Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to this week's episode of Not D and D brought to you by Ian World. As always, I am your host Jessica and joining us this week, we have two guests. We have Sebastian and Jordan from Hit Point Press. Thanks so much for coming on.
Thanks for having us, Jess.
Yes, thank you for having us.
You're very welcome. The reason I have you on is to talk about the upcoming Shift role playing game, which I saw upcoming on Kickstarter, was very interested in and wanted to get you on to talk about it for my own personal interest to be honest, and here to share it with everyone else as well. So, thanks for coming along. If you're watching live, thank you very much. Welcome. We will be taking questions so you can get involved throughout the stream. Just pop them in the comments.
If you're listening to the podcast later, all the links to everything we're talking about will be in the show notes so you can just click
through there. But before we start talking about Shift, about role playing games. I'd love to talk to you both a little bit and get to know you uh a little bit more. So how about you introduce yourself and what you do at Hit Point Press. Who would like to go first?
Jordan, it should probably be you.
I don't know why I have that particular honor, but I'll take it. Hi, I'm Jordan. I'm one of the content leads at Hit Point Press. I was basically the first employee that we ever had, and I've been doing that for eight or so years. My job has evolved a lot, but now it's landed mostly on a lot of writing and game design. I've helped usher in our D&D products like our Big Bad booklets and Humblewood campaign settings. But Shift is something I'm particularly proud of and excited to get out there. So it's my first kind of original game design that I've collaborated on. So I'm excited to share it with the world.
So this is a little bit of your baby we're going to be talking about.
Yeah. I parented it with my friend Graham who used to work with us, a very good game designer and dreamer of big ideas. And so we sort of tossed the idea around a little bit back and forth and so it it'll be both of our names on the front of the book, but I'm just sort of taking it to the finish line as far as the completion goes.
Fabulous. And Sebastian, how about you? How are you involved with Hit Point Press?
All right. Hello, I'm Sebastian. I am the community manager and publishing coordinator over at Hit Point Press. I started in content with Jordan and then I moved to be doing things more on the community side. I've been there for about threeish years I want to say. And yeah, we are super excited about Shift, you know, being an original system, being our first one.
Absolutely. I mean, I'm not D&D. We love an original system as you can probably guess. So that's why we had to have you on to talk about it. But I mean you two have very interesting careers in role playing games and I know a lot of people listening also love games and would be interested in doing something similar. So I don't know if you could talk about how you got started in in working in games like Sebastian what how did you get started working in role playing games?
Quite by coincidence actually. I started originally as a freelancer and I was working for all sorts of different people on different projects and I was collaborating on my own community stuff and I found Hit Point Press because the whole pandemic happened and I lost my job due to corporate restructuring at the time and so that gave me a lot of time to experiment with game design and it was something that I was doing. I was already in a few games with some friends and it didn't occur to me that this was something that I could do and actually like make a living out of and so I was very lucky to be put in touch with Jordan and to join at Hit Point Press. I'm really happy to be with the Canadian company.
So yeah, fantastic. And Jordan, what about for you?
Well, I've always been a gamer. I didn't go to school for anything like this. I didn't really see writing and game design in my future when I was a kid. I went to school for animation out of all the possible things. Yeah. Drawings instead of writing. And I met Rico, our boss, CEO of Hit Point Press. He and I became friends when I was working at a comic book shop. And he at the time had a sort of gamedev studio that he was part of. And so I did a bunch of art animation for flash games and stuff for him and his company, but on the side he was working on something called Cardam Jigs, which was a like a real small side gig making accessories for Magic the Gathering. And he needed someone to stuff envelopes for him. And eventually I came on board to do that. And one day he just turned around and asked like, "Is there any other products that you think we should be looking at?" and the SRD for Dungeons and Dragons, the open license came out for fifth edition right around like a few just a few days before he'd asked me that question and I said, "Well, why don't we make we make accessories, so why don't we make some accessories for D&D?" And then it just snowballed from there. Our animated spells did really well and then all of a sudden we're writing campaign settings and then there was Hecna and then there was the Big Bad book and all this kind of stuff and then it just spiraled out. Eight years later now we're working on our own system but yeah I never planned to sort of be here. My only real experience was that I have you know 30 years of gaming under my belt to some degree, most of it past decade. Yeah. I don't want to say it's luck. You know, it's been a lot of hard work to get here, but it was bumping into people who are of the like mind and like Sebastian said, I try and pass that on to the people that I know to give them the opportunities to work in the biz because it can be a lot of fun.
