Amber is a classic example that comes up in these discussions.

Intrepid uses playing cards instead of dice to resolve scenes and combat. For scenes, two people each narrate an outcome, and players vote on the version they prefer using red or black playing cards. A card is then selected and that outcome becomes the truth, so there is still an element of randomness.

In combat, each suit has a specific meaning for the ebb and flow of the battle, jokers change the scene, and the first person to draw the 4th ace wins the fight.

Most of Ben Robbins’ don’t have a random element at all and conflicts are resolved through procedure. Follow uses two coloured stones/poker chips/tokenswhich are drawn from a bag, similar to Intrepid. He also provides a “finger dice” system for getting dice-like results without using dice. On a signal, every player throws from 0 to 5 fingers, and groups of 5 fingers are eliminated. The remainder is roughly equivalent to a d6 roll.

Congratulations, that is no small feat! Got it in you to tell us about it? I love hearing campaign stories

Hey, perhaps this is a bit silly, but I just wanted to let you know I always look at these and read through your notes. I really enjoy Satisfactory, but don’t have as much time to play as I did once, so it’s always a delight when I stumble across one of your posts on my feed and I get to see the progress you’re making.

I appreciate the time you take to plan everything out and make your builds look good, it’s always inspiring.

Anyway, that’s all. Keep it up mate!

Congratulations! It’s an exciting time and they are such marvellous little creatures. Here are some random thoughts that may be useful

Pregnancy

• Everyone’s pregnancy is different, so listen to your wife above all, but here are some things we dealt with that are not terribly uncommon:
  • First trimester: nausea, tastes in food changing, scents being particularly offensive. Which tastes and scents worked and which were offensive changing on a daily basis. Have a “clean room” and some kind of array of candles or air fresheners to rotate through, when the dinner that sounded great in the morning is suddenly stomach turning as it is being prepped
  • Second trimester: the easiest in some respects, but here is when the mental load, in the form of anxiety, stress, and depression really started to set in. Be prepared to shoulder as much of the emotional burden as you can carry. Take care of yourself so you can take care of your family
  • Third trimester: The peak of the physical discomfort. Moving is hard. Breathing is hard. Every day feels like running a marathon. Minimise the amount of moving your wife has to do

Delivery

• Most hospitals / maternity wards offer tours. If you are planning a hospital birth, going in the week before to see the place helped reduce a lot of the anxiety when the time finally came. They can’t be scheduled far in advance because it depends on how busy they are, so keep checking

• Familiarise yourself with the physical details of the birth process. We read through “The Birth Partner” (Simkin and Cheney) together in the preceding months. There is one chapter where they subtly endorse some pseudoscience, but if you can skip over that when you run into it, we found it very informative and helpful about what to expect.

• The event itself is exciting, but overwhelming. Again, your wife will be entirely consumed by managing the physical demands. You can help by taking care of the logistical and emotional demands. Advocate for her. The staff are on the same team as you, but you are the only one with the brain space to ensure that the decisions your wife wants for the birth are being kept in mind.

Newborn

• The first 2-3 weeks are the hardest. You’re adjusting, and the baby is adjusting, and all three of you will have to figure out how to make it work. I hope you are in a place where you can all take time off work. We were lucky in that we were able to breastfeed without too many issues, but regardless if it works the same for you or not, those early days must be a team effort. My wife fed, I did the diapers, and we all woke up together.

• Early on, we ran into some pretty difficult nights where the baby just would not sleep. It turned out she was not getting enough breast milk. Once we started adding some formula, she went right back to sleep. We did this until my wife’s supply increased, which is a fairly common pattern.

• I don’t know why I didn’t expect this, but newborns generally dislike the experience of getting their diapers changed. It will be a fight for a little while. I say this because, if they ever stop crying while you are in the middle of one, duck and cover. That means they are about ready for part two. And it can come with some force. Those little changing mats do not cover nearly enough. We had to put down an extra layer of paper towels along the whole “trajectory”. (This does calm down eventually)

• Babies are demanding. It is rewarding, but there will be exhausting days. Early on, my wife and I devised a system where we each get one day a week that we have “off” from the baby, barring emergencies. I can’t overstate how much of a difference having that one “recharge” day makes in managing the stress, it has been extremely helpful.

