Indie RPG Prompt Generator [working title]

One of the most straightforward styles of play, an action game consists of a mostly linear series of elaborately staged set-piece conflicts, broken up by interstitial talky bits whose main purpose is to move things along to the next set-piece. Action blends easily with most other genres; anything that's not compatible with the set-pieces can happen during the talky bits.

Comedy in tabletop gaming is a paradox: if you try too hard to be funny, it's not funny at all. The most effective comedy games place the player characters in absurd situations and saddle them with unreasonable goals, but otherwise play things utterly, painfully straight. Comedy emerges as self-directed schadenfreude, finding entertainment in your own character's misfortune.

In a crime drama, the protagonists are their own worst enemies. Though their nominal adversaries are external, in practice it's their own emotional hangups, conflicting priorities and eccentric moral codes that send their carefully laid plans off the rails time and time again. The rules should ideally give the players an incentive to have their characters repeatedly make extremely poor life decisions.

The dungeon crawl is the action game's more cerebral counterpart. There's still a series of elaborate set-pieces, but here each set-piece is treated as a puzzle to be solved; getting into a fair fight usually serves as a failure state. In spite of the name, a fantasy setting isn't obligatory – many contemporary heist capers are functionally dungeon crawls (and, conversely, many dungeon crawls are heists).

Epic fantasy and its sci-fi counterpart feature larger-than-life protagonists in a larger-than-life world. The lines of good versus evil are clear, the stakes are nothing less than world-shaking, and everything has ten thousand years of history. The rules often reflect this preoccupation with scale, featuring escalating numbers, long lists of cool powers, or great thundering handfuls of dice.

While most premises can be made family friendly, as a genre, such games usually concern low-powered protagonists whose perils aren't taken seriously by those in power, keep violence rare and generally bloodless, and feature rules that reward morally upright behaviour. Games that set a YA fiction tone are much the same, save with a more permissive attitude toward acceptable violence.

Though their subject matter has much in common with crime dramas, film noir games are set apart by their deliberate pacing and introspective focus. Character creation in a film noir game usually gives considerable mechanical weight to characters' beliefs, principles, loyalties and self-image, and the flow of play may explicitly encourage flashbacks and monologuing.

“Grindhouse” is a catch-all term for B-movies, exploitation films, splatterpunk horror, and other low-budget theatre fare. Though most games should avoid the strong sexual content that often characterises such films, other elements have broader appeal: improbable names and outfits, cheesy one-liners delivered earnestly, and gratuitously, often comically over-the-top violence.

Horror in gaming is a difficult needle to thread. Danger and helplessness are easily emphasised by killing major characters, but having to sit out most of the session because your character got it first is no fun at all! More player-friendly approaches use narrative and game-mechanical death spirals to gradually tighten the noose, giving players time to appreciate how doomed they really are.

An investigative procedural follows a strict formula: a problem is introduced, investigated by the protagonists, and solved through the clever application of what they discover. The rules will usually have a strong focus on information-gathering, e.g., through social interaction, by exercising the player characters' very particular skills, or sometimes just by beating people up until they talk.

Magical realism is, in many ways, epic fantasy's opposite number. Its settings are familiar rather than exotic; its scale is intimate rather than grand; where epic fantasy expounds, magical realism consciously refuses to justify itself – its fantastical elements simply are. The rules of games of this type tend to delve into metatextual weirdness and blur the line between player and character.

The sports drama is a modern morality play: victory is achieved not by being stronger or more skilled than one's opponent, but by demonstrating the virtues of the sort of person who deserves to win. As a game style, it shares action's division into set-piece conflicts and interstitial talky bits, though the set-pieces are often fewer, and the talky bits more developed. If possible, include training montages.

Pulp adventure is a meta-genre that encompasses sword and sorcery fantasy, zap-gun space opera, dubiously historical adventure yarns, and related media. Dashing space rogues, mighty-thewed barbarians, and globe-trotting “science heroes” have a home here. Pulp adventure games typically feature an episodic structure, straightforward mechanics, and a casual attitude toward violence.

As the name suggests, romance games focus on exploring and building relationships between player characters – usually romantic ones, though intimate friendships are often addressed as well. If the player characters' goals don't explicitly revolve around finding love, there's typically a specific game-mechanical reason why cultivating relationships will help achieve those goals.

Like its media counterpart, slice of life gaming focuses on the everyday. Activities that most games would regard as unworthy of the rules' attention are put under the spotlight. Such games aren't entirely without stakes, but player characters usually shouldn't face anything worse than the prospect of being terribly inconvenienced. If you're setting the right tone, that'll be enough!

Surrealist games are weird in a very particular way. The fantastic is juxtaposed with the mundane, but where magical realist games treat it as familiar, surrealist games use it to alienate the players from their characters. Rules-wise, such games may feature random events, unusual player/character or player/GM dynamics, or conflict resolution that produces vague or cryptic outcomes.

Thrillers explore the intersection of mystery and danger. Typically, the protagonists have no idea what's going on, and that's why they're in danger! Usually there's some sort of conspiracy behind it; in most media, the protagonists are outsiders, while tabletop games often flip the script and position the player characters as conspiratorial insiders, menaced by a deeper corruption from within.

Reductively, a tragedy game is one where player characters end worse off than they began. Everyone dying at the end is one of several options. Tragedy shares horror's reliance on game-mechanical death spirals, with a critical difference: where player characters in a horror game are usually doomed from the outset, tragedy games encourage players to voluntarily doom their characters.

Suffering bad outcomes reduces player characters' ability to do certain things – or, conversely, exercising certain abilities may reduce your ability to mitigate bad outcomes. This might represent a system where characters take damage directly to stats, or a game where your “do cool stuff” resource pool is the same as your “survive bad stuff” resource pool.

