#httrpg — Public Fediverse posts

Anecdote: my experience GMing Toast of the Town and Slimes in Blossom Grove for groups of total strangers (at game shops, online and at game conventions):

Half of all Joe Random RPG groups reach for violence at least once in Toast.
One-Third of all Joe Random RPG groups reach for violence at least once in Slimes.

A brief thread on the details:🧵 [1/x]

#HTTRPG #TTRPG #GMing #AdventureDesign

One result of that #HTTRPG blogpost was that I got correspondence from a gamer who participates in a different flavor of high-trust where they're equally passionate about roleplaying, but utterly agnostic about whether the roleplay is gameplay. They've got a couple of PDFs out explaining and exploring their style.

No good to me personally, but I can send folks their way when I encounter that same overlap, which I have at least once before (here, I think).

My hope is that this article will serve as a single landing-point for folks curious about what I mean by "High-Trust Trad" roleplaying, or HTT.

https://rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com/2026/08/whats-forever-for.html

But, I know about hope, and the Internet. 😁

#HTTRPG #TTRPG #GMing #AdventureDesign

It was maybe 1989 or 1990 when I first started saying some version of the following in GMing conversations:

"When I prep, there's a likely version of the game session in my head, but anytime it actually goes that way, I feel a little pang of disappointment."

Delight at the PCs upending my expectations, to the point of (a little) sadness when they didn't, was a pillar of my GMing years before I had the tools or perspective I have now, but it's a clear antecedent. 😅

#HTTRPG #TTRPG #GMing

@SJohnRoss every time I read one of these things that are snippets of #HTTRPG, I grow more intrigued. I can see that doing this will undoubtedly make me a better player and GM.

I yearn for a more complete guide.

I'm doing a #HTTRPG design workshop with @SJohnRoss and it is expanding my tools for #ttrpg immensely.

I just watched someone presenting an adventure/campaign outline which I would just have accepted just two weeks back.

Now I'm going "There is no engaging problem to draw the PCs in, just a simple goal the players have to buy into." and "You talk about agency, but you only offer video game choices."

Might still be fun to play. Just talking about how *my* views are changing.

Some ways of trying to describe #HTTRPG to strangers. It's mostly about #AdventureDesign, in a style that existed commercially (on the fringes) from the early 80s until sometime in the mid-to-late 90s, before disappearing from game retail.

I run Discord workshops that teach the basics of designing in this style. Workshops are free, text-only, and 1-on-1. I'm ghalev on Discord.

Relevant: https://rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com/2026/08/whats-forever-for.html

#TTRPG

@SJohnRoss My #HTTRPG mis-understanding: Instead of a story to be told, it's a series of problems and the story comes from the actions of the characters. (I think?)

Would it be closer if the death of the bad guy doesn't solve the problem? Like a game of thrones type of situation.

Entities currently fighting for power:
- hungry undead
- a church
- a warmonger
- the corrupt king
- a pirate king with history

And it'll have LTT parts but I'm trying to figure this part out.

@SJohnRoss

I want to write a #HTTRPG adventure. You seem to be the expert on that subject.

I was thinking of setting it up like Ghost Recon: Wildlands, where as long as all antagonists are connected it doesn't really matter how you go about dispatching them (or whatever the goal is).

Then I'll prep a hex map for the world, put everyone in their places, and let the players loose.

Is that too rigid/linear?

I'm currently digging through my lengthy conversation with him looking for the right approach and the right tools to go about this, but it was a very long and wordy conversation where we touch on every topic related to RPGs, occasionally getting back on track again. So it's not easy to find.

He can be critical about stuff that doesn't appeal to him, but I did just come across this:

There are a couple of ways I like to do problems but there's no WRONG way. Whatever gets you to one is good. I sometimes start LTT style, with a goal. I often start with a victim (but I run a lot of heroic games). There's no wrong starting place.

So wherever I start is fine, just refine until we get there. Let's give this a try.

One hint for how start that he gave was:

pick a problem or a victim or a goal or something like that. Something they'd care about.

Not having started the campaign, it's hard to tell what they care about, but I think part of the campaign, especially the start, is getting to know people, so they'll care about them. People do live in the wilderness. There will be some isolated farms, maybe even a small village, eking out a living under harsh circumstances. These are likely early victims of monsters and banditry.

