I'm gonna be the naysayer and point out that, yes, there is a syllabus - sort of. Maybe not for RPG design in particular, but for game design as a whole, and RPGs are games (or "borderline games" if you want to get technical), right?

My short list:

• The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses - Jesse Schell
• Rules of Play - Salem & Zimmerman
• Flow: the psychology of optimal experience - Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell
• The Design of Everyday Things - Donald Norman
• Universal Principles of Design - Lidwell, Holden & Butler

RPG design ⊂ game design, and game design ⊂ design. Keep that in mind.

Yes, play the types of games you want to make, but also play the types of games you don't want to make to get a solid grip on the fundamentals of game design. If you focus solely on what you like you'll risk becoming narrow-minded in your craft and designing bad games.

Also: design, design, design. And by design I mean plan, execute, test, adjust, rinse & repeat. Studying is essential, but consolitading what you've learned through practice is what will make you truly understand the nature of your findings.

TL;DR: If your exclusive aim is financial success, odds are you are wasting your time.

>1. Is it possible to see how popular a game actually is on DTRPG, in terms of the number of downloads/sales?

Some publishers disclose their sales numbers, but I don't think DTRPG does. They do release a ranking for the top grossing once in a while, if I'm not mistaken, but no numbers.

>2. Short of running a Kickstarter, how would you guys gauge the level of interest from the community in anything you're putting together?

That's a hard one.

A Kickstarter campaign isn't a good measure of interest because it is first a measure of awareness. You can't accurately measure if people are interested in your product if they don't know it exists.

Communities tend to grow organically. For every out of the blue home run crowdfunding campaign we get in the news, there were others that only managed to succeed after slowly building an audience for months or even years before starting - and even more of them that didn't bother to build an audience and just flopped.

>3. Given that my stuff has been put together in the bubble of my mind and the games that seem similar to mine are only really similar in terms of the backstory (ie, humanity gets to a new region of space and is then cut-off) and, from what I've seen of them, that's where the similarity stops, should I worry about putting out a game/setting that has a lot of superficial similarities to something else or is that just the nature of the beast - ie, any fantasy RPG would inevitably draw comparisons with D&D?

It doesn't matter how far departed from your references your product is, they will show. And it will be compared to stuff. Other than that, steal like an artist.

>4. Should i just stop overthinking this?

Yes. But don't worry. It comes with the trade.

Good luck :)

I like the idea. I would tie it in with some Grand Goal or Central Objective. Perhaps the Andermen are the descendants of Atlantis. Maybe it's a story similar to Lord of the Flies - w*ho will have the conch?* Maybe each player has a secret, that plays a role through-out the game and changs game-session from game-session. Check out the Micro-RPG Jam, and look for settings and mechanics. The resource page pinned to this subreddit has a lot of good ideas in books like Game Design Patterns, where the author goes over various games and their mechanics.

Many times I see games that have a mechanic specially built for the settings. This is especially prevalent in the Micro-Jam, but also in many full Games in Game Design Patterns. There's always a variation that makes the game the game.

Not a laywer, you should always get a lawyer for legal help. The Dungeon World text is CC BY 3.0, meaning it is this and this means you can claim copyright over your whole piece by simply putting "© 2017 Kriele1's Game Company" somewhere noticeable in your text. Under the terms of the license, however, you need to cite and attribute. This can be as simple as "This Game is based on Dungeon World, 2012 by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel. Used with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) License"
 
That's my understanding of it, anyways. What you should probably do is just email or tweet at Sage or Adam (email is listed on http://www.dungeon-world.com) and ask how to do it.

Look into the game Soth, which is a game about cultists in small town America trying to summon the dark lord Soth. It’s a great game and the GM, while not a PC has a very controlled role using built up suspicion points in order to make actions behind the scenes with the NPCs.

Note: The Soth I linked to above is the first edition only available as a PDF and it’s getting a new version with a kickstarter for a print version soon. You can sign up for an announcement when that happens here: https://goo.gl/forms/QWfmRbnTFCUBtgFQ2

Not bad for a 100-word rpg.

​

This is my book:

https://www.amazon.com/Towering-Inferno-Richard-Martin-Stern/dp/0330242334

I am a pyromancer. Goal: Watch the world burn.

​

The best spells in my opinion are those with "shenanigan potential", as discussed in this Questing Beast video. Also spells that aren't just a list of numbers (30ft range, 5d6 damage, etc.) but actually feel like magic.

That's why I wrote Bastard Magic to use spells made of words rather than mechanics. The player, GM and characters can all read the same spell description, understand it, and no dice are needed unless the system calls for them itself.

I like the rope tricks from Marvel and Malisons (or was it Wonder and Wickedness?). Catherine is also a favourite.

That's absurd. Among other things, WotC pretty famously has an internal playtest cycle for Magic called Future Future League that they've been running for at least sixteen years (and which was preceded by Future League). I don't know if the D&D playtest cycle has a cute name, but there's no reason to think they don't or didn't test internally.

The software you mentioned are great for writing up your game but not layout work. Scribus is an open source desktop publishing application that's pretty good; or so I hear.

If you really want to be creative with your layout, I highly recommend using Adobe's InDesign for layout, Illustrator and Photoshop for graphics. They work very well together though there is a bit of a learning curve. But once learnt, the workflow is phenomenal.

Dungeon World uses a similar system. It works great for games that do not require a grid.

For my game, I did something similar but added numeric values to each distance in addition to the vague description. Like this:

https://snipboard.io/9hLWTb.jpg

While in combat or exploring, knowing where everything is and how far a weapon can reach could be crucial to determine what type of action your character will take. Distance is divided into five categories:

Alongside: Anything close enough to hug, kiss, touch, grapple, poison someone's drink, or stab them is considered to be alongside. Besides being a measuring distance, a weapon with this property does not give its wielder disadvantage while used in close quarters, or while being grappled or overwhelmed.

Close: Anything that is not farther than a foot or two beyond arm's length is considered to be close.

Near: If you can see the white of their eyes or hear their footsteps in the distance, they are near or nearby.

Far: Anything at shouting distance is considered to be far.

Extreme: If you can barely see your target and they are out of shouting distance, they are considered to be at an extreme range. Any length above this is specified in feet (and meters).

This thing is a really cool project for a single person. I look forward to seeing what tweaks and tools you put together in the future. As a lightweight tool for quickly hacking some art assets for an rpg it looks good- the ink filter is the most interesting part, but it will need leaning into a specific art style.

​

For people who need free art tools, Krita still beats most of the market, replicating almost all features of photoshop, and its available under the GPL for commercial use. The plugins and filters section is top notch, and its not too tricky to build new ones.