Things we got that have been worth their weight in gold:

• Convertible car seat / stroller–we are using the Doona brand and it has been incredible
• Big pack of burp cloths. These need to be within arm’s reach in every room in the house
• Dedicated diaper changing station with diapers, wipes, hand sanitizer, and a burp cloth in drawers within arm’s reach
• Bassinet that can swing over the bed for easy feeding
• A velcro swaddle. Most are too big for newborns, but as soon as they can fit in, it is way easier than trying to do the origami with the blanket. Babies always beat origami

Things we got that really weren’t as important as we thought they were going to be

• Two diaper bags, one would have been more than sufficient
• A diaper caddy for around the house. As opposed to spit-ups, diapers generally are leisurely enough for you to make your way to your diaper changing station, so it was not incredibly helpful to have extras within arm’s reach
• Postpartum cart with snacks and supplies for my wife. Nice idea, just didn’t end up using it much

I know that looks like a lot, but it’s really not bad, because most of it is extra, conveniences and nice-to-have things. As long as you have food, diapers, and a safe place for the baby to sleep, all of that other stuff can be figured out on the go, and you will figure it out as you find what works for you. And the love and joy that come with the baby are indescribable. The rewards are there, and they eclipse the challenges.

You can do this, and it will be wonderful!

I think you’ve done well with the concept! Solid history without being too ornate, lots of open room for development and questions answered, and sounds like you’ve already got ideas about how to highlight with mechanics.

The only piece of advice I would give is, in addition to thinking about leaving hooks open for the DM to work into the story, also consider the other direction: how is your character going to be moved, compelled, and changed by the broad strokes of the adventure they are going to get into and the companions they are going to be adventuring with? How can this character help set up other characters to do “their thing”? I’ve found the games I’ve played in to only be improved by having those dialogues with the DM and other players up front

It’s an excellent game, hope you get to try it out even if you don’t pick it for this particular venture.

Forgive some unsolicited advice, but if you ever do get around to it, the bit that was trickiest for us to wrap our heads around was the Touchstone role. They don’t have quite as many mechanics to interact with as Power and Perspective, so it can be easy for them to feel a bit sidelined.

The truth is, though, Touchstone wields an enormous amount of power. Played right, they decide if the Kingdom lives or dies. Power and Perspective should absolutely be trying as hard as they can to court/persuade/win over/cater to Touchstone at every turn, because that is the only way to get the people on your side. Perspective could be throwing out softball predictions with a clear right and wrong answer, but all Touchstone has to do is throw their weight behind the “wrong” choice and it still turns into an agonising dilemma for Power. Can’t rule over ashes.

I love Fate. I am using it to run what I’m calling my “sedition sandbox” campaign (there’s an evil empire, you’ve been sent to its capital as spies and saboteurs, now tell me how you bring it down from the inside).

It’s been working great. On our best nights, we hit a tone reminiscent of Andor as my players hit key targets, turn their enemies against each other, and grapple with just how far they are willing to go in the name of the cause.

Check out Kingdom! It’s a less traditional game, but it strips away just about everything except for the power, politics, and intrigue, and does it rather well, in my mind. It can handle scopes as broad as a galaxy spanning empire or as narrow as an after school fan club.

Do note that it focuses primarily on internal politics, in that all the players are expected to be members of the same organisation and want it to succeed. But they should have very different ideas about how to accomplish that or what success looks like, which drives the ebbs and flows of power

Yeah, it works well enough. I haven’t had any issues, at least. On Linux, I prefer something along the lines of Workspace Matrix to get a proper two dimensional layout, but on Windows, the built-in workspaces have been at least sufficient for game night and don’t require any additional setup

I use LogSeq to organise all my notes. My group meets in-person, but I use Foundry to put background art, NPC portraits, etc. up on a screen, as well as to manage any NPC character sheets.

It may stretch the definition of ‘tool’ a bit, but the other thing I do is set up my laptop with four desktops/workspaces (notes, Foundry, music, rules) so I can switch between them with Ctrl+Windows+Left/Right. It’s a minor thing, but I am constantly surprised by how many people I run into who don’t know that you can do it. Switching desktops feels like much less friction to me than Alt+Tabbing between windows for some reason.

Outer Wilds. Endings of both the main game and the DLC can still get me to tear up a bit. I saw a post somewhere, don’t remember, that said something along the lines of “Listening to the Outer Wilds OST is the only way I feel my feelings any more.” It’s about like that.

Seconding Fate, the rules do a good job of supporting the fiction rather than encumbering it. I felt it very much supported that feeling of “I can do anything I can reasonably imagine.”

To help with the tyranny of the blank page, I’d recommend coming up with a pregenerated character to demo how it all works. Then, encourage her to change or adjust anything she wants to on the sheet. My players initially found it easier to modify something to their liking than to come up with something from scratch.

Magic can be as simple as “Roll your Lore skill” if you want or you can look up several more detailed add-ons that are out there, like Fate High Fantasy magic.

The rules are freely available here: https://fate-srd.com/fate-condensed.

