TTRPG players: Well of course we're going to work together to break the game, it's a better story that way.

I compare the price of new shoes to knee surgery, and the shoes are usually cheaper. That and trying to buy things before the price goes up or they're just unavailable due to tariffs.

Pull off a highly elaborate heist

Which if you think about it, kind of makes a short table into a checklist or a countdown.

I just treat those short tables more like a deck of cards and reroll any time I land on the same one more than once.

Still trying to get my head around the fact that my literal royalties were, in fact, business income.

Maybe you do still do regular dungeoncrawling but in an art deco themed interdimensional civil war.

Hear me out: Carcosa Borg. Every time 3 Acts have passed, the play ends and the PCs emerge from their reality into an even more surreal world.

It's because the EP1 team was fresh from working on Shadowrun, which is both very crunchy in character creation and in play.

Not only does this guy get horror games and specifically the game I wrote, but he comes up with an even more interesting idea for a horror RPG.

sinful.games/carrots-and-...

I'm sure there are some super niche examples that go farther, but RIFTs has to be it for RPGs that have actually been sold in shops and played by more than a dozen people.

Going to second RIFTS here, or maybe Heroes Unlimited (another Palladium product). Tons of arithmetic, lots of flipping between pages to check tables and add things up, zero tactical depth. Everyone is just a big pile of hitpoints that you roll to attack each round.

Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut Explain Surprise vs. Suspense There's a bomb under your chair, and whether you know about it or not affects surprise and suspense.

Like Newfable says, I would find a way to show the potential consequences of taking longer in game ahead of time, because that creates tension and suspense. There's an old Hitchcock quote I think about a lot when it comes to tension:
nofilmschool.com/alfred-hitch...

This is great advice.

That way, even a very fast win will still be, "phew, we got that done just in the nick of time".

That said, I don't think it's possible in 5e to build characters that are actually impossible to challenge. If nothing else, put the final fight on a timer, with increased narrative consequences for every extra round it takes them to win. Let the players know about those consequences ahead of time.

You don't need to run the perfect campaign. Your players are happy just to be there and be a part of it. You also don't need a mechanically challenging final boss fight for the campaign to have an impactful resolution.

I've realized that what I really like in RPGs are games that present interesting dilemmas. They can be narrative, social, logistical, tactical, diegetic, non-diegetic, as long as there are multiple non-optimal approaches to navigate.

I just finished running Bisquiet, a Spire framework by @writnelson.bsky.social, for my home table, and we really enjoyed it. Food service was a very relatable setting, and the central five characters felt like they explored the dilemmas of being a semi-succesful revolutionaries well.

Good bat.

Frog-Eating Bats Remember Ringtones Years Later Frog-eating bats trained by researchers to associate a phone ringtone with a tasty treat were able to remember what they learned for up to four years in

news.utexas.edu/2022/06/20/f...

I also made sure the ingredient list was reasonably healthy, affordable, and items that work in a stew. I left out celery because it goes bad too quickly. (3/3)

Of course, Galen would recommend eating food with the opposite humor to your own, but I leave it up to the players to decide what the link is between the Orc stats and the ingredients they use: it could be the method the Sages use to direct the development of the Orcs, or something weirder. (2/3)

Cooking With The Orcs by Lyme Cooking Expansion to Dawn of the Orcs

I read On the Property of Foodstuffs by 2nd-century physician Galen of Pergamon to work out the humors of each ingredient in Cooking with the Orcs. I wasn't about to get my humorism from some modern pseudoscience website. (1/3)

lymetime.itch.io/cookingwitht...

introducing 5e 5e, a complete 5e conversion of the worlds greatest roleplaying game

Cooking With The Orcs by Lyme Cooking Expansion to Dawn of the Orcs

Today, I am proud to announce Cooking with the Orcs, a new cooking minigame expansion for my Ennie-nominated dark fantasy worldbuilding game Dawn of the Orcs!

lymetime.itch.io/cookingwitht...

Well this is embarrassing, looks like despite the error message it went through every time I filled out the form, and now I've submitted the game four separate times.

Fear and Panic by Lyme Player-Friendly, Open-Source Horror Roleplaying

Didn't expect this post to be so popular. And holy cow, is that a like by Johan Nohr himself? If you're interested in the game, pick up a copy here: lymetime.itch.io/fear-and-panic

Hi! It looks like the form isn't accepting my submission. I keep getting a "critical error" message.

A black cover evoking horror paperbacks of the 80s and 90s. A black silhouette that might be a human in a jacket stands in front of sheep. The sheep have bright white eyes, black silhouettes for heads, and dark gray wool. They fade off behind the central figure into the darkness. More white dots behind them might be sheep eyes, stars, or something else. The only color in the image are two red dots for the eyes of the humanoid figure and the title, "Fear and Panic", in the same shade of red. At the top of the cover is the catchphrase, "Fear is the key to survival." At the bottom of the cover are the words, "A HORROR RPG BY LYME".

New cover for Fear and Panic, featuring art by @stregawolf.art!