Finally, you can search out copyright free art/photos, wikimedia commons lets you search by use license.

I do not bother to check up your actual RPG because I can't look past the glaring problems this implementation has.

• Use https://letsencrypt.org/
• Do not use copyrighted material on your page
• bundle and minify your scripts
• actually, before you do that - give your code a serious look and read up on some ECMAScript best practices

Users of this page might want to use throwaway credentials.

Additionally you want to add some "Help" pages to give some introduction and guidance.

Closest I've seen is actually a browser based tactical RPG. Card Hunter has a couple of different character classes that can equip varying kinds of gear. Each piece of gear adds specific cards to your deck. During play you take actions by playing cards from your hand. I can't think of a reason you couldn't use the same setup for a tabletop game, other than needing to make all the cards.

If Photoshop is your comfort zone you can make it in there for sure. Other software is better suited for it once you learn the software though. heck, I made mine in Word because that's my comfort zone.

also, a plug to game-icons.net because they have a lot of great icons.

Try to draw it out on paper before getting all technical. And just make the sheet you want to play on.

An alternative idea[1]. You can reach inside your book and pull something out of it; it becomes real.

Examples:

• Pull The One Ring out of The Lord Of The Rings and use it like Frodo to turn yourself invisible.

• Pull a Blaster out of a Star Wars book to well...blast stuff.

• Pull Lucy's Healing Potion out of The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe to heal a wounded character.

Caveats: - Only works with popular works of fiction (avoids slowing down the game due to "uh...what's that?")

• You can only pull things out that could fit through the "frame" of a paperback novel (keeps things from getting too gonzo - e.g. no you can't pull out a full size star ship).

• Just because you pull something out doesn't mean you know how to use it. Sure you can pull out The Elder Wand from Harry Potter. But do you know how to cast spells using wands from the Potter-verse? Maybe. Maybe not.

• Works of fiction that contain items deemed "too gonzo" are "magically sealed" (in the fiction). E.g. Balefire from The Wheel Of Time.

Alternate Rules - You can only pull out non-magical objects. Lightsabers are fine. Magical staffs are not. - Each time you pull something out, your book chars. Do it enough and you need to find a new book.

[1] Inspired by this book.

For your last question at least, https://pixabay.com/ plus using GIMP to apply filters to match your game's theme and era should be effective.

Marketing is the same regardless of what you're doing: don't be a spammy annoyance, ask once in good faith and let it go if you don't get a response, and contribute to others if you want them to help you. No shortcuts; it's a "simple but not easy" process.

InDesign or Scribus (free) are going to be your best bets for nice-looking layout work. There's a learning curve, but it's a much better investment of your time than trying to wrangle Word. You're using a word processor, but what you want is "Desktop Publishing" or DTP.

I use Google docs to allow me to work from anywhere, even my phone.

For motivation. I found this gem of a tool https://habitica.com/. its exactly the kind of horse and carrot nonsense to keep me working on something each day, even if its just for a few minutes.

Other than that. I checklist everything to write up later. I've heard some people use voice recorders but that seems a bit creepy to do at work.

I think the biggest thing with a TTRPG is deciding what the 'product' is. There is a reason that if you go into a brick and mortar store, you don't have to pay just to even look inside the book - it is both unreasonable, and the words on the paper are the instructions, not the game. You don't charge people to read the instructions, you just don't. PWYW is a really good way to get the instructions in people's hands, and let them return and pay a fair price if they like your game.

Prestige/adoration/'street cred' all have value too. The truth is that designers who haven't put in their time in the community, making free things and using the free things others make - just 'appear' on DTRPG or god forbid kickstarter and just start asking for/expecting people to pay what I could be paying people whose work I already love, who I want to be successful independent artists, it's just a really tough sell. And I WANT people to play my games more than I want the money. If nobody is getting rich making RPG's - then obviously money is not the most important thing, you mention your willingness to PAY because of this - but the point is, there's no point in doing all the work that goes into this if the paycheck is all you care about. It just doesn't make sense, from there's it's just a question of HOW much you don't care about a paycheck.

There is a fair amount of low effort/low quality trash on DTRPG, but honestly, all healthy markets have those things. You don't want to see everybody get squeezed out before they even start. The real problem is the awful search/sorting of DTRPG, and to be fair itch.io is also pretty hard to search, that really would make a huge difference if they were more useful for connecting games with gamers.

> Sonic the Hedgehog RPG

> I'm looking for something that is free

If you don't care about the legal consequences (IANAL) then WordPress, if you care about the legal consequences then there is no way you are going to pull this off with out paying.

Good luck.

>Well, I've already looked at a number, including FATE, RTD, GURPS, COC, and Eclipse Phase. Are there any in particular you'd recommend?

It sounds like you need to branch out into a number of games that don't fall into the trad spectrum - other than Fate, everything you mentioned is thoroughly grounded in the 'classic' RPG mentality. Not that it's a problem, but it does mean you're not being exposed to a bunch of other perspectives on games. Check out the Powered by Apocalypse games, Burning Wheel, the Cortex System, Traveler, Chronicles of Darkness, Stars without Number, AGE, Whitehack, Pendragon - anything you can get your hands on, really. Itch.io's new tabletop department has dozens of small, tightly focused indie games - many of which are free - that are a great way to expose yourself to different approaches to game development.

>Be heroes! Or villains! Or somewhere in between! Do adventures, or get wrapped up in intrigues and mysteries, or just kick in the door of some long-forgotten ruin. Follow the plot, or go off the rails and make the GM want to pull their hair out, haha.

The question is what are the Players doing, not what are the characters doing. Are your players supposed to be active agents, guiding the story? Are they reactive and just have to figure out how their characters will adapt and survive? Can players help change the setting by making suggestions or building consensus, or is everything left in the hands of the GM?

I'm no mathematician either, but I recommend this site for dice pools. Under "Game rules," you can set it to "Exactly X dice equal to..." or "At least X dice equal to..." and then enter one or more target numbers. Combining the probabilities of hits vs misses and matching numbers is beyond me I'm afraid, as is your advanced problem, but maybe you'll be able to figure it out.

This site's also great for dice pool probabilities. Under "Game Rules" you can pick "Exactly X dice equal to" or "At least X dice equal to" and then enter multiple values to allow for hits/misses.

https://www.omnicalculator.com/statistics/dice

Inspired by /u/AgentMania's Micro-RPG Jam. Working with the selected theme of "The Sun is Dead". Unsure if I'll actually submit but any feedback within the limited window of time would be much appreciated, thanks!