I have put hundreds of hours into RoR2 on PC, love the game. I recently purchased a Switch copy so I could play with a friend of mine who is console-only. Sadly, the port is still in a pretty bad place when I checked last (2-3 weeks ago).

I am not expecting the PC and console experience to be identical by any stretch, but I am talking about basic issues like the music on each stage cutting out after playing for only 10-15 seconds, wonky damage (Beetle Queens absolutely massacring us even on Rainstorm if we touched their projectile splash zones), and all the other miscellaneous issues from the patch like logbook being glitches, unlocks being unpredictable, etc.

I think it could potentially be fixed, but I would give them time to put out a few more bugfix patches before I considered a console purchase

I have not yet played Return of the Obra Dinn, but it is always high up on the list when I look for games like Outer Wilds. I’m a huge fan of Outer Wilds, so maybe the recommendation can work in reverse

From what I have heard, the deduction is not as intense as in Obra Dinn, but there is very little hand holding, and the whole game has been brilliantly designed so that it is driven entirely by your natural human curiosity. Once you get through the initial “tutorial” section (probably the roughest part of the game, push through!) the whole game is wide open. See something weird orbiting a distant planet? You can go straight there and start poking around. If you follow the leads that turn up there, you will eventually even figure out what it is, and why it is there. Do that enough and you’ll eventually figure out the strange mystery of your home solar system.

Can’t recommend it highly enough, but you only get to play it without knowing the secrets once, so go in as blind as you can. It took me 20-30 hours to “solve” the main game, maybe another 20 for the DLC, which is also well worth it

Maybe FATE would be worth checking out?

Things I think it might hit for you:

• Characters are good at what they’re good at. You define the core concepts of your character and use them to get bonuses. Your character is a Highly Trained Ninja? Then yeah, you’ll be getting bonuses to all your sneaking, hiding, acrobatics, flashy martial arts, etc. Plus, the way the maths work, the dice have a bell curve centred at +0 (extremes of +4/-4) so the +4 in your character’s best skill is constantly having a huge impact on outcomes. Contrast that with your +7 in D&D which is still missing 25% of the time

• Fairly simple rules. The core is, describe what you’re trying to do, and then use one of four basic actions to model it if a roll seems appropriate: Attack, Defend, Overcome (beat a DC) or Create an Advantage (alter circumstances/environment/characters to tip the odds in your favour). However, there’s a little more for combat and also a meta currency to manage, which I’ll talk about below

• Very quick to get off the ground. Character creation can take only minutes if you want. No mucking about with long lists of feats and spells and class builds and whatnot. You’re actively encouraged to leave spots blank and fill them in during play when an idea strikes you, great for new and unsure players

• Completely setting agnostic, it’s flexible enough to do almost anything

Things I think it might miss for you:

• FATE’s approach is much closer to a story game, especially compared to something like D&D which leans towards the simulation side of the spectrum. Its meta currency, Fate points, aims to emulate the feel of an action movie or TV show. Spend points to do awesome things, get them back for accepting challenges, complications, and setbacks in your character’s arc. That latter point especially often means the table needs to have a “writer’s room” mentality, which isn’t a good fit for all players.

• FATE doesn’t really try to do certain things that D&D does, like strict resource management, accumulation of powerful loot, big powerful character level ups, or dungeon crawling. It can be done, and guides are out there to help you do so, but you will be bolting a lot of extras onto the system, so watch out if those are what you enjoy

• Which brings me to the last point, FATE is a system that really wants you to hack it and make it your own. It’s very resilient to this sort of thing compared to something like D&D where getting some maths wrong can make things unfun in innumerable ways, but it does take effort and thought regardless, which may not be to everyone’s taste. For example, you won’t really find a “bestiary” of monsters to throw at players, you’ll be making them up yourself, maybe entirely on the fly.

The rules are all freely available online or in pay-what-you-want PDFs. There are three current editions:

• FATE Core, all the rules of the game plus lots of extras, examples, optional systems, things like that

• FATE Condensed, all the rules same as Core, but with most of the extras cut out and overall streamlined down to 60 pages from 300 or so

• FATE Accelerated, uses the same basic ideas for its rules, but simplifies things down to the barest of minimums, e.g. dropping the skill list for 6 basic “approaches”, simplifying the damage system.

Here’s a link to FATE Condensed, as I personally found it easiest to start with: https://fate-srd.com/fate-condensed

One disclaimer: I haven’t actually played it myself yet, but I have been prepping a one shot I’ll be taking my D&D 5e group through this weekend to see if it’s going to be a good fit for us, so I have been doing a lot of research!