A character's core traits describe what they do, not what they are. In its simplest form, each trait is a “doing” word that corresponds to a particular type of action. More complex examples might include both “verb” traits describing what a character can do, and “noun” traits specifying what they do it do, pairing them up for each action; this variant is often paired with dynamic abilities.

Each archetype has its own way of becoming more mechanically powerful. This could be as simple as each playbook having unique “XP triggers” (i.e., actions that award advancement resources when performed), or as complex as playbooks having entirely different mechanics for powering up; for example, one might depend on better equipment, another on developing plot immunity, etc.

Some aspect of a player character's mechanical traits gets weaker when they “level up” rather than stronger. Characters might lose more than they gain, turning advancement into a long-term death spiral, or it could be a more even trade, such that access to more potent abilities is offset by bigger consequences for failure. Extreme forms may function as a doomsday clock.

The task or conflict resolution rules decide how much narrative control the acting player has over the outcome, rather than – or in addition to – deciding success or failure. The simplest version is that the player gets to narrate the outcome on a success and the GM gets to narrate the outcome on a failure; other games have more nuanced agency-sharing.

Player characters' moral or philosophical stances have mechanical weight. In a game with a metaphysical bent, a character's affinity for Order or Chaos – or whatever the relevant axis is – might be an objectively measurable quality. Alternatively, a more good-versus-evil game might have a Corruption-type trait that's rolled for (and cultivated by) using evil magic.

The game features magical or technological items that function as bundles of powerful special abilities. Unlike equipment, artifacts have their own identity; unlike items expressed as secondary characters, they're not tied to a particular character – anyone can pick them up and use them. This Rules Toy indicates that gaining and losing such items is expected to be a regular occurence.

Players must define specific, typically short-term goals that their characters want to or are compelled to achieve. Pursuing those goals may grant extra resources, bonuses in conflict resolution, or other benefits; conversely, ignoring them may be penalised. Characters may have aspirations that work against their own best interests, and may be obliged to keep them secret from other players.

Binary stats are binary not in the sense that you either have them or you don't, but in the sense that the exist on a binary, arranged into opposing pairs such that increasing the value of one stat in the pair automatically decreases the value of the other. Binary stats can represent competing aptitudes or priorities, or simply establish that nobody can be good at everything all at once.

The game rewards players with mechanical resources for playing their characters “correctly”. Less formal variants may take the form of generic “good roleplaying” rewards; in other cases, each player may have a specific list of roleplaying priorities or agendas. This Rules Toy can overlap with devil's bargains when acting against your own best interests in order to stay in character is rewarded.

Each player character has certain traits whose existence or current numeric value is a secret. In some cases, this information might be kept secret from the character's own player; for example, a game where you're not allowed to know your own current hit points. In other cases, the classified trait might be known only to that character's player, and must be kept secret from other players.

Player characters are obliged to follow certain enumerated rules of behaviour which rule out obvious solutions to the game's challenges. These rules may be the same for the whole group, or they may be different for each player. Violating one's code of conduct may have a variety of consequences, including penalties in conflict resolution, loss of resources, or risking a loss of control.

Individual failures can have collective consequences. Especially bad outcomes might tick a group-wide doomsday clock, damage an asset represented by a group playbook, or deplete a communal resource. If appropriate, players may be permitted to voluntarily accept a collateral consequence in lieu of suffering personal fallout.

The colours of dice, tokens, or other components of play is important to the rules. For example, the game might use multi-coloured dice pools, where the number of dice determines success or failure, and which particular colour of dice rolls the highest determines how that success or failure plays out. Colour coding is a common feature of complex economies.

Certain game-mechanical resources are held in a shared pool that can be drawn on by any player. Most games have some elements of group resource sharing: money, reputation, etc. The presence of this Rules Toy indicates that the particular kinds of resources that form a shared pool are at least a little peculiar; for example, the whole group having a single pool of hit points.

Player characters face obstacles when communicating with NPCs, with each other, or both. This may reflect a literal language barrier, a magical compulsion, or pervasive social misunderstanding, and could be modelled by treating even basic communication as a mechanical conflict to be overcome, or by outright prohibiting players from speaking certain words or stating certain facts.

The game's resource economy features resources of multiple types, which can be spent on different things and exchanged for resources of other types: for example, magical energies of various elemental affinities, or more concrete resources like money, favours, and reputation. Complex economies are a common way of permitting tactical play without using a map.

Player characters can become more powerful by satisfying specific, thematically appropriate conditions: achieving certain aspirations, obtaining or expending a particular resource, succeeding (or failing, or simply participating) in certain conflicts, etc. These conditions need not be in the character's best interests. Different playbooks may specify different conditions for advancement.

Each player character, or the group as a whole, has a network of friends, accomplices, or other associates who can be called upon for help. Contacts are much simpler than full characters – often just a single trait each – and serve as extensions of the acting character: when your contact acts, you roll the dice and pay any resource costs. “Minions” are contacts you can get away with mistreating.

Some or all choices that would ordinarily be made during character creation can be deferred until later, defining the affected traits only when the need to know them arises during play. This may be a dramatic or narrative conceit, or the player characters may literally be amnesiac or otherwise undefined, discovering or choosing their own traits at the same time their player does.

Resource tokens or other play materials are physically destroyed, or possibly eaten, in the course of play. Examples include using candy as magic points, tearing off portions of your character sheet as traits are used up, or breaking parts of a miniature figure as your character suffers damage. Non-replenishing destructible components may function as a doomsday clock.

Players are able to “buy” desired outcomes by agreeing to have something bad happen, usually (but not always) to their own character. The desired outcome may happen immediately, or the player may receive tokens that can be spent at a later date, effectively exchanging whatever resources were consumed by the bargain's price for resources of another type.