So, yeah. Absolutely. And you said 30 years of playing and running. I don't want to get too specific. Well, to get specific, do you remember the first game that you played?
Well, I remember the first game I tried to play, which was Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. A cousin of mine, I don't know, I was 10 or 11 years old, and he looked at me and he was like, "This kid will like these books." And he dropped a bunch of old, well, at the time, they weren't that old, D&D books in front of me. But I had no idea. I couldn't wrap my head around how it worked. And I would phone, he was 20 something, and I would phone him asking him to explain the rules for me. And I left so many messages. And so I never really got it. I loved reading them, but I never really understood how to play them. I think when it finally clicked for me, it was probably the Star Wars D6 system.
Oh, nice.
I think that was the first Star Wars licensed RPG that ever came out. And that kind of opened my brain up. I was probably around 13 or 14 years old and I started actually designing new races and stuff for it. So I think I could probably pinpoint my first real passionate interest in RPGs is with the Star Wars D6.
I like that. That's a good that's a good one to have. Sebastian, I'll put the same question to you. Do you remember your first role playing experience?
I do. Yes. My first ever game was Pathfinder First Edition. I didn't understand what a role playing game was and I didn't really understand how to play it. You know, I didn't have the rule books. I didn't have dice. You know, it would come to my turn and it would feel like trying to learn the game all over again because I didn't remember what I was supposed to be doing. I gave it my best shot, but I didn't know what I wanted to play. So, I mean, I remember the DM specifically saying, you know, what kind of character do you want? And I was like, well, what are the options? And then he was like, I don't know. Do you want to be good at swords? Do you want to be casting spells? And I said, can I do everything? Can I be good at everything? and he was like, "Yeah, okay. You should play a paladin." I've since learned that that is not the class that I should be playing. I've come to understand like what I what I enjoy as a player, but I'm glad that I had that experience and I'm glad that I gave it another shot again, you know, four years later and then after that it kind of clicked.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Pathfinder is quite a heavy system to get you started on. Like it's a lot of moving parts there for a new person. I mean this month on not D&B we've been looking at games that are kind of accessible for new players with the mechanics and that segues us really nicely talking about the shift RPG because when I looked through it, it really looked like a lot of the intent was to kind of have that. So Jordan I don't know if you can talk us through the ideas of shift RPG like what was your inspiration and context for or concept even for making the system.
Yeah. So, I have to give credit for this back to Graham, of course (risky pixels on social media). He loves just sort of like coming up with dice mechanics and probabilities and things that involve around probabilities. And so, he came to me with this idea of these dice that kind of get worse as you play to represent things like exhaustion or running out of resources or mana or however you want to think of it. And I helped him sort of finagle the numbers around a little bit to figure out exactly what would work. And then we this is where we came up with the namesake of the game, which is the shift, the shifting dice. And we liked it a lot and we found that it could represent a lot of things in the game. I do like a lot or some crunch in my games, but Graham would be fine playing a game that was just written on a note card. So this is a middle ground that we kind of came to where the building block is the trait and the shift die is as bite-size as you can get and then if you want to add something new to the game, you just have to interpret it through the lens of the trait and the shift die and you can add it in. So the game is very expandable and very easy to design for and then also easy to tweak. I can go over the core mechanic.
Yeah, let's do that.
That's everything in the game, whether it's your character's abilities, the vehicles they're driving around in, the monsters they're fighting, whatever, are built out of these traits, which, for those of you familiar with Fate or even a little bit Powered by the Apocalypse kind of games, they're very simple bite-sized ideas that describe the things that you can do. The standard for a character and shift is the equivalent of their basic attributes in D and D would be body, mind and soul. So those would be what we call your core traits. And each trait is assigned a die depending on how good you are or how good you are at using that trait. The dice in our game go in reverse order. The best dice in our game are d4s and then the worst are d12s, which is counterintuitive to a lot of people, but once you see how it works, it becomes second nature. But really all you have to think about is the less sides that are on the die, the better chance you have of success, because to attempt something with a trait, let's say you're using a body trait and it has a d6 associated with it, you want to knock down a door. You'll roll that d6 that's associated with it and on a one, two, or three, you succeed. And that's why the dice start at the d4 and go down to the d12 because that one, two, three as a successful result gets worse the more sides the die has. Then the shifting comes in when you roll the highest result. So, if you roll a six on a d6, it shifts down to a d8, the next worst die. If you roll ones, that's critical successes and you can use those to shift them. You can shift dice back up or allow your teammates to shift back up. But yes, the shifting down of the dice means that, in the case of one of your core traits, like using your body, you roll the six on that d6. It could mean that you got hurt. It could mean that you're getting exhausted and you need to find another way to get through this door. That kind of thing. Everything in the game is built around that. So when you're fighting monsters, they're just a pile of these traits as well that the GM is rolling to interact with you.
