rpg

Ive been in the TTRPG Discord since the beginning, and was also an early backer for the Neopets TTRPG Kickstarter. I have also read the playtest in its entirety.

It's... not good. I don't just mean the playtest, either, I mean the entire situation around the Kickstarter is really bad. PUBLICLY-DISPLAYED internal fighting among the developers at Geekify, and also the people developing the game have no RPG designers -- or at the very least none who have come out publicly as being an actual RPG designer in the 2 years this has been developed.

It's a very messy debacle and the project manager seems to have no idea what to do about it.

Also, I give my opinions on the actual playtest itself, which is indeed mostly just the D&D open-source rules slightly reworded.

I've never made a video where I'm upset before, and I'm always extremely supportive of indie or more-obscure projects like this, but having backed with over $100 and waiting 2 years just to find out the mess this situation is has really gotten to me.

What do you guys think of the situation in general? Do you still feel hopeful for the project? Have you read the playtest and if so what do YOU think?

First I got notified about Para Bellum. Now I got pinged about a bit of short-fiction.

I think that's cool, I haven't looked into those books but IMO there haven't been much about Desert Wars in the official lore

I think it looks very interesting, but not for me. It is quite combat heavy and you have to play with minis (I am a theatre of mind kinda guy). Alsp I am not the biggest fan of startong as local legend on level 1, the power level is to high for me.

That being said I love the class design and the team focus. (I only watched videos)

What are your opinions? Did you already play it?

I have a group online, we used to do in person but had to do online and m not sure how to feel about it now. I have depression im always super nervous somehow. I feel like im letting my emotions ruin my fun and im not sure what to tell my dnd group. i also wish we could do other stuff and not just dnd but idk, they seem to only want dnd as that's something we all know.

What would you advise i do?

I've always GM'd with my laptop, never used a screen, but I like the idea of it more and more.

I was just curious what people put on there? What do you consider essential and what has come in handy for you?

For reference I run Call of Cthulhu so especially interested in that, but I've also done DND so really just curious in general.

Curious to know how other GMs go about designing and filling out their campaigns with different material like items, NPCs, locations, etc. I've traditionally gone very deep and sometimes even granular (much to my own detriment because I bite off more than I can chew sometimes), and try to build out enough material to establish the setting and make everyone feel "unique" to the campaign setting.

What do you find works best for you? How deep do you like to go when building out the setting and materials? Are there any specific elements you focus more on as opposed to others?

Great blog posts related to playing, GMing, and designing TTRPGs, from the last year.

My group just finished a 6-year, 16-level DD5E campaign consisting of Adventurers League content strung together. It was a lot of fun of course, or we wouldn't have kept at it for 6 years, right?

Character backstory was 100% irrelevant throughout the campaign. I think few if any of my fellow players imagined their characters as having eventful backstories. We had only one adventure shaped by party dynamics, where we quested for a scroll to Resurrect our cleric after a bit of bad luck with death saves. Apparently the only friends our characters ever had were each other, and the small handful of recurring quest-giver patron NPCs in the AL modules.

As players in our late career years with other outside hobbies and interests, sure, we can't all commit to every campaign session or sink unlimited time into story collab. But I feel like it could have been so much more immersive and special with just the slightest bit of story tailoring to the PCs, not just steering us to dungeon after dungeon to solve a few puzzles between set-piece battles. I feel like it must be possible to run a campaign where backstory and character evolution still matter within a necessarily flexible attendance policy.

By contrast, another friend ran 8 or 10 sessions of the "Tomb of Annihilation" book, with a lot of thought toward weaving characters into the setting using backstory and personality details solicited from each player. Such a different experience, and I was a little heartbroken when the campaign fizzled due to scheduling impasses.

How would you describe the importance of backstory and player-driven story direction in your group? What are your top tips/tricks to make D&D characters feel less like interchangeable plug-and-play potatoes rolling through a disjointed series of episodes?

I made a one-word horror roleplaying game!

It's a free to download PDF.

If you're not familiar with lyric games and are curious, check out the linked episode of the Dice Exploder podcast - in short, they are focused on exploring the question "what constitutes a game?" (and often being a bit obnoxious in the process of answering).

https://naught101.itch.io/it-comes

Has anyone tried this game? It's yet another take on modernizing OSR, which apparently has gathered a few enthusiastic players.

I've heard that it doesn't do anything new, but what is there, it's excellent. I've been feeling the itch for a dungeon crawl for quite some time now (all my parties have been playing narrative-heavy DnD5e/5.5 and it's becoming a bit stale tbh), so I wanted to master something different. Do you have experience with Shadowdark? Would you recommend it? Is there something I should pay attention to? Tips on how to run OSR?