Thanks for the feedback! I've gone ahead and updated the Jam page and the language on the voting page to reflect the appropriate times in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The timer at the top of the Jam page is controlled by itch.io and should reflect your local time.

You bring up some good points concerning the timing and constraints of the Jam! This was brought up a bit the last time I posted as well. Depending on how this weekend goes (and what feedback from the Jam looks like) I may alter the size limit for the RPG itself (possibly expanding it to one page or even removing it altogether).

At the same time, this jam emphasizes creating a complete experience within that 200 word space. And the time limit forces creators to do so without much room for thorough feedback or play-testing. I'm curious to see what participants do with these added restrictions and if they think it adds anything to the challenge.

I'll likely be creating a feedback form that participants can fill out so that I can get a better idea of how to shape things for next year.

Not at all!

Half the reason I decided to put this jam on was because I enjoyed participating in the 200 Word RPG Challenge so much that I wanted to do it again. (And sadly found that it only took place once a year).

The other reason was to bring some tabletop RPG love over to itch.io.

I meant no offense by the guideline! If for some reason it comes off that way, I'm happy to change it. I was trying to constrain the type of entries submitted as much as I reasonably could, while giving the reader an idea of what constituted a valid entry. (And maybe trying to be funny at the end).

Others have brought up that the issue of "What constitutes a game?" often gets debated in regards to these types of contests. I guess I was also trying to narrow the focus of entries in response to that debate.

You might want to consider a creative commons license for your original content. Clears up what "free" and used "freely" means. Also provides "no takesie-backsie" protection for both parties. Just a thought.

Let me throw back to Mark Rosewater‘s 20 lessons.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/twenty-years-twenty-lessons-part-1-2016-05-30

One of them is that not everyone has to like every option in your game. It‘s actually better if one type of player really loves class A and hates B and another group hates A but really loves B, than having everyone be sort of luke-warm about A and B.

However, sound like the Swashbuckler class will be pretty central to this, so you may want to pull off something like the 5E Fighter, that has a pretty low base complexity, but you can choose a path that adds a lot of moving parts.

What did the playtesters say?

There's tons of complicating factors, artists have their own commission structures, etc. Jackie's estimate I think is a good baseline. Barebones minimum I think you could conceivably get away with is like $150 towards a new artist hitting the lower bounds of what most people would think of as "a cover", but even that's a bit iffy/"You should probably be paying them a little more".

Personally I'm a big proponent of A) Learning new skills, and B) Using existing art assets. Not saying you need to learn to draw, but if you can't afford to pay fairly, you can use the photo mode in Affinity Publisher to edit CC0 or stock photos (like the nice ones from a subscription) into something decent. The Ironsworn book lives & dies by Shawn Tomkin's ability to process stock photos into a coherent art style, and it definitely didn't stop the game from winning awards & making an impact in the space.

Great looking trailer! Doesn't say much about the game though, or even that it's a tabletop RPG.

I have used a lot of images from pixabay (https://pixabay.com/). Although it can be difficult to find exactly what you need it's easy to spruce up a document with a bit of work in GIMP.

Procedural modelling like what Solidworks does will only get you so far. I suggest something that excels at mesh modelling such as Blender, which is more appropriate for modelling terrain.

Also check /r/worldbuilding and /r/mapmaking.

Here are a few suggestions:

For body text, you want something that looks good on screen and in print. Not too big, not too small, and one that renders well at low resolutions so it will look good on older or smaller screens.

The Lucida family is available on MacOS, Windows and most linux distros and is designed to render well on low resolution devices. You could use the serif for body text and the sans-serif for headings. In fact, Lucida will go with a wide variety of sans-serif fonts for headings. As another option, Palatino is also widely available and looks reasonably good at low resolutions. It was one of the original 35 fonts that shipped with PostScript and was chosen for this property.

For both fonts, 10 point type on 12 point leading (2 extra points between the lines) will look good in print - if your text type is too large it takes up more room and starts to look like a children's story book.

Avoid fonts with strong weight stress or fine detail for on-screen display.

If you want a sans-serif font then anything in the Helvetica family or its look-alikes (e.g. Arial) would work fine. Tahoma, Trebuchet and Verdana ship with Windows and are designed to render well on low resolution devices while looking good in print. Some of these are available in the Microsoct Core Truetype Fonts Pack. Consider 9pt text on 11pt leading if you use these fonts as they can look a little clunky in print at 10pt.

Mobile devices can be a little tricky, as there are only a small handful of default fonts on Android. To make a truly cross-platform document you will need to embed your fonts, in which you will need to make sure that your licence allows you to.

Amazons is about two sword & sorcery amazons, like a buddy movie. Two players play the Amazons and the rest - at least two - play the GMs. It handles the co-GMing in a way that'll be familiar to Apocalypse World players, very conversationally. It's not a game that will ever take the world by storm, you know, but I enjoy playing it a ton.

Firebrands is a pure roleplaying party game about the messy lives and relationships of anime giant robot pilots. Instead of a GM it has turn-taking and minigames, so it's pretty far out from usual RPGs.

You can find Amazons in Worlds Without Master issue 11 and Firebrands at my Payhip store.

So, this is just my first impressions, not like rules or anything. I can't even imagine how much work this must be for you in Word and I know there are probably limitations on what can be achieved.

Headers don't pop, they fade. The font is too thin. Maybe Averia Gruesa Libre or Fondamento or another thicker google display font?

I feel like it needs more whitespace. Between art and wrapping text, definitely. Between your dividing lines and the text body. And above and below each table.

When you only have a couple of lines of a paragraph on a page, consider editing the text above to push them down to the next page or to bring the whole paragraph up. Or just do a page break and use those two lines of space for an example or tip or aside.

Under "mechanics" the bullet list breaks awkwardly. You have three short bullet points and then a block of text that's indented like a bullet point but isn't marked.

Consider italicizing, boxing, or otherwise denoting examples. You use "ex." and "Ex."; I'd pick one.

Instead of just highlighting a single word, consider highlighting the relevant clause -- "D100 is used when finding the percent of something" instead of just "D100". I would also add an "A" instead of capitalizing the "D" just because it looks awkward to me, like "A d100 is used".

I would not use asterisks to set off the "Disclaimer". I would also change that to "tip" or "note" since it seems more like a tip or note than a disclaimer.

Just my immediate thoughts on it after looking at a few pages. Hope that helps a bit.

eta, forgot to mention, but where are the page numbers? It would be easier to be specific with numbers to refer to.

Inkscape is Free (Open Source) and I find it more intuitive than Adobe's products. Plus it saves in SVG format by default, which is an open standard, so it can be shared easily and is also viewable on the web.

