Destiny #RPGaDAY2025

 Destiny as a rule,  a dice to rule our destiny. Well, the makinf off that rule isn't anything unusual since the days of  Fate and the forums of the forge. The innovation in the moment was related to changes in the rules that directly affected the narrative and interacted in multiple ways with the narrative proposed by the DM.

The player's contribution within the mechanics of the game went beyond the dichotomy of success or failure. Adding their own contribution to the description of how their character failed or how they managed to perform their action successfully added to the narrative.

So, depending on the player's participation in the game's narrative, they could gradually acquire the ability to influence destiny. To change the world, adding new elements not thought of by the narrator, even adding non-player characters or new elements to the world described. 

The process of playing with destiny led to more and more games including this type of rule in their system, sometimes changing the role of the narrator and even shifting it among all the participants throughout the game. 

In response, it seems to me that an important segment of role-players closed themselves off to innovation in the narrative aspect of gaming. That section of the hobby focused on playing more in the old style (OSR) with titles where each person's participation is fixed and unchangeable. 

Which I find a bit narrow in certain cases, because it's also true that many role-players switch between titles and play styles, which I feel is the best approach to these kinds of changes: enjoy them and use them however we want.

Sign #RPGaDAY2025

 

A sign is a message that announces the purpose, objective, or particular interest of a space or activity. In the case of role-playing games, the signs that are presented to players tend to be the names of pubs, shops selling magical items, or, in general, institutional or entertainment places that their characters have decided to visit.

The sign can appear as a clue, a bloodstain, traces of stone inside a modern apartment. Cigarette butts along a hospital corridor. When an object that should not be part of a specific location appears in said location, something bad has happened, a simple object becomes a sign.

The orange sky and a ruined building are signs of the kind of world in which an adventure will take place. These are indisputable indications that we are ready to venture into a irradiated land where fierce battles will be fought for gallons of gasoline and fresh water.

Neon signs serve the same purpose in this world as they do in any fictional one: to attract attention, to plant the seed that by walking through the door next to the sign, something we are missing can be found.

Overcome #RPGaDAY2025

 Overcome rule ...YES

From the beginning of my years as a DM, my relationship with the rules was complicated, mainly because when I was a teenager, the third edition rules seemed very complicated to me. I only began to understand certain aspects thanks to “Never Winter Nights.” Especially about the spell slot system, which I honestly don't even understand because it was so difficult for me to grasp. Back then, the blocks of text in the player's manuals seemed more intimidating to me than they do now. And I think the reason I don't worry about it now is because I'm simply  was no longer interested in the fundamental part that plays the rules in a rpg session. 

It sounds extreme, like many of my opinions, but at the end of the day, what I want to convey is that when we get together to play with our friends, I prefer to take a relaxed attitude towards everything, because what we are doing is getting together to PLAY, that's what we're doing at the end of the day...PLAYING A GAME!

So yes, it was liberating to overcome the rules of a system that was functional in a big part, but with a big quantity of unnecessary crunch.   With the third edition, there was too much going on. The language of the book wasn't my native tongue, and if I had difficulties, the people I was playing with didn't understand a damn thing about the mechanics. To really play role-playing games, do you need to become a law student? Since those years, I've been feeling that discomfort, which is so strong that I immediately lose interest in any role-playing book or adventure that exceeds 80 pages.

In that sense, the types of games available on itch.io feel good, but they didn't add much to my experience when I discovered them, since my liberation from heavy walls had happened a decade earlier.

The confrontation with the rules went at the pace of my different players. If they got bored counting the weight of the backpack and keeping a precise count of the arrows, that was left aside. If they got confused about vertical and horizontal movement, it was left out. If they didn't understand how spell slots worked, okay... then they weren't used, and that was that... although this last part was eventually adapted in the fifth edition, where it was easier for me to stop using certain rules.

In my games, initiative numbers don't matter. In my mind, the balance is clearly on the players' side, and things move quickly, although I often feel the frustration of some players with the rules... Why the hell are we using this? There's Microlite 20 or 74... so many different OSRs... why the hell continue with this?

In general, I think most of my players wouldn't have a problem with this, but there are always a couple who get obsessed with the rules and try to give them weight and importance at the table, which I take into account from time to time, but inside I feel annoyed. Who do they think they are? Imposing rules on my absurd game of dragons and red gnomes!

F!!

