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So as a for fun project, for the last couple of months(?) I've been kinda working on my own ttrpg thing. More of a narrative thing since I find my group would rather play that than a tactical dungeon crawler (D&D). Frankly, im not sure why they've been so against it at first. The system has 4 core stats, you roll 2d6 for checks and add bonuses, and you character gets to have 3 unique abilities/quirks/powers/skills that they start with and the players get to choose. Not simple "add +1 to rolls" type stuff, more like more options for how your character interacts with the world...

Would anyone like a system like that? Setting agnostic, and involves a bit of dm fiat, but if I make it, I'm making it free for all.

Grand Providence is my current TTRPG which I have been developing as a custom way to run games for my friends and myself. It has a large focus on rules to help the Providence, or Game Master, run the game, a balance between combat, exploration, social encounters, and downtime rules, and my own world. Along with this, Grand Providence is also structured to support my custom world of Steleis along with multiple eras that the world goes through. For now, this blog will be something of a dev log or diary for my development of the game. If you are reading this and are also into game design of any kind, send me a message!

Grand Providence Task List

Finished tasks:

Create the Classes, Subclasses(Roles), Aura, Emblem, and Features for character creation

Create at least 360 different abilities for the Classes and Roles

Create and refine the basic crafting system

Create all of the armor and weapons in all three tiers of quality

Create all of the potion effects, inscription effects (implement modifiers), gem effects (weapon modifiers), and rune effects (armor modifiers)

Create rules for scavenging while exploring and scavenging defeated enemies

Create shops, give items prices, and give all items a weight(BU)

Make the template and EXP costs for the custom abilities players can make

Make a multitude of status effects that abilities and terrain can have

Refine the Health, Spirit, Ambition, and Mana rules used to track a characters status

Create a vulnerability and resistance system for the main damage types

Create the traumas and insanity effects that characters gain while adventuring (may need refining)

Create multiple jobs that can be taken during exploration

Create the main rules for traveling including travel speed, number of encounters, and chances for getting lost

Create a carrying capacity system that stops characters from keeping every item they own on their person but includes minimal book keeping

Define all of the Aspects, Skills, and what they can be used for while playing

Create both active and passive skill checks and their respective difficulty levels

Create a system to handle general stages of player leveling which defines their aspect, skill, and expertise levels along with giving the Providence an idea of how much Halos players should obtain per adventuring day

Make a way for players to add their own custom quests, how much EXP different quests should give, a momentum system for players to gain small bonuses for taking multiple quests without resting, and a resting system that encourages players to push their luck and continue on before taking a break from adventuring

Create a system for both sight and sound distances and multiple levels of alertness that modify said distances to increase the ability for Providences to track player stealth

Create a debt system where players can owe or be owed debts from NPCs

Create a rival system that encourages players to combat their rivals without outright killing them

Create a simple system for the Providence to track an NPCs basic emotional and mental state for social encounters (may need to be refined)

Create a language system which encourages players to spend EXP on learning languages while also not punishing them for only knowing one or two languages

Make rules for players to have a limited amount of downtime in town which can be used in a large variety of ways, mainly for healing and spending EXP

Create rules and abilities that allow players to interact with the Gods and Fears of the world, becoming either a Priest or a Warlock (needs refinement)

Refine the current terrain to include multitudes of terrain types that interact with one another and abilities

Refine the enemy template

Unfinished tasks: 

Create a wide variety of enemies (Goal: 500)

Define a wide range of actions that can be taken during combat to give players an idea of what they can do and to give the Providence an idea of what kind of actions should cost different numbers of ambition

Create a system to help the Providence make adventures that include social encounters, exploration, and combat while giving each different examples for what kinds of challenges give differing amounts of EXP

Refine the town rules to ensure that players feel like their downtime is important outside of healing and using EXP

Create a way for Providences to generate towns which will handle what actions players can take, the kinds of shops, and the quality of said shops that exist in the town

Add different weapon coatings and oils which effect the amount and type of damage the weapon deals

Continue to play test and refine all rules

Gameplay Diary 2/11/24

Hello! This is the first of hopefully many posts where I talk about my most recent game using Grand Providence. The current campaign my players are using is outdated so many of the rules are not in place yet but every session matters.

First of all is the session itself. The campaign is far into its second half and a few sessions away from finishing up so these players are well established already. Along with this the current and next few sessions will have a focus on roleplay. I did not want this RP to feel like a slog on my players so I gave all of them disguises and introduced six new characters and one that they know and have lost to before. In a way this session could be seen as a small interlude before the campaign continues on that still keeps the players engaged in their characters and the story.

