPG where you pick a lock by rolling vs LC for each picked tumbler, then damage to its LP, & then when you defeat that tumbler you move on to the latter tumblers but not before saving vs tumbler resetting

this is approximately how turn-based TTRPG combat feels, to me

generally, because the fiction is supposed to be neccessary for the RPG to be an RPG rather than just a G, you want something that looks like fictional cause --> mechanical effect --> mechanical cause --> fictional effect

as an example:

now, generally speaking, since you're building a game in which roleplaying is required, you don't ever want to make rules that look like case (4) -- there's no roleplaying required there

and you often don't want to make rules that look like case (3), because it's deterministic and boring

Generally, with rules, it's possible to imagine a few basic types (and say that everything else is a compound of those)

1) mechanical cause --> fictional effect

2) fictional cause --> mechanical effect

3) fictional cause --> fictional effect

4) mechanical effect --> mechanical cause