Deceive #RPGaDAY2025

 Deceptive device...An interesting result that immediately makes me think of DnD Beyond, the huge tables with touch screens, apps, and websites like these with rules, creatures, and optional stats. All of the above is misleading, as you can fall into the trap of thinking that it is necessary to enjoy a role-playing game. Not even the basic manuals and the basic set of dice to play DnD are necessary.

All of the above is misleading, as you can fall into the trap of thinking that it is necessary to enjoy a role-playing game. Not even the basic manuals and the basic set of dice to play DnD are necessary. And it should be clarified that those specific tools aren't misleading because they are negative per se. 

The thing is, you don't really need them to play role-playing games, and I'm not going to go so far as to say that storytelling around a campfire is synonymous with role-playing games; it's different. But to play an exploration adventure in a dungeon with a wizard and three explorers, all you need is a basic set of trial-and-error rules.

So you can play with the most basic rules on any system and continue your work as a tomb raider explorer. All you need is for everyone to agree on how the rules work... in this game, we all have 5 lives, we flip a coin, and whichever side comes up in our favor counts as a success. Otherwise, we describe how a heart is lost. It's only in very specific cases that the coin is flipped.

So, it's not that complicated. Nor is it necessary for a person to refuse to use any extra tools they like to add to their game table. Let everyone play however they want, but let it be clear that too many things on the game table are simply extras.

Darkness #RPGaDAY2025

 

I don't think I've ever managed to convey a proper sense of darkness, which is why the “Veins of the Earth” made by this blogger  ...The module appeals to me so much. The module includes different ways to generate natural caves, with their obvious risks and a description of the creatures based on the sounds they make, their scent, and changes in the ambient temperature.

The creatures are divided into two types: individual creatures that can cause problems for adventurers, and others that are neither aggressive nor carnivorous, but whose alien behavior or inability to relate to our reasoning causes them to oppose the interests of explorers who have made the ambitious error of delving too deeply.

The other type of beasts are presented as societies or communities, plagues, entire species that function differently from simple individuals, whose descriptions can be an entire adventure or campaign in themselves. In reality, there is a lot to review. Some entries, however, are simply incomprehensible, but this aspect is not overused, as the incomprehensible barely covers a few pages.

I find it very difficult to work in the dark, as we are generally asked to rely on other senses that we are not very familiar with. And I think that the fact that a character cannot even see their own hands leaves them somewhat immobilized.

If you add a torch to the terrible darkness, everything becomes much more manageable. But if we find ourselves in a game where practically everyone has night goggles, what's the point of night or darkness?

So I dare to point the finger at the fifth edition of DnD for steering me away from the habit of storytelling that emphasizes darkness, too many spells, environmental elements, and abilities that come from ancestry... Perpetual and eternal day, for fear of causing fear and despair. The tyranny of joy sweetened with sugar glass strikes again.

Origin #RPGaDAY2025

 The origin of it all is a story that now makes me cringe, but I'm going to share with you everything that happened and the reasoning behind the first game in which I took on the role of narrator, DM, or whatever you want to call it.

THE ORIGIN

At that time, I was obsessively playing GTA 3, which led me to become quite familiar with the city of Liberty City. I was 12 years old and had played a game of DnD with my brother a few weeks earlier, so after reviewing the Call of Cthulhu manual, I wanted to run a game without knowing what I was doing. With a lot of ignorance and enthusiasm, I got down to work.

So I let myself be guided by teenage enthusiasm, anime, and my complete lack of knowledge about Lovecraft and the Cthulhu myths. So I simply chose one of the missions in the game and cast my brother in the role that Claude Speed plays in GTA 3, a simple, unscrupulous errand boy.

I travel around the city, committing crimes on behalf of some mafia boss, and then a fleshless angel descends from the heavens and attacks me. Making full use of my AK-47, I manage to take the angel out of circulation, only for the summoner who brought the creature into the world to immediately appear on a kind of floating dragon. The anime villain appeared and then flew off on his sinister creature. I forgot to apply the sanity rules, and soon that first session ended.   

 So cringe-worthy. Cheers.

Message #RPGaDAY2025

 

A terrible message

I don't think we're enemies, but the owner of a board game store has been posting messages on various social media platforms attacking the group of friends I usually get together to play D&D with.

Many of us got to know each other in her store and we might not have met otherwise, that's true. But the attitude she took towards the role she played in our personal plans to get together and play ended up being unhealthy and so cringe.

