The Bard player still has to say the right things in the first place to make the check at all, there is not guarantee they will do that. But if they do… LET THEM this is literally their characters big thing! Why not let them do that specific thing? It feels backwards to me to have a “Well this fight has a conversation skill option but I am not going to let the character that has conversation skills participate”.

IMO the rolls are not the interesting part of this, the party figuring out how they can get bad the guy to change their mind is.

So this is the question I tend to ask, if nothing else to learn something about your tool. Why should it use it over more established competitors? I am specifically thinking something like Roll20 and FoundryVTT, the former being easily accessible and free with SRD content at your fingertips, and Foundry just being, well, Foundry. Hell even Owlbear Rodeo for a generic and easily accessible tabletop. For campaign management text programs like Notion.so and full on world managers like World Anvil are providing massively powerful tools too.

What it is Dungeon Maker provides that is either missing from these other options and is so useful that losing out on all the other stuff in them is worth the switch, or what does Dungeon Maker do so much better than the others that it is worth switching?

Not trying to be a jerk about it, it looks like you have a solid base, just curious about your ideas on these things.

After 15 years of playing I came to the very easy conclusion that, at the start of the game we talk about how we as a group would like to handle a missing player. What the group wants is often the best way.

My personal preferred method I always suggest along side that is “If a player is not there, their character is not there and we don’t try to explain it in game, we just play.” - it is in my experience by far the best way, not “But Pyke should still come with us and help us!” hour long discussions. No “Well sorry Dave, last session when you weren’t there, Gimmerleaf died.” garbage. No one is going to spend that PCs resources or make a judgement call on “what that character would do” or how they would react to things.

It keeps the agency squarely on that players court while letting the rest of you just keep playing without having a bunch of in game worries about an IRL issue that is not under your control.

It’s like, impossible to pick a favourite. It is usually what I am running/playing at the moment which right now is Shadow of the Demon Lord, that game is doing so much for me, I am having a blast running it and my players is having a great time playing it. I am in a Apocalypse World game too and that is great - of games I am not currently playing Stars Without Number is like high on my list, but Alien RPG is great too, Call of Cthulhu is very good too, and damn if I could ever get to play in a Burning Wheel game run by and with friends I trust that would be high on my list too.

There is like 10 other games that are up there for me too, I can’t pick just one favourite, things are just so different and interesting that I don’t really wanna just pick one.

The tabletop roleplaying game feels like the perfect landscape for romance and sex stories to thrive within - especially when it comes to more modern TRPGs, where the goal is often to develop bonds between characters rather than win battles. I wish the article would actually go more in to depth what it exactly is about TTRPGs that make them “the perfect landscape” for romance and sex stories. The author just states it as a truth to accept rather than ever talk about it.

I’d also challenge the idea that modern TTRPGs are not about winning battles. D&D is still by a mile the most popular game, followed by the likes of Call of Cthulhu that focuses on solving mysteries and overcoming the mythos, with Paizo games following behind being, at their core, about the same stuff as D&D. You can say what you want, but the modern TTRPG audience is still all about that winning battles game.

So funny thing, owning a bunch of the itch.io bundles from the last few years, there are plenty of games out there about relationships, romance, and sex… But they are not easy to find because, well, that is not what the majority of our current crowd wants. It’s not that romance and sex is under-served, it is that there is a very small audience for it in the RPG sphere.

I think if you are in to this kind of content that is great for you but understand that it is something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable even to engage with in private by themselves… Bringing it to a table of friends in an environment where the writing is very often in first person. That is a big barrier to break.

I’d actually strongly disagree with the assumption that “The tabletop roleplaying game feels like the perfect landscape for romance and sex stories to thrive within” - I think these kind of games, backed up by having read some of the romance games from the bundles, actually move away from the classic TTRPG space and in to some new, cool, experimental spaces, but not in the classic sense of “sit around a table and play characters and tell a story together”.

Trying to sell a TTRPG about sex and romance is also going to be a hurdle to overcome. It is a hard thing to put in a hobby store on the front of a webpage in a hobby that is often sold alongside board games, minifigures, and pokemon cards.

Honestly this feels a bit like the classic “Why aren’t other people taking their time and effort to make the thing I specifically want, even if the thing I want is super niche and won’t make money”. What is the old adage? If the game doesn’t exist, you are now on the hook to make it?

I dunno, this is just some very messy immediate thoughts on the thing.