Tabletop Roleplaying Games
Systems
I am a fan of simple game systems. As much as I think big, crunchy systems filled with rules, modifiers and maths are fun — and the realisation of an emergent property often forming the highlight of a campaign — I also value simplicity above all else. Rules that can be explained in seconds, or rules that don't need to be memorised because they fit on a playing card, or rules that are instantly self-explanatory once practiced with friends are my favourite. The less complex a system with the more interesting outcomes and emergent play, the better.
No Dice, No Masters
No Dice, No Masters, first introduced to me by Orbital, but originally from Dream Askew, is a wonderful, simple system that centres around the two ideas in the name.
- No dice: instead of fickle dice and a boatload of maths, this system uses tokens. You spend a token to have you or your character perform a move, a decisive, positive action. Conversely, you earn tokens by making a weak or impulsive move that reveals a flaw or vulnerability in your character. A brilliantly simple way to guide players into making interesting, complex characters and exploring them in the narrative.
- No masters: the duties of the game master are shared among the players, with players taking on specific NPCs. I love this idea, but the game itself needs to generate at least some portion of the game/narrative so all players have something to react to. That said this isn't necessary if the story isn't about conflict with an external force — a bunch of good roleplayers will simply build story and set the tone for one another.
Quest
The Quest system from the game Quest, is a favourite. It formed the basis of a tentpole TTRPG project of mine because of its wonderful simplicity. Quest was designed to introduce younger players to RPGs and so feels like the traditional systems we're used to but simplifies them dramatically:
- There is only one die, a D20.
- There are no maths to do: Weapons/actions have deterministic numerical outcomes, like fixed damage values.
- Available actions/spells/powers are laid out in skill tree pathways. Customisation and homebrew of classes and skills is expected and extremely easy.
- Systems are deliberately designed to aid with theatre of the mind, especially the spatial rules.
- Hard systemic emergence that would cause debate is non-existent. (Soft world-building-y emergence still exists, of course).
The entire ruleset can be communicated in a few minutes and it's an extremely quick and easy system to tell a roleplay/narrative-focused story on top of if you want to keep your players firmly in the story and not above the table.
Some favourites of mine
Wanderhome
A cozy slice-of-life RPG about travelling through a wonderful little pastoral world and living through its seasons and tides.
Mausritter
A fail-fast-fail-hard RPG where you roll up a mouse, join the adventure and almost inevitably get killed by one of the great challenges faced by mousekind: birds, possums, traps and poisons. Despite its somewhat horrifying premise, it's an incredibly fun game to build short campaigns around.
I'm fortunate enough to own a boxed copy of this game, which is a wonderful set.
Tales from the Loop
Simon Stålenhag's universe lends itself brilliantly to a nostalgic eighties tale of kids solving mysteries and offers an incredible tapestry of components and worldbuilding to build amazing short or long-form mysteries from. I'm a huge fan of Stålenhag's work and I own most of his art books in addition to the Loop universe rulebooks.
Long Time Listener, Last Time Caller
A one-page with the players taking the position of a radio station host and their callers-in as they discuss the events of an ongoing cataclysm and the end of days. It's very roleplay and storytelling heavy, but leads to some great theatre of the mind improv.
Mousehole Press
I've just recently discovered Mousehole Press, Jack Harrison's tiny studio. Of note are Koriko and Orbital, two small games I'm just starting to play but already adore the vibe of.
- Koriko is a solo journaling RPG inspired by the Miyazaki classic Kiki's Delivery Service, where you roleplay a young witch living through a year away from home in an unfamiliar city.
- Orbital is a no dice, no masters game about managing a space station, with all the tangled webs of human life and community politik that comes with homesteading on a spaceship. It oozes the vibe of the kind but precarious lives we learn about in Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series, some of my favourite science fiction novels ever written.
Game Master Notes
Toy Box Campaigns
A non-trivial chunk of these ideas comes from different interviews with DMs Matt Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan, describing their very similar systems for building campaigns with what Mulligan calls 'a toy box': a modular set of 'toys' the player can interact and engage with, but that are otherwise not threaded together with a solid plot.
'Toy box' campaigns are designed around the idea of reducing the Game Master's cognitive load. It's trivial to either overplot or underplot a campaign. On one side, you end up with rigid structure that's wasted or hard to adapt when your players immediately wander away from it, and on the other, you end up with wishy-washy scenes invented on the fly out of desperation rather than being intentionally crafted.