Some part of the game depends on subjective interpretation of a particular set of (usually randomly chosen) symbols. Often this takes the form of a tarot deck, or something resembling one; other sets of symbols that could potentially be used for this purpose include floriography (i.e., the “language of flowers”) or astrological signs.

Play focuses on managing an organisation with which the player characters are affiliated. If everyone belongs to the same domain, it may be represented by a group playbook; if each player directs their own domain, it's usually a secondary character. When the domain serves as the primary character, with individual members being deployed as playable characters at need, it's a form of troupe play.

Each character, or the group as a whole, has a counter that ticks up or down to some very bad outcome: summoning a powerful demon, the player characters being rounded up and arrested, etc. The doomsday clock may tick in response to specific player actions – for example, a group-wide “wanted level” – or it may tick on its own and require the players to take action to slow it.

Play alternates between “zoomed in” action phases that play out moment by moment, and “zoomed out” downtime phases that are handled in less detail. This usually takes the form of a list of downtime activities for players to choose from, with each choice granting certain benefits in the next action phase. A group playbook can help to keep downtime activities focused.

Players can invent new abilities for their characters on the fly. This Rules Toy is often paired with action words or lexical traits to better define what sorts of abilities can be invented. Dynamic abilities usually have a limiting factor: for example, they may cost resources each time they're used, or deploying them at all may be treated as a conflict, with failure resulting in a messy backfire.

Each player character's current emotional state, or possibly specific facets of their self-image, are given mechanical values and play a role in task or conflict resolution. Stats of this type usually change frequently – potentially every time they're tested, in some games! – and there may be drawbacks to letting them get too high as well as too low.

The mechanics that govern individual character advancement, the progress of the campaign, or both have a definite end point, beyond which play is no longer possible. This could represent retirement, ascension to another plane, or a time-sensitive goal. An enforced endgame may pull double duty as a doomsday clock, if most or all of the end states are bad.

The game features long lists of equipment, usually with complicated mechanical traits attached to them. Gearing up is an important group activity, and – in games where emphasis on traits granted by equipment is strong – may act as a limited form of modularity, effectively allowing traits to be swapped between characters. In some genres, “equipment” may not always be physical in nature.

The game uses dice as resource tokens intead of, or in addition to, using them as randomisers. Each player might have a persistent pool of dice that can be expended to add them to rolls, or the dice themselves might be rolled to generate a resource pool, with each die functioning as a token with a value equal to whatever it rolled.

The game's conflict resolution tools have no concept of simple failure. Once the dice (or whatever) are brought into play, the players are guaranteed that something will happen to move the scenario forward. Poor outcomes may lead to complications, resources costs, additional challenges, or the player characters achieving their goals in a way that makes things worse, but never a pure setback.

The traits that player characters use to engage in conflict resolution change frequently. These changes can be both good and bad – for example, by moving points from one numeric stat to another – and may happen by varying means. If traits can only be degraded (e.g., lost, spent, damaged, etc.) as a result of conflict resolution, that's ablative competence instead.

The game is presented in the form of a different type of media: a comic, a short story, a cookbook, a scientific paper, etc. The mechanics of play may be set aside in footnotes or annotations, left implicit for players to derive on their own, communicated by a fourth-wall-breaking narrator, or set forth plainly without acknowledging their incongruity.

Some part of the game makes reference to objects which happen to be present in the play environment – for example, character creation based on the contents of the player's living space, or a road trip game that uses the colours of passing cars as a randomiser. Games intended for solo play may be based entirely upon found objects.

The game's resource economy is driven by tokens awarded to players by other players in response to particular actions; for example, providing assistance, provoking laughter, etc. Players typically can't award tokens to themselves, nor does awarding a token reduce one's own supply. The GM counts as a player for this purpose, if present.

Either the game lacks a conventional Gamemaster role, with all decisions that would customarily require a ruling from a GM being dealt with by group concensus, or else the GM role rotates among group members over time. GMless games often incorporate elements of troupe play in order to ensure that someone is always available to play any needed NPCs.

The Gamemaster's role is personified by a specific non-player character, usually an authority figure or adversary. In GMless games, responsibility for this character may rotate or be shared among group members. Effective GMPCs have strict limits on their ability to act in order to avoid sidelining player characters, and often serve as vehicles for modular genres.

Character creation is undertaken as a group activity. This might entail designating certain traits as a “one per group” proposition, establishing a network of relationships between player characters before play begins, some sort of collective resource budget, or incorporating character creation into a group worldbuilding session.

The player character group as a whole has an archetype or playbook – effectively a group-level “character class”, conferring a pool of shared resources and special abilities. This typically represents either an organisation that the player characters belong to, or a base of operations (a hideout, starship, etc.) that they own. Important non-player factions may enjoy similar benefits.

Some dimension of the game's setting is defined collaboratively by the group. This could be incorporated into character creation (i.e., with each character playbook being responsible for deciding certain details), be carried out as a dedicated worldbuilding session before play begins, or afford players a typically resource-limited authority to declare setting details during play.

Each player is expected to take on the roles of multiple sequential characters over the course of play, such that your current character's choices influence the character creation options available to your next character. This Rules Toy is often found in games where campaigns take place over a span of generations; alternatively, in a one shot, it may imply extremely high character mortality!

The game involves the creation of a physical or digital “art project” – a short story, collection of illustrations, etc. – which is kept as a memento after play concludes. Keepsake games are distinct from other games involving arts or crafts in that the keepsake is created during play, rather than being prepared in advance. Journalling games are a subset of keepsake games designed for solo play.

Player characters have one or more traits that reflect what they know, either about particular topics or in general. These traits may model ignorance as a conflict to be overcome, furnish a pool of points that can be spent to purchase information from the GM, or allow players to declare that facts related to their specialties are true. The last is often found in games that feature group worldbuilding.

