How do you feel about the dozens, if not hundreds of hidden gems scattered across the much wider sea of DriveThruRPG and itch.io?
Even under the specific context of indie RPGs, some games have vastly more publicity than others. Some games have Kickstarters that pulled in tens or hundreds of thousands of USD, and have active Discord servers with hundreds or thousands of active users; these are the indie darlings that get frequently recommended here and there. Other games never had a successful Kickstarter at all, have a Discord server with a single-digit number of users, and have just one writer working on them; and that does not stop them from being good. The bulk of DriveThruRPG and itch.io is mediocre, but a rare few specimens are exceptional.
As ever, word-of-mouth is a crapshoot. "If you build it, they will come" is a flat-out lie in many cases.
Over the past decade or so, I have come across, played, and run several highly obscure indie games that I have seen virtually nobody else talk about. Some of them have climbed in popularity by now, while others still languish in obscurity. I have also run and played my fair share of indie darlings; while some were good, others did not live up to the hype for me.
What has been your experience with the really, really obscure games, the ones that are all but unknown even by indie standards?
What are some of the obscure games you've played, I wanna hear about them.
It is not that obscure (mostly because it is attached to a relatively more well-known system, and I do mean relatively), but one game I have gotten quite invested in as of late is Tailfeathers/Kazzam. It is a grid-based tactical combat game set in a wizard school.
If ever you unearth this RPG and its teamwork mechanic, I would be interested in seeing it. Thank you.
I once saw an extremely ambitious D&D 4e heartbreaker called simply "4.5" (which is, admittedly, un-Google-able). It was hundreds upon hundreds of pages long, and had a wide variety of classes and powers. The author had a fully automated framework for it in MapTool. I played through several encounters as a blaster caster. The game was surprisingly enjoyable and reasonably well-balanced, though the author admitted that blaster casters were overpowered in the current version. The monster abilities actually forced a good deal of variety in player tactics.
Sadly, the author lost all confidence and shelved the project, never to be seen again. It was unfortunate, especially since the game was already in a fully playable state. I still have the PDF of the rules, but I do not know if the author would want it to be disseminated, particularly when there were several updates and balance patches planned.
>I still have a PDF of the rules
Backed up?
And Kafka wanted his writing burned, and Poe hated all his work, and Vincent van Gogh thought he was talentless. Author ownership is a farce and intellectual property is a plague on humanity. If you like something you need to share it, for the work's own sake and for what it can inspire in others.
I talked to the author earlier today. They said that "It's not in a distributable state."
well i hope you will just ignore him then
>What has been your experience with the really, really obscure games, the ones that are all but unknown even by indie standards
They were bad, but I was looking at jam entries so I shouldn't have expected high quality. There was one indie rpg alpha version I read, though, that really wowed me with how it handled teamwork. The author removed the unique core resolution mechanic in later versions, and thus, removed the cool teamwork mechanic. I forget the name, it's somewhere on one of my hard drives, probably.
As for the opening question, it feels bad, but it's to be expected. What determines the success of your pet projects like this is your internet following and how pretty the cover looks on a shelf. I watched a booktuber talk about her community poll responses—they were in the high thousands—and numerous people said they would not buy a fiction novel if the cover did not match their current interior design or if it did not meet their personal tastes. So what you need to do is be popular and hire some damn good artists. Easier said than done...
>There was one indie rpg alpha version I read, though, that really wowed me with how it handled teamwork. The author removed the unique core resolution mechanic in later versions, and thus, removed the cool teamwork mechanic. I forget the name, it's somewhere on one of my hard drives, probably.
Sounds awesome, I'd love to have a look if you could find it.
I'll grab it tomorrow. I remember it being a 2d10 system with funky symbols for success, half success, and failure. I think it was a table lookup, or 7+ on a d10 for a half success, I can't remember. The title of the RPG was something like Trails of the Stars, or Trials of the Stars. I'm pretty sure the author was here in the game design threads years ago.