Yeah, it makes sense why D20 is not there because I think that would just be too harsh odds there.
Yeah, it wasn't going to be interesting enough and, you know, the D20 has had its time in the sun, I think. And I'm glad that we don't focus too much on it.
Absolutely. Well, the game really looks like a toolbox to kind of make your own systems, settings, and worlds. Sebastian, you do a lot of community management, so you're speaking to people that are play testing it. What sort of things are people creating using the system?
Oh, people are creating all sorts of things. Yeah, it's really designed to do that as you say, you know, it's designed to be super flexible so that people can imagine their own settings and it's designed to help with world building so that you can create your own environment with your own kind of personal lore and do so in a bite-sized way. We have these monthly game jams in our Discord server where Jordan comes up with some prompts and we invite people to create their own worlds.
We have a kind of structure built out for it. There's some videos on YouTube as well that that kind of walk you through not only how to play the game but also how to do the world spark created by Sebastian as one of the videos.
Oh, wonderful.
Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, we've seen everything from like, you know, from kind of sci-fi to horror to, you know, um southern gothic. Yeah, you can really do anything with it. And that's kind of what we're super excited about. Someone is designing a setting that revolves around a sport and they've also used Shift to design the rules for the sport so that you can kind of play it like a board game within the game, all using all using the core mechanics of Shift. It's been really, really cool to see.
Amazing. We've had some chatter in the comments. Someone said they're attending a game con next month and no one is running Shift, but they do really want to play it. Maybe they should run a game of it. So, are there resources available for people to try it out at the moment?
Yeah, their timing is great because our free RPG day content which was available on free RPG day in June has now gone public and is available for free to download on our site rpgshift.com. You can get all that. And it's specifically designed to sort of teach a GM how to start and how to run a one shot. There's resources, print and play resources to run it in person. Sebastian was helpful and instrumental in helping us get that put together. It was basically right down to the wire on free RPG day. We heard that there were people running it all over the place, which is great. So yeah, rpgshift.com will have the links to whatever you need.
Perfect. Yeah, I just saw them say that they downloaded all the free stuff. So that's great.
That's all you need. Additionally, we also run monthly organized play games run by our shift GMs, some of whom I can see in the chat. So hello, thank you very much. But yeah, every month we run tables and we'll put out some time slots and you can experience shift and they're designed to be beginner friendly. So then even if you've never played it before and you're not super confident with the rules, that's ideal really.
Absolutely. Well, it sounds like the core mechanic is fairly simple to pick up. Like you just explained it very quickly there to me. But Jordan, I know you mentioned there's extra mechanics so you can kind of adjust the complexity of the games. Do you have any examples of these other mechanics that people could put in? So if somebody's listening to this and they're like, I want a little bit more structure in my games, what sort of things are available?
