Ryutama

That's true. One idea I had for the object dilemma would be random tables for the different environments but still let players throw something in if they want it (like the example in the book where a player had their dog as an object). I could probably just take some mundane object tables from OSR stuff.

I like it.

The book already lists stuff for each environment, so I'll look at doing a pass on those, building them out a bit, and working them into a proper d% list.

I've also been thinking out building out something like a Skill Challenge sSystem, for complex situations. The game *really* doesn't turn on combat, and it'd be nice to have a more robust framework for stuff that isn't travelling. Does the game have something like a target number by level chart that I could go off of?

As far as skill checks go, it just has a single chart on page 93 of the difficulties of various things.

If I were you through, I'd wait a little bit on doing any extensive homebrew (unless you just want to or need to now, of course). The first supplement is supposed to be released within like the next two months according to the kickstarter and I'm not sure what all extra rules it will have.

I am currently making CATastrophe homebrew.

Aside from setting changes, I also retooled combat system considerably - added "zones" replacing vanilla's areas (the only difference is that there's more zones on the battlefield so you can move between them), added martial styles for combat characters and miscellaneous combat actions and retooled the action economy a bit (now using an object in combat lets you do a secondary action).

>, the only thing I'm not vibing with are the story game elements.
The entire game is, to a certain extent, storygame elements.
I'd suggest trying it as written first. It's very different from a "classic" D&D-type game. You can't really approach it with the same mindset.

It's a weird middle between storygame and classic hexcrawl. It has enough structure to be the latter, but with player input elements of the former.

I've admittedly only glanced over the combat system, but I've been thinking about ways to implement the dungeons from Crystal Chronicles.

Way I was planning of doing it was to add different "event tables" to roll on for each dungeon that include things like meeting various other traveling groups or jsut finding treasures or NPCs and have 2 normal encounters and a boss for each.

OI! PDF FAGGOTS! DO WE HAVE ONE!

Also, not op. I do not want my enthusiasm to reflect badly on him. The thread maybe, but not op. Never op.

Of all the play reports I've been desperate to read, the biggest one is how hard it is to actually crack the various eggs.

Here's stuff I made so far, maybe it'll serve as inspiration.

docs.google.com/document/d/1a8FRCmV3I2q2-qzUTV7ScjuFnH05uMNLz39qgft9EM8/edit?usp=sharing

It's a reference sheet rather than a complete document, so it might be light on explanation. It also contains supplement sea travel rules for ease of reference.

You can safely ignore everything from "Nanomagic, son" - it's setting-specific and I am only starting my monster retool.

Check above, a kind soul posted a mega with all PDFs
-actual OP

I'm gearing up to run a hex crawl with ryuutama on roll20 hopefully soon, pick related. As far as player rules concerned, game seems to fit well into it pretty much out of the box, and populating the hexes is left up to monster-huge vistas/encounter seed/hazzards/adventure seeds table.
Rollable Tables are quite handy for rolling or moving a slider into the right position for rolled terrain or weather or whatever, you can have all the hex types/weather in a single token that way.

Thanks, I appreciate it. Will check this out once I'm comfortable with the core game rules.

I don't think it needs to be story game elements though, I think the game would work pretty well as a standard trad game. If I ever get to run it with people who I trust, I'll try the story game stuff out.

Thx op. You aren't a faggot.

These are really cool.

I've had a game idea sitting on the back burner for a while about a Nausicaa-inspired post-apocolyptic game set on a colony world that got off from the rest of the galaxy when its jumpgate catastrophically blew up and everything got hobbled to something like an early modern tech level. A lot of stuff in here seems like it would be super good for that.

I was actually looking for some insight on this! I'm planning on doing a hexcrawl but was looking into using random tables for generation of the world map as we go. Does anyone know of good hexcrawl rulesets for generation and whatnot?

Are you sure about that?

I'm doing the same "discover as you go" style. Sadly what hex goes where is my weakest table desu. At first i was going to just give every terrain the same roll chance, but then ended up assigning them values of how likely they are to neighbor each other from 0 to 3, then converted it into d100 table.
I'm justifying it to myself and possible confusing players by "Because dragons". Why there is Alps, desert and a swamp next to each other? Well, Alpine, desert and swamp dragons nest there, so here you go. Dragons-first fantasy logic.
I bet there is some 2ed d&d supplement that tell exactly how to do it well, but i'm too lazy to find it.

Same. I rarely do fantasy stuff so I don't have the same level of on hand resources I do for most other types of games. I should probably ask in /osrg/. There HAS to be a bevy of robust hex crawl systems.

Ryuutama is interesting in that right out of the box, thanks to the various dragons, the game supports a variety of tones, from slice of life to bleak tragedy. I'm interested to hear if it can actually do that and if the GMPC powers actually make a good contribution.

...

The dragon-driven topography's actually right there in the book, actually. It talks about how if Prairie Dragons hang around an area long enough, the seeds they carry around in their feathers will start to plant woodlands.

There's some good adventure hooks in there about, say, a town asking travelers to lure a Wasteland Dragon that's wandered into the area away from the town's pasturage, before he ends up desertifying it.

As far as mechanics concerned, I'd say there is good support for green and red ryuujin, because game have dedicated systems for travel and combat, and red has alternative rule for dedicated dodges. Thought reward system as-is favors green. I'd make it something like 50x the highest monster level to bring it it line with exploration xp, if you are running red, and maybe cut travel xp in half.
Blue and Black have some tonal support through artifacts and benedictions, but not much else. I'd suggest adding or rewriting xp triggers for them into something more tone appropriate.

How viable is playing this with only 2 people or even solo?
Kind of intrigued by it but don't exactly have enough people to play it with.

