💦 FULL SET: Gallery - Collection




Archive for August, 2025

Older Entries »
h1

Nobi Nobi Sword in Play

August 31, 2025

This weekend I got to sit down and play Nobi Nobi: Sword with two friends and see how it actually runs. It did not run too far from what I expected, but here’s some thoughts.

First, the set up was easy since all you’re doing is choosing a pregen character type and pulling out a quest to tie things together. There’s no meaningful setting lore attached outside of whatever that card gives you, which, speeds play but also means a lot of “get ready to improvise world details”, which might be a bump for some folks.

Each scene is it’s own thing and I feel like mostly the default mode of play is “don’t think too hard about how this scene ties to whatever the last scene is, or the mission itself”. It’s not impossible to come up with these things, it’s just that it is likely to be the most work or challenge in this game if you’re going to be a stickler about trying to rationalize consistent logic bewteen the randomness.

Because players aren’t making any choice about what the party is doing next, what kind of scene is happening next, it’s the lack of agency you got from a railroaded game without the unifying vision of a GM. On the other hand, because you know you don’t get that choice, you’re not left trying to suss out what direction you should go or if you can do something or not because it would “interfere with the plot”. This is kind of the main thing I felt why this would be a little pick up game but not a great long term sort of experience and that was 100% the experience.

A small, surprising element that appeared during play is that some of the reward cards you get point to building relationship ties with the other player characters. One player picked up “Sensei” which you pick another character to be your mentor; you can use their ability at double power. I picked up “Tsundere” which meant I had to have a crush on another character but allowed me to give them a bonus to their rolls by helping them out. I think tying in “you get stronger relationship mechanics as part of advancement” might be an interesting idea to port to other games, just not randomized through cards, is all.

Overall I’m going to put it in the category of “short boardgame experience with a light dusting of roleplaying”as a game, and certainly not a bad one to start as a light intro to people curious about roleplaying games. Probably not a category most people who frequent this blog need, but if you have a large circle of boardgame friends who have been on the edge about RPGs, this could be a way to open the door for them.

ETA:

Friends came in town and we played Nobi Nobi with 5 people; as a 5 player game it was much more entertaining, and I think you want at least 4 players to get the experience. I’d probably say Nobi Nobi is to RPGs what “party games” are to boardgames. A lot of the light/dark reward cards get fun interactions when more of them are on the board, so more players really helps in that regard.

If you find my blog entertaining and valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon.

Posted in for the noob, myplay | Tagged , | Comments Off on Nobi Nobi Sword in Play

h1

Game Hype: Trespasser

August 29, 2025

I picked up Trespasser which is a paranormal, post apocalyptic military RPG (specifically zone fiction & military moe). Influences include Stalker, Roadside Picnic, Forever Winter, Girls Und Panzer, and probably a bunch of other things I’m not up on.

Apparently sometime in the future, there’s a big war and despite the hypertech being thrown around, one valley, Corte Largo, is spared – because it has a floating fortress in the sky, Damocles, that calls down strikes with laser targeting systems any time anyone or anything tries to invade.

However, a small number of individuals, Trespassers, have snuck in to try to pry pre-war military and scientific secrets from this place, guided by mysterious operators known as Conductors, who seem to have telepathic/psychic powers.

You play the Trespassers trying to run missions, perhaps for their respective forces outside, perhaps for their own reasons. Many of the chargen options point to characters who have been mindwiped, artificial clones, failed Conductors, and other somewhat weird types being sent into this place. This game also feels like a spiritual cousin to Lacuna, in that you’re playing agents sneaking into a forbidden territory with it’s own set of rules and information and goals given by higher ups you can’t fully trust.

Mechanically it’s fairly light; a simple pass/fail system, combat uses an action point system of Stamina. I feel like the game mostly flies on the setting and concepts, with a light mechanical combat as the mainstay of the systemic part. The ideas are intriguing but I’m guessing the general experience of play depends mostly on the GM’s ability to frame and push the weirdness and clues and there’s not much advice in here. So… it’s going to depend a lot on what you come into the game with and your ability to manage that.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a cool setting and a fun premise, and can structure clue play on your own it might be worth grabbing.

If you find my blog entertaining and valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon.

Posted in recommended | Tagged | Comments Off on Game Hype: Trespasser

h1

Plot Clocks vs. Pacing Flips

August 27, 2025

I’m running Primetime Adventures and just read ARC, so pacing mechanics are on my mind, specifically the subset of pacing systems that bring a campaign to an end. This could be an exact number like Primetime Adventures, or it could be looser like ARC, Polaris or Poison’d – you can see it coming but it may come up sooner or later than you think.

Anyway, there’s a useful trick this does for the group; everyone can see it coming, and it helps everyone know “how hard to push” for goals or consequences.