She took credit for being the only place where role-playing games should and could happen, while at the same time maintaining that there was no problem with everyone playing on their own, but insisting that we couldn't play with the people she had brought together in her business in the first place.

The logic he brought up was unknowable. We came to play and, without realizing it, we already had a number carved into our backsides. The situation was absurd.

And yet we laughed and wanted to put everything that had happened behind us. We played along with the situation, and although the owner never took the teasing well, she remained silent.

The situation happened a couple more times. So we slowly drifted apart.

And yet, despite the excesses, a part of me wanted to keep talking. The owner was funny, and I liked her despite how absurd she was. But her constant aggression became exhausting, so we left her business and got together on our own to play at one of our friends' houses.

The same old D&D reunion with friends, that's the good way.

You get together with your friends in the basement, eat pizza, and laugh nonstop until dawn. That's how it should be, it's that simple.

And I know very well that everyone reading this post knows perfectly well that the experience of getting together and building a story through the laughter of several basement nerds is a moment that cannot be possessed by anyone.

The role-playing is a non-place.

The ideas are bulletproof, literally.

That is the message I would like the business owner to understand clearly, but I realized long ago that the message will never be understood. She may be able to read the words, but it is clear that she will not truly understand them in a way that will lead to significant changes. That will not happen.

That is the reality. 

 Few messages hit home.

Tavern #RPGaDAY2025

 To get a little more substance out of the conversation about the tavern i así for some help from the random results.

A melancholic moment comes up, upon climbing the mountain peak above the clouds, a cantina full of cockroaches can be seen at distance.

The image is not pleasant; I worked in a bar for a short time with some friends. In the bar my friends ran, exchanges of all kinds were common, and according to what they told me, cockroaches would crawl over the faces of sleeping drunks.

I saw uncomfortable things, that strange feeling that bars give me, and I think it can be conveyed in the scene where Frodo walks through the Prancing Pony. The uncomfortable atmosphere perfectly conveys the feeling of wandering around a bar that is uncomfortable, smelly, and terrible, as long as you're not drunk. If you've already had a few beers, the place isn't so bad; it can even be quite enjoyable. That's how those dark caves of perdition work in my hometown.

And I think that the feeling of the bar as an unsafe, dirty, and dangerous place only comes across when the plot or the players' actions are leading to a conflict inside the establishment.

If nothing is going to happen inside the bar, I admit that it's my fault. I don't always remember what bars are like, and I often describe them as if they were restaurants with beds, which is a waste of space.

Of course, it's not that every bar the party enters will be a smelly place full of conflicts that will explode in their faces. That's not what it's about, but it's worth remembering that when you spend a lot of time in a bar, conflicts can arise, and we all know that in a role-playing game, conflicts generate sweat and laughter...the fuel of every good DM.

Bars are places of risk and adventure, although largely lacking in any tangible reward beyond the simple fact of having a story to laugh about with your friends the next time you get drunk.

Not my tabern

Prompt #RPGaDAY2025

 In the extra throw, it turned out to be a proud approach to accessories. I guess something like dice or notebooks, if that's what it's about. 

 When the hell did I use that kind of prompt in a post?

Of course, I love dice and miniatures like many others, I paint and collect a little of both, but I don't usually mention or share those hobbys on my social media. 

Oh, at least not excessively. Perhaps I boast a plastic miniature that is about to be finished, and the dice remain in the background of a TikTok video I made about advice and tips for DMs.

More accessories.

Of course, there are notebooks, dozens of notebooks of all kinds that we forever DMs with long careers have. I've translated several systems into multiple notebooks, only for them to never be played. It's crazy.

Complete campaigns that are never touched again, notes of all kinds. Essential information for the next session, which, when that session happens, everything occurs except me taking out the notebook with the supposedly essential information. 

I use the apps on my cell phone more constantly to look up references about the rules and creatures in the fifth edition of DnD. In a way, it's my lifeline, but if I can access it, I simply combine the information I have in my head and come up with a strange amalgam that will serve as a stopgap until the next session.

And well, there are other companions we have who like to play the old-fashion way. Markers, miniatures, pens with bright gel ink, 2B pencils, erasers, and junk food that makes a mess, leaving behind a colorful bath of grease and sugar. 

That's all, I guess, but I don't really use prompts for any of that. Although the things i am talking about are more accessories actually.