The game isn't built around hyper-specialization or hard skill barriers, so playing with only one or two people is very much possible. I'd maybe take a kid glove approach to start with, though, or have a very interventionary Ryuujin, since a bad roll during the travel portions can really mess you up.

>story game elements
What are those? The only definition of "story game" I know is "RPG I hate".

In reality, it tends to mean RPGs where the players have more input into the path the story may take and it also tends to be much more rules-lite then something like pathfinder.

I use it as a shorthand for "players share authority with the GM". It's not perfect but it's relatively understood. What I don't get is why someone would be worried about that.

Whenever people call Ryuutama a "story game" I become mildly baffled until I realize that there's a huge focus on character interactions over pure mechanics, plus the general expectation that the GM and players will work together to create the world the game takes place in.

The game specifies that letting the players get involved in world creation is up to the GM's discretion, but recommend it as it contributes to player investment in the world. Since I enjoy building worlds, that's really attractive to me. But GMs who want iron control or players who want to sit back and be entertained might not like it so much, so tailor to group, I suppose.

Anyway - to be fair, I haven't actually played it with a group, but I've watched several LPs on Youtube and done world generation for a possible solo game, so I am pretty familiar with it. Currently my favorite TRPG by a fairly wide margin.

The only critique I've ever seen by people (aside from pish-tosh on "story game" elements) is some critique of battle mechanics. Since I'm not a mechanics-focused gamer, and the mechanical elements don't seem outright broken, neither bother me.

like other anons said, it's player input into story creation.

I haven't had good experience with story games. I really wanted to play them, but I have never found a group that played them tastefully enough to be fun and enjoyable for me. In my experience, giving players narrative control usually just results in silly/nonsensical stuff or awkward players who don't know what to do with said control.

The pithy answer would be "find better players" (or git gud).
In all honesty though, I can concede that not all groups are suited for that kind of games, but as everything else, it's an acquired skill. There are things that can be done even in more "traditional" games in order to accustom players to the playstyle. Personally I find that with a modicum of effort, letting go the reins makes for better games.

While it's kind of a contrived answer, some people just aren't good at it. And there's nothing wrong with that. Some people are just more creatively inclined then others. And if that's all your group is about, then it may be useful to maybe encourage them to find another game where it's less of a focus however I found that those kind of players usually have passion about some other element of the game, so while you guys do town creation earlier in the session for a new town you stumble across and that player may check out for a bit, you can later have a quick part where you focus on what that character is passionate about. Now, in my experience, they tend to be most passionate about combat or causing mayhem. So let them lead the charge against a group of trolls or goblins who are causing trouble in that previously mentioned town. Or give them a chance to get into the trouble makers camp and cause trouble for them. I'd caution against allowing it to fall into murderhoboism or tarintino-esq hyperviolence as these don't really fit with Ryuutama thematically.

I was talking more in general than about Ryuutama. Still, I agree that not every game works for every player, but I don't think that it's *that* hard to get players involved.

Does anyone have experience running (or playing in) a game with the Black Ryujin?

Nope. I don't think so either. That's the wonderful thing about TTRPGs! Though there are some instances of players where its better to kick them (fuck you James).

Some parts of the game reference having the players create objects in the battlefield or help build the world/towns. It's working off the assumption that none of you have done this before and the GM will need help since you're all noobs. It's easy to disregard and just leave all that to the GM.

It doesn't have the PBTA/Fate players narrate the entire stor and constantly drama at each other stuff.

I have this book,and would love to run it someday.

I personally have not, but I've heard one of the English translators talk about a black dragon campaign run by the game's creator.

I searched Google trying to find where he talks about it and ran across this after-play report by someone who ran the same premise at a convention: tagsessions.blogspot.com/2016/04/one-last-journey-as-world-dies-ryuutama.html Haven't read this yet, so could be shit, but it's something, at least.

I know that I want to run a black dragon campaign after I have more experience. In retrospect, I realized that about 50% of my world premise is pulled from Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.

>I realized that about 50% of my world premise is pulled from Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.

Literally the reason I wanted to get into this game. CC has such a fucking cool setting but I feel like the traveling aspect of it should be an integral part of any tabletop version of it, possibly even more so than the dungeoneering.

My first scenario was even my players heading out to the river Belle to find the sap of a mystical tree because there's an epidemic in their village that tree is said to be able to heal, meeting a military expedition shortly after departing and running into a weird hermit living near the river and telling them to search behind the waterfall for the tree but beware the big monster nesting there. So much of it can be adapted so well.

I have yet to do a combat, class and spell overhaul to include the different races and FF spells, however.

So what's a good way to generate a map to travel, how many days should a 2 hour-ish intro journey cover and what kind of events (and how many) should there be? The prebuilt tutorial scenario from the rules book seems kind of short, though I suppose that might be due to it not including any of the potential RP talk.

I was also wondering how to handle an exploration journey into unknown lands. How do you do direction checks and how do you fix the direction they need to walk in if they get it completely wrong but don't actually know exactly where their goal is in-character? Just give them hints in the environment through explanations or even just have your Ryuubito interfere directly in some way?

>The prebuilt tutorial scenario from the rules book seems kind of short
They're exactly what you're looking for. About two hours each.

Not run a game myself. I will suggest you look into the Roll20 LP of Ryuutama, though. He ended up spacing the locations too far apart. They did several sessions and only just got to the first town by the time they ended the series.

You should be generally aiming to get people from Point A to Point B by the end of a session, with at least one camp in between. So probably aim for a camping stop about once an hour, depending on how quickly your players are making their way through the hazards.

First, allowing player input has nothing to do with the GM needing help or not and second, that's not how PbtA and Fate work.