And maybe I'm going to give them some hints for helpful character backgrounds. Like someone's relative disappeared disappeared, and the PC wants to find out what happened. Maybe even save them.

#httrpg #httkingmaker

Recently I was fortunate to have a super interesting discussion ad-hoc adventure design workshop with S.John Ross, who has some very interesting ideas about adventure design, called High-Trust Trad. Trad meaning non-D&D, non-storygames, which is my sweet spot too (though I'm less purist); high-trust is a bit harder to explain, and I won't be able to do it justice here, but it focuses on the characters and how they approach the problems they encounter, the choices they make, how they interest with the various NPCs, etc. It should be roleplay-heavy, driven by in-game motivation, not by predetermined plot, mechanics or meta-game considerations.

A good HTT adventure is non-presumptive, which means it has no expectations about how the PCs will approach the various aspects of the problem. The adventure is made up of a cluster of problems, and for each problem, it should be trivial to come up with 6 different ways to approach it, and 6 more with a bit of thought. A limited list of options is not good enough.

From how I understand it, an HTT adventure is like a complex machine that's already in motion and will cause suffering unless the PCs can stop it. Which may involve discovering what the problem is in the first place.

S. John Ross's Toast of the Town is a great (and free) one-shot adventure that's a great example of HTT design.

He has a bunch of tools to help him flesh out the problems in his adventures. And he tried to explain them to me, and while I doubt I fully grasp them, I figured I'm going to try to apply them to my campaign ideas. Let's see how far I get.

#HTTRPG #httkingmaker

Toast of the Town

https://friendica.opensocial.space/display/8ffdf77c-1566-9451-7206-772219952777

@Anth0rx @SJohnRoss

So opponents should not be predefined in an #HTTRPG adventure?

About the "opponents" thing: who says they must be opponents? What if the PCs manage to come to some agreement or even find a common goal?

You don't always have to fight. Well, sometimes you do, but it can be more satisfying when that's driven by the motivations of the players and the "opponents", rather than merely prescribed by the scenario design because you must have X number of level Y fights before going up a level.

@SJohnRoss So opponents should not be predefined in an #HTTRPG adventure?

What do you mean by "Conflation of the players with the PCs"? The players should not create their own characters?

@SJohnRoss
Could you provide more examples or elaborate a little more on each? I am just starting to get down the rabbit hole on #HTTRPG and feel a little lost 😅

@SJohnRoss It occurs to me that some people (which is to say, me) end up focusing a lot on the "High-Trust" part of #HTTRPG and not at all on the "Trad" part, which I'm not sure I, personally, understand.

I'm thinking of things like Graham Walmsley's "Dying of St Margaret's" for Trail of Cthulhu. It has all the High-Trust hallmarks, to my eye, in the sense that it doesn't pre-suppose any solutions to the central problem -- but it does pre-suppose that there are no solutions; the bad thing is bad and no one can do anything meaningful about it. So maybe it doesn't count on the Trad front?

Anyway, if you'd care to offer any clarification on this, I know I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

@SJohnRoss I know, but I think when you're 12 realising system <> RPG is part of the evolution towards different gaming traditions. Particularly in the 80s with disconnected community. That's why I mention the rhetoric of the game. I only came across your #httrpg a few weeks back, so there's an unfolding of things I don't have the taxonomy down for yet.

The secret to high-trust traditional roleplaying (or HTTRPG): You can use all the tools you've learned from generative worldbuilding in #OSR and #solorpg gaming to emulate the feeling of an epic, hyper-planned campaign AS LONG AS everyone at the table have good faith buy-in in the fiction of the secondary world. In a way, this is exactly what #burningwheel has always encouraged in its play culture. #ttrpg #rpg #httrpg

@SJohnRoss what do you think some of the big things to keep in mind when designing this would be, to make sure it stays #HTTRPG and doesn’t fall into low-trust? Or phrased another way, is there anything unique about dungeons that makes the more difficult to support HTT play?

Reading some MERP adventures included in the depths of their fantasy city sourcebooks ... and a third or more of _those_ are High-Trust as well. While I've had basically positive contact with the Iron Crown library for decades, honestly I skimmed their adventures, to my detriment, for most of that time. It's nice finally noticing how wrong I was 😅 #HTTRPG #TTRPG #MERP