**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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This submission is generated automatically each Saturday at 00:00 UTC.

**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.

----------

This submission is generated automatically each Saturday at 00:00 UTC.

I'm aware a lot of people don't like video games in their TTRPGs around here. If that's you, this post isn't for you.

I'm also aware that TTRPGs lack a lot of the limits video games have, but I don't see why we can't have it both ways.

I'm looking to compile a list of TTRPGs that emulate a style of video game in terms of the feel of that kind of game. I'm not looking for games that are set in the world of a video game but don't emulate its feel. I'm moreso looking for those that mimic the gameplay loop and feel of a video game genre, specific game, or specific game series.

This could be the feel of sneaking around in dishonored, the fast paced skill expression of a boomer shooter and the lack of explicit storytelling, the challenge and skill expression of a souls-like, the tactical combat and party interactions of a CRPG, etc. It's also worth noting that for a game to fit, it should probably check multiple boxes of a given kind of game, not just one.

Of course, we don't neccesarily want the limitations of a video game. Translating to a dififerent medium will never be 1:1.

Some TTRPGs I've found that emulate video game feel:

- RUNE by Gila RPGs (lots of their games seem to fit here) seems to mimic Souls-like video games

- This Fan-made Skyrim TTRPG

- Fabula Ultima mimics JRPGs

- Courage mimics Zelda games

- MOURN mimics Boomer Shooters

- Riftbreakers and its second edition mimic MMORPGs

- ANGELSPAWN appears to be inspired by Diablo

- Arx ObsKura mimics Arx Fatalis

- Ascii Delve mimics old school ASCII based roguelikes and seems to be especially inspired by Caves of Qud

- Fallout 2D20 by Modiphius seems to actually put some effort into emulating Fallout, especially Fallout 4, even if it is very much its own experience

- Fallout by XP to Level 3 may largely use 5e as a base, and while I normally don't like how much people hack it to bits, it actually seems to stand on its own quite well and mimic the feel that playing fallout gives you

- Dragon AGE by Green Ronin is one I was pretty hesitant to include since it seems a lot less tactical than the video game, but it does seem to have a lot of Origins's spirit still intact, even if it has a lot of cinematic elements too

In as much or as little detail as you like, I jist really wanna know what stories other people are currently telling.

Pretty much what the title says. I've had interest in games like Nightbane and Rifts, but it seems like Palladium games have a reputation of having great settings but a janky engine. How much truth is there to that?

Edit: Well, considering the comments, it seems to be an resounding yes lol

To elaborate on what I mean, the first example that comes to my mind is Dolmenwood. You get the books, and you have an entire world provided to you with comprehensive guidance on how you run it, with what appears to be very minimal need to fill in blanks.

I'd love to hear about what games you love that provide you with something like this?

I'm completely open to differing perspectives on the support that feels comprehensive to YOU. Looking at Flail! at the moment and it looks like solid procedures and guidance for making hexcrawls and dungeons with minimal fuss, but I'd love to hear about why that approach speaks to you and how the game(s) you love provide it to you!

I THINK I'm gently bouncing off of a couple of mechanics in Dolmenwood, but am wanting to look in to games that provide this sort of thing. If you love Dolmenwood I'd love to hear about why as well, even though it was my example I'm not intimately familiar with it and don't have experience running it!

Edit: in case it's not clear I'd also love to hear about system/setting combos. Like Mausritter In conjunction with The Estate to give a campaign with interconnected scenarios etc.

I've never been super big into Harry Potter, I mean I've read all the books and seen most of the movies, but I was never a huge fan, but recently I've had this strange niggling urge to run some sort or "Magic academy" game for my players. I want something with either a decent magic system that's somewhat flexible, or something rules light that has just enough mechanics to feel satisfying. I'm also a little burned out on normal medieval fantasy, but matters of setting are entirely for me to tweak. Thanks in advance for your help.

Obviously the number of games people want to run outpaces the number of games that get played.

But theoretically, somewhere in the world there's four people (or however many the game recommends) that would be up for playing it.