Play occurs on multiple “levels” within the game's primary fiction; e.g., the player characters might be oneironauts exploring other people's dreams, or actors whose performances are treated as a secondary reality. Characters in such games typically have different traits in each layer of the fiction. Optionally, choose one additional Rules Toy which operates only within the secondary fiction.

Characters are defined by collections of keywords, rather than (or in addition to) numerical stats. A more powerful character is one with more keywords to throw around, and the effectiveness of their actions is determined by how many relevant keywords they can bring to bear. The game may impose limits on how keywords can be combined. (e.g., by type, by source, etc.)

Rather than assigning traits during character creation, players make choices about their characters' pre-game histories, with each choice granting certain traits. Especially complex life path rules may function as a standalone minigame. Alternatively, players might select abstract symbols that grant certain traits, then interpret the symbols to invent a history – like divination, but backwards!

Players are expected to get up and physically act out certain types of in-character activities. They aren't necessarily expected to perform them well unless the player skill Rules Toy is also in play. This can also cover games where the procedures of play correspond to some real-life activity; e.g., a game played via text messages where the characters are texting one another.

Perhaps the oldest form of player-facing resource economy, driven by taking other people's stuff. Loot must usually be extracted from a dangerous location before it can be claimed, and may compete for space with other resources, obliging players to make hard choices between traveling light and the risk of having to abandon valuable resources of other types to make room for loot.

In certain situations, or in response to certain negative outcomes, a player's character can be compelled to act in certain ways without that player's input. If this result is rolled in conjunction with shared control, the resource economy may permit players to bribe each other to accept player-chosen compulsions; otherwise, the compelled behaviour is more rigid.

The game's rules are divided into several sub-games, each of which addreses a different sort of in-character activity, and each of which has its own unique mechanics. All of the minigames may share the same basic procedures of play; alternatively, you can choose 1–3 additional Rules Toys that haven't already been rolled and use each one as the basis of a different minigame.

The game's resource economy is driven by bad things happening to player characters, awarding resource tokens for each misfortune. The types of misfortunes that yield resources may be the same for everyone, or they may vary from character to character. This is distinct from devil's bargains in that the misfortunes are not voluntary, though the two can coexist.

The game's basic structure shifts over the course of play. This may occur in a repeating cycle, based on a formal act structure, or in response to player character advancement. For example, a dungeon crawling game might shift focus to domain management at high levels. For each shift, pick one new Rules Toy that applies to that mode, and optionally, one existing Rules Toy that no longer does.

Player characters' abilities and traits can be modified easily and rapidly, and doing so on the fly is a major focus of play. Most games have at least some modularity in this respect; this Rules Toy is defined by allowing kinds of traits to be freely swapped out that most games would treat either as static, or as able to be changed only with great difficulty.

The game has a set of rules modules that can be used to fine-tune its genre, or sometimes change its genre entirely, often based on choices made during character creation. These rules may take the form of features of a group playbook, allowing the players to decide on the game's genre by selecting the appropriate group archetype, or they might be expressed as special abilities assigned to a GMPC.

The game has more than one Gamemaster role, each of whom is responsible for a specific aspect of play. It may even be the case there there are multiple GMs and only one player character; if so, the game will usually combine this Rules Toy with a modified form of troupe play to allow each group member to take a turn in the spotlight.

Conflict resolution employs no randomisers of any kind. Other parts of the game, like character creation or lookup tables, might still use randomisers. If dice or cards are present in conflict resolution, they're used in a way that doesn't produce random outcomes. Games with no randomisers may use blind resource bidding to inject uncertainty into conflict resolution.

One shot games are intended to be played with short, self-contained scenarios, rather than as part of ongoing campaigns. One shots tend to feature either very rapid character advancement, or no advancement at all. Episodic games are a special kind of one shot where the same characters may appear multiple times, but they don't carry anything with them between scenarios.

The game is designed to be played through a non-real-time medium, typically either email or a web forum. Such games tend to have few dice rolls, but significant ones; it's not practical for a scene to require dozens of mechanical decision points when each one could take several days to resolve, but what few rolls do get made can afford to demand substantial handling time.

Some dimension of the game's task or conflict resolution rules depends on player knowledge, skill or dexterity rather than character statistics. Examples include answering trivia questions, making pulls from tumbling block towers (sometimes known as Jenga towers), or live action games where the player's performance of the activity they're acting out is judged.

The player characters compete against each other. Each player may have their own independent goal, or all players may share the same goal and compete to be the first to achieve it, individually or in teams. The game may also pair an ostensibly cooperative goal with status or survival incentives that are most easily obtained through betrayal, creating a prisoner's dilemma.

The game uses playing cards – either standard poker-style ones or a custom deck – instead of, or in addition to, dice. The cards might be used as randomisers, resource tokens, or both; a persistent hand of drawn cards can play both roles at once. Owing to the large number of possible hands, playing cards are a popular tool for non-map-based tactical play.

The game distinguishes between actions taken by the player and actions taken by the player's character. Player actions influence the game's rules and story “from the outside”, and don't necessarily correspond to any particular in-character activity. These actions are usually resource-limited; especially cheeky games might even call those resources “plot points”.

Not all player characters are created equal – some are much more game-mechanically powerful than others. This can be balanced in a variety of ways: by encumbering powerful characters with onerous codes of conduct, by granting players of supporting characters access to more potent plot devices, or via troupe play, letting players alternate between playing powerful and supporting characters.

Characters' abilities are grouped according to the source that grants them: deviant science, martial arts, psychic disciplines, etc. Power sources are often linked to playable archetypes, and certain effects may be exclusive to particular sources. Some games further distinguish power sources by assigning each one a Rules Toy that only comes into play when wielding abilities of that source.