When examining probabilities for bell curve dice, I like to invert my thinking and view the modifier as the "base value" and the dice as the "variance." The average of 3d6 is 10.5, and the overall range of values is 10.5 +/- 7.5, with 10 and 11 most likely and 3 and 18 least likely. So "3d6 + 6" is more like "16.5 +/- 7.5," with 16 and 17 the most likely outcomes. Each +1 shifts the center of the curve to the right by 1. Since it is a bell curve, and the center values are more likely than the outer ones, this produces the effect you saw, where each +1 is "weaker" than the last.

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/neo1s0r7w6 shows the idealized bell curve distribution for 3d6 (same mean and standard deviation). The blue curve is 3d6 without modifiers. The slider for the orange curve lets you apply a modifier. Anything to the right of the black dashed line is a roll > 10. The more area under the curve to the right of the line, the greater the probability of rolling > 10. When you move the orange slider up or down from 0, the "10" line is crossing the big bump in the middle, so changes there have a large effect on the probability. As the modifier gets higher or lower, the "10" line is on a smaller part of the curve, so the changes have less effect.

I've done a quick re-skin for them, for readability at least. @rabbitDumbling, feel free to use it.

[HTML FILE]

Another thing I'd suggest you think about is to add more paragraph breaks. Big walls of text are tiring to read.

Cool. This is what it looks like when you attempt to minmax for running away.

https://dochub.com/james-thor-brewer/xZrbqk/character-sheet-fillable?dt=JBGZD1n-ifck6qjfsw_y

Speed 10. That means you can outrun evreything in the bestiary, except a similarly optimised flinn. Next XP block goes to ticking up finesse for speed 11. Character sheet order could have matched the order of character creation- somewhere clear to note down race etc would be good.

It would be a good idea to compress the PDF files! As they are now, they make for a hefty and long download, and take up much more file space on google drive and similar backup programs. I plan to do the same for my own copy of the beta PDF, but it would be a good idea to do it for wider accessibility

If you don't know how to approach this sort of thing, I'd recommend ilovepdf's free online compress pdf page.

It was originally for board games, but the textbook Rules of Play is so foundational to the creation of the language used to talk about games I can't justify not having it on a designer's shelf

How about this? You buy yourself and your friends some dry-erase blank dice from Amazon or a specialised dice store.

Then you write the numbers you need on it. Switch to another weapon? Erase and write new numbers on it!

That way it’ll be easier than to consult a weapon damage table if it is your core mechanic.

You might even be able to combine strategic mechanics by using e.g. different colour markers on each side.

E.g. you have a weapon that can be used in melee and ranged. Maybe a throwable dagger?

Rolling a black number when in melee results in double damage. Rolling a red number when not in melee. How many numbers do you write in red? How many in black? Is there a limit (max 4 numbers in any colour)?

Just an idea though.

I've seen a lot of RPG designers talk about The Non-Designer's Design Book as a way to learn the basics of layout.

Two thoughts spring immediately to mind.

One is The Quite Year, it's a small scale collaborative worldbuilding game but it has a couple of important concepts that could help you out.

• Dilemmas, and choices are presented to the players via an external mechanism. In TQY's case it's a deck of 52 cards with binary choices written on them. Players make their decisions about these things in real time. Ex: The harvest was bad this year, what are we going to do about it right now?
• details are introduced piecemeal as the timeline progresses. It keeps the world dynamic, while also ensuring that the setting gets fleshed out.
• Debate is formally structured, and highly limited. You only get one brief chance to say what you want to say, so make it concise and good.
• Each turn a player is a designated action taker. Their action can't be contested, it simply happens. In a larger game you could probably assign this duty to a group of players each turn.

I'm not saying all these ideas would work for every situation, but they're something to consider.

The second is Watch The Skies an X-Comm like megagame. This sort of game does does actually support 100+ players (though it's not strictly a world building game).

• The key to it's success is compartmentalization.

• Players are split into nations, and then further subdivided into different positions in a government. Every nation might have one player as their president, another as their chief general, another as their chief scientist ect.

• In this way players all get to make meaningful contributions to the game, but are limited in the domain of what they can affect.

RPG book layout - rules reference vs teaching rules for the 1st time.

Here is a podcast featuring Rob Daviau on the subject of writing rulebooks. The talk is applicable to tabletop board games and RPGs.

Also, just to give you another resource, this one I have some issues with, but I still think there is some really good information in it.

It's called the Wunderkammer-Gesamtkunstwerk Model. I do think you have to set up a free account on this site to download it, so sorry about that.

Dude I don't think you understand the difference between "the fiction" and "the mechanics". A background isn't "merely". A background is just as important as the class in a character concept. Mechanically it might be less, but that is completely different than it's role in a character concept. If this is blowing your mind then I suggest staying the hell away from any rules lite game, as you seem to need a crunchy game that mechanizes every single aspect of your character or you are incapable of understanding how the concept works in the "the fiction".

Oh and by the way, you should buy a thesaurus should is not a synonym of can. At this point I am not sure if you are just doubling down on your trolling or really are this clueless and need that explained. Honestly, I am hoping the former.

Normally you get a maneuver and an action every turn.

If you are a novice rider (as in you can ride a horse because of course you can, it's not hard), then you have to spend your maneuver on the ride maneuver.

If riding a horse is natural movement for you (because you are saddleborn or trained in horsemanship), then you do not have to use your maneuver to ride, however you don't necessarily have any other maneuvers to be doing while your horse moves. You need to take additional abilities to do fancy maneuvers while on horseback.

As for attacking the mount, same as usual, you can target the mount if you want.

There are also martial abilities that allow you to defend your allies if they are attacked that would apply to your horse if you want. Ditto for the mount, it could defend you if that was something it wanted to do and was trained for.

https://wordpress.com/page/2d20138813766.wordpress.com/72

There's the link for the martial abilities. Let me know what you think.

The problem with game design theory is that arts and humanities perspectives are underrepresented. /u/DXimenes's list is fantastic, but I think it reflects that imbalance.

Where is the theory with the really deep, nuanced understanding of games as cultural objects through and through, not just as aspects of engineering, mathematics, behavioral economics, and (some) psychology?

Suggestions?

The Campbell & Vogler are good shouts, although as far as writing about writing goes, they can also tend to play into an overly social sciences / positivist psychology type understanding of narrative. I.e. I think there are people out there who think that there can be a formula to follow for a good narrative, in the same way as there can be a formula to calculate an orbit, or construct a bridge, or whatever. (I know Campbell isn't writing a how-to manual, and Vogler is very good about saying "you can switch this up or whatever", but I think you do find people using them in that way).

