One of my favourite writing exercises for #ttrpg design is our #RPGenesis community challenge. You can join the game jam now and get ready for 2026: itch.io/jam/rpgenesi... 👈 Kick a fresh design into gear by writing 5k+ words in 7 days! Hosted by @ladyentropy.bsky.social and yours truly 💜

Dice when? That probably sums up many challenges people have with learning different TTRPGs. They either reach for the dice too much or they avoid them like the plague. In fact, they find some way of #ttrpg playing that's on either side of this spectrum and cling to that, no matter the game.

Friendly reminder that actually played actual play became a thing way before performative actual play. And is still here. The fact that the second one is hugely more popular and obscures the first one should be familiar to tabletop roleplayers as we've already lost the word RPG to videogames.

Here We GO! Come along, my dearies! www.kickstarter.com/projects/lum...

Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast was a game that arrived at my house about three days before I had to pack up all my games for moving, so I never got to read it, until now. HOLY GUACAMOLE is this book good. It's a thing of astonishing depth, breadth, and detail. An incredible achievement. Outstandingly.

By not recognising "AI art" as something worthy of definition, I give myself the space to simply keep saying that art makes life worth living. Whoever says that humans are also just regurgitating their training set has no idea how art works. The power of conflicting values and embodied feelings.

I guess people can resent #pbta for explicitly stating when you should roll for something. Do they perhaps prefer a #trrpg that stays silent or ambiguous on the subject of when to roll? I prefer an explicit offer of gameplay, even if imperfect answers are given to questions I'm not so sure about.

so is it all ogre for #affinity?

The 2000s have established infinite ways of engaging with X without actually doing X. Even post-modernists would be surprised. Every trace of culture is forced to consider how far the real thing gets supplanted by their simulacra. The power of convenience, popularity and technology is overwhelming.

I was this close of writing "some moment in fictional time", but I know that opens up another semantic battle front. These same folks would even say that there is no fiction. But in traditional games it's often close to that thing you're waiting for the GM to describe.

Folks that recoil from having story in their #ttrpg may be unaware that every time you skip over some moment in time you've just made a narrative decision.

Getting hyped for the next Apocalypse World thing and I don't even care much for crowdfunds anymore... #pbta #ttrpg

Thinking about the latest Oatmeal piece. Right now, every machine-generated image can be, on one hand, automatically granted the title of "AI art" and on the other, inherently bad. 1/4

As far as fiction can help us look at the world, urban fantasy may unlock our future if we move past self-referential tropes. There are fresh stories hidden in our present situation that only partially match with what the cyberpunks have foretold. Yes, we have arrived at the 2020s. Now what?

grim smiles behind masks white torpid constitution quiet on the set #haiku

Always keep in mind when something like #dnd is written just enough so that people on social media stop screaming and just buy the same damn thing again and again. That's the death of #ttrpg design and some people even cheer for that. That's the way of the hasbros. #dndisnotforme

colouring book break

Hey #ttrpg folks, do you feel it's possible to pin down a few of your aesthetic preferences? Can be some favourite clichés, story premises, philosophical themes, character archetypes. Can be how you assume TTRPGs should work, language, tools, required skills. Can be purely visual. Or auditory.

Me when I'm lamenting all the horrible things that happen to my TTRPG characters and the tragic mistakes they make

At Queerness in Games con. Watching Avery Adler's keynote

I still find it funny how tiktok responds to my #ttrpg preferences given that #dndisnotforme with a bunch of cool people to follow, while youtube after years still goes "so... AD&D?... there's a new D&D boxset?... DM tips?..." It's sad because the channels actually exist and make videos.

Personal #ttrpg turn-off: when a designer says they had this huge kickstarter and so they had to put every idea they had into this one game. You actually don't, just fully realise this one vision, pay your people better and live to fight another day.

It's fucking weird that the default mode of playing ttrpg remains campaigns

What's a typical 5E fantasy setting? Wrong answers only. #ttrpg #dndisnotforme

what's a profit? #ttrpg #indiedev #dndisnotforme

Just boosted the bsky.app/profile/did:... 👈 #dndisnotforme feed. Now it should bring new posts to you quicker. Pin it to your bsky if you're looking for a #ttrpg feed that isn't dominated by the D&Ds. The rich tapestry of our favourite tabletop hobby is right there beyond the red plastic curtains.

when you think it's cool but don't really want to learn the instrument #dndisnotforme #ttrpg original comic by webcomicname.com

I DON'T CARE IF OTHER PBTA GAMES ARE EASIER TO UNDERSTAND APOCALYPSE WORLD IS A HERO IN THIS HOUSE END OF STORY

So much #ttrpg coolness is about embracing failure. A designer tries to imbue their vision into a game and at least partially fails. We try to leverage that vision at our table and sometimes happily fail. Protagonists in our stories reach for the stars, fail and learn something new about themselves.