The entire session, three hours of gameplay, being full RP can be a daunting task but the players were both playing with their new personas while also playing a kind of merry go round with all of the NPCs they could choose to talk to. I expect the next session will be similar as their extended amount of RP leads to one of the last bosses of the campaign. A sort of dungeon of RP before the boss of said dungeon appears.

For the future of GP this session solidified my ideas of keeping the social rules locked into argumentative encounters. The idea of needing to even check rules aside from passive skill tests during all of that RP both hurts my head and makes me consider the time effort. Every rule the Providence needs to check and every die that needs to be rolled, especially from the players, is seconds added onto the game that take away from the action. Any lingering hopes of me thinking of adding rules to non-argumentative social encounters is squashed and I'm glad for it. I also have a better idea of the level of rules that I do want for social encounters which is little to none. The rules I have for GP now are less actual rules and more a small cheat sheet the Providence checks and updates on the side as they speak. Keeping the rules for social encounters so light helps said encounters have a smooth flow which is easy to break.

If you're reading this and have any social encounter rules you have made or seen in a TTRPG that you would recommend, send me an ask or message and I'll check them out!

Grand Providence development update 2/18/2024

Hello! This week was one of my downtime weeks where I spent more time taking in game design and ideas than putting them down to the page. While this means less progress, it does not mean no progress. The main two rules I worked on are ones I am happy with so far and both of them should open up a large swathe of options for the Providence as they make combat encounters.

First is the terrain. Often when I look up how to make combat more interesting I see many people bring up terrain yet when I tried to find interesting terrain rules I came up short. My main inspiration for what I wanted was something similar to the terrain effects in Divinity: Original Sin 2. While that game has many effects that end the turn that I don’t agree with, the way players and enemies can manipulate and combine different terrain effects was great. Taking that and combining it with the different types of terrain I already had, slowing terrain, debuffing terrain, and damaging terrain, made the integration simple. This type of terrain includes fire, water, blood, poison, oil, and ice. Secondly I made terrain that has less combinations with other terrain types but are more focused towards making players who are using stealth have more or less options. These types of terrain focus more on sight and sound to ensure that if a player wants to hide they have to plan their route. This type of terrain includes tall grass, fog/smoke/steam, and sound tiles made up of things like twigs, glass, or trash that, when stepped on, can be heard from different distances away. If you’re reading this and have any other types of terrain you’d like to suggest, go ahead and send a message or an ask!

The second mechanic I focused on is the enemy creation template. Next week I will be focusing more on manipulating the values to make enemy creation balanced but this week I wanted to make it interesting. Right now the enemy template is kept simple but can be easily modified by the three different modifiers that can be applied. Boss enemies gain a large amount of bonuses so that they can handle groups of 4 people without too many secondary enemies to help. Basic enemies gain one of eight different combat focuses that all modify their stats in a simple way or give them an ability to use. Minion enemies gain no combat focus, have no SP, and have only 1HP so they are almost always guaranteed to die in one hit. The main goal of this is to be able to make one enemy, say a goblin, and have it so the Providence can easily make minion enemies for when they want to swarm the players, normal enemies when they should encourage more interesting combat, and boss enemies that can challenge a group of players alone. This is one of the mechanics where knowing if it works or is balanced will take a long time but, right now, I feel good about it.

Thank you for reading! I hope this gave you ideas for what to do, or maybe what not to do, for your own games.

Grand Providence development update 3/3/2024

Hello! Let's get right into it.

The first set of rules I worked on were small, miniscule even, but I believe them to be important. These are the rules of what happens during different stages of being encumbered. These are important because having a simple binary set of unencumbered and overencumbered makes the decision for players simple depending on the severity of them. Does being overencumbered make the game terrible to play? If yes, never be overencumbered. If no, carry as much as you want until the GM yells at you for having an entire library worth of books in your back pocket. While having gradients is good, it can also get out of hand in the blink of an eye. Keeping this in mind I decided that there would be four states of encumbrance along with keeping the low numbers and simple assignment of Bulk to items. This makes calculating a character's encumbrance level less of a math problem for players and Providences. Carrying less than half of your carry capacity means a slight bonus to stealth, more than half means an increase in the dodge and parry action cost, going over your total carry capacity means an increase in the movement action cost and a slight detriment to your exploration speed, and finally carrying more than twice your carry capacity means you get one less ambition at the start of each turn. These detriments stack as well so the more you carry the more you feel the effects. These effects also, I hope, lead to players considering their options. Lugging around a treasure chest during combat? Terrible idea. But doing so when your only punishment is going a bit slower while getting back to town can be appealing.