Example 1: Losing Track

Most of the indefinite campaigns I’ve run or played, what happens is that players will open up a subplot, and either forget about it completely or tell themselves “I can deal with that later” and then they never get back to it. Obviously, sometimes those subplots aren’t actually that interesting and dropping them is a good choice, but plenty of times they’re in the back of the player’s head, but they can’t justify it to themselves to push hard for it.

Compare this to, “There are 4 sessions left. I’m going to have to go HARD if I want that to happen.” And, in turn, the GM can look and see, “There are 4 sessions left, if I’m giving them scenes to get this thing, I can’t waste time and stretch it out, I need to make it quick and punchy and deliver on what we set up.”

Example 2: Rushing In

Less often, but still often enough, you’ll see situations where players go pell mell hard at a sub goal because they’re afraid this is their ONLY CHANCE to get it. It may cause them to neglect other things, or take consequential courses of actions that have costs far beyond what they would normally risk for this kind of goal. The unclarity leads to overdoing things, maybe more than what they want.

Compare, again, to “Half the players are just over halfway on their Zeal/Weariness tracks, and it took us 8 sessions to get here… I’m thinking we have 6 sessions at least left” – you can slow down on some subgoals without having to freak out, because you have a guess on how much time is left.

You can see how just having it up front about how critical things are, helps the play group avoid unintended pacing flips from either “saving it for later” or “now’s my only chance” where it’s not needed.

Now, I don’t think plot pacing mechanics are universally good even for games focused on story/fiction creation, mostly because they seem to work best with games that are built with them in mind; the types of conflicts, player input, resource/currency cycles, and advancement should also tie in to fit the game. There also needs to be a little bit of familiarity with them to take advantage of that coordination method; numbers the players ignore that only show up at the end are not meaningfully directing their play before that endpoint.

That said, I do think about how these kind of rules just quietly help resolve a regular issue in open-ended campaign play, and, even if you only use to to mark the end of “arcs” within a larger campaign, it’s a useful thing to consider.

If you find my blog entertaining and valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon.

Posted in theoryforplay | Tagged | Comments Off on Plot Clocks vs. Pacing Flips

h1

Game Hype: ARC by Momatoes

August 26, 2025

I bought ARC some time ago, I just didn’t have the brain focus to read it. I not only wish I did, I also wish I bought it even sooner, because it seems like the perfect kind of game for my circles.

So the broad premise is you create a fantasy setting where a great Doom is about to hit – you play the protagonists attempting to stop it. Structurally, there’s a countdown you’re racing against, and your odds are drastically improved by your Bonds with other player characters. You’re going to need the power of friendship, loyalty, and love to win this, and you’re going to have to work together.

Bonds
Bonds are the friendship ties you have with other characters. Mechanically you’ve got 3 squares (major bonds), each square is broken into 4 quadrants (minor bonds). Minor Bonds can be spent for rerolls, while Major Bonds give a flat bonus to the person when you help them. Given that resolution in this game is “roll a d6 equal or under the target” getting a +2 or +3 bonus to the target number is massive…

Now the second trick is that each Major Bond square needs escalating actions to fill up; the first one is normal stuff of looking out for and caring for each other, the second involves risk and injury, giving up opportunities for your own goals for someone else, and the third? Death, near death, or giving up big dreams and hopes of your own.

Longtime readers will know this is close in concept to my favorite motivation mechanic – The Spiritual Attributes system out of The Riddle of Steel, so I’m very happy to see ARC’s Bonds as a related type of game mechanic.

An Old School Initiative for New Tactics
This is definitely a game built for theater of the mind, but throws some fun tactical bits on top. Initiative depends on what you’re trying to do that round:

1. Characters standing ground.
2. Those taking non-harmful actions
3. Those attacking others.
4. Those using Spells or Techniques.
5. Those moving far (> 2 heights).

So in this, you’ll note that folks taking non-harmful actions goes before attackers; this means doing clever tricks like closing a gate, cutting a rope bridge, or aiding your allies will get to happen first – players who are smart at stunts to help the allies and impair the enemies benefit. Attacks go before Spells & Techniques; players will want to make sure to stop problematic enemies from getting their special moves off this way. This mirrors the old school D&D thing where combat had phases for movement, ranged attacks, magic and melee.

Another small trick hidden in there, is that “Standing Ground” means you’re defending yourself and nearby allies; every attack against a protected ally that fails, you get a Minor Bond. Which you can then spend to give them rerolls in combat later in the round when they get to attacking or using abilities.

Fighting the Clock
I know a few games have done stuff with “real world play time” vs. “game time”, but I think ARC is doing a lot of smart things all at once.

You have a Doom Clock. At the start you decide how long the campaign is aiming to be – a 1 shot, a few sessions, a longer campaign – and then the number of “moments” or ticks on the clock is set. Every real world hour of play, it ticks down 1, and some dice are rolled to see if it ticks down more than that. If your characters knock out some of the secondary problems that feed into the Doom, you can eliminate those dice.