But what game would be the toughest to find those four people? If there's even though to begin with?

This isn't asking for the worst game either. There's at least a small number of folks that'd at least like to see first hand just how bad something like FATAL really is.

Recently I've been interested in running Otherscape because Cyberpunk+Occult is a pretty interesting combo for me. However, from what I can read online, it would seem that the system is "divise" among people online which is why I came here to ask the opinion of you people on the matter.

But … and this is very important for me: I only want the opinion of people of have both red and played this game, I don't believe that having merely red the book is enough to give an enlightened opinion about the system. Therefore, if you chose to post an answer in my threads this automaticaly means that you swear on your honor that you did so.

Now I feel the need to adress another issue because I just know somebody will be itching to ask me why I didn't post this thread in the dedicated Mist sub, this is because we are on Reddit, and I just know from experience that subs tend to react extremely harshly towards negative criticism even when they are made in good faith, I have nothing personnal against the Mist sub in particular but this risk goes against my goal of finding objective reviews of Otherscape, which is why I chose the general RPG sub which is hopefully a more neutral ground ; now that this inevitable question has been adressed I will no longer comment on this statement, and I ask you to please do likewise.

This Saturday at Canada's longest-running tabletop gaming convention¹, the Canada Roles organizers announced the winners for the new award honouring Canadian TTRPG designers and artists. To be considered, the game had to be released in 2025, produced by Canadian residents or citizens, and not generated by AI.

Voting was open online to Canadian citizens throughout the Spring, and in-person voting was held at Terminal City Tabletop Convention (Vancouver), Breakout Con (Toronto), WPG Con (Winnipeg), and CanGames (Ottawa).

I'll share the winners and runners-up here². For the full list of nominees, see the website. Congratulations to all the winners, runners-up, and nominees.

Visual Design

Winner: A Fool's Errand,³ B Marsollier, Planet Arcana.

In A Fool's Errand, players use tarot cards to tell an expansive science fantasy story, both in the waking world and the surrealistic subconscious realms. Contend with calamity as you indulge or deny the gods.

Runner-up: Ringmaster, Pascal Godbout, Spotless Dice Games.

Rules Design

Winner: Dirtbags!, Lariviere-Lacombe, The Dungeons Key.

Dirtbags is a sci-fi shooter where you play expendable troopers facing relentless tours of duty.

Runner-up: A Fool's Errand, J Strautman, Planet Arcana.

One Shot and Short Form

Winner: Sock Puppets,⁴ Kurt Refling, A Smouldering Lighthouse.

Make real, actual puppets to ruin a perfectly good puppet show.

Runners-up: First Date Update, Mat Copelli, Role Play Chat Press; Kaiju Control, James Kerr, Radio James Games.

Scenario or Supplement Design

Winner: Field Guide to Floral Dragons — Verity Lane, Chris Pinch, Jordan Richer, Sebastian Yūe, Hit Point Press (for Dungeons & Dragons).

Habitat and lore of Floral Dragons for 5e along with magic items, fungi and poison.

Runner-up: Join Their Ranks — Jed Doerksen, Trapped Chest (for Reanimated).

Footnotes

^{1 - Next year is the convention's 50th anniversary. How wild is that? I love going to CanGames because there are kids just discovering the hobby playing beside people who've been retired longer than some of us have been alive.}

^{2 - I'm not affiliated with the awards -- just wanted to share. Though, uh, I did have an ulterior motivation; see note 4.}

^{3 - Most of these games are available through a variety of platforms and distributors -- itch, DriveThruRPG, IPR, etc. Since the awards were organized by the folks at Canada's indie RPG distributor, Compose Dream Games, I've linked their listings as a little thank you.}

^{4 - That's me! Yay! Let's all agree that it's cool and good of me to share these awards that I won one of instead of sneaky and cheeky.}

Throwaway account and fake names for obvious reasons. I GM a TTRPG with my friends in person every week, been doing so for about 2.5 years with the same group. Everyone gets along, aside from a handful of tiny moments but we are all adults who work out shit out. Everyone is friends, we have been in each other’s life events etc. Everyone is fine with each other.