One of the coolest things you can learn from TTRPGs is being satisfied with your character dying when you've claimed a meaningful position for them in the fiction. That's an underrated urgency: don't wait for this #ttrpg to explain itself to you and risk having your character die as a tourist.

If I wrote a Kult or World of Darkness #ttrpg scenario where a billionaire had four public sold-out events to talk about the anti-christ, it would be rightfully criticised for being too much on-the-nose.

Five ways to look at what a #ttrpg character wants in no particular order: In a Wicked Age Burning Wheel The Shadow of Yesterday Wraith: the Oblivion Pendragon #dndisnotforme

Five ways to look at #ttrpg initiative in no particular order: Feng Shui Burning Wheel Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Savage Worlds Blood & Honor

Five highlights from #ttrpg character sheets in no particular order: Little notes explaining everything in Mouse Guard Fill the circles in Vampire: the Masquerade Armor locations in Warhammer Fantasy 1st edition Writing down relationships in Fiasco Checking skills in Call of Cthulhu

Five #ttrpg character archetypes in no particular order: The original Lasombra from Vampire: the Masquerade The Gunlugger from Apocalypse World The Dragonblooded from Exalted The Whisper from Blades in the Dark The Hick from Tales from the Loop

A GMless #ttrpg? You probably mean GMfull 🤔 Either way, I'm interested 👍

Five #ttrpg settings in no particular order: Kult Wildsea Amber Paranoia Mage: the Ascension

For something like a new edition of Apocalypse World #ttrpg, I'd consider paying twice the money to give it amazing artwork. Like, I'm tired of this divide between great games and great illustrations. Why can't game design and graphic design come together much more often?

Listening to the latest design interviews from Quinns Quest 🎧 Great conversation with Jay Dragon 👍 provocative and inspiring. The upcoming Seven-Part Pact #ttrpg feels very ambitious and it's so cool to hear about people pushing crazy ideas forward. #dndisnotforme

Even when geekiness goes mainstream, there's always the geek-nerd divide. "I'm a boardgame geek, but not a nerd like those roleplayers." "I'm a #ttrpg geek, but not a nerd like those LARPers." "I'm a LARP geek, but not a nerd like those furries." ...

Alright, my dearies. Here we go. Join us for the ride? www.kickstarter.com/projects/lum...

There's a lot of unsaid #ttrpg discourse that perhaps can be summarised as "please don't interrupt this person telling me this cool wondrous tale". By its very nature, people don't want to talk about it, not from a player perspective. If anything, they prefer to lead conversations away from it.

When #ttrpg folks say "fiction first" or "follow the fiction", they assume fiction isn't this precious thing gatekept and filtered by a single person at the table. Which is probably the default for a lot of people and therefore fiction isn't so much of a common ground as expected. #dndisnotforme

Feels like I made the right decision in not letting youtube get too excited with recommending me CR stuff. Gotta keep teaching the algos that I want to see #ttrpg but that #dndisnotforme Funny enough, tiktok learns this much more easily than youtube. The long tail is still alive on tiktok.

Embrace being bad at the #ttrpg thing for your non-existing audience. You have an engagement with the other players at the table and no one else. It's fine if you all fail together, which means you don't fail because there's no one following you and keeping score. Play like nobody is watching.

It's not incredibly unusual to have no combat in a #ttrpg with certain themes. People do want to hurt other people. People do want to force other people to do something for them. This doesn't mean that they want combat. Apocalypse World In a Wicked Age Fiasco ... What's a combat? #dndisnotforme

"Tribe 8 - Tribes in the Dark" new version of Tribe 8, a post-apocalyptic tribal punk RPG from the 90s, based on the Forged in the Dark system, is now on Kickstarter. #ttrpg #tribe8rpg #tribalpunk #fitd www.kickstarter.com/projects/dp9...

inside of me there are two wolves one wants to release a #ttrpg for free one wants to commission art for it at a fair compensation

I guess my #ttrpg take is that you can split a backstory in two columns: stuff that happened to you and stuff you did. I know it's just a backstory, but please put at least one thing on the stuff you did column.

This month, I'm highlighting a few single-page TTRPGs, like CATS by Minakie! Play as a cat, get up to shenanigans, and do it all on one sheet (shown in the image as cut into two pieces). Find the review on TTRPGkids here: https://loom.ly/SoH9PAc