**Come here and talk about anything!**

This post will stay stickied for (at least) the week-end. Please enjoy this space where you can talk about anything: your last game, your current project, your patreon, etc. You can even talk about video games, ask for a group, or post a survey or share a new meme you've just found. This is the place for small talk on r/rpg.

The off-topic rules may not apply here, but the other rules still do. This is less the Wild West and more the Mild West. Don't be a jerk.

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Just looking for intriguing ideas for fantasy worlds and games in general. Stonetop seems interesting.

I'm looking for suggestions on TTRPG systems which are ideal for fully analog in person gameplay. Doesn't necessarily need to be a narrative focused game (I'm kind of a fan of crunchy combat encounters), but my goal would be a system that is:

• Simple enough that we don't need complex character sheets or automation to make the gameplay smoother.
• Simple enough that we don't need to reference complex system/rules frequently during play.
• Very intuitive for theater of the mind encounters. If possible, still tactical but no need for grids and maps. Maybe sketch a quick visual on a big piece of paper, but no minis or grid combat.

I've only played/GM'd 5E and Pathfinder 2e. With 5E we run a pretty light screen usage for digital maps and d&d beyond character sheets. For Pathfinder were heavily on screen using foundry and because the experience technically is so similar and seamless comparing remote play to in personal play, my group has fell into a full remote only digital experience.

Fully open minded on setting. Just hoping to try something new that brings the table and physical dice back together. Also, I know I absolutely can run 5e and PF2e in person and screenless, its just that the digital alternatives make so much sense for them. I'm looking for something that is clearly the opposite where in person screenless works so well it wouldn't even make sense to explore digital options to simplify.

Quick confession. I've got a shelf (and a hard drive, TBH) full of games I bought, read cover to cover, got genuinely hyped about, and will almost certainly never run. Mothership, Spire, like four different OSR things, a gift campaign about SEC football, one Kickstarter brick I still haven't finished reading. For a while I felt kind of guilty about it, like I was doing the hobby wrong or just setting money on fire.

But at some point I stopped seeing it as a backlog and started seeing it as its own thing. Reading a really well made RPG is just fun on its own, totally separate from ever getting it to a table. A good rulebook is part game design, part worldbuilding, part art book. I'll read a clever initiative system the way other people read a good nonfiction chapter, get inspired, steal one idea for the game I'm actually running, and put it back on the shelf perfectly happy.

What finally made it click is that my home table only really runs one, maybe two systems a year, and thats the real bottleneck. It's not money and it's not interest, it's the group's time and their willingness to learn something new. So the play side of my hobby crawls along while the reading side moves as fast as I want. They're just two different speeds.

I dont think it's a problem anymore. It's two hobbies wearing one trenchcoat and I genuinely like both of them. Am I the only one who does this, or is your shelf a graveyard too? And does anyone else still feel a little guilty about the pile, or have you made your peace with it?

I’ve never seen this type of campaign when I’m interacting with the western(by western, I guess I mean NA) RPG community, and I think it would be fun for me to introduce this eastern type of campaign on this platform.

Now, since there is no concept like this(at least not one I’ve heard of) in western community, I’m going to refer to it as opera campaigns. The idea of the opera campaign is that it has a coherent story of its own and players are merely side characters to the story. The character taking the central stage will be an npc controlled by the game master, and most of the game will revolve around this one npc(and most of the time, the npc’s mental struggles and suffering). The players will merely be this npc’s friends o acquaintances who for whatever reason the specific campaign states get involved in the conflict and is there to witness the story of this npc.

For the players, they control their characters just like in any other campaigns but they’ll have that npc protagonist controlled by the gm being a part of their party. And very often(by that, I mean most important and emotional scenes) they’ll be locked into a “cutscene”, in which the gm narrates a prolonged action from that npc protagonist(it’s often an interaction between the bbeg and the protagonist, both played by the gm, or significant moments to the protagonist). “Watching” these “cutscenes” feels like watching an opera, which is why I can it opera campaign. And of course, these campaigns are extremely railroaded with almost no freedom in the direction of the story whatsoever since the protagonist is that npc, not the players.

Now, I was giving the most archetypical description of opera campaigns. It’s a spectrum just like every other types of campaigns. Some campaigns allow more freedom while some less. I know how abstract what I just described seems, so let me explain through the most recent campaign I had with my friends.

In that campaign, the other 3 players and I played as classmates of a teenage wizard character, who was controlled by the gm. So all four of us just did normal human things to solve mysteries while the teenage wizard used magic to fight evil forces. Eventually, we learned about the teenage wizard’s past, fear, trauma, and the campaign ended with us accepting the wizard as a flawed person who was also our(characters’) friend.

The appeal of this is that it has a complete story with coherent themes, and it’s like reading a novel with your friends while playing as characters in the novel. I’ve never seen anything similar in western campaigns, and I’ve watched countless actual plays and read modules. And don’t get me wrong, this type of campaigns is only a sub-genre sort of thing in Japanese and Chinese communities, too, but it is a sizeable one, and you can certainly find a good amount if you are shopping modules.

Anyway, I don’t really trust in my own ability to explain the concept, so feel free to ask me about specifics.

Hey folks! I'm NOT saying it is a good idea. I'm just wondering. Have you ever changed a system during a campaign? Or have you changed a setting keeping the same characters?

Hello everyone!

I’ve been thinking about my next campaign and have been mulling over character creation guidelines for my players.

A question that’s been on my mind lately, though is how genre-savvy should the characters be?

For example, is it wise for a GM to have people bring monster hunter type characters to something like Curse of Strahd, for instance? Would you allow a PC who recently left a Cult of Nylarthotep in Call of Cthulhu? What do you suppose the limits of how ‘genre-savvy’ the PCs should be are?

My buddy hates grunt fights, like HATES hates them, primarily running them. He constantly laments how he wants to run more games but dislikes the tedium of having to run grunt encounters or generally go through dudes that Do Not Matter:tm:. What systems could I point him towards that would work well for primarily narrative focused things and combats only occurring for big climatic clashes or bosses?

A boss rush ttrpg, I guess?

So I've been finding posts about what's the Best campaign/adventure, and it's always the same suspects; The Great pendragon campaign, Impossible landscapes, Curse of Strahd, Masks of Nyarlthotep, pound of flesh etc etc.

I have no doubt these are great but these guys take 20+ sessions, I'm looking for the best ones that are less than 10 sessions long or so, hell even 5 sessions long.

Any system at all, what are the shorter campaigns and adventures that really stuck with you?

I have been looking for a xianxia rpg recently. There are a number of wuxia rpgs that I have found in my search, but so far I have only found one that is xianxia. Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate. Just from a quick skim of the book, it looks like it is more wuxia with some xianxia elements mixed. It seems so odd to me that there is such a dearth of xianxia rpgs. Has anyone else come across any other xianxia rpgs? Anything coming down the pipeline?

I lurk often and both here and RPG design there has been for at least the year+ I've been lurking, seen a lot of people looking for and creating TTRPGs with as little/few game mechanics as possible.

While I understand that there is obviously an audience for rule light I wonder if I'm just being blind and not recognizing that there is a massive audience of people who would rather use Improv over dice to resolve a scenario.

So, I guess my question or topic of discussion is:

What attracts people to games, with little to no "game" mechanics?

I saw a show called Peaky Blinders a while back, and liked it that much that i wanted to do a campaign about that setting with my friends. Only rules i know are CAIN, DND and Western. My only though was to homebrew guns from that time into Western but that would be time consuming. So i wanted to ask if anyone knows any good ttrpg i could use for a Peaky Blinders inspired campaign.