The rules create incentives for player characters to harm, exploit or double cross one another, improving their own position at the cost of hindering the group's shared goals. Prisoner's dilemmas are often a feature of player versus player games, but they can pop up in more collaborative games as well – the best betrayals are unexpected!

Each playable archetype has an exclusive Rules Toy which only that archetype's playbook uses. Choose one exclusive Rules Toy per archetype. This exclusivity might be associated with archetype-linked power sources, or it might be a purely mechanical conceit. Archetypes may be able to gain access to a limited form of each others' exclusive Rules Toys through some form of cross-training.

Some choices during character creation, advancement, or both are made using randomisers rather than by the player. Blending player choice with random elements is a frequent feature of life path systems (e.g., the player chooses the path, the dice decide the outcome), while purely random character creation is often found in one shot games, or those that expect high character mortality.

The game makes substantial use of randomised content, either in the form of dice-driven lookup tables like the ones in this document, or in some equivalent form, like a deck of cards with results printed on them. This may form a part of character creation (though not all random character creation is table-based), or it may be used to produce random events or creative prompts in play.

The passage of time in the game's fiction is connected to the passage of time out of game. This element is often (but not always) present in live action games, and in some play by mail RPGs (i.e., those in which each player receives one “turn” per real-time day, week, etc.). Some games may switch between abstract “game time” during active play and real time passage between sessions.

Different parts of the game's setting operate on different rules – not only socially, but mechanically as well. At its most straightforward, each region might grant bonuses to actions that suit its idiom; a more complex implementaton could involve each region having its own exclusive Rules Toys. In especially “meta” settings, region properties may constitute geographic modular genres.

The rules keep track of relationships – not necessarily romantic ones – between players characters, and offer mechanical rewards for cultivating and maintaining those relationships. Those rewards may include bonuses when acting for or against one another, additional resources, or assigning the relationship itself a playbook with ranked special abilities.

Players can invent new abilities for their characters as an in-character pursuit: martial training, building devices, researching spells, etc. Doing so will often require committing downtime activities, obtaining particular types of loot, or some other appropriate cost. Determining that cost usually depends on the GM's judgement, though some games adopt a more formulaic approach.

Players are able to “purchase” desired outcomes by spending resource tokens on them. This may involve wagering resources on random events, or bidding them in a sort of auction. Games with no randomisers may achieve uncertainty by requiring players to engage in blind bidding, such that they don't initially know what target number they're bidding against.

Player characters are able to take action in the past as well as the present, with or without a resource cost. In some games this may represent literal time travel, though more commonly it takes the form of flashbacks to retroactively “prepare” for present challeges. In either case, the cost of the action will usually be dictated by plausibility, as assessed by the GM.

In a game with a reverse death spiral, resource depletion isn't strictly a bad thing: your character becomes more powerful the closer you are to running out of some vital resource. Usually this is a resource where full depletion will remove your character from play, so you get the biggest boost right before you crash and burn, though less fatal variants exist.

The game uses fixed verbal formulas to invoke certain rules, mark transitions between phases of play, open or close scenes, etc. This can help to clarify intent – i.e., to make sure consequential rules aren't invoked by accident – and to lend a sense of ceremony to important actions. This Rules Toy also covers ritual gestures and other non-verbal formulas that serve the same purpose.

Player characters have access to a set of traits which support, overcome, or otherwise relate to each other in a cyclical fashion. This might involve elemental alignments, martial arts styles, or a set of numeric stats where each stat receives a bonus when rolling against a specific other stat. These relationships are often a positional component of tactical play.

The scale of the player characters' forum for action can shift radically. This may occur in conjunction with downtime (e.g., playing as an organisation during downtime phases); by bringing a secondary character into play (e.g., piloting a giant robot); via troupe play (e.g., alternating between playing very large and very small characters); or the player characters may simply grow or shrink.

Some or all player characters have a signature feature – a pet, vehicle, bonded weapon, giant robot, etc. – which has its own character sheet and receives a level of mechanical and narrative attention comparable to that of a player character. If it also has a mind of its own, this functions as a variant of troupe play, with each player effectively playing two characters at once.

The game's mechanics only care about one particular kind of scene, activity, or conflict; everything else is handled through freeform play. Games of this type often have a set of ritual phrases to mark the transition between freeform and rules-mediated play, ensuring that everybody knows when the dice are being invoked and why.

Multiple players share control of the same player character. In some games, this might mean each player has their own character, but sometimes hands off control to another player. In others, it might mean there's only one player character, with players taking turns directing them. Paired with secondary characters, each player might direct another player's secondary character.

The rules reward players for talking about their feelings – typically meaning their character's feelings, though some games deliberately blur the line – through interaction scenes, in-character soliloquies, etc. Rewards may include resource recovery, shedding negative conditions, or the potential to gain influence over the character you open up to.

Characters' abilites take the form of discrete, single-function mechanical “tricks”. These tricks are usually binary in nature – i.e., either you have one or you don't – and they typically don't have numeric ratings. They may be organised into linear paths, with each rank in a path granting a new trick, or each trick may be part of a complex web of prerequisites and dependencies.

Goal-based social interactions – i.e., interactions where you're trying to get something out of the other party – are treated as a form of combat. Characters can be compelled to take certain actions by “defeating” them. When applied to player characters, defeat in social combat usually penalises them for refusing to play along rather than compelling them outright.

The game is designed to be played by a very small group: either a one on one group consisting of a single player and a single Gamemaster, or a single player by themselves. One on one play is often paired with a rotating GM role, with each player taking a turn as the other's GM, while a solo game obviously has no GM at all.

The narrative focuses on a single player character at a time. This Rules Toy is a good fit for games where player characters are often separated, such that only a single PC is likely to be present in any given scene, and is usually combined with either rotating GMs or troupe play to ensure that non-spotlight players have plenty to do.