Both will lead to a weaker campaign and both require immense cognitive load. One requires masses of wrote memorisation and rarifies improvisation (at least for you), and the other requires a baseline of difficult improvisation and a huge capacity for working memory as you come up with things on the fly.
The toy box method essentially does away with this. The idea is to make a collection of simple but well thought out 'toys' for your players to interact with. Characters, plot beats, encounters, pre-made stat blocks, etc., which can be sprinkled into the play space at any moment and don't require a massive cognitive load to summon up or describe.
I'm going to go on a long tangent here, but it will come back, so mentally bookmark the previous paragraph.
One method of writing I developed as a teenager creating fiction for myself and my friends was — if the story had one — to work backward from the villain's perspective. Plot out the entire villain's plan and write, in a thousand or so words, exactly how the villain would execute their plan, why it was going to work and what the end result would be, both for their domain and the benefit of the change for themselves. You might be rolling your eyes and thinking 'duh, of course you should give your villain motivations,' but it's more than that.
Breaking from a narrow-minded vision of the story and world from the protagonist's or reader's perspective immediately reveals problems you might not otherwise notice. From the most complex to solve, such as: the villain is a mega-genius but when read in isolation, their plan is nonsensical, or worse, only works because of the protagonist, to the most simple: my villain keeps teleporting to wherever the protagonist needs them to be to move the plot forward, whether in terms of their physical location or the state of their plan/story/arc.
I arrived at this idea because I had a tendency to write the latter into stories. Villains did stuff, from my perspective, at appropriate times where it was convenient for me to transition the narrative to my protagonists' reaction to them. Or worse, my villains exclusively reacted to my protagonists, like robots pathfinding their way to a goal 'the protagonists just don't like' by bouncing off the walls.
Now, if I'm being totally honest, there's nothing actually wrong with any of the narrative decisions I just wrote. The point, for me, was that writing this villainous perspective outline helped me see where I the choices I had made were intentional or accidental. Intention is all that actually matters.
To get back to TTRPGs, all of this is to say, this is — to more or less of an extent — how you should be thinking about characters. They're not static props for your players (or readers). They're living, breathing people with their own stories happening right now. Whether the player meets them or not, their problems are still happening.
To come back to the toy box (get your bookmark out!), there's actually an argument to be made that you don't even need plot. Players tend to care, at least in my experience, about characters more than plot. You just need realised NPCs whose goals or problems are aligned with or against the players' goals and problems. If your characters are likeable (or hateable), the campaign might just write itself from the push-pull of their influences.
A sufficient toy box of interesting characters influencing your world and your players is the perfect tapestry for you and your players together to actually weave the plot across.
Add a few locations, big or small, to ground everything in a shared sense of reality. Give yourself location toys, item toys, generically usable stat blocks, and dress them in the aesthetic and philosophy of the place and time you want your players to experience.
Then it's just about deploying those toys in the right moment.
An example character sheet with the toy box method
I love this template because it lends itself to engaging and well-rounded characters without actually having done much work, which is what the toy box is all about.
Give the character some roleplaying cues —
- A unique detail — something visually memorable about them, like an ostentatious piece of clothing or a curious habit.
- A vocal pattern — not necessarily a voice, but a style, like 'frenetic' or 'monotone' or 'disinterested'.
- Give them mannerisms — they squint a lot or can't sit still or constantly self-correct.
- (Important characters) Relationships — characters should relate to one another. Are they dating? Friends? Enemies? Do they weirdly not know one another? Even a simple connection can incite engagement from your players.
The next thing is to give the character a current problem. This is a super easy toy box trait. It doesn't matter what that problem is, but it should be happening right now. The player may or may not be able to solve it, but the existence of the problem should guide player choice about them.
Note (if you think about language literally the way I am want to do) that a problem could just be a goal in disguise. You can call this whatever you like.
I find framing it as a problem to be helpful because I tend to end up forming more granular, interesting chunks of conflict. To me, goal implies 'I want to retire to the countryside before sixty' as opposed to 'Janice next door keeps stealing my chicken eggs' — the latter of which is much better catnip for your players and much more useful to your toy box.