All of the entries posted on Failure Tolerated tagged rpgs| www.failuretolerated.com
All of the entries posted on Failure Tolerated tagged dnd| www.failuretolerated.com
The latest entries posted on Failure Tolerated| www.failuretolerated.com
One of the biggest complaints new creators have is that they hate dealing with stretch goals. it’s a common customer complaint too, because if you do stretch goals wrong (you are), you’ll overburden your project and put yourself behind schedule, over budget, and cut your profits to nothing. So why have stretch goals? What’s the point? You’re Doing Stretch Goals Wrong Stretch goals are not“cool stuff we can do if we get extra money.” They’re not bonus content. They are a key part...| Failure Tolerated
When it comes to encounter design in horror games I think about this image a lot. Silent Hill 3 Horror games require really intentional environmental encounters in order to build tension. If this was moldvay I’d replace tricks on the stockings table with“environmental horror.” It’s huge and it’s easy to forget. But if you put all your horror in encounters with monsters or other people then you’re 9/10 releasing more tension than you’re building. Environmental encounters are ques...| Failure Tolerated
Maybe there’s something to having a base encounter HD for certain hex areas. 1/3/5/7 seems about right. And we can use this similar level chain to say: minion/elite/boss/megaboss. So in hex 1 areas an elite would be 3 HD and. Boss would be 5. In hex area 5 a a minion would be 5 Hd and an elite would be 7 and a boss would be higher, a 9. I should look at the spread of HD in odnd and BX and maybe it’s just a multiple +3/x3. But this gives us an easy way to cap areas if we know what the base...| Failure Tolerated
Read this interesting post on the author’s“12 favorite problems,” which is a callback to something physicist Richard Feynman talked about. Most people look for solutions. But few seek out problems. There are exceptions. Physicist Richard Feynman, for example, liked to keep a list of his dozen favorite problems. These were big open-ended questions that could guide his life’s work. “Every time you hear a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see wh...| Failure Tolerated
Listening to the interview with Luke Gearing on Into the Megadungeon and a couple things jumped out at me that I hadn’t really considered before. Schroedinger’s languages. Where your players have language slots that they can spend to talk to things. I’m a big fan of language irl and making it more important in dnd. So I think either saying“choose languages of things you want me the Dm to include” is one way to handle it. The other is to let players pick WHO they want to speak to. Th...| Failure Tolerated
“ONCEUPON A TIME, long, long ago there was a little group known as the Castle and Crusade Society.” – Dungeons & Dragons (1974),“Foreward” (sic) “Players, players, and more players — that’s what comprises the D&D phenomenon. And phenomenal is what it is, as the audience for this, the granddaddy of all role–playing games, continues to expand.” – Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition Player’s Handbook (1977)“Foreword”| www.failuretolerated.com
When you’re working on a key for a dungeon or other location, it can be difficult to come up with all the concepts you need to round the place out. One trick I’ve learned to cut this in half is to write rooms in pairs. So the idea is that you maybe have a shitty or boring list of rooms like so: 1d6 goblins. Treasure chest with some gold. Empty room. Orc. Pit trap. Right? It’s not far from basic dungeon stocking. What we do is take these rooms and create a second room to connect them to ...| Failure Tolerated
Boy, what a month. If you haven’t heard, for the past thirty days we’ve been experimenting with a new event. We call it Mothership Month, and we hope this is the first of many. TL;DR Mothership Month ends Tuesday, December 10 at 12 PMCST (or whenever the backer train ends), so if you haven’t checked it out, do it now! What is Mothership Month? It’s essentially a month long pep rally for Mothership players and wardens. Here’s some highlights: We launched Wages of Sin, a brand new har...| Failure Tolerated
One of the biggest complaints new creators have is that they hate dealing with stretch goals. it’s a common customer complaint too, because if you do stretch goals wrong (you are), you’ll overburden your project and put yourself behind schedule, over budget, and cut your profits to nothing. So why have stretch goals? What’s the point? You’re doing stretch goals wrong Stretch goals are not“cool stuff we can do if we get extra money.” They’re not bonus content. They are a key part...| Failure Tolerated
Last week my church hosted a reading by the poet Kaveh Akbar at TCU. Kaveh’s debut novel Martyr! is a NYT bestseller and his poetry appears in the New Yorker, New York Times, The Paris Review, and on and on. He gave a beautiful reading and the Q&A afterwards was generous and insightful. One of the things Kaveh said that struck me as a game designer, was this idea that he is“obsessed with the opportunity cost of writing and reading.” It’s a great gift of your time and energy to read a ...| Failure Tolerated