Conflict resolution places a heavy emphasis on positioning. This could mean the literal position of a token or miniature figure on a map or grid. It could also mean narrative position (i.e., who “has the initiative“ in descriptive terms), or a more abstract sort of position, like position within a resource economy – especially if a complex resource economy is also in play.

Each player is responsible for directing multiple player characters, though usually not at the same time. Each player might have a fixed roster of characters, with backup characters being brought into play in situations where a player's primary character can't participate, or players may withdraw playable characters from a shared pool at need.

The particulars of the setting form a not-especially-subtle allegory for a particular real-world issue: politics, personal identity, or that perennial favourite, human mortality. The setting's allegorical nature doesn't necessarily mean that the simulation hypothesis is in effect, though the two are admittedly frequent companions.

The setting's history corresponds to that of the our own world, up until a specific, identifiable point of departure. The setting's “present day” may be set in the midst of that event, in a divergent present day, or at any point in between. The departure from our history might be a result of time travel or supernatural interference, or it might be a real historical event that just played out differently.

The setting features technology whose capabilities are at odds with its apparent sophistication. The clockwork wonders of gaslamp fantasy are a classic example, but just about any technology level can work: consider the self-aware robots of 1980s casette futurism, or the fanciful biotechnology of The Flintstones! “Magitech” is anachrotech whose existence is explained by saying a wizard did it.

Customarily inanimate objects – or, at least, certain types of customarily inanimate objects – are in some sense alive. This could involve actual animating spirits, a science fiction setting where common household items frequently possess artificial intelligence, or a world where furniture sometimes just gets up and walks away.

The setting contains one or more objects of enormous size, obscure purpose, and unknown origin. If such objects are enterable, they might serve as dungeons, and they're often central to a mystery – but just as often not; sometimes big dumb objects are just big and dumb. A popular variant of the bottle setting takes place inside a big dumb object, a fact which may or may not be be widely known.

The setting's people are dependent on some technique, technology, or infrastructure which its current inhabitants don't understand and can't readily replicate. This could be a remnant of an earlier iteration of the present society (i.e., a former glory), or it could be something stolen, or even just found lying around; in the latter case, its origin may be a mystery.

The setting is contained within a larger “outside world”, separated from it by a barrier that can be crossed only with difficulty. This barrier may be physical, supernatural, or social; a small town in the middle of nowhere can be a bottle setting just as much as an isolated space station. The outside world may represent a deadly threat, a source of power, or an aspirational goal forever out of reach.

Achieving the player characters' goals requires frequent contact with some sort of hierarchical bureaucratic apparatus. This could mean a local government, a court of law, the organisation the player characters work for, or an administrative body that happens to have authority over something the player characters need. Navigating a bureaucracy often forms a sort of non-physical dungeon.

The setting features an incongruous or extraordinary form of communication. This might simply entail the presence of long-distance communication where the setting's technology otherwise wouldn't support it (e.g., via some form of anachrotech), or it might be the type of communication that's unusual: widespread telepathy, the ability to record and exchange dreams or memories, etc.

The institutions that appear to dominate the setting's political landscape are puppets or false fronts for the true power behind the throne. The conspiracy's sphere of influence may function as a hidden world – possibly literally, in the case of a supernatural conspiracy. Some settings feature numerous petty conspiracies working at cross-purposes, setting the stage for cloak-and-dagger factionalism.

The setting features multiple sapient species living together openly, though this coexistence need not be entirely without conflict. Humans aren't necessarily one of those species. Basic options include space aliens and fantastical creatures; a transhuman setting might feature living starships, while an animistic setting may count the local architecture or geography among its citizens.

The setting arranges for adventures to come to the player characters. This could be as prosaic as situating the game at an intersection of well-travelled routes, or as fantastical as a dimensional nexus where every door is a potential portal to another realm. This is in some ways the inversion of a highly mobile setting; combining the two is possible, but requires some care.

Repeating events play a prominent role. The scope of the repetition depends on the scale of the game; a game intended for long-form campaigns might focus on cycles in nature or society's repetition of past mistakes, while a one shot game might be stuck in a Groundhog Day style time loop. If the cycles are happening for a reason, the setting may have a destiny.

The particulars of the setting form a deconstruction of some popular set of tropes. Exactly which set of tropes depends on the other results received thus far; it could be the genre, another Milieu element, or the type of game suggested by the Rules Toys in play. Being terribly smug about it is customary, but is – strictly speaking – optional.

The setting is driven by the tides of fate. This may represent a literal supernatural doom, or some sort of mathematical or dialectical-historical inevitability. This element is distinct from destiny as a player character priority in that it affects the setting as a whole, not individual characters; the player characters may oppose it, work to bring it about, or simply be along for the ride.

Social divides within the setting are reflected by stark physical divisions that go beyond separate neighborhoods. For example, a city's underclass may literally live underground, walking subterranean avenues that never see the Sun, while an alien species' living spaces may be fatally uninhabitable to outsiders. Factionalism often thrives in such places.

The setting is home to beings whose power and influence vastly exceeds that of the player characters: giant monsters, post-human artificial intelligences, or metaphorical “dragons” whose power takes the form of political connections. Their influence may be subtle and pervasive or brutally direct, and the player characters may serve, oppose, or simply strive to avoid them.

In tabletop RPG jargon, a “dungeon” is any secure location that contains something the player characters want. In settings that feature them, the standard scenario takes the form of a caper or heist; when the player characters' goals are abstract rather than concrete, arranging for what they're after to be something that can be stolen may require lateral thinking.