I'm thinking of running a Mothership campaign in the near future, but my group typically plays over Zoom and not everyone has a device that can support a VTT, so all of our games tend to be "theater of the mind". No complaints, I've played this way for years.

If you've played Mothership, do you think it would be runnable without a TT/VTT, or is that pretty essential?

Hello!

I am a fairly new GM, and have only ran a few sessions of CY_BORG. I’ve played in many home TTRPG games (mostly DnD 5e) and have familiarized myself (through reading rather than experience sadly) with some fundamental RPG design and GM advice. My issue is, at the time I went to the game store to pick up RPG books, I wasn’t knowledgeable on Shadowrun and the editions/universe other than the fact I wanted to run it some day.

I have now realized, after buying the book and past the possibility of return, that I have bought the reprint of Shadowrun 2050 (1e) which appears to be the most complicated and problematic of the games in terms of system. That being said, I’d still like to run this some day and I’m mostly fine with a bit of complexity and crunch in an RPG. I was wondering, though, if there was a way that I could sort of build up to running something like Shadowrun?

Running not only a very rules heavy system but also a world with something complicated like The Matrix in it is pretty daunting compared to most RPG systems I’ve been interested in, so I’m a bit lost on resources to help guide me. It also doesn’t help that even among old school Shadowrun fans 1e seems to be the least played edition.

Thanks in advance!

Hi all, hope this is the right place to put a question like this.

I am looking for a potential roleplaying game to play with my kid (9 years), but there is absolutely no interest for anything fantasy or sci-fi. Just a love of anything animals and recently we discovered Everdell as a cool boardgame for our family. Root is another boardgame that in style would fit our interests.

Does anyone know of any roleplaying game featuring animals having jobs, building communities? Fighting monsters or evil dudes is not completely off the table I think, I am sure I could tone that down myself if necessary. Bonus plus if it features art like the two games I mentioned.

Thanks!

Dice are pretty much synonymous with RPGs, but there are a few rare systems that forego them altogether, like Castle Falkenstein.

What are some other systems that don't use dice? Are there any that completely remove luck/random chance on "important player actions"?

Howdy. So I’ve been running a 5e D&D game live at a table and another one on foundry. Both groups kind of collapsed over the holidays and that’s fine. I want to try a super hero RPG. I’ve been looking at Masks but it seems kind of teen focused which I’m not into. Does anyone know if this system is more adaptable than I’m giving it credit or if there is a better system they could recommend?

I'm making a character and want some advice on if it's reasonable and if my ideas for how to build it will be effective.

The idea is a dwarven fighter with the battlemaster subclass. The primary role would be as the party's tank but I also want it to be able to do some controlling. My thought is to build the character to grapple and then use chains to bind enemies. It would use heavy armor and a shield. I'm thinking that a topple weapon would be good but the weapon is secondary or for characters too big to grapple. My plan for combat is to rush to the most dangerous melee enemy, grapple and bind them and then move to the next enemy grapple and bind.

I'm looking at feats more geared toward tanking like heavy armor master, shield master, and sentinel. I'm also considering speedy to get to the stronger enemies quicker.

I know that you can grapple with one empty hand and being able to sheath or unsheath a weapon for free each attack makes it easy to switch between weapons and unarmed attacks when I need to. Can I use the chain to bind the enemy while using a shield? Should I look more at the grapple feat or tavern brawler? I don't currently plan to take either. Is there a better way to achieve the build's goals or better combat tactics that I should use? Is this kind of build even reasonable in the first place?

Edit: The system is D&D 2024

Fantasy RPG settings have almost always drawn inspirations from real world cultures, including real world folklore and mythology. This also includes fantastic creatures, which are a staple of monster manualy since the earliest days of D&D.

And in recent years, there have been more and more efforts to draw TTRPG inspiration from non-European sources - a trend I approve of, since we can always use more diverse sources of inspiration.

However, I am curious how you all use creatures from different cultures in your fantasy campaigns and worldbuilding. I could see a few different approaches:

Do you assume "counterpart fantasy cultures" for your world? I.e. is there a Not!Europe, Not!Asia, Not!Africa, Not!Mesoamerica etc., each of which has "culturally appropriate" supernatural creatures? In such a situation, supernatural creatures would largely stick to their "home region", and occasional "guest stars" in other regions would be noteworthy. This works well, but it does mean you are usually limiting yourself to a "culturally appropriate" subset of the creatures in the books.

Alternately, you could try to integrate these creatures into whatever cultural region your campaign focuses on. In my view, this would require some rewriting in how these creatures are portrayed and/or named - if your region has a culturally English or Germanic slant, then having creatures that are called "Sramana", "Betobeto-san", or "Tzitzimitl" (to pick three examples from the recent Monster Core 2 for Pathfinder) will seem strange.

I feel there is no "right" or "wrong" approach to this, but I am curious how you are tackling this issue.