Without capital, your game is DOA. Publishing a game is risky when you know what you’re doing, let alone when you don’t. So what are you supposed to do? For most people the answer is obvious: crowdfund your game. Crowdfunding transfers risk from the company to the consumer. It’s so good at this that the entire tabletop industry now relies on it. But it comes with a few caveats: Crowdfunding reveals your delays and fuckups. If you’ve backed the Mothership campaign, you know we’re no ...| Failure Tolerated
Here’s how you want to set your margins on your game to make sure it’s profitable. You’ll want to use a spreadsheet to keep track of some of this stuff. Spreadsheet maintenance is a big part about figuring out your business. It’s like a sketchbook for numbers, so learn to have fun with it. So let’s start with this: your ideal profit margin is 10x. That means you set your price as 10x higher than the cost to make a copy. If your game is $20, then it should cost $2 per unit to produce...| Failure Tolerated
I Cast Light! has become one of my favorite blogs this past year, and Warren’s latest post, Straight Up Villain, is a good example why. Warren outlines a kind of prep which is what you’d call“selling your sawdust” in the business world. Basically if you’re already making lumber and sawdust is spraying everywhere, why not just bag that up and sell it too? In prep it’s the same thing. Warren recommends beefing up escaped enemies and making them a problem for the party later on. This...| Failure Tolerated
When it comes to encounter design in horror games I think about this image a lot. Silent Hill 3 Horror games require really intentional environmental encounters in order to build tension. If this was moldvay I’d replace tricks on the stockings table with“environmental horror.” It’s huge and it’s easy to forget. But if you put all your horror in encounters with monsters or other people then you’re 9/10 releasing more tension than you’re building. Environmental encounters are ques...| Failure Tolerated
I’m obsessed with two things in dnd: giant campaign spanning megadungeons and vast wildernesses to journey through. These often seem at odds with each other. One thing I’ve been considering is to have dungeons with big“locks” between levels. As everything else in ttrpgs, these are soft locks. Obstacles essentially, that can be beaten a number of ways, rather than hard locks like in video games where you literally can’t progress unless you get the exact key the game wants. A good exa...| Failure Tolerated
There are lots of similarities between the note taking/productivity communities and the rpg hobby. Namely that an obsession with tools and methods of prep can overwhelm and overtake the actual doing of the thing. In the case of notebooks and organization there are all sorts of sub hobbies. Fountain pens, notebooks, journaling, calligraphy, personal knowledge management, productivity, etc. but all of these hobbies presume a life worth cataloguing or things that need to be done or words that sh...| Failure Tolerated
This is a 400+ room mega-dungeon with multiple levels and sub-levels, built around a direct goal: retrieve the SKOROSORB, the mysterious artifact used by the evil wizard ILLITHVARN to wage war upon the KINGDOMOFOROSTRANTHY. It is meant for mid- to high-level play: my players started around level 13 or 14, and are now between levels 20 and 22. Each main level has 60-70 rooms and each sub-level has 30-50 rooms, heavily themed around classic Dungeons and Dragons tropes: traps, treasure, explorat...| Failure Tolerated
Thinking more about The Underclock and how it fits sort of my ideal dnd game as more of a countdown. It makes me think there’s a whole game in the idea that after the countdown the ONLY encounter is a dragon showing up. For campaigns this isn’t great but for a night of fun it sounds like running away from a dragon that is hunting for you constantly really hits the nail on the head of what I’m looking for. #dnd #dungeoncrawling| Failure Tolerated
Maybe there’s something to having a base encounter HD for certain hex areas. 1/3/5/7 seems about right. And we can use this similar level chain to say: minion/elite/boss/megaboss. So in hex 1 areas an elite would be 3 HD and. Boss would be 5. In hex area 5 a a minion would be 5 Hd and an elite would be 7 and a boss would be higher, a 9. I should look at the spread of HD in odnd and BX and maybe it’s just a multiple +3/x3. But this gives us an easy way to cap areas if we know what the base...| Failure Tolerated
Read this interesting post on the author’s“12 favorite problems,” which is a callback to something physicist Richard Feynman talked about. Most people look for solutions. But few seek out problems. There are exceptions. Physicist Richard Feynman, for example, liked to keep a list of his dozen favorite problems. These were big open-ended questions that could guide his life’s work. “Every time you hear a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see wh...| Failure Tolerated
Listening to the interview with Luke Gearing on Into the Megadungeon and a couple things jumped out at me that I hadn’t really considered before. Schroedinger’s languages. Where your players have language slots that they can spend to talk to things. I’m a big fan of language irl and making it more important in dnd. So I think either saying“choose languages of things you want me the Dm to include” is one way to handle it. The other is to let players pick WHO they want to speak to. Th...| Failure Tolerated
