What If There Was A TTRPG Where You're Only A Part-time Adventurer? So All Of Your Abilities And Toolkit

What if there was a TTRPG where you're only a part-time adventurer? So all of your abilities and toolkit are specific to your mundane job and you need to find ways as the player to apply them to dungeon crawling.

TTRPG where instead of levelling up to get new abilities you can just yell and new abilities appear on your character sheet.

Will they be good abilities? Not always. But they will certainly be new abilities.

I'm just about level 100 in Elden Ring and my favorite quest line BY FAR has been Ranni the Witch and Starscourge Radhan.

My jaw dropped the first time I wandered down into Siofra River and saw the starry night beneath the earth. My jaw dropped twofold when I was told how those stars got there.

A lot of fantasy games should take notes on this kind of worldbuilding. Too often I find that settings (my own included) are unwilling to do things as outlandish as "arresting the stars and imprisoning them underground" because the writer is worried that such a concept won't be taken seriously by Players. Perhaps this is because said writer is concerned that it will ruin the suspension of disbelief for Players, as it directly contradicts the cosmology of our own world.

But brother this is FANTASY, let your cosmology go wild and let your Players get elbow deep in that cosmology in turn. Freeing the stars from Radhan's grasp and watching that crater to Nokron appear on the map has been one of the coolest things in the first 100 levels of Elden Ring.

i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other, as in theyre the retelling of the same war with one saying here’s what happened, we all died, and it did not matter at all and another going hush little boy, of course we won, of course your friends came back

*furiously taking notes for nostromo-inspired setting playbook in a sci-fi horror game I haven't even started*

part of the fun of the original alien is the horror of the nostromo itself imo. it’s a cell of corporate greed ferrying narrowly-trained workers across barren space. it’s huge and yet claustrophobic, cockpits crammed with machinery giving way to yawning berths dripping chains and water. the supercomputer is named mother in a stroke of human anthropomorphization, but instead of providing comfort or protection, it’s only a courier between its creator and its wailing brood. ripley yells “mother! mother!” at a matronly-voiced computer that speaks calmly over her helplessness. the ship is full of endless details and patterns and unlabeled buttons and dials the audience can’t entirely make sense of; to do anything on the ship is a rigorous, technical process, and we must depend on the characters to know it. the internal mechanics of the ship are so alien that a literal alien can hide among the bits and bobs and not be noticed. it’s great.

BotW? Nah, I'm on that CotW shit

Chicken

Of

The

Woods

I made tacos :)

They were very tasty