The Silent Bard

A Deep Dive Into Your Resolutions Happy New Year! Welcome to 2026. Let's talk about Resolutions! Don't worry, I mean resolution systems  in TTRPGs. I'm not a masochist...usually... Overview Generally, TTRPGs narrate events until something happens that could significantly affect the characters or the story, at which point they use some sort of systematic method to resolve success or failure and offer a guideline on the results. There are a lot of niche variations, but in general they use a randomizer, typically dice...   Words, words, words! Hey, there could be someone out there that didn't know this stuff, AND was still kind of interested, right? (Hi, Mom! Look, no hands!) Ok, ok, yes, you knew all that, but it's important to take a minute sometimes to set it down in front of you and LOOK  at it. Bear with me, alright?  "I attack the ogre" seems pretty simple in context , but that's often because you are making some assumptions, probably using the syst...

Some People Don't Listen  Years ago Paul ran a fairly hardcore game of Shadowrun that needed a couple more people to round out the team, so he stopped into his local game shop to recruit. He picked up a couple of older guys who seemed easy to get along with. We had a cybered up Troll Sam, a femme fatale who was great at blades and shooting, and had a ridiculous skillwire library for anything else, and a studious hermetic mage; we added a physical adept and a pretty competent shaman. We were set. The mission had the team sneaking into a small Balkan country where a powerful spirit had set up his own little domain. The team posed as travelling merchants. Not perfect, but it was good enough...until the shaman stopped the game to record how many sticks of which flavor gum he had handed out to some kids. Dude, doesn't matter...  but no, he ground the game to a halt and made sure everyone STOPPED for him to make sure he had recorded proof of an exact count - for something no one els...

On Dice, Mechanics, and Personal Taste Oh boy... been a bit, eh? We've actually been pretty busy trying to polish up LevelOneRPG , which is almost ready to promote from Beta to production version. We opened it up as an Alpha some time back, mostly inspired by the 1e Manifesto , and I have to admit that having people already looking at your still-broken version does motivate one a bit! We had a couple of good playtest sessions on Twitch if you can stand Paul's deep-fried Southern Raconteur accent (he's the one in the plaid with the ball cap if you couldn't figure it out) - not exactly epic, but fun was had by all and there were significant lessons learned, and Paul got to use his "two and a half ex wives" joke before the four minute mark. :) So now he's working on a fresh edit which includes some alternate resolution systems, because the biggest problem seemed to be the way the novel dice system took the players out of the game for a minute on several occa...

As I've said before , I was originally conceived and implemented as a D&D character. First Edition AD&D, to be precise, back when Bard was an Appendix that had me start out as a Fighter. The upshot is that I've always known my way around which end is pointy and where to put it, and I've always been pretty sturdy. It also means I was there, many times , as our players stopped the game and left us, the characters, frozen in time with a weapon just reaching its target  so they could discuss what it meant  that seven more "hit points" were going to be deducted from our amorphous bag of Life. The blob of HP has become so ubiquitous that many don't even question it any more. Video games just blithely take it for granted, as do many TTRPGs. Yes, it's absolutely possible for someone to get shot and keep coming, but seventy-four times in an afternoon?!?!? People, Bactine isn't that good. Wrapping a little gauze around it isn't going to make it all b...

I did a  review . You read it, right?  So it should be ok to at least talk about our own game a  little ...maybe even release a "game jam" version? Behold!  Level One RPG This is a minimalist derivative of the soon-to-be-released  OneRPG ! We don't generally like class and level systems, so we built our rules not to require them, but Level One uses those rules to implement a class and level based game that works. 😁 It's totally playable, and I'm gonna get Paul to open up the Discord so folk can ask questions and discuss, maybe run some games over Twitch to demonstrate.  Here's what he put in as the blurb on the release page: A simple, flexible, ENIOTS ( E verything N eeded I s O n T he S heet) game using any dice you like . Freeform Classes, spells and magic items. Custom advancement and metacurrency.    Uniform system for resolution of actions that sets effects such as damage in the same roll. Yes, with any dice you like . Don't believe it? Try...

Today's post is just a review of an RPG system. Well, the title says it all. That's a wrap - good night everyone... Ok, obviously it doesn't say it all. As a professional jongleur and wordsmith, we all know I can say a LOT more than that, and just saying a game is "elegant"  doesn't really mean much without some elaboration, does it?  So let's unpack. Dash  RPG is, according to its own website, is "a condensed version of Charge that fits on a half fold brochure." This is true - you can get the entire ruleset from its itch.io page  as a "Name your own price" download, and print copies of the the formatted character sheets each with the whole reference on the back of that single sheet to hand out to your players. There's even a one-page SRD guide, formatted to fold, to help if you are making your own game based on these rules ("Both Dash and Charge are released under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY." -- the Licensing pa...

Ok, let's get this out of the way... I don't like class and level based systems. There, I said it. Yes, I know I was originally a D&D character, and yes, I know it's still over half the market. I'll admit that it can be a lot of fun. Hey, I rocked every version of me, and all of the originals were D&D. It absolutely has its place, but it's like that first girlfriend you had as a kid when your hormones finally started making you think you knew what love was. You tell people she broke your heart, but really, more often than not, you just grew apart. You know it's true. And ladies, you really just figured out you could do better, right? So consider this. Samuel Clemens, known to most of you as Mark Twain, wrote - “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one...