The next set of rules were based around enemy types and their different resistances and vulnerabilities. In Grand Providence, resisting one of the four damage types does not mean you half that damage. Instead creatures will have Toxic Resistance 4 which means any time they take toxic damage the damage is lowered by 4. Vulnerabilities work the same way. While it is tempting to have every monster have a personalized set of damage resistances and vulnerabilities, this can cause a large amount of strain on both players and Providences when multiple creature types are present in a fight. Due to this I wanted to follow my general design philosophy and keep the rules simple. Each of the nine different categories of enemies, one of which is broken into six subtypes, have a generalized set of two resistances, one which is higher and one which is lower, and one vulnerability. While doing this I also ensured that the different damage types were represented as close to equally as I could. This was due to one of my friends and players who has issue with D&D, specifically with how many monsters resist poison. He is a rogue at heart and enjoys the idea of poisoned blades but the high amount of monsters that resist said poison makes it so he feels that the play style is too detrimental. The other reason I wanted to keep each monster type with generalized damage resistances and vulnerabilities was for the hunt of a monster. In many games players can have a hard time preparing to fight something because the options are too varied and scouring through a list of monsters that have the specific signals given can feel like studying while grinding a game to a halt while the other option is to keep studying in game until you find the answer which als grinds games to a halt. With this normalized system players can study where a monster attacked, find signs of it being a flora monster of some kind and know that, in general, fire is a good idea while toxins and corrosive damage types should be avoided.

The final set of rules were ones for the Providence only. These are the rules for making towns. Oftentimes making towns, what kind of shops and how large the shops are, what kinds of buildings the town has, and all other decisions are up to the GM while also having a low amount of mechanical structure to them. This often leads to GM’s either needing to do a large amount of work to make each town or just letting players buy whatever they so desire. That's not how I like to do things. So I took all of the shops and divided them into three sizes. A small blacksmith will have less or lower tiers of items than a large blacksmith. I then took all of the shops and divided them into four focuses a town can have, Core, Scholarly, Crafting, and Religious. Then I took all four of those and made five levels of focus the town can have for them. A town with a high focus on their Core and Crafting will have a better blacksmith and general store for example. I then took a large list of different buildings of interest for a town and divided them into these four categories. This way, when a Providence makes a town they will know the shops, the type of items they sell, and a list of different buildings that town will have. Keeping with this generation I then suggested a number of focus points a town will have depending on its size and then made the lifestyles and training levels depend on a towns size. This way when players hear that there is a small religious town to the west and a large craftsman town to the north they have a general idea of what they can expect from those towns.

That’s all for this week. If you have any questions, comments, or criticisms send me an ask!

Gameplay Diary 3/11/2024

Hello, short post this week as things were mostly the same as the last session. A lot of roleplay and trying to learn about NPCs. The main topic I want to focus on is actually my friend's game, which we played right after mine. To give background, the other players and I were sent to find out what was making the population of a dungeon act aggressive towards the inhabitants of the village. The first issue that we came across was the fact that we were told that our reward for the quest was based on how many creatures in the dungeon we left alive. The second was the fact that we were on a time limit without information on how long we would need to spend in this mine. The third was that the NPC who gave us the quest had no other information or leads to give us outright. This leads to a group of four adventurers going into a dungeon with a strong “Do not kill” protocol in mind which then leads to all of us running through the dungeon to find the source of the issue as fast as possible. Not ideal if you worked on the dungeon as he did but the optimal strategy for a group who has such limited knowledge. Now the blame can easily be placed on us as players. We didn’t search out any information but, to us, this dungeon could have been large and demanded every second of our time. The problem with a GM blaming players is that it never works. As a GM you should expect players to show up, play your game, and do nothing else. The people you play with are smart, cunning, and good problem solvers. Players, with a capital P, are flighty, quick to act on limited knowledge, and prone to running into more problems than they can solve. All of this made me consider the idea of how GMs make dungeons. There is a large amount of information on how to make an interesting dungeon. The five room rule being one that many people look to along with the ideas of different elevations, a theme that spans through the puzzles, fights, and lore, and ways to guide players through a dungeon so they see everything you want them to. I would like to take all of this game design knowledge and transform it into a way for Providence’s to follow a few steps or guides that will lead them to making an adventure, dungeon included, that helps the Providence know how much EXP each section gives, what kind of knowledge is necessary for the players to not get blindsided, what kind of knowledge is beneficial but not crucial for the players, and how to have different parts of the adventure flow into one another. This is a daunting task as the modularity of an adventure and the Providence’s ability to improv when the players go off of the plan is one of the largest draws for TTRPGS. The idea of just throwing a Providence to the wolves, saying something along the lines of “Dungeons are things in the ground and adventures are fun romps you experience with friends, you figure out the rest” irks me as the GMs, especially those who are new or don’t research level design, can fall into simple pitfalls that make an adventure not live up to what they expect. My main goal of the mechanic will be to assist in avoiding these pitfalls while also keeping the “Adventure outline” simple and easy to make so that a Providence can make up additional sections or entire adventures using the system without too much strain and without ruining the flow of the game. If anyone has any advice with things that are similar to this or have any questions, feel free to send an ask or a message!