Here's a workshop I did recently which gently criticises Campbell's Hero's Journey, by inventing a new monomyth (based on a randomly chosen novel) and seeing if it fits Lord of the Rings. I think it fits pretty well:

https://www.academia.edu/32941944/Teaching_Materials_Surrey_CW_Workshops_5_6_Fiasco_Fiction

I quite liked Jane McGonigol's Reality is Broken and Jesper Juul's Half-Real. For RPGs specifically I think you'd want some theater studies type stuff in there too, right? Something a little more theoretical than 101 Improv Games You Can Play, but in that general region?

The GNS theory as a whole is not practical. It's a nice theoretic framework, but it doesn't exist as an actual thing. No system or even player for that matter is simply gamist, narrativist or simulationist. The distinction is useless for all practical purposes.

Personally, I find the Wu-Ge Model a lot more practical but everyone has to find the model that works best for them, I guess.

As has already been said, watch Avatar: The Last Airbender. Watch it. Learn it. Love it. Further, you might look at how the Avatar RPG (https://www.slideshare.net/alansaenz/avatar-the-last-airbender-d20-rpg) handles what you're asking about.

​

If I were to give personal tips, while I haven't made an elemental magic system myself, I would say that using wind and air is extremely powerful, with a great many abilities if used well. Within the Avatar series, we see Airbenders jump great heights and distances, fly on gliders they can control, construct locks and mechanisms only their air currents can use, spawn cyclones, strike targets at range with focused blasts of air, move objects, mask the sound of their movements, and a number of other abilities. The question is one of imagination and implication.

The game is really only a brief character creation exercise and a single core mechanic. If there is interest, I could post the rules for stuff I had to cut, like talking action outside of your Frames and a downtime/healing phase.

The theme for the jam is "The sun is dead," although you aren't required to use the theme. As I write this there is still a full day left to go in the jam!

https://itch.io/jam/micro-rpg-jam

Ascent might work well for an English name, if you plan on publishing it. The Russian name is probably not trademarked/copyrighted so it will work.

>English

Your English is pretty good and translating your current design document would be good practice to make it better still.

>Document presentation

Presenting your document isn't just for show. It's easier for you to write your game and it's easier for others to critique.

Change the font. Courier New is awful. Try Cousine if you want something similar, but actually readable.

Purple coloured headers aren't very noticeable. I would suggest you to familiarise yourself with and use the header/text system in GDocs. Your headers should be clearly noticeable when scrolling through the document, not a minute purple blur.

>Grammar

Use the built-in Google Spellcheck. There are quite a few typos and errors, in particular with number postfixes.

I'll continue providing feedback in the GDock, there is a lot to go through, so I won't be doing it all at once.

That might depend a bit on what exactly you are after. If you want a nice looking sheet with art and fonts to match the style and feel of your game, maybe Inkscape is the way to go. It certainly is free but I'm not sure it qualifies as simple.

I would rename Wisdom to Intuition or Wits. Wisdom is difficult to quantify and express during play, so the term too often becomes a surrogate for any number of things.

Skill Threshold (threshold, really) is a rather clunky word. Pick a different one.

I really like percentile systems. Really fine grit, versatile, and there's a good amount of meta results to play with. I can see how you're going to use Xd10 just from the core rules part. I'm not sure how much extra value Xd5 and Xd2 will bring.

I'd suggest you to use Notion, it allows you to do a lot of stuff. I've been using it to share a system I'm working on.

Anything more permissive than "All rights reserved, otherwise I will come to your house and bludgeon you about the head and shoulders with the Berne conventions" is a complex topic.

Licensing has come a long way in this age of the Internet, which is a double-edged sword. Licenses have proliferated, but few have been tested.

Arguably the most respected "sharing" licenses have been developed by Creative Commons. There are several "CC" licenses available, each with unique terms and conditions that satisfy different needs. They've been developed with non-lawyers in mind and each is accompanied by a plain language explanation of what it allows and disallows.

At the other end of the spectrum, the OGL and OGL5 are varying degrees of broken, convoluted, and disingenuous.

1. huge issues. insurmountable issues. as long as youre not selling your game you are fine, but you wont be able to copyright your work either.

2. see above, since you have someone else work inside your document you cant copyright it. you could technically look up every single license for the art you use and fashion a new one that incorporates all of those... but its not worth the hassle.

if you do end up removing the art https://creativecommons.org/ is a nice and easy way to copyright your stuff.

I'd say it's definitely not, especially if there's awesome commissioned art it'll undermine. If you really need to fill that space maybe see if you can do something with vector elements (from https://thenounproject.com/ for example) or typographic elements.

You could do it with a hand of cards, letting the GM make intelligent choices about what cards to play but limiting the options to what's in hand. Cardhunter is/was a lovely little tactics crpg which used this premise, but there's no reason you couldn't extend it to tabletop - you'd just need the cards.

iirc, Penny-arcade guy's Thornwatch was intended to be this, but turned into a board game, and I've heard the concept raised multiple times but never seen it actually executed.

Averia Serif Libre, one of its siblings, or Linux Libertine.

You could also consider something like Radley.

Do you have a genre or setting?

Serif PagePlus X9 hands down! It's a full-featured desktop publishing software, competitive with Adobe InDesign. It's uses go far beyond character sheets - you could publish a complete finished book with it...

Best of all, it's only $25 usd. This is because serif had moved on to a new set of softwares, and dumped the price of last-year's-model.

If you want to see what an amateur designer (me...) can do with PagePlus, the current Myth Maker alpha was produced with it (get the pdf at www.MythMakerGame.com).

If you're still not convinced, try the starter edition. It's an older version with some features disabled, but it will make a fine character sheet: http://www.serif.com/desktop-publishing-software/ (note that this version cannot make a proper book, as documents are limited to 5 pages)

When you're ready to buy the full version: http://www.serif.com/PagePlus/

I often find myself using canva.com as it has a lot of free assets. It's fairly easy to manipulate and create the design you want. Plus you can download your creation in lots of different file types. It is a little time consuming as it's a pretty bare bones system (no layers or anything like that) but it will get the job done.

I also like to use pdfescape.com to make fillable PDF forms for online play (given the world we live in right now). It's not the best tool but it will get the job done and doesn't require you to pay. You can make fillable paragraph boxes as well so it's nice for inventory sections.

Scribus is free desktop-publishing software that can take care of your page layout needs.

Despite the points /u/mk572 makes, there's absolutely nothing wrong with starting to fiddle around with page layout right away! If nothing else it's still good practice, and unless you're being super finicky, it's not that hard to adjust layout based on changes to the material. The majority will be slotted into the same page template after all.