Aha, I found the name through some archive digging, but I do not have the pdf with me. It's now called Vagrant Star, but I remember it as Trial of a/the Vagrant Star. If the author drops by, maybe he'll still have version 0.86 or thereabouts.
I really should've held off on posting. I found the pdf (
) after only a bit more digging, so I'll summarize the rules of both the playtest and final versions and why I prefer the playtest.
First, the final version (The Vagrant Path):
>d10 pool that caps at 14 (I assume this is an extreme)
>1s are flaws and subtract 1 hit per 1, cannot be re-rolled
>2-5 are misses, don't add or subtract, can be re-rolled
>6-9 count as 1 hit
>10 counts as 2 hits
>Matches are pairs of hits and give you a better outcome
>Difficulty (hits required) is 1 for simple, 2 for moderate, and 3 for difficult
>Outcomes are Advantage (meet hits + match, critical success), Success (meet hits, succeed normally), Setback (don't meet hits, fail), and Disaster (more flaws than hits, critical failure)
>Teamwork is done by designating a leader, who rolls against the difficulty of the task, and everyone else rolls against the difficulty of the task and adds based on their result
>Helpers add 2 hits for Advantage, or become the new leader everyone adds hits to, add 1 for Success, subtract 1 for Setbacks, and causes everything to fail for Disaster
Trail of the Vagrant Star (early version):
>d10 pool that caps at 6
>keep highest 2 and add together, compare to table
>18+ is success + benefit (critical success)
>12+ is success
>10+ is success + drawback (7+ if only rolling 1d10)
>9 and below is a failure
>Difficulties are simple (can be roleplayed instead of rolled), moderate (can be roleplayed with relevant Trait or Skill), and complex (must be rolled, at disadvantage if you lack skill bonus, automatic failure with only 1d10)
>Every 5 and above rolled counts as a hit, d10s count as two
>Hits matter against a second, optional, numerical difficulty for a task
>Teamwork is done by designating a leader, and only their pool counts for hits
>Everyone rolls, but only keeps one die, and the two highest of the group are added together
>If the Leader gets the two highest rolls, only their dice matter
I prefer the latter method, even though hits are messy, because it "feels" like everyone is contributing to a single roll by taking the best dice among them, and it is easier to identify which characters contributed the most based on the die they contributed. When everyone rolls and adds hits together, it feels divorced from teamwork to me, closer to a car leaving a factory of workers than people working together on the same immediate problem. Maybe that's me being weird, but that's how I feel.
I haven't run the math or read the system versions in detail, so I'm unsure why there was such a drastic change, but I assume it was because of playtesting. The final version's rules are undoubtedly more polished, consistent, and playable, but it always struck me how salient that original version was at capturing how people work together.
Nothing. Why should I feel anything about them?
>Other games never had a successful Kickstarter at all, have a Discord server with a single-digit number of users, and have just one writer working on them
Aside from the Kickstarter being unsuccessful, i feel called out here
Don't really know about obscure RPGs beyond downloading random things from shares and never looking at them. But miniature games are much the same. A couple f us on /awg/ keep shilling Xenotactics because it's really good, simple, (intentionally) free. But it has no traction.
I expect miniature games have it worse than RPGs. If it doesn't have its own minis it'll be ignored. If it has STLs it'll be ignored the vast majority with no printer. If you cast your own pewter or resin you've got a whole extra business to run. And on the player side it's harder for one dedicated fan to force a game on a group.
I can house rule any gems I need myself. There's these two good books that basically instruct you on being the best DM ever, and it's all you need.
You’re not gonna tell us which books you mean, are ya?
>Don Quixote
>The Oxford Book of Baby Names
I’ll run anything under the sun, so long as it grabs my interest. Way of Steel, Omen, Grimoire... Popularity is absolutely not a factor of quality, so long as your players are adventurous.
Amazing indie RPGs that no one knows about has the same place in my heart as obscure foreign films: I'm sure they're great but I can't spend my life chasing after media that isn't generally available.
