SabrinaTeenLich Community

About initiative systems in general, I've been developing a system for my own game for some years now. Immense amounts of play-testing with several groups.

Our initiative system works like this:

• The combat is divided into groups, usually allies vs. enemies.
• At the beginning of the combat, everyone rolls for Senses.
• The character that obtains the best result takes the first turn.
• If the character takes a relevant action for the combat and succeeds, the next turn is taken by someone from the same group; otherwise, the next turn is taken by the enemies' group.
• If a group finishes all its turns, the other group finishes all their turns too (regardless of failed actions).
• The result of the last action of the round defines which group takes the first turn for the next round.

Observed results:

• Turn order becomes super easy to track. You could say that you don't have to actually "track" anything, or only the GM, probably marking checks on their list of combatants to see which ones haven't acted yet.
• Players start to get used to thinking of strategies in real time ("Hey! I could do this now!")
• Surprise attacks are super easy: if your group surprises another (i.e., an ambush), your group takes the first turn and then the system is the same.

Bonus track: orders
This is a very specific and optional rule but very fun to use:

• Any character at the beginning of their turn can give an order to another player character that hasn't acted yet.
• If the other character obeys, they can take that action now and then the first character finishes her/his turn (and takes their normal action normally).
• If the other character does something different or just doesn't obey, the first character loses their turn.

I think there are two ways to approach horror in TTRPGs: a horror setting in terms of aesthetics, and a horror story. One is frightening for the characters and the other evoke frightening ideas to the players as well as to the characters. Settings such as Raventloft or Zombicide are frightening to the characters but not at all to the players, while something as Kult could be even pleasurable to the characters but unthinkable to the players.

I certainly love horror TTRPGs and the best GM I can think of is my best friend, that is a clinical psychologist and create NPCs inspired in what he knows and works with, so every time he describe those NPCs and show how they act, the realism of the situations keep all of us players on the edge of our seats, because how close those stories are to reality. He always GMs Lovecraftian horror themes and make the stories as close to reality as possible, so we can think "well, that could be almost possible", on a absolutely normal and everyday place. So the setting for the characters is not particularly frightening at all, but the situations are horrible.

So I think what makes a TTRPG good or bad in this regards is what you're looking for, an aesthetically frightening setting like Warhammer 40k? That would have a lot of skulls and blood and screams, but for the players is just an extreme action movie. Or maybe something that makes you think or question morality and that makes you think that that would be very frightening to experience like a story based on Clive Barker books (probably Kult)? That could take place maybe in your current city focusing on conversations between characters in a Starbucks, not aesthetically frightening at all, but the ideas could be horrendous.

If I were to choose I'd choose the second option, the frightening stories. And for that I think the game itself is almost irrelevant. Any game that allows you to play normal people in a setting were anything could happen, is a good game, as long as the system don't interrupt the story. When my friend GMs and we want to play a horror story, he stopped using Call of Cthulhu years ago and now we just use Rats in The Walls, a super simplistic CoC rip-off, and we played the most memorable stories using something as rudimentary as that.

@sabrinateenlich

Yeah! At some point I'll make an English version of the play-test document so you can see all the details.

But basically you roll five dice and each die could be a success or a fail according to the used attribute (as in WOD games). The premise is that you need more successes than fails, so if it's a simple roll, you need 3 or more successes, and if it's a contested roll, you need more successes than your opponent. And to modify the difficult the GM could ask for additional successes on simple rolls.

About play by post, I'm not sure. Although I don't like PbtA games too much I think for a PBP game they should do the trick, don't you think? So you can solve complete scenes in one roll instead solving each action separately.

I haven't seen the DH system in detail (just some minutos of gameplay on youtube), but I THINK that the GM spend some "Fear" points between player turns to take enemie's actions, or something like that.

Other system I have on my notes "to try in some other game system", is something similar to Alien RPG: there's a deck of cards with numbers, every PC and NPC draws a card and the ones that are faster draw more than one card. Then the GM asks "ok, who has the 1st turn"? and the PC acts, then asks for the 2nd, and so on. What I think could be interesting is that no one knows the init number of the rest of characters so every turn everyone is expectant to see who comes next. IDK, is just an idea.

@TheFool

And I'd say that probably one of the keys is the unexpected, when they make you lower your guard...

I remember a one-shot he GMd were we -the group of investigators in the mid 1920's-, had to go to a small town in a desert area of our country to investigate some disappearings. We arrived at a train station and then had to take a small bus that would take us to the city. During the ride the people were very reluctant to talk. He described the personality of the rest of the people of the bus and that already was kind of unnerving but not in a terrifying way but rather a sort of a "what's wrong with these people" way.

At some point after leaving the bus, we asked for directions to get to a guesthouse our employees had prepared for us, and people completely changed their attitude from "ok, what do you want now, we're working here" to "jeez, really? to Christina's house? you guys are definitely not from here, are you" (I don't remember any names from the story so I'm just making them up).

Although later we arrived at a guesthouse/manor, where the lady that received was very kind and helped us with a smile on her face. That was a relief after just awkward conversations from the beginning at the bus. Christina was a lady on her 40s, widowed, in charge of a too-big-for-her house, frowned upon by the rest of the people as a "spinster".