So, as our Discord folks know, because we've released some playtest material to the Discord exclusively, there are what I call dials. There are building blocks that you can adjust that the core rule book will provide you. The core rule book will have some sort of micro settings in it, but it will focus on adapting your setting, adapting to the game, to the setting that you want to play in. And so, when it comes to adding more crunch or even simplifying certain things, the dials that you can you can tweak are things like how difficult it is to travel your world, how difficult it is to rest and heal. And those revolve around the level of resource management that your players are going to have to deal with. If you're at the most difficult level of travel, then they're going to have to keep track of what resources they have in their pack. That's going to limit how far they can travel. We use a system called legs. You decide how many legs the journey has. And for each of those legs, each character is going to have to expend some resources. So you're going to have to plan out the trip and how far you're going to get. It’s very favorable for the Hex Crawl fans out there in the in the world. I think it'll be useful if you want to play with that kind of mechanic. And then the same goes for resting. And then travel can be dialed. We go from the way we usually describe it is like, you go from Saturday morning cartoon to Elden Ring, you know, like as far as the complexity of things. The game supports easily just smash cutting to whatever location you are in and you can ignore the travel completely. And resting follows the same suit. The game works great if you want to just play, you know, like a happy-go-lucky kind of mech game where everything gets repaired between sessions and everything, all your dice, reset back up to their maximums or you can dial it all the way to the more difficult mode. As I mentioned, everything in the game is built out of these traits and that includes locations. Locations have their own sets of traits that kind of give the GM tools to quickly figure out, well, what are the defenses of this place if the if the players go rogue and want to start attacking the guards or what's the economy like here? Will they be able to find the item that they're looking for and they've got traits with dice that they can roll to determine that or have the have the location attack the players or attack another location.
Oh, nice.
Yeah, they're basically little characters unto themselves. And then the kind of economic strength of the location factors into just how good your dies can shift back up. And so if the place that you're visiting is a one-horse town and doesn't have a lot going on, then you're not going to be able to get all the resources you need to sort of fill the tanks. And so you have to start considering well what's our home base or can we improve the home base because in just in the same way that your dice can shift up you can work to shift up the dice of the locations that you're visiting. I would call that a whole sub game that you could play to kind of use the traits to flesh out the world and then have players really thinking about their journey and where they're traveling to, because if they know they're going somewhere that doesn't have a lot of resources, they're going to have to plan around that. The rest of the core rules just has a ton of advice on just generally how to tweak things. We've got through our play testing with the Discord. We're going to have three different ways, three different kind of difficulty levels, of getting a critical success because the old rules is that sometimes you get to roll more than one dice and the original rules were that all the dice had to show one to get a crit. We've had feedback on both sides saying they loved it and they hate it. The game works great if every one counts as a crit. So that's sort of going to be the middle ground, but you can make it harder or you can make it easier. So yeah, the system is really going to be about making a game that works for you, that fits into the Shift rule set.
Fabulous. Well, in terms of setting, like I said, this doesn't feel like it has its own kind of setting because the idea is your creativity to put on it. So, how does that translate in character creation, Sebastian? Like what sort of characters and or beings are people making to play the game that you're seeing?
Yeah. So, the fun thing about this is that the setting influences what kinds of character options are available. So, it will be tailored to the setting. We have a setting called Dorado Station. And that's a kind of blend of like sci-fi and western, I would say. It’s set on a, you know, it's a bit of a desolate planet. And so a lot of the character creation options are designed so that you can solve the kinds of problems that you would find in that setting.
Sure. Yeah.
We distribute these settings in little bite-sized forms called world sparks, which Sebastian has helped develop considerably as well. And a world spark is not a full-blown campaign setting with all the lore and everything you would need, but it does come with everything that you would that you would want in order to get your first session off the ground. And one of the things that is included in it is 10 traits. We call them example traits because that's not the limit. Shift is quite easy to create your own traits on the fly, but we list, so Dorado Station, for example, is our free RPG day release as well, and it has 10 focus traits which are like the special ability traits as suggestions that fit the setting and that people can use or riff on or modify or just have inspire their own. The core rules is going to release with a bunch of these world sparks and GMs and players alike will be able to mix and match between them or just go with their own. When we're doing play testing or when we're introducing the game, like Sebastian and I both run Dorado Station for different groups at cons and things, we usually start with having people create all of their abilities and everything from scratch, because it's a strength of the system. We only pull out the list of traits if someone is struggling or just some people's brains aren't wired to sit down and invent everything from scratch and that's absolutely fine. So that's where the world spark comes in. But we find I would say more than half of the time people love just naming what their trade is and then picking a couple of keywords which kind of help define it and they're off to the races.
Yeah, I mean there's people in the comments now coming up with ideas and it makes sense, you saying the world spark, cuz someone commented, "Oh, join the Discord and build a world spark for that idea." So I can see people in the comments literally now talking about ideas. So I'm seeing that happen in real time.
Absolutely.