Just another backing up /u/Caraes_Naur. Scribus, or LaTeX are the only real choices for properly formatting documents for PDF or print publication.

My instinct for software engineering is something UML related but...

A graph editor would probably work

Looks like there is a skill tree template on creately. Dunno how creately works but maye you can use it. https://creately.com/lp/skill-tree-maker/ I don't think creately is totally free, though.

Realistically, if you have a simplistic skill tree that is more like a hierarchy chart or organizational chart, you could probably find a free hierarchy chart or organizational chart maker. Especially if everything only has one prerequisite. More or less what that creately skill tree maker looks like anyway.

A flow chart maker might suffice as well though it would look weird.

It might look weird but a class diagram could probably model this.

If you need something more complicated, a UML package diagram might make more sense, but this starts getting really complicated. Might be necessary depending on what you are doing, though.

Came to say something similar. I think for this use the D16 and D24 would fit in great (double of the more "traditional" d8 and D12 respectively) to fill in some of the larger steps, possibly a D30 as well to be the high end since D100 is such a HUGE leap at that point. Lots of sets out there, I found this one that included some other oddball die sizes:

https://www.amazon.com/Unusual-Approved-Dungeon-Crawl-Classics/dp/B00YLSWZGO/ref=pd_lpo_21_t_1/135-1243934-3648910?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00YLSWZGO&pd_rd_r=bca22340-3f59-4426-ae68-0bc38ae9e716&pd_rd_w=OpvsE&pd_rd_wg=VX9Go&pf_rd_p=fb1e266d-b690-4b4f-b71c-bd35e5395976&pf_rd_r=FYR86WJEK6AEWFHKN8K4&psc=1&refRID=FYR86WJEK6AEWFHKN8K4

For something a bit wild, but still, something I think could power a great chivalric game that captures the tone of chansons de geste, take a look at Mouse Guard. It's a streamlined version of Burning Wheel, and if you lean into the character beliefs, it fits very well.

Grab this book for the juicy setting bits too, it's as good as the Gies books, very usable:

https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Life-World-Charlemagne-Middle/dp/0812210964

I bought this. Great deal at just over $1.64 per set (If you take shipping into account). Gave away dice sets to at least 7 people but have gotten a few more sets here and there for personal use. (Diablo 3 die from Blizzcon X is my current go-to set.)

I tried to split evenly between sheer craft and more nuance/humanities focused books. Mihaly's low is a book on behavioral psychology. The Design of Everyday Things is from Donald Norman, the same person who wrote Emotional Design (also an amazing book) and has a very... how should I put it... mixed approach to his understanding of design :)

But you're definetely right. As a game designer by profession I also feel like there is a lot missing from the syllabus in the humanities side. I mentioned the books I mentioned because he asked for a starting line, I guess.

Jane's book is a little too self-help-ish to my tastes, but I love one of her references, Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse.

As for games as a cultural object, the go-to is Homo Ludens by Johann Huizinga.

AND YES, THEATRE. Carnegie Melon's MET course has improv acting classes and I think it's amazing.

(Campbell's monomyth is a structure though people tend to teach and practice it like a formula. If you start studying storytelling from a writing perspective, though, you eventually get to and learn to love non-plot)

You could check out Alone Against the Forlorn Wild and Strain, currently 75% off at https://itch.io/s/25795/winter-wasteland-tabletop-rpg-sale

The concept is that your skill tests are rolled against your highest condition (Stress, Hunger, Thirst, Exposure, Exhaustion). You can roll extra dice on skill tests to increase your chance of success, but risk gaining more condition points. Each condition has different requirements to reduce, and it is a constant challenge to balance your conditions, with limited time in the day to accomplish as many tasks as you can.

This is such a great question, but it's so hard to answer! If there's a process, I think it goes like this.

1. BUILD AN AUDIENCE. Play your game at conventions, play it online, talk about it online. Get involved in game communities, playtest other people's games. This is vital, because those people will be your customers and help your game stand out.
2. PLAYTEST YOUR GAME: Play your game over and over again, with different groups, tweaking it until it does exactly what you want it to do.
3. EDIT YOUR GAME: Turn your game into a final, polished text. For your first game, you might simply get friends to read and spot mistakes. Later, you might hire an editor.
4. LAY OUT YOUR GAME: Turn your text into a product that's good to read. This tends to mean a PDF file. Layout is a difficult skill, using specialist software such as Adobe InDesign or Scribus. You could try to learn it yourself - it's fun, but hard to do well - or you could hire a layout artist.
5. (Optional) PRINT YOUR GAME: Create printed copies to sell. This usually involves working with a commercial printer: perhaps a print-on-demand outfit like DriveThruRPG, perhaps a bigger printer. That said, you could simply print your game on your home printer and sell it as a little booklet.
6. SELL YOUR GAME: Get people to give you money for your game. Think of all the different ways you could do this: put the PDF on DriveThruRPG and itch.io; put the text on the Kindle Store; do a Kickstarter; rent a table at a convention and sell printed copies to people.
   

I've simplified that down to the basics, but I think it's a good summary. Good luck! And you're welcome to ask questions.

Hi BingBongDonkeyKong,

What a fantastic name.

With regards to your expanded version of Crash Pandas - publish it! Stick it up on itch.io. The one-pagers are all under creative commons so you can do what you like with them so long as you credit me with the original design.

As far as method goes... generally I work out an intro for the game, like "YOU ARE A CRIMINAL BEAR" or "YOU'RE IN A COMA, TRY TO WAKE UP" and write it up, then puzzle out a core mechanic that serves to push the story towards the promises made in the intro. At that point usually it's about half a page, so the rest of it is covered by "what else do I need the game to do?" and "how many gag tables can I fit in here?"

My advice would be to give the GM as much control as possible; you simply don't have the room to build a fully-functional system like D&D on a single page, and as such a lot of what goes into those books will be replaced with "make it up as you go along." Which I think is honest games design, that what we do anyway (who runs D&D exactly rules-as-written?) but it's tempting to try and keep more control over the intended experience by constraining the GM. Resist that temptation.

Thanks for the feedback!

I've decided for itch.io to facilitate the sharing since Drivethru and some other services require registration before the download.

I didn't think it would be so many clicks, I didn't realized it since it always feel fast and easy to me. If I find something better to host it I will, for now I'm sorry if itch.io is bothering you.

​

>Do I really need to know you could write a blog but decided not to? Who cares?

​

Well as an author I would like to "talk" to the reader, and to somehow try to create a friendship, I'm sorry if I failed to you, but I tought someone would care and it maybe could influence someone to create their own Zines...