Grand Providence development update 3/17/2024

Hello! This almost slipped my mind today but I am a vigilant person so to the updates it is.

The first mechanic is one that builds off of one I spoke about before, that being enemy types having general resistances and vulnerabilities. This mechanic being weapon oils and armor waxes. Armor waxes are items that temporarily add a damage type resistance to armor while oils can either add additional damage of a certain type or additional damage when fighting a specific creature type. Both of these items act as the reward that players can gain when they take the time to investigate an enemy before engaging it. They also act as a guide for new players. When a player sees an item that gives them a large boost towards damage against a specific creature they want to know what they’re about to fight to ensure their money or crafting items are not wasted. This leads to players investigating areas the enemy was seen in, asking people about the creature they may have seen, or studying an old dungeon for any hints as to what may be inside.

On the topic of enemies this is less of a mechanic but is still important to the gameplay of GP. That being the distribution of enemy types and the general levels of enemies players encounter. It’s a common piece of information that most campaigns of a TTRPG don’t make it to the later levels. This along with the fact that creatures with huge amounts of power being common makes them feel less special means that a good distribution of enemies is important. Because of that I decided to have almost 40% of the enemies be BR0 or BR1 with smaller percentages being in the higher battle ratings. I also divided the enemy types so that, in said earlier levels players are more likely to fight flora, beasts, and other humanoid creatures while in later levels players will be fighting divine, extrinsic, and magical enemies. This is twofold as a way for players to feel like their enemies have evolved with them while also allowing for a certain type of enemy to become more of a horde enemy as players continue through the game. A group of three flora enemies could prove to be a challenge to early adventurers while, later in a campaign, players can fight through a forest of thirty of that same enemy without breaking a sweat. This is to let players look back and see how far they’ve grown in strength.

The last mechanic is part of something larger. That can be said about all mechanics but this one especially. My game day post last week had me consider a lot about what games do to help game masters master their games and how I dislike letting people who are passionate enough about this hobby flounder when they aren’t level designers or writers. Because of this I am trying to make a way to take an idea for a quest or adventure, break it down into its smallest parts, and flesh out those parts so that none get left behind or neglected. My first step is to get an idea for a way to quantify an adventure. How grand is this? How difficult will it be? How much time will it take? One way is through experience and, due to grand providence not having scaling EXP, how it is assigned. Grand Providence plans for players to have around 1,000 EXP by the end of a campaign with an average of 12, 25, or 50 EXP per session for longer, average, or shorter campaigns respectively. Keeping that in mind a quest that gives 75 EXP in an average length campaign should take three sessions. To then allot this EXP I made the final mechanic of this week. For the combat, social, and exploration sections of an adventure I made EXP charts. These charts measure the overall difficulty of an encounter. Fighting a small group of minions, having a short argument with someone who doesn’t care much, or traveling a short jaunt to the dungeon? These are smaller encounters that should then take up less time in the session. Going up against a boss and their lackeys, convincing a king to change the march of their army based on little evidence, or racing against the continent on a time limit? These are all things that can take one or more entire sessions and should give an equal amount of experience to the characters. This mechanic will hopefully help run the adventures Providences have while also helping them know how many real life sessions said adventure will take, making it so one shots don’t spiral out into five session long adventures or vice versa.

My next step is the information both players and characters need. A good way to help the Providence know when players need a lead or how to give out information that could make or break a session from feeling well paced or not is proving to be difficult. If anyone has any advice on giving players information let me know, I always look forward to improving my craft!

Gameplay Diary 3/25/2024

Hello, time for me to review my own work. Yesterday's game was a disappointment for me but it is a disappointment I saw coming. As I have run this campaign over the last months I have learned that combat scenarios that include complex abilities the players have to figure out and then combat is either something that does not work for TTRPGs or is something I personally can not handle well. In either case I have learned from this long before now and have adjusted my ideals for Grand Providence accordingly. Along with this I have been working on the bestiary, something I may give up on in exchange for making enemies as I play my next campaign with a more finished version of Grand Providence to then release it separately. Working on a large selection of enemies is enticing but the core of the game should come before any auxiliary sections of the game. See you next week!