So in terms of the game, it sounds like it's pretty far down in development. Like, you're still play testing it, but when is the game going to be actually coming out on Kickstarter? I know there's a pre-launch page up at the moment, but what's the plan?
You want to take this one, Sebastian?
Yeah, sure. So, right now we're in in the phase of like, you know, we've done a lot of play testing, but we're really looking to introduce new players to the game. So, that's kind of what we're trying to achieve with the monthly organized play games. But as for Shift itself on Kickstarter, we're expecting that in early October. So please do check for more news.
Yeah. Fantastic. And we have had a question in the comments as well related to Kickstarter I believe. They’re saying that there is going to be a regular version and a deluxe version. So they're asking what separates the two.
We're not a company that kind of gatekeeps content behind a fancier version. So, it really is just going to be a different cover with a fancy sparkly treatment. But in the interior, the only difference that might happen is sometimes we do a slightly different end pages on the very inside of the cover. But the actual content is going to be the same in the book. The book will be the same size as well and both books will be the same quality. One will just have more shiny on the cover.
Absolutely.
Thanks. I hope that answers your question in the comments there.
We’ve chatted through a lot of the game today. If people have questions, like if they're catching up or they're listening to the podcast, where's the best place to get in touch with you to ask any questions they have? I'm assuming the Discord because we've talked about that a fair bit.
Yeah, you'd be right. The Discord is a really good place for that. Please do join the Discord. It's very active and both Jordan and myself are around and you can ping us and we'd love to talk about the game with you. We’ll shout out the members of the Discord community. A lot of some of them are here watching right now. If Sebastian and I can't get to an answer, one of our great community members will point you in the right direction. They'll help you find all of the resources that we've distributed for the Discord only, all that kind of stuff. It's really cool seeing people come up with new ideas, people joining the Discord just to learn, just finding out that they can play the game there. So yeah, we had some games being jammed this weekend and I think we're going to do at least monthly games if not more.
So fabulous. So if you people want to try out the game, Discord is the best place to go. I notice you've also got all the usual social media as well. So, I'll put them on the screen for Blue Sky and for Instagram and the links are in the show notes there. So, if anyone wants to click through there if you don't use Discord for whatever reason. But yeah, I'm really excited for Shift to come out. I was really excited to see the pre-launch page and learn more about it. So, thank you for coming on and talking with me more about it. Before you go, I would like to ask you the final question, which is, do you have any recommendations for any other tabletop RPGs? The rules are it can't be a game that you've made and it can't be D&D of course. So what are your things?
Well, one of the first games I think that Sebastian and I ever played together was Heart the city beneath from Rowan Rook and Decard. I think we were chatting about it before we started and I think that that's probably you should check that out. That's from your side of the pond. Ron Rook and Decard are on your side of the pond I believe.
Yeah. We're big fans. Do you have any favorite things you would like about Hart there, Sebastian?
Yeah. Honestly, the setting is just so so good. Like they do a really good job with balancing like you know kind of gross body horror but with a kind of absurdist humor. And I appreciate the way they write it. There are definitely elements of heart and shifts DNA in the sense that I think the key words are kind of hard you know. What would you say, Jordan?
Yeah. I think as an inspiration, Heart just kind of inspired me in all kinds of the different ways that you can create games and resolve, like have resolution mechanics in games that sort of buck the usual trends of just rolling higher than a number or whatever. It's a game that integrates its setting and its system together super well and uses the system to describe the setting as opposed to overloading you with too much content. And that's going to be a big inspiration on Shift, I think, moving forward is that instead of writing 10,000 words about a world, we'll give you the building blocks to play in that world and let those pieces, let those puzzle pieces sort of describe the setting to you.
Yeah, that's a great recommendation. Thank you so much. Thank you again to both of you for coming on and I’m really excited to see the crowdfunding take place in October. If you're listening or watching and it's of any interest to you, if you click follow on the Kickstarter page, that will be really, really helpful, because not only will you be notified when it's launched, it also helps other people find it and see the game as well. Also, thank you for watching and listening. We'll be back next week with another indie tabletop RPG to share with you. So, if you're interested in learning about games that are not D&D, you can listen to this podcast that we come out every week. But for now, I think that's all. So, I'll say thank you very much and goodbye.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I think what this says most of all is that whatever I'm making has a good foundational base if a larger group of TTRPG designers thought some of these concepts were good enough to publish!
