Flames of the Meta-Dragon
Flames of the Meta-Dragon is a TTRPG system by Matthew Jarmak, published in 2024. It’s available PWYW on itch.io, and licensed CC-BY 4.0.
Flames of the Meta-Dragon, cover art by Dean Spencer.
At only 14 pages, I feel a little silly writing a summary. There’s about a page of rules, six example classes (Fighter, Wizard, Werewolf, Rogue, Enigmaballer, and Hobb), a page on creating and converting classes from other games, a page on “how to run the game,” and a page on converting 5e monster stat blocks.
The real trick though, is that Flames is a wrapper class for the player-character object, a façade pattern. In an ideal game of Flames, the GM is running one game, and each player may or may not be playing the same one, and communication is defined to allow this seamlessly. It’s a kind of object-oriented fever dream, or perhaps an experiment in formalism like MOSAIC Strict.
It does this by defining a few common terms: Injury, Check, Attack, Save, Difficulty (Easy, Average, Hard, Heroic, Absurd), Round, Turn, Level, and XP. Each class contains all the rules for its own systems but any outside interaction must be defined in those terms. For example, the Werewolf must manage competing rage and gnosis tracks to be effective, but no other classes or rules need ever be aware of this.
But that’s the whole thing: it’s a system in the sense of one of those “generic SRD” systems that got real popular for some reason after Wizards fumbled the OGL.1 It’s surely a cut above many others, but it’s not quite at pick-up-and-play.
Limitations
This approach only works (as the game is keen to point out), as long as all players roughly know what they’re doing. If everyone comes into it expecting something D&D-like, the game should have no problem delivering. But if your character (or the game your character is from) wants to focus on actions and activities not defined by the wrapper class, then I don’t know if that will work. It might! But I wonder, for example, what a PbtA playbook looks like after conversion.
It also feels like the author has limited themselves to these terms as well. The wizard class, for example has three basic spells. But because they are described primarily in game-terms, they’re effectively just Magic Missile or simple curses. As you build “advanced” spells out of them, perhaps more magical-feeling things are possible, but I would love to see some acknowledgment of the possibility of “plain text” interaction.
Tone
I have one more complaint, and it’s that the author is too self-deprecating. There’s a little of it on the itch page, but the book itself is stumbling to apologize for its incompleteness and constantly joking about its ill-advised nature and how that reflects on the author and the players both.
I get it, they’re jokes. But it’s a wild idea that looks fun to play with and I wish the author would admit it!
Kintsugi
I am not brave enough (or familiar enough) to attempt encapsulating a more abstract system, but David Schirduan’s Kintsugi is a minimal masterpiece that I decided to give a try. Some text from it is reused here directly, under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
The Kintsugi
You are a magical golem, a mutant, a robot, or something else mutable. The only thing that’s sure is that failure only makes you stronger.
Injury: You cannot be meaningfully injured, although you may get discouraged.
Check: Roll a six-sided die, comparing it to the skill that makes the most sense for this action. If you rolled under or equal to that skill then you succeeded at that action! If you rolled over that skill then your action failed. Ignore difficulty.
Attack: As check. Successful attacks cause 1 injury.
Save: As check.
Turn: On your turn, you can make one check, and do any number of things that don’t require a check.
Experience: When you fail using a skill, that skill increases by one. When a skill reaches (6), cross it out; you’re too damaged to use that skill any longer.
Skills
Start with one skill: Do Anything (2). Whenever you fail using Do Anything:
- Describe how you changed or grew stronger.
- You gain a new skill relevant to that action.
New skills start at (3). Do Anything never increases.
Cultural Robots by ApexInfinity Games, CC0.
No shade, I wrote one too.↩︎