​

>Sorry, but "Witchcraft & Outcry" sounds weird. I get the mild D&D reference with the ampersand, but otherwise these are random words that don't seem to be connected to anything particular in the game.

​

I really made it randomly because I could not really think in anything better and I thought it would be ok for a Zine name but I know it's bad! lol

But I didn't think it would really matter just to share some ideas with the community. For a game name it would really be better to have another name, if you have any suggestions I'm open.

This is highly overcomplicated for an RPG, but its cool. It's a kids wizard duel game, the way it works is that you choose the spell you want to start with. Theres basic firebolt, or summoning spells, and then there are counters for those spells. So you reveal your card and then resolve whatever happens. Once you have your first turn, you can't just choose anything, you can just rotate your wheel to pick the next one.

So if my six options are this, and I started with option 3:

1--2--3--4--5--6

Then I can only do 2 or 4 next. So there's a method of prediction to it.

There's also resources to cast the same spell again, and a load of other rules. But if you want a rock-paper-scissors approach, maybe using that with fighting stances.

how big is a space? is it 5ft (1.5m)? if that is the case then 1x1 square is enough just like how D&D handels it. Centaurs aren't necessarily the size of horses, see this link as example.

If one space is 3ft (1m) I would suggest to use a 2x2 space just for simplicity.

I've had a lot of luck with Obsidian:

https://obsidian.md/

Basically it's note taking software using Markdown format. It has a lot of great features right out of the gate, and has a number of quite useful extensions. Free software, so that's nice too.

You could also try Ikarus:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1039110/Ikarus/

which is more RPG/worldbuilding specific. It's still in early access and rough around the edges, but it's free and worth a look.

Now, this to me sounds like a classic TTRPG conundrum. You have a very interesting and diverse "combat" system shall we say, but it doesn't sound like there is much beyond that on the RP side.

Sure, you can be a charming club captain who cares more about his looks and his wage than the team he plays with, but how does this translate to the core mechanics of a matchday?

How do other players, but more important, the fans react to characters like that? Okay, and now what if you're a thuggish brute who likes to break legs and get sent off more than he touches the ball? Now, you're a wonderkid who has just been brought in for a record fee?

I think what would be interesting is exploring the lives beyond the pitch. Maybe a player has a crippling gambling addiction that is affecting his on field play. Maybe one has a debilitating disease that is threatening him ever playing again. These RP scenarios will help you build an interesting campaign, continuing these dialogues, that culminates in the build up of a weekly fixture, or even a big World Cup Final. THIS will help players feel more immersed beyond "ah im just a cocky dickhead" because their actions will inspire further consequences and reactions.

That's where I think the meat is in this idea. I highly recommend looking at these interactive books. One is a crime mystery where you have to manage your team, whilst also finding out whodunnit. The other is the sequel where your players are caught up in a doping scandal that could threaten your whole tournament.

My (very WIP) system currently has 93 skills, each of which has 10 powers. I’ve used a free AirTable account to very easily organize it all. Here’s my setup, but there’s lots of customization options, so this might be good for you! https://airtable.com/shrBwGdp69xfWYUYn

I think Adobe InDesign or other PDF makers would be a good fit once you get to the final stages and want to make your work look good. However using Docs or even Word is compelty fine.

I know some do use the website https://www.notion.so/ which takes some practice using but it can help with organization. End of the day, welcome to the hobby and best of luck to you.

Are you sure you need something complex? Why not have a Word doc with headers set up (the Navigation Pane will display all your headers, so you can navigate by clicking on it). Google Docs or Open Office likely has something similar.

If you do want something more sophisticated, you may want to look into a desktop Wiki of some sort. (WikidPad)[http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net] is free, open source, and runs on your computer (I assume you don't want this the contents exposed online).

The TLDR is that it's similar to Dungeon World, but not based on "moves." It's based on fixed success tiers:

• 1: Catastrophe for the PC. Triumph for the NPCs (all of them targeting the PC).
• 2-5: Setback for PC. Full success for NPCs.
• 6-10: Partial success for PC. Full success for NPCs.
• 11-15: Full success for PC. Partial success for NPCs.
• 16-19: Full success for PC. Setback for NPCs.
• 20: Triumph for PC. Catastrophe for NPCs.

The GM describes what's about to happen. The player describes what they want to do, typically in response to or to overcome what's about to happen. They can always ignore what's about to happen and do whatever they want. They roll.

Full details are in my WIP outline. We've been playtesting for over 6 months.
https://workflowy.com/s/stories-todo/fGb3ZUw8nyYVaUNk

Everyone should have a divination practice! I imagine dice get the job done just fine!

This is the Rider deck I use: https://www.amazon.com/dp/091386613X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_KMHJMW0X0DNNFFGMV9A8?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Might work for you if you’re still looking!

If you're willing to make a possible road trip out of it, look for a nearby maritime museum. There are some really great ones in North America and Europe.

This is also pretty good, if pricey: https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Age-Sail-Illustrated-Sixteenth/dp/1782740694

This simple ebook.

https://www.amazon.com.br/How-Beat-Police-Interrogation-English-ebook/dp/B007BEZ3AU

It doesn't pretended to be a study. But it's easy enough and entertaining to start with.

I can't remind it is on this book or another about private investigations. But one comic example of trick is putting a rock on the car's wheel of the target, then you take a shoot of him moving it and measure his strength.

The ebook How to Beat... show cops lying about technology so they proved you're guilty. Start interrogation showing how they switched an old wife for a younger one to an accused of child abuse, so they build empathy. It's like Mindhunter, the TV show.

A contact of mine said he received suspicious calls for working that probably are cops trying to build a case against random people. They need to make a score.

It may help building background for the Average Joe and a context of manipulation outside explicit torture.

Set within the Bible's Book of Revelation, you must survive as the seas turn to blood and horrid beasts pour fourth.

Theocratic states locked in a Cold War fueled by divine high magic. Adventerers are often the pawns in a proxy war. Will you trigger the Apocalypse?

Your backyard. You play as small/faerie people in the tall grass. Everything is dangerous when you're small. Something is bringing the scraps of trash and leaves to life. Inspired by the art of Richard A. Kirk.

Precolonial Africa. Everyone has done movies and games in fuedal Europe/Japan/China etc, Africa is avoided for whatever reason.

On that note, pick any historical place that isn't rich today and you'll find very little content for it.

Afganistan's history is full of suprises. Playing a game set after the death of Alexander the Great and during the rise of the Seleucid Empire would be interesting. The Seleucid calendar gave us a "year zero", previous calendars were cyclical. One scholarly book even suggests the idea of the "start of time" suggests an "end of times"

Congratulations to the winners (and everyone who submitted, what a feat! :) ).

