RPGaDay 2026 5&6

Looking through some other people's RPGaDay posts and then looking more carefully at the image where the prompts are found, I can see that each of the weekly rows has a sub-prompt that seems to be based on a distinct characteristic. and each of the daily columns has a sub-prompt (which seems to be based on that old poem of "Monday's child beig full of woe..."), when combined with the daily prompts and the text at the bottom of the image, a few people have been making characters for various games by combining these elements. I might try that for a series of posts ext month, picking a game system where I think that kind of character might fit, then building the character...or just trying to build each character type in a single system to see how versatile it is...

 

For the moment. I'm just going to keep plunging ahead with the prompts in the same way I have so far. 

5. Burden

Naturally, I'm reading this two ways. The first being a psychological burden that a character has to bear... some kind of deep secret that they must bear on their own. The second is encumbrance systems in games. I think both are really interesting, but I'm going to go with the second one. Like a lot of people, I first encountered encumbrance systems in games through the idea in early D&D of measuring things in coins. If you carry this item it's equivalent to carrying this many coins... and that might be because the item is heavy, or just because it's awkward to hold. I can see from a gamist perspective of balancing the systems of play how this might be a useful abstract system to counter the usefulness of certain items or just to create a mini-game within the system for characters to work out ho to optimise the variety of items they are carrying. I've tried on a couple of times over the years to create an encumbrance system like the Diablo games, where characters have a grid and the various items they carry need to be organised onto the grid Tetris-style with everything fitting in place, and anything overlapping the edges of the grid starts to apply over-encumbered penalties. I really want to get this idea to work, but each of my implementations feel a bit clumsy so far.

One of the key reasons that Erin and I really liked DURF as a system was the encumbrance system. Everyone gets a number of slots that they can put equipment into, and players need to decide whether they fill up with items which could be useful in a variety of situations, or leave them empty and allow for the character to exert themselves a bit more. The more encumbered you are, the less exertion is available and the quicker you get tired. It's not massively realistic, but it aims in the right direction, it allows for some interesting creative decisions, and it does make players think. 

6. Reach

Again, there's a few ways I can look at this, but I'm going to go with the idea that's used in a few games where different types of weapons have different lengths and gain an advantage in combat because one combatant with a short reach weapon will be at a disadvantage against another combatant with the longer reach weapon. 

For may years I thought this was an interesting abstract idea, a longsword would have an advantage over a dagger, because the person with the dagger would need to get closer and act more strategically to inflict wounds on their opponent, while the person with the longer weapon would have a better chance of hitting, even if they were making a wild swing or two. However, once I started LARPing, this really became more apparent. Someone who had bought a 60cm foam sword would have to work twice as hard as someone who had bought a 100cm foam sword. In some of the LARPs where I played, it was even incorporated into the rules that certain players were only allowed to carry certain lengths of foam sword to reflect their character's skill in melee combat. Novices could only use foam daggers up to 20cm long, those with basic skills could use 60cm "blades", and the lengths of blade would get longer as the skill increased. Not particularly realistic, but the length of the blade actually did provide advantages and disadvantages to players, to reflect the skill sets of the characters they were portraying.