Grand Providence development update 3/31/2024

Hello! This is a short week as my college classes have started back up and are harder than ever. My main focus this week has been two things. First is the enemies and the possible bestiary for Grand Providence. I worked on and made about ten enemies over the course of three days, three days where I had no classes or other obligations. Looking at the time it took and taking my friends advice I have decided the bestiary was no small task and that the core book of Grand Providence should be my main focus. Having a group of enemies to use in testing will be useful but if my choices are to work tirelessly on something that may eventually help or work on something that matters now, I chose the obvious answer. Always remember to look at the work you’re putting in and weigh it against the gain it will bring to the system. Some aspirations may bear fruit but nothing is more important than the core of the game. A Mario game with 100 small mechanics may be fun but no Mario game will be fun if one mechanic, moving and jumping, is not fun.

The second focus follows the first. One goal I had for Grand Providence was to make both sides of abilities fun. Those two sides being using the ability itself and gaining the mana for the ability. This is a hard thing to accomplish as gaining mana often requires a secondary resource in the game to be given up. Make the recourse too specific or restrictive and using the abilities, one of the main fun parts of the game, stops being worth it. Make the resources too broad or cheap and using abilities has no weight. This will be one of the mechanics I have to make and pray it does not fall apart when first testing comes around. As such I have three of the four ways to gain mana planned out. If I can’t find a good fourth way to gain mana, I won’t force it as that fourth option would most likely end up being a dud anyway. If y’all have any systems that have interesting ways to gain mana or any other resource that is used for abilities, let me know! Happy Easter for those who celebrate. If you’re reading this, you just lost The Game and happy early April Fools!

Gameplay Diary 4/8/2024

Rough week, huh boss? One player couldn't show up and can't show up next session either, another had to show up late making the game last only 2 hours, and we're so close to the end too. All of that to say I think everyone still had a good time but I've been thinking about the length of campaigns a lot lately. My current campaign and last campaign have gone on for a year and two years respectively. That is to say they were both long and by the end of them both my players and myself were feeling a bit of burnout. It is easy to look at a long campaign and see it as an accomplishment. It is an accomplishment, wrangling players for that long is a herculean task and running a game for that long is something I will always have respect for. All of this and yet I still can’t stop thinking about how so much advice for art that I’ve seen is to take an idea and cut it down into its bare necessities. Trim the fat, remove the excess, ensure every word has meaning. When you control the art this is not an easy task, when you control part of the art it can become confusing. Consider asking an improv artist to ensure their act has only the best of the best when they don’t have a clue as to what exactly will be going on. Players meander, players take their time, players look at the smallest parts of the world for hours at a time. It is rare when a player does this towards the big dramatic part of the campaign you planned out three months ago. This is not a slight against players. I am proud of them for focusing on what interests them in the worlds we make. To continue the analogy from earlier, you are then asking an improv artist to cut down an act that is unknown to them while their stage partner chooses a random amount of time to focus on each topic for. So the issue is that my campaigns often have sections that could have been cut or made much shorter because either I, my players, or both did not enjoy them but I have no idea if the next section will be gold or copper sold by ea-nasir. Perhaps this is just an issue I face. Perhaps it is an issue that can not be solved. Perhaps there is no issue and this is nothing but a section of doubt I must overcome. If anyone understands this rambling mess and has advice, I’d gladly take it.

Grand Providence development update 6/7/2024

Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. College began to be rough and I had to decide between the weekly updates and my grades. Seems the choice was obvious but now I’m back! First update is the fact that Grand Providence is now in the early stages of being finished. Flavor text, specific instructions for how to rule things, and art are all things that need to be worked through but I have multiple DM’s looking over the book for sections that are confusing or need more explanation. Flavor text will be something I chip away at over the weeks. Art is a rough subject as I currently do not have the funds to hire an artist but maybe my scribbles will make do. I’d rather I have my own chicken scratch than AI slop. Second point is that my campaign is finished. There was a rough time where my group missed four sessions before the final session. That along with the fact that the campaign had some now obvious issues made me begin to lose some hope but it all turned out alright in the end. Truth be told that campaign was made solely because a friend wanted to play in it and I needed something “short” to test out the early rules of the session. Well short turned out to be almost a year exactly so I’m worried about what my next long campaign will look like. Either way I’m happy to be back. College starts back up in April so I may go quiet again but until then I’d like to start sharing my experiences playing in my friends games and working on GP. If anyone has any advice for the final testing phases of a game, please send them. Thank you for reading!