Two or more of the setting's major political players are at war with one another, and have been for some time. The conflict may be cold (i.e., carried out via sanctions and subterfuge) or hot (i.e., people openly trying to harm each other). The player characters may be soldiers in this conflict, or they may be exploiting the chaos it produces to pursue some unrelated goal.

The setting's society is characterised by a sense of resignation to impending doom. This could be the fatalism of the inhabitants of a dying planet, or the fatalism of a high school sports team that knows they're totally going to get their butts kicked this year. The player characters may offer the possibility of hope, or they may just be out to get what they can, while they still can.

Certain information is dangerous or harmful to pursue, express, or sometimes even know. In a setting with supernatural elements, the information might be inherently inimical, or there might be a conspiracy dedicated to suppressing it, but this element can also play a role in purely down-to-Earth settings; many communities have Things We Don't Talk About.

The setting is less than it once was. This may be well documented, or it may be hinted at by the wreckage left behind; in the latter case, big dumb objects are often present. Some connection to those former glories may be a source of power for the player characters. This element is frequently a feature of post-apocalypses, but not always – it's possible that the pre-apocalypse world sucked.

There's something wrong with how the setting is put together. This could be a purely physical problem, like a town that's been split in half by an earthquake fault or a space station with a hole blown in it, or it could reflect an ontological breakdown, such that time, distance, relationships between concepts, or some other metaphysical facet of the setting doesn't work like it should.

The setting is caught in a period of social upheaval immediately following the introduction of some game-changing new resource, technology or infrastructure. The nature of the game changer should ideally relate to the player characters' objectives. In appropriate situations (e.g., games with magical or robotic playable archetypes), the player characters may themselves be the game changer.

The principles that govern the setting conspicuously resemble the rules of a game. For example, there might be a one-to-one correspondence between society's social classes and the game's character classes (or whatever the game calls its mechanical archetypes). This will usually afford the players considerable latitude to lean on the fourth wall without breaking character.

The setting is big and the player characters are small. In certain genres – or with certain types of player characters – this difference in scale may be entirely physical; alternatively, it can imply a focus on the grand sweep of history, the impossible scale of the forces the player characters are up against, etc. Whatever the case, a certain sense of wonder and terror is customary.

The setting is a much nastier place than it has any logical right to be, even considering any aggravating factors. The nastiness may be played straight, or for laughs, as the game's tone dictates; in either case, the player characters likely have some very peculiar ideas about how to improve matters. This element is a frequent feature of allegorical settings.

The political landscape the player characters engage with is dominated by familial dynasties of wealth and power, with all the pomp and melodrama that goes with them. They could be actual queens and princes, less formal but no less recognised dynasties like organised crime families, or just popular jerks with rich parents.

The setting consists of a relatively mundane everyday world or society, with a much more dangerous or fantastical secret world that lies beneath. This may take the form of a parallel dimension, a supernatural masquerade, or a purely figurative “world” – for example, a criminal underworld, or the world of martial arts.

The game's setting is in some sense mobile. It might be a nomadic society, or one that maintains permanent settlements which are themselves mobile (e.g., flying cities, towns constructed on the backs of giant creatures, etc.); alternatively, the entire game may take place within some sort of large vehicle. Scenarios probably revolve around the particulars of various stops along the way.

Large portions of the setting's geography are hostile to human (or whatever) life, and can't be ventured into without special protection. This usually means physical hostility, though it could also refer to socially hostile environments where the player characters are certain to be snubbed, driven out, or even attacked on sight if they show their faces without being properly vouched for.

The setting is in the process of being invaded. This could represent a straightforward conquest or a stealthy infiltration, and may or may not be public knowledge. Alternatively, the setting may already have succumbed to invasion, and is now under the thumb of a foreign power; in this context, “foreign power” could mean anything from the next polity over to a malevolent parallel dimension.

The text treats some element of the game's fiction as real, and players are encouraged to participate in this fiction. For example, the game might be presented as a tabletop adaptation of an invented piece of media, or the text might be framed as a game from an alien world or alternative dimension that's somehow made its way to Earth.

The setting is a playground for massive business entities that blur the line between “citizen” and “employee”. Though the term is associated with cyberpunk fiction, such groups can be found throughout history; the national telecom monopolies of the 1970s provided the model that first-wave cyberpunk drew on, while the East India Company played the role as far back as the 1600s.

The setting is rife with secrets to be uncovered. These mysteries could be sinister, whimsical, wondrous, or strikingly mundane in their particulars. If the player characters' priorities don't obviously align with mystery solving, think about how uncovering the setting's secrets can serve as a tool to help them reach their true goals.

Events in the setting tend to self-organise according to a particular set of narrative tropes: fairy tale logic, the Campbellian hero's journey, the Great Man theory of history, etc. At least some of the setting's inhabitants are aware of this phenomenon. This might be the product of a destiny, the simulation hypothesis in action, or the work of a conspiracy forcing events along certain lines.

Nothing interesting ever seems to happen during the day. In a fantastical setting, the Sun may literally be occluded or missing; more commonly, there's some practical, cultural, or supernatural factor in play that encourages the player characters to confine their activites to hours after dark. In exotic settings that lack a conventional diurnal cycle, consider what might take its place.

The lives or livelihoods of the setting's inhabitants are threatened by something that most people don't believe exists, either because knowledge of it has deliberately been hidden, or because it's simply regarded as very implausible. The threat may hail from a hidden world, or it may conceal itself within the everyday world by some means.

At some point in the setting's past, somebody messed up real bad, and the consequences of that are finally coming home to roost. The setting's present inhabitants may or may not share any genuine culpability for it, but whatever force is bringing the long-delayed reckoning either regards everyone as equally guilty, or is too impersonal to care.

The culture the player characters must navigate revolves entirely around one particular pursuit: a form of art or music, a sport or game, etc. This pursuit should ideally be related to the identity or priorities of the player characters, though this relationship need not be direct. In games with a satirical bent, it may also form the core of an organised religion.