Your characters taking a rest, will also demand a few minutes of real time to be dedicated towards it, which is a slick way to build in things like bathroom breaks etc. into your real play. Certain spells or techniques come with a “cool down time” of real world time; you can’t cast this repeatedly within a 20 minute period etc.

This sets up a building pressure but the players have a lot of control how they want to run the risk/reward of pushing things to save time vs. going slow to restore their Blood & Guts (HP & Willpower, effectively).

Stuff is Actually Key
Something that is not apparent from the preview rules, is how much the inventory options of stuff feed into this game. Because, “stuff” includes spells, special martial arts techniques, magic items, and personality traits. Like, “Critical Thinking” gives you a bonus defense to attacks on your mind and emotional well being. The spells and techniques get pretty powerful, pretty quickly; the ability to ignore all armor & defenses, the ability to implant false memories, to copy someone else’s spells or techniques, etc. A lot of what most other traditional RPGs put into the character build, actually hide in the “stuff” space here.

These things tie together and feed a lot of ideas about what kind of characters we’re talking about and a lot of what makes this game sing.

Mostly Open Setting
So with the structure in place; the setting is whatever you want it to be. You can easily port established game or worlds in; for example it’s not hard to imagine Final Fantasy game worlds using this system, or you could do a cartoon or TV show, etc. And of course, you can have the GM’s personal setting, or build one as a group.

Momatoes notes that you could do sci-fi or cyberpunk but basically the extra work comes in changing over spells and techniques to things more appropriate, but this is not impossible work, as you can probably reskin 50-75% of it without much effort at all.

My only tiny quibble on this game is that Momatoes’ amazing layout sometimes makes it a bit harder to read since each page is almost like a whole new graphic design experience, which did not stack well with my bad focus brain. On the other hand, if you get the PDF version, you also get a text only markdown version which I suspect is going to be my preferred way to reference this generally.

All in all, this looks like a very cool game and I’m hoping to run it sometime in the near future.

If you find my blog entertaining and valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon.

Posted in recommended | Tagged , | Comments Off on Game Hype: ARC by Momatoes

h1

Nobi Nobi Sword

August 24, 2025

I picked up the Nobi Nobi RPG collection and have started looking at these RPG microgames. My take from an initial skim is that this is probably a fun set of “intro RPGs” that are great for pick up games and one shots, but would not be a general recommendation for folks looking for a full RPG.

Structure

These are small box RPGs, which use cards and d6s. You get a set of oversized cards that give you a pregen character class with some fun manga illustrations, and 6d6 in the box, and a number of cards that set up the scenario, challenges, and rewards. Sword is the fantasy set, and I assume the other sets – Horror, Magic, Thriller, change up scenarios, characters, etc. accordingly. Unless they do a digital version, the restriction here is that these become RPGs you can only really play in person.

  1. Players pick cards for characters
  2. Draw a scenario card
  3. Players draw challenges, there’s some prompts but also dice challenges
  4. Success gets one reward Light cards, failures get Darkness cards. Both give some form of bonus.
  5. At some point you hit the end challenge and do an Epilogue card

My Take

For much of my gaming career I’ve always felt we need “intro RPGs” that teach people basic stuff about roleplaying, in the same way boardgames have simple intro games (Chutes & Ladders, Candyland, etc.). This seems to be exactly that; there’s no giant book, there’s no abstracted theory to absorb. Follow the directions on the cards, say cool things, have fun, roll the dice.

Some of the cards have some interesting combination prompts, too. For example, one of the challenges has “giant” where you draw another challenge card but the problem is now a giant version of the second card. I can see a fairly decent amount of replayability despite the fact the game is entirely “built in” prompts.

Now, all that said, there’s not a lot of choice you make; you get to decide when to utilize some of the reward cards and some of the prompts are open ended, but because success/failure always gives you one reward or another, and mostly it’s about “did my dice get lucky?”, it’s a little bit of a randomized rail experience with players roleplaying their character’s attitudes or describing cool extra details.

On the other hand, I’ve played in railroaded campaigns which, unfortunately were just that experience but with a LOT more book keeping and 4-6 hour sessions, so… I guess we can say this is actually the best distillment of that philosophy condensed down? (nervous laugh). I’m also reminded of the Anima: Shadow of Omega card game which emulates your classic Final Fantasy style videogame or anime story with a little more strategy applied, but no requirements to roleplay as a cousin of this.

I think this is going to be a fun popcorn kind of game you can have as a snack when you just want to mentally check out for a bit. It’s also the perfect kind of RPG to hand to 7-9 year olds to learn about RPGs. (Caveat: I saw one of the rewards was “bunny suit”… there was no illustration but yeah it also suffers some of manga/anime’s weirdness issues in places, so grain of salt on that). I could also see if you have play groups of people who are mostly into boardgames, and want to dip a toe in RPGs but without the commitment of time, learning rules, etc.

If you find my blog entertaining and valuable, consider supporting me on Patreon.

Posted in recommended | Tagged | Comments Off on Nobi Nobi Sword

Older Entries »