Mine didn't do super well unfortunately. Giving comments when you're reviewing should really be encouraged, as it's kinda discouraging and draining to see a low score but not be sure what led to it. I mean, I have my guesses (for example, I didn't have the time or energy to do an editing pass before submission, so I bet the text could be much better), but only one reviewer (thank you!) post a comment with really good feedback, so it is hard to know.

One thing that's for sure - having an artist on board really helps with the final product as seen by other submissions! I'll try and get ahold of one for next time, if I do it again. :)

Hey u/Sofinho! I'm glad that someone else was leaving comments for everyone as well. My itch.io handle is TheBigTabletop (Zero To Hero). I just got done giving everyone comments and feel so tired but so glad I got to read so many cool entries!

Hey everyone! I created this for the Mega RPG Jam that ends today. Red Giant is a brief dip in the waters of insanity and horror with a focus on a simple and rules-light system allowing players and GMs alike to get right into the game. I'm still updating Red Giant and would love to hear what you think!

Part of me wants to give this a shot since it sounds like it would be fun (I have never been apart of a TTRPG Jam before). I made an Itch.io account (username is civ-man on there, I don't have anything up as of right now).

I want to ask this since it will likely be the design route I'll go down for my first go and me being in school, but are Hacks allowed? Like taking a current system then tweaking, changing it and adding new mechanics to make it it's own thing? This I'll likely still give it a shot either way if I can't Hack a system, but I wanted to ask since it'll give me a good chance of being able to do it easily.

DTRPG is the 800-pound gorilla in the field, but a lot of indie RPG publishers and writers have also begun using Itch, which has a category for "physical games".

If you're just going to get it online where it can live and possibly find a life - build a website. DTRPG and itch.io are great resources, but nobody will find your game there just by browsing unless it goes viral. But people google "1 page RPG" all the time, so it would be to your advantage to have it somewhere that SEO works for you rather than against you.

That's really not what OP wants, based on the comment. "I just want to make $1 of profit, I just want one person, one thread, to notice." Those are pretty humble goals, you don't need a Kickstarter for that, and honestly, all that added stress of managing/running a KS, making sure all your fulfillments go out (especially if it winds up more popular than you expect) makes it arguably not worth it.

Itch.io is just fire-and-forget. Set up a page, set a price, release it into the wild. Plus, Kickstarter doesn't really bring any actual existing community on its own, you can get way more community with actual posts on Twitter, Reddit, etc. Kickstarter just gives you a good focus to build hype around. If you don't want to build hype, it's not for you.

There are many different creative commons licenses you can use including ones that allow home use but not commercial use. Though if someone does try to steal your stuff to use commercially it would still be up to you to find them and persu legal action against them.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

> It does not mean it’s a bad system, just that it goes completely against my preferences.

Yeah, that’s cool. The first 30 minutes or so of THIS Clockwork Game Design Podcast more or less describe the challenge I am wrestling with. Essentially, the problem of options in tactical combat, in my case through the goal of in-character immersion.

> How do you plan to handle declaring and resolving things simultaneously with multiple combatants on both sides?

I am going to wing it. :)

> Is dodge an alternative or addition to normal defense? If they can’t be used together, what does one gain by using dodge?

Characters have 3 ability scores: prowess (thorn rune), cunning (C rune) and wyrd (hagal rune). Prowess makes and defends against melee attacks. Cunning makes and defends ranged attacks.

When you dodge, you spend stamina to replace whatever ability score you were going to use with cunning. Additionally, you get a small bonus on top of this. [+] is basically advantage from 5e.

The emergent complexity is Dodge allows low prowess but high cunning characters to engage more safely in melee combat and also helps a little against ranged attacks.

Because the lighter your armor the more stamina you have, varying degrees of lightly armored cunning melee characters can be built. (Basically, dexterity fighters instead of strength fighters.)

The counterplay is that staggering (stunning) a character prevents them from using dodge, as does them running out of stamina. If you are hit while dodging, you also lose more stamina and thus run out faster. This opens up high cunning dodge characters to be punished in melee if they are staggered or run out of stamina.

I use Zettlr. I used Typora until version 0.9 something but found that Zettlr offered more features that I enjoyed(better folder organization, supports linking between documents with a few clicks, better table editor, better theming, more configurable spellchecker, highly configurable character replacement), plus Typora is closed source + paid, while Zettlr is FOSS.

Before you ask, Zettlr does support bookmarks, sections, navigation and all that. It also supports exports to all conventional text formats (it's .md or just plaintext with formatting symbols by default).

I sync between my devices using Syncthing.

Hi! I took this and made a Repl of it using Python. Just run the code using the button on the top, and then on the right, put in

game()

And hit enter.

My first suggestion using this was an Erotic Survival game set in the Prehistoric era. Well then...

So I just got done testing a game in Closed Beta, and I had a rough time at first finding a lot of players to test what we did.

In the end, I found a lot of players on meetup.com. I would search for cities around mine that had tabletop groupings and gatherings, and I would reach out to whoever was running it and see if they'd be interested in taking a look at the creation, and maybe getting their group involved in it. This method got us 17 groups to play our tabletop and because of them, we're now able to move into a live beta.

It takes a little time, but I promise you, it's worth it.

I used https://www.sejda.com/pdf-forms - it is a bit finicky, but it works and it's free. The input boxes remain visible so that may affect your aesthetics, but I don't find that a dealbreaker.

To say it in a fancy way it's a type of a markup language. It sounds scary, but it's actually just a simple way to well... "mark up" your text to signify different things: headings, bullet points, bold, italics, etc.

It's exists somewhere between plain text and rich text. Unlike rich text (like a .doc or .rtf file) it is human readable when open it as plain text (with something like notepad++). It can also be easily exported to different formats - plain text, rich text, html, pdf etc.

It's quite commonly used online. In fact, if you ever made text bold or italic on reddit, you already used it.

For example, by writing the text below:

# Heading ## Subheading

* point * another point, but bold

1. and a numbered point 2. another numbered point.

A new paragraph!

You are actually writing this (when it "renders"):

Heading

Subheading

• point
• another point, but bold

1. and a numbered point
2. another numbered point.

A new paragraph!

You can see more examples of how it's used on wikipedia. The ghostwriter guide is even better intro to how to use it for writing.

I was going to recommend Typora, which is a minimalist markdown text editor which I've been using for last couple years. It auto generates the outline and is a pleasure to work in... however, it seems that since I jumped onto it it became a paid software :/

Glad you found the bookmark panel for N++. You can probably find some plugin to handle markdown files and auto-generate an outline as well if you'd decide to go markdown down the road :)