The setting's physical or metaphysical makeup includes a specific, well-defined process or substance that has no real-world analogue, but which is unremarkable to the setting's inhabitants. Examples might include “vital essence is a fluid that can be extracted and bottled”, “any kind of matter can be magnetised”, etc. The setting's magic, if any, is based on manipulating this process or substance.

Note: this document takes no official position regarding whether faster-than-light travel belongs in this category.

The setting's major political players include one or more organised religions. In games that feature vampires, zombies, or other supernatural creatures as antagonists, these organisations may be the nominal good guys, though more often they play a passively antagonistic role – even if the player characters work for them! Religious leaders in such settings often function as dragons.

Large portions of the setting are subject to ubiquitous surveillance; the player characters must constantly concern themselves with whether they're being observed, and by whom. The setting may be a police state, or plagued by omnipresent social media, or the difficulty in avoiding observation may stem from something about the player characters; e.g., celebrity status, etc.

Some or all people in the setting possess a magical familiar, personal AI assistant, free-willed subconscious manifestation, or other companion creature. Such creatures may be commonplace, or they may be restricted to those who share the player characters' social sphere; depending on the Rules Toys in play, they may function like equipment, or like a secondary character.

The setting contains a handful of specific geographic sites that are hotly contested for their cultural, historical, political, or supernatural significance. If the setting has multiple major factions, they're almost certainly figthing over them. Their nature should be such that accessing, controlling, destroying, or otherwise influencing them would facilitate the player characters' goals.

The internal logic of the setting acknowledges the existence of the players and/or the narratively privileged status of player characters. This doesn't necessarily imply the simulation hypothesis, because it doesn't require that the setting be acknowledged as fictional – only that the player characters in particular be acknowledged in-world as receiving special status and guidance.

The setting consists of small, relatively insular safe havens separated by large stretches of dangerous territory. In traditional tabletop RPG settings, this typically means fortified villages in the midst of monster-infested wilderness; in your game, both the havens and the wilderness can be more metaphorical. The spaces between havens may function as dungeons.

The setting is in the process of recovery from some wide-ranging disaster. The disaster in question may be recent or long past, but its consequences remain a daily presence. Pandemic, military conflict, environmental collapse, and miscellaneous magical or technological weirdness are all potential culprits. Whatever the case, the recovery process is likely a narrative focus.

The setting has abolished most forms of material scarcity. Unless it also features magic or sufficiently advanced technology, people probably can't access unlimited quantities of material goods and resources, but they can have as much as they reasonably need. This bounty is not necessarily evenly distributed; if it isn't, gaining access to it may form part of the player characters' goals.

The setting's society is characterised by recurrent or ongoing shortages of some vital resource. The resource in question might be food, water, a rare energy source, or perhaps something esoteric, intangible, or metaphysical. This element is a common feature of both bottle settings and post-apocalypses, for different reasons.

The setting's society is preoccupied with elaborate and inflexible social rituals, and imposes disproportionate punishments for failing to perform them. This a frequent feature of both bureaucratic cultures and supernatural hidden worlds. Particularly onerous forms may be paired with a panopticon to demand constant compliance.

Ritualised battle has a central place in the setting. This might entail a society that resolves disputes of honour through duelling, a legal system which permits – or encourages! – trial by combat, gladiatorial games as popular entertainment, or an underground subculture revolving around some sort of blood sport. This element is oddly common in settings that also feature pet monsters.

It's customary for some reason for both player characters and major NPCs to maintain multiple identities which are, as far as common knowledge is concerned, entirely separate people. This division is implicit in certain character types; its presence as setting element establishes that navigating the complexities of maintaining separate identities is a focus of play.

The setting is, in some sense, unreal: a dream, a virtual simulation, a story that someone's telling, etc. The player characters may or may not be aware of this fact. If this result is rolled in conjunction with hidden world, it may be the case that the everyday world is real and only the hidden world is unreal – or the other way around!

The setting's non-recent history is unknown to the majority of its inhabitants. This might be because the setting's present occupants have arrived only recently; because the setting's history is being deliberately occluded in some fashion; because the setting sprang into existence, fully formed, in the recent past; or because the history that's known isn't how things really went down.

The ability to make radical modifications to one's mind or body is available to the setting's inhabitants. This may take the form of cybernetics, magic potions, or some form of historical or contemporary pseudoscience that actually works in the setting; e.g., mesmerism, neurolinguistic programming, etc. These tools may be available to everyone, or only to a narrow elite.

The community the player characters live in is located somewhere that wouldn't ordinarily be amenable to habitation, like a bubble-dome at the bottom of the sea, a rope-bridge-festooned network of flying islands, or hanging off the side of a massive space elevator. Such communities are often bottle settings, but this isn't obligatory if travel to other, similar communities is plausible.

Some part of the setting's infrastructure depends on a strange resource, perhaps something that wouldn't ordinarily be considered a resource at all. In a grimdark setting this resource may be something that's intrinsically horrifying to obtain, but it could also be something just plain odd: an alien metal, a genre of music, an emotional state, a particular species of molluscs, etc.

The setting's geography extends upwards as much as outwards. This verticality can be mundane, like a game that takes place on the side of a mountain, or within a very tall building, or fantastical, like a game set amid the boughs of an enormous tree. Such settings are often allegorical, with physical elevation reflecting social or spiritual elevation, but not always; some settings just like to be tall.

The setting contains some superhuman – and likely supernatural – agency that grants people's wishes. This could involve straightforward bargains, “monkey's paw” style curses, or unconscious desires coming to life. The agency that grants the wishes isn't necessarily malevolent, but most examples of the type are at the very least indifferent to any chaos their actions bring about.