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• Swashbuckling roleplaying games free#

I give a bit of helper text for the weapons, mostly for the sake of the GM rulings (and to give some individuality to the choices) and then I pile on yet more flavour with the “starting trinket”. I beg you, please, choose the Bewitched Grappling Hook I’m wasn’t interested in the complexity of different characters having different amounts of punishment they can take, so a straightforward track seemed the simplest. The last thing I wanted was players being reminded of video games, where each character has a giant pool of Hit Points. Pirates do dangerous things, and HP seemed too “clinical” and overloaded a term. Harm exists because we need some kind of “oof, that hurt” tracker. I guarantee you the player will say either “Yes, sounds amazing!” or “Are you insane? I obviously want to sneak around!” Harm, Gear & Treasure

I think you’d make an awesome wizard, how does that sound?” “OK, this game has heroes who fight, heroes who cast spells, or heroes who sneak around. Will often cause the player to say “ooh, uhm, I’m not sure…” but if you instead said:

“OK, you can be someone who fights things, someone who casts spells, or someone who sneaks around.

By offering a list, and then giving the escape hatch (the “choose your own” option) at the end, each player will either see something they like and pick it, or will see the options, know what they don’t want, and write down something else.įor example, if you’re playing D&D, saying to a player: Make the players buy into the fiction of the game.Īnd thirdly, it’s to avoid decision paralysis. If you were choosing between Fighter / Rogue / Wizard, well - Wizard sounds exciting, Fighter sounds kind of “meh”, and what the hell is a Rogue? But making a pirate who is Affectionate but Grizzled, or Nervous yet Brutish, or Menacing and Lithe? I challenge anyone to not get an immediate mental image of those scoundrels. So, character creation - I deliberately get the players to make three simple choices (their temperament, appearance and cliché) instead of one, complex choice (a character class, for example).įirstly, because being a Laidback, Brutish pirate with A Lovely Hat is more than enough for this game to get going, in terms of seriousness and tone. Focus on the fiction, not the numbers.Ī Nervous Giant who’s Always Drunk is, canonically, an author stand in We’re telling a shared story that is in and of itself the activity we’re doing together. Introducing people that have never played RPGs before, explaining “hey, we’re gonna be pretend pirates fighting skeletons and stuff”, for Buccaneers & Brine I explicitly want them buying into the fiction of the game - not thinking about nitty gritty boring details. The explaining of rules is actually a significant point in itself. If I’m sitting in a circle with my mates, playing pretend, telling each other made up stories, the last thing I want to be doing is tracking numbers and stats and explaining tons and tons of layered rules. This one is sort of obvious - I just prefer narrative RPGs. Note: I’ve never written one of these before, so apologies if its all over the place! Simple, Narrative Choices In Character Creation

Swashbuckling roleplaying games free#

I’m going to go through the various sections of the rules, roughly in order, so feel free to skip around. Hopefully this will give you some of your own inspiration too! Now that I’ve had some distance from the writing and editing of B&B, I wanted to talk about why I made the choices I did, what I hope those mechanics result in, and the ideas behind the various parts. I think its an invaluable way for other creators to have their own “ooh, I never thought of it like that!” moments, and I know for a fact some of my own best inspiration has come from off-hand remarks and comments from designers I follow and admire. I am a huge believer in people deconstructing their own projects and speaking about why they made the choices they did.