Except for one.

One player (let’s call them Goblin to keep their anonymity) has been increasingly getting on everyone nerves, and in different ways to each player. Both at the table and away. At the table, they don’t really participate much with others or even with me unless directly prompted. Usually they just sit on their phone and ignore most of what’s happening, occasionally chiming in.

Now I’m a pretty lax GM. I have enough players that if one is a little passive but isn’t harming the game, it’s alright. I can kinda tell this person mainly just wants to socialize and doesn’t actually care about playing the game much. Hurts my feelings a tiny bit, but not enough to make me upset. If they’re just happy to be out of the house and hanging out without ruining the game for others, it doesn’t bother me personally, usually.

That being said, they’ve begun to annoy every single person at the table when we are not playing. They make excuses to not come, even though im perfectly okay with people missing if they have life events going on (who am i to say no you cant go to a concert or work trip or birthday party etc)? The game continues unless 50% of players can’t make it.

But so far this year, they have shown up to a grand total of 6 sessions. It’s almost June and they have contributed next to nothing. Even when they are here, Goblin will maybe only once or twice say something (and no they are not socially anxious or shy at all), they barely know the mechanics of their character or utilize them despite playing this long, they don’t level up for two or three weeks after I say they can (they once didn’t level up at all until the level up after that), and the main input I get from them are stories (kinda like fanfics) they write about what their character is thinking outside the table (and while I think that is cool, it would be cooler if Goblin actually participated with literally any other player more than once every two months or so).

On top of all of that, we’ve had another friend (let’s call them Kobold) stopping by to watch us and hang out. Kobold knows I have a full table and can’t accept more players, but they have asked if they can play whenever Goblin is not there. So far, Kobold has attended triple the amount of sessions Goblin has and actually participates with everyone, and they are not a new friend either so everyone already gets along.

I know this is a lot of information, so my TLDR is this:

How do I gently kick a player that hasn’t shown up to many sessions this year and is beginning to irritate the other players beyond the table in their personal lives without completely blowing up that friendship (mainly because I don’t want to cause problems for everyone)?

Edit: grammar/mistaken autocorrect words

Thank you everyone for your advice. I appreciate it and will try to talk to Goblin with the approaches you have suggested.

Been running Daggerheart for a bit and figured id share my thoughts, posting here instead of the Daggerheart subreddit because that subreddit has a habit of jumping down your throat anytime you even imply that Daggerheart isn't perfect.

Im gonna separate this into Pros, Cons and Thoughts. And I want to be clear this is my own feeling on the game.

I am also not taking into account 'oh you can homebrew away this issue so its not an issue' cause you can homebrew anything and everything.

Pros
-I like the 2d12 system, im pretty neutral on the actual dice it's self but I do like that a crit is done if you get 2 of the same number. this has led to moments where someone rolls double 1's and we are all 'ouch bad roll sorry mate....wait a minute' its fun

-I like how damage and HP are done, so its basically impossible to one shot the players. Which is grea.

-I like the minion rules i.e how damage overflow lets you hurt more than one minion with a single stab. Lets the people who dont have area of effect still feel like badasses.

-The different features for weapons and armour is pretty cool

-I like that to me it feels like DnD-Lite. There are some games ive wanted to run were DnD felt like the best system but I just haven't been motivated to run DnD cause of just how much there is. So this is the perfect system for those games.

-Its easy enough to homebrew giving players extra experiences and powers, just because of how little the experiences and certain powers help from a mechanical aspect. Yes this goes against my thing about not mentioning homebrew but I felt this was a good enough pro that id mention it anyway

Cons

-If you don't have Hope you kinda lose your experience. Kinda. Wth experience if things aren't dangerous its expected that if you have an experience say 'Master Acrobat' then you just succeed at things acrobatic like. But if there is danger involved say guards shooting at you. Then it just gives a flat bonus to you check IF you spend Hope. If you don' spend Hope then all your training goes out the window and you are as skilled as John who saw a trapeze one time twenty years ago.

