Wonderful writing! I remember when my group stopped playing this system in late 2020 because of all the racism stuff. I’d love to see a follow up volume sometime expounding on alternatives to The Big One With The Huge Marketing Budget. I know we explored many including Cypher, Ryuutama, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Wanderhome, Glitter Hearts, and more.
That's a good thought for a future post (or possibly multiple posts. this stuff gets long and technical quickly!). There are so many good indie games, and so many of them are games built on already extant systems as well. And they also tend to be less complex when it is a new system.
[REDACTED TTRPG SYSTEM] seems like it's in a weird place where the stock backgrounds are sort of... underwhelming? A little too thin to flesh out a character's attributes, skills, and abilities.
I feel like the changes to character-building in Tasha's do some really good things for getting around the weird racist stuff that [REDACTED FANTASY AUTHOR] baked into older fantasy tropes; but then also put a lot of extra work onto the daunting task of a player making their own character.
I need to look and see if there are any useful 'templates' for new players, or players with writers block, who want some cool ability/skill/lore/flavor packets like your smuggling/assassination history for Ilyat! I think that's the thing that would really push Tasha's into fixing how race & character creation interact, at least.
Hi Max, welcome to Inklings. Thank you first for respecting my desire to not invite the [REDACTED GAME] defenders in, I appreciate that.
It's really hard to find that balance. You want to give your players control over their characters, but in a way that also respects the setting and everything else the GM has come up with, and you also don't want to just throw them in and let them drown, especially if they're fairly new to ttrpgs. Tasha's has looked to me like at least a good attempt at fixing some of the issues - but I still kind of thing the best fix would be rebuild from scratch so you don't have any racism in at all from the beginning. That, however, requires way more work!
For me the most important is being a GM or having a GM that is flexible enough to tweak the rules and setup, and willing to even go through character creation step by step. But that does add time to everything and can just be a daunting, exhausting project. It's really useful for a game, especially if it has more in-depth mechanics, to provide templates and ready made options so you can take out some of that.
I do actually offer commissions on creating characters and other things. Obviously it's not free because it comes with a bunch of experience of these things, and whatever time it takes me, but I love creating new characters for things. I love being inventive with what's on offer, even if it involves some extra time spent sorting through pages of stuff (because wow some of these things are verbose even compared to my ability to ramble for days!)
Thanks for your thoughts Max, I do hope you come back!
Wonderful writing! I remember when my group stopped playing this system in late 2020 because of all the racism stuff. I’d love to see a follow up volume sometime expounding on alternatives to The Big One With The Huge Marketing Budget. I know we explored many including Cypher, Ryuutama, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Wanderhome, Glitter Hearts, and more.
That's a good thought for a future post (or possibly multiple posts. this stuff gets long and technical quickly!). There are so many good indie games, and so many of them are games built on already extant systems as well. And they also tend to be less complex when it is a new system.
[REDACTED TTRPG SYSTEM] seems like it's in a weird place where the stock backgrounds are sort of... underwhelming? A little too thin to flesh out a character's attributes, skills, and abilities.
I feel like the changes to character-building in Tasha's do some really good things for getting around the weird racist stuff that [REDACTED FANTASY AUTHOR] baked into older fantasy tropes; but then also put a lot of extra work onto the daunting task of a player making their own character.
I need to look and see if there are any useful 'templates' for new players, or players with writers block, who want some cool ability/skill/lore/flavor packets like your smuggling/assassination history for Ilyat! I think that's the thing that would really push Tasha's into fixing how race & character creation interact, at least.
Hi Max, welcome to Inklings. Thank you first for respecting my desire to not invite the [REDACTED GAME] defenders in, I appreciate that.
It's really hard to find that balance. You want to give your players control over their characters, but in a way that also respects the setting and everything else the GM has come up with, and you also don't want to just throw them in and let them drown, especially if they're fairly new to ttrpgs. Tasha's has looked to me like at least a good attempt at fixing some of the issues - but I still kind of thing the best fix would be rebuild from scratch so you don't have any racism in at all from the beginning. That, however, requires way more work!
For me the most important is being a GM or having a GM that is flexible enough to tweak the rules and setup, and willing to even go through character creation step by step. But that does add time to everything and can just be a daunting, exhausting project. It's really useful for a game, especially if it has more in-depth mechanics, to provide templates and ready made options so you can take out some of that.
I do actually offer commissions on creating characters and other things. Obviously it's not free because it comes with a bunch of experience of these things, and whatever time it takes me, but I love creating new characters for things. I love being inventive with what's on offer, even if it involves some extra time spent sorting through pages of stuff (because wow some of these things are verbose even compared to my ability to ramble for days!)
Thanks for your thoughts Max, I do hope you come back!