Christina prepared us some dinner and talked very proudly about her son that was outside doing some chores or something. She talked very lovingly about him, calling him Andrecito (diminutive for "Andrés" or "Andrew", a way of making a name sound more sweet, usually used by mothers). She talked about how good hearted her kid was, how much he helped her around the house and warned us of how good a talker he was.

We were already sitting at the table, talking about life, asking her questions about the city while she prepared and started putting food on the table. So she asked us to wait a second so she can go and bring Andrecito with us so he could help us a little a bit more with information about the city and even probably taking us there as he was way more active and outgoing as she was.

At this point I should remember that this friend of mine apart from being a clinical psychologist also worked for several years with kids and families, so he can certainly make any everyday-people NPC VERY realistic. We were already very happy talking to this easy-going lady. She was very sweet!

She went out of the room and a couple of minutes later we hear some squeaking of wheels outside the door. The door opens and we see Christina pushing an old wheelchair. Sitting on it was a person. He was around 20 years old. Completely paralyzed, in an awkward position, dirty clothes, messy hair, drooling, with his eyes looking at some random spot in the air, trying to breath as calmed as he could. "Andrecito! These are the people I told you about! Go on, don't be shy say hello to our guests"...

Man, we were frozen. We the players were looking at each other without knowing what to do or what to say. Our characters therefore were shooked as well, but Christina was in her own world. "Oh, my dears, please don't mind him, we don't received many guests lately so he's probably a little shy today, usually he's the life of the party, but please go ahead and ask him what you need".

After a couple of minutes we started talking again and trying as best as we could to not disturb this lady and act as if everything were just fine. But man were we wrong, every couple of minutes she did something unnerving. From feeding him with a spoon, where half of the food just dropped and half he swallowed TOO slow, to pushing us to talk to him, to what we received just slow and awkward eyes movements or involuntary drooling.

But that was just the setting of the story. From that point forward everything wen to hell. I couldn't remember everything, but as a sample... That night we went upstairs to try to have some sleep on the guests rooms. For obvious reasons Christina and Andrés had rooms downstairs...

At some point one of us heard something on the hallway outside our rooms. She was already super uncomfortable with everything, so she reluctantly walked very slowly to the door and put her ear on it. She heard a very faint metallic sound, as the sound of a very old door knob... or a wheel... She opened the door a slit and peeked out... there was the wheelchair, empty, on the middle of the hallway.

Anyway. Never play horror games with that kind of people

PS: during that session we didn't rolled a single dice. So yeah, systems for that type horror could help, but are not THAT important I think.

Hey! I just loooooove that game. I haven't played long campaigns or very complex scenarios, but from my experience I can say:

Trust the system. I've seen some GMs trying to force D&D or PF stuff into their games thinking it's necessary, but don't. The Shadowdark rules as they are work just fine.

That includes using theater of the mind for combats instead of trying to do grid-based combat. The C/N/F system works brilliantly and it's worth giving it a try. I'd just suggest while GM'ing to narrate a simple environment and monsters that are easy to follow: better something like "You enter a cave with some big stalagmites to the left, a clear path in the middle, and some openings in the wall to the right" than trying to explain a complex battlemap, and better something like "A big orc and two skeletons attack you!" than a whole squad of different monsters (the simpler the combat, the easier it is for players to imagine and follow it).

Apart from that, the rulebook includes really really good advice in the GM'ing section, and I cannot recommend it enough.

I've yet to meet someone who could say "I played Shadowdark and I didn't enjoy it"

@sabrinateenlich Absolutely! Here is how I'd explain the main difference between games like Pathfinder or D&D and Shadowdark:

• In PF/D&D, you want to play with the system, using the story as a backdrop. You have fun selecting feats and other powers, planning encounters based on your stats and special items, and the GM weaves everything into a story that makes sense to tie it all together.

• In Shadowdark, you want to play with the characters in a living, immersive story, and the GM uses the system only when necessary to move the story forward in a rewarding way.

There's obviously a spectrum between these two styles of play, and each group falls somewhere along it, but I think that’s what sets Shadowdark apart from more traditional games. The system is solid and fun enough that it doesn’t get in the way of enjoying what happens to the characters in the story.

As a player, I'm trying to play in a more collaborative way with the rest of the players. Not just trying to make a credible character or make the most of the character sheet, but also trying to do stuff that helps other players accomplish more things—whether that's more damage in combat, more fun situations in social encounters, and so on.

As a Game Master I'm trying to make the game system integrate more naturally into the narrative, to make it bother as little as possible or feel more natural. And I'm also trying to avoid explicitly giving options to the players, instead preferring to make the options evident to them (avoid saying things like "Ok, you want to do that? Then you have these two ways of doing it", for example).

And as a developer, I'm trying to include more flavor or lore of the game into the game rules so those feel more "necessary," or to make the rules help the game style represent its lore.

@sabrinateenlich that's very true actually. For example, in the game I'm developing, players share a resource called Damnation. Whenever they want, they can increase that number to perform re-rolls. However, if any of them get a critical success, the GM must roll using the accumulated Damnation as the attribute to determine how harshly destiny collects its due. And that has led to some very tense and fun moments, when other players say to the one deciding whether to re-roll or not: "Yeah! Go ahead! Condemn us!" (in a delightfully ambiguous, positive-yet-negative way )

@sabrinateenlich actually as soon as we make a playtest or quickstart I'd probably post it here in the forum to share