I wrote up a thread recently about safety tools in ttRPGs/mothership, but I wanted to archive it here for future reference and expand on it a little bit. Let’s get into it: I’m working on the section on Safety in the Warden’s Guide. It’s something we’ve worked on for about a year. This is the 12th draft. It’s not quite there (and after this follows a page with specific safety tools), but it outlines my thoughts: Safety tool are about hospitality. WIP page from the WOM To me safety...| Failure Tolerated
For awhile now, I’ve wanted to talk to James Maliszewski of Grognardia fame of his experience playing and running a seven year campaign of Empire of the Petal Throne. EPT has long been a fascinating game for many RPG fans due to how early on in the scene it was created and because of the depth of the lore designed by its creator MAR Barker. More recently it has come into the news since it turns out Barker had pseudonymously written a neo-nazi propaganda novel. I wanted to talk to James abou...| Failure Tolerated
A lots going on in the Motherverse. We went from producing a zine a year roughly to now having something like six plus books due this year and a hundred or so third party products. I don’t have an MBA or really extensive knowledge on how to run a company other than that Sunday marked TKG’s 9th year in business. That’s pretty cool! But I’m always trying to learn how to do this better and the past year has been a huge challenge on that end. So what am I working on? The list There’s ab...| Failure Tolerated
One the easiest traps to fall into as a new referee in tabletop rpgs is to treat violence the same as video games do. Video games are particularly well suited for testing your reflexes and hand eye coordination, as well as your ability to make optimal decisions from menu-like option trees. However, in order to excel at testing these things, they must limit your choices down to what can be simulated by the game’s engine. Basically, its the constraints and limitations of video games that make...| Failure Tolerated
I don’t think Mothership needs levels anymore. I don’t think they serve the game in any meaningful purpose. Here’s a few things that I think could easily stand to replace levels but still give a sense of progression and advancement to players. Note: This post was heavily inspired by two articles by Dreaming Dragonslayer about running games for young kids. But I’m starting to think rpgs designed for young kids get a lot right that rpgs designed for adults get wrong. Check out the Playi...| Failure Tolerated
Last night Gen Con Online held the 2020 Annual ENnie awards. A Pound of Flesh walked away with a Silver ENnie for Best Layout/Design and a Gold ENnie for Best Adventure. We’re deeply honored, to say the least, and I’m incredibly proud of our team and the amazing work they put into A Pound of Flesh. It’s been about a year since we released A Pound of Flesh, though it’s felt like much, much longer, as I’m sure many of you reading this can relate. Our work on Mothership, however, hasn...| Failure Tolerated
We had session 07 of our Gradient Descent Playtest a couple weeks ago and it didn’t go so great. Let’s get into it. Joining us tonight: Ian playing: Lula Shrike, Level 0 Scientist Explosives tech. Slantio playing: Uriel Sigma, Level 0 Android Engineer Nick Reed playing: Ambrose Rex, Level 0 Marine Gunner (Absent) Alan Gerding playing: Jimmy Cobb, Level 0 Teamster (Absent) SinisterGrin playing: Everett-7, Level 2 Android Slantio playing: Roka, Level 0 Scientist (who believes she’s an And...| Failure Tolerated
So you might have heard that last week we released Dissident Whispers, an anthology of 58 original rpg adventures in support of Black Lives Matter, and more specifically to raise money for Bail Funds. Dissident Whispers by the Whisper Collective in partnership with TKG This project was in direct response to the Black Lives Matter protests currently underway across America and the rest of the world. Over 50 volunteers worked on this project over the course of 10 days to put together this amazi...| Failure Tolerated
We had a two player game tonight for our sixth session of Gradient Descent. A lot of our players had to bow out from travel, work, and illness. But I love small games! In smaller games players really can argue over choices and make their case. In bigger groups you have a lot more social dynamics in play. Bigger groups are more fun because of mob mentality and hi-jinx. In small groups I see a lot more cautious play. In large groups any given player is more likely to get bored and pull a lever ...| Failure Tolerated
I wrote about this a little on twitter the other day, but we’re changing the way we do ship combat in Mothership. In Mothership, ship encounters are social encounters, not dog fights. The game assumes that the minutiae and logistics of conducting space warfare can largely be handled by the ship’s computer. What can’t be handled is the decision making: should we risk death to fight with this other ship. This means we’re placing a heavy emphasis on a ship’s innate capabilities over th...| www.failuretolerated.com