-Fear is not for me. Basically the fear system is a resource te GM tracks and the players can see, and is used for a lot of things. If you want to use some NPC special attacks you spend Fear, want multiple NPCs to go you spend fear etc etc. Cool in theory but because its based on luck of the dice you can get to a BBEG fight and just have no fear to do anything, or the players can roll like shit and barely survive the BBEG then look over and see your 12 Fear and know you went easy on them.

It's a balancing act that requires the dice to not lean too heavily one way, and sure you can always use Fear for ANYTHING but if i go 'i spend a fear and you get cold chills and that's all that happens' my players will call bs after a while. I've found some work arounds, but they dont always work.

-Moving in combat can SUCK. This is something ive found as a player. In the game I play as I play a melee guy with low Agility (he's blind) and so what i've found is that if im ever too far from an enemy like say I get knocked away) then I am incentivized to just sit out the rest of the fight because moving requires a dice roll, and failure means 1 of 3 things (I dont move at all, I move part way, something bad happens) so failure means 2/3 times I dont get close enough AND i always just hand over the spotlight. Me sitting down and doing nothing is more beneficial to the party than me trying to get closer.

I get that the rule is done so players just dont go 'i move. i move. i move. i haven't rolled once and now im all the way in another country before the enemies can do anything' but it sucks for those who aren't trying to cheese it.

-I don't like the initiative system. 'oh but its more cinematic!' i don't care, it leads to a lot of players unsure of who should go and I as GM am doing a lot already I don't want to keep a mental tally of who has or hasn't gone in a while. I do like the token optional rules though we do it with 1 - 2 tokens and not 3.

I have two other issues with the initiative system.
One being that it discourages risky plays. Because failure is going to pass the spotlight to the enemies you are discouraged from acts that are likely to fail. in other games the enemy is gonna go or not go, your action doesn't change that but in this failure makes them go more often so failure can feel like it's penalizing more. An yes the rules of play says 'take risks' doesn't change that the mechanics encourages the opposite

Also this i an odd one but it makes it harder to come up with conditions/status effects. Lts say in any other game you are poisoned. This is easy to do, each turn you take poison damage until the poison is gone. But how do you do it in Daggerheart? If you do it each time the PC acts then they just may not act until the healer takes 3 turns to heal the poison. but if you do it as a countdown say each time the spotlight changes from pcs to NPCs then the PC may get screwed over by their party having bad rolls and die before they can act which is just mean.
A lot of status effects that would normally be 'on your turn x happens' are hard to reproduce in Daggerheart cause initiative system.

Thoughts

-The game very much is made with combat in mind. You can say its not all you want, but this game has one of the most impactful weapons tables ive seen, where there is a wide variety and a lot of them matter. It also limits what weapons and armour you can have by tier because it KNOWS that some are too powerful for lower tiers. Combat very much is baked into the game, and it's intended to be a key part of the game.

-They should remove the 'if you dont have a spellcasting trait you cant use a magic weapon' rule because like 2 classes dont have a spellcasting trait, it just feels mean to those classes that they miss out on some of the most fun weapons

-Its weird that you can have a max of 5 of each consumable. This feels like its trying to go off of Numenera's cypher system which has 3 consumables max. but 5 of EACH is so high that it feels like its not even a limit.

anyway thats my thoughts, I know i said more about the negative than the positives but that's just cause its easier to express those thoughts. But I do actually like the game.

edit: I just remembered one point i wanted to make. That one ability that lets you track should be cheaper

you spend 1 hope per question about tracks the questions

-how many were there
-what way did they go
-what wre they doing
-something else (i think it was when did they pass through)

so ifou want to ask 4 questions its 4 Hope. Those are all things that a somewhat skilled tracker should be able to do. They should either make it 1 Hope or make it a dice roll.

Sorry i just remembered this and wanted to share (my current character has the spell. he's a detective. so i have thoughts about it)