I don't know what I'm missing, so I can't be upset about it. Maybe there are some real bangers in the pile, and no one is playing them, but that's not my problem - I am playing systems I like right now. Maybe in 30 years these systems will be rediscovered by games historians and they'll realise the genius of some frick that made a game about being an anime girl in a high school, and it'll be the most popular game for the rest of human existence.
But more often than not there's a bunch of mediocre game designers that want to be praised as visionaries when they make extremely niche and uninteresting products, and their game never gets traction because it offers nothing substantial.
I mostly get around this problem by using cute obscure shit to inspire gimmicks mainline.
Because you are wise and beautiful. You know the recipe for a fun game.
>How do you feel about the dozens, if not hundreds of hidden gems scattered across the much wider sea of DriveThruRPG and itch.io?
I couldn't care less.
I make what I want.
Most of them are just shitty campaign books. It's no loss.
What in the frick is this reddit thread with copy pasted replies from reddit.
The colon-ization of your board will proceed without hindrance
You weren't kidding, literally copy pasted, too.
I like Victoriana.
Aren't you crossposting from Reddit, OP? I remember seeing the same thread there today.
Why would I have feelings about them?
Discoverability has ALWAYS been a total shitshow for RPGs. Not only are people very bad about actually learning and playing more systems, but there's very little effort when it comes to categorizing, sorting, and reviewing even the most basic features of the vast majority of system that are popular enough to have a sliver of name recognition. At best, you might find someone referring to games as "rules lite" or "OSR" but no one takes the time to differentiate or even just describe what their games offer.
You can find some quick breakdowns on thousand of board games, with user reviews and feedback and quick how-to-play videos. You want anything even remotely like that for RPGs? Be prepared to wade through thousands of hour of the most worthless, slow, useless videos made by the more technologically illiterate people on the internet staring at an open book and inarticulately trying to paraphrase the text they have on the fricking screen.
>You can find some quick breakdowns on thousand of board games, with user reviews and feedback and quick how-to-play videos.
Call me naive, but board games are significantly less open compared to an RPG, especially since few games give you a concrete outline on how to play, how a session should be structured and paced, and generally aren't replicable since most people playing them are adding, removing, and changing rules intentionally or otherwise. More reviews and feedback would be nice, though, yes.
Board Games still have a wide variety of edge cases and unique interactions that aren't going to be covered in a 10 minute how-to video. I'm not asking that every single item, character option, and possible encounter is broken down in a single, easy to consume video. You can cover the broadstrokes. It's entirely possible to layout the basic mechanics, the themes, what's unique, what works and what might need houseruling, in a reasonable amount of time.
Why would I care about the fate of a game I have no stake in?
>How do you feel about the dozens, if not hundreds of hidden gems scattered across the much wider sea of DriveThruRPG and itch.io?
I don't know about them because they aren't talked about here, but this thread seems like a great place to discuss those hidden gems.
Anybody know of some hidden gems and would care to shill them here, please?
Just because it's obscure doesn't make it a gem. In fact, it's probably obscure because it's shit, and liking shit because it's not popular doesn't make you cool or interesting, it makes you an insufferable contrarian.
Generally speaking, things are popular because they are good, or at the very minimum better than their peers.
>Generally speaking, things are popular because they are good, or at the very minimum better than their peers.
That's not true. A lot of things are brute forced into fake-popularity because they have lobbyists and money that forces the shit down peoples throats.
Just look at music.
There's a wide variety of reasons something might be unpopular, like simply not having the money to afford tons of advertisements or having connections in news media to overhype their mediocre work. It's possible that a good game has gone buried because the author just couldn't get the word out... But the far more likely reason the majority of games go ignored is because they have nothing to offer or they may simply be lacking. They could be incomplete or published and sold in a state that is only barely functional, but not fully developed to its full potential. Or they could just be bad and derivative and serve no purpose because dozens of other games offer the same thing, but better.
>Generally speaking, things are popular because they are good, or at the very minimum better than their peers.
Based 5e-loving mainstream consoomer.