The Neglected Player

Created for the TTRPG Manifesto Jam 2025.

After scheduling conflicts, GM burnout might be the second-biggest reason for TTRPG campaigns coming to unsatisfactory ends. I have some Thoughts about why, and how one might approach better supporting GMs when designing TTRPG systems.

Full text of the manifesto in the screenshots, or PWYW for the PDF.

Also I made a little game to try to show some of what I had in mind! It's called Transforming Hero Roll Firster, and it's for running combat encounters in the style of Japanese tokusatsu shows like Kamen Rider and Sentai. It's very rough around the edges still because it turns out that designing games to be easy to GM is quite hard, but I've included it here as a sort of paid bonus DLC.