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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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WOTC President John Hight fired. What does this mean for D&D and all their plans? Sounds like he was probably an influence on doing the Universes Beyond initiative.

Hey guys. I'm looking to build a catalog/resource for high quality but overlooked games, like in the title. I'm a blogger that has a substantial ttrpg hub, but my sole attempt at finding hidden gem RPGs just has six games. I'm looking for some help from the community.

To be clear I'm not looking for games that nobody's heard of and probably aren't that great anyway. Also not looking for a game that came out in the 80's and has been out of print for 40 years. It needs to be a game that never got recognition, got overshadowed by something else, or that's kinda obscure but actually good, well-designed or influential.

What games should I be looking at? Any genre is fine.

I don't mean the specific concept of killing superheroes, I mean more like regular ass humans needing to get creative to fight a much more powerful or superhuman threat. I guess monster hunters could also work in this regard? so are there any rpgs like this?

We probably all know about Horror on the Orient Express (but is it any good?) but what other great adventures feature trains?

Been GMing for a party of 3 regulars and 2 newcomers for a few months now. I know all of them pretty well, but haven't played an actual RPG with 3 of them. It was fine at first, but a few weeks ago it started being a drag for me.

I generally try to act stuff out for the players, i.e. most anyone relevant in the story has a name, a few lines of background and whatever I can pass for a personality. I'm not trying to act like its absurdly high quality, but theres enough to immerse yourself if you want to, because the whole theatrical part of DMing is one of the aspects I like most. But the party just can't take anything seriously for more than 10-15 minutes.

I had a pretty dramatic sidestory going involving a serial killer, who was at large in a town the party frequents. He had killed 2 NPCs the party knew and liked. It was going fine at first, but a random joke towards the latter half of the session turned the murderer into a running gag, and neither him nor the actual murders themselves were taken seriously after that. This has happened half a dozen times for larger scenarios, and happens constantly for smaller ones. I can try as hard as I want to set up something dramatic, creepy or just a little serious, and 15 minutes later its a comedy.

I've gotten used to this to a point, no story you ever write survives first contact, and in a world where my primary goal is that everyone is having a good time this would be fine. But its gotten to a degree where I personally don't enjoy telling the story anymore, because it feels like building a sand castle as impressively as possible, and all your players care about is how forcefully they can kick it the fu*k over.

So I changed course, cut out the dramatic moments, stopped trying to write cool or tragic characters. I just about halved the amount of prep time per session. And since there isn't anything to smother to death anymore, I'm much more relaxed at the table and can more easily participate in just acting stupid. I still prep locations, encounters, quests and all that. But it now operates on a very "Sitcom with a limited budget" type of scale.

And then everyone got kind of mad. I had mentioned the whole comedy-fatigue before, and they had promised they'd try to adjust a bit, but I felt like none of it ever really showed. Now they feel like I'm not trying at all and the setting being boring. After a bit of back and forth I said something to the effect of "This is just me giving you the same amount of energy as the other way around." and that hasn't gone over very well.

I'm mostly asking whether others had similar issues, and if theres some middleground I'm missing. I would normally like to continue the party, but its looking kinda dire.

If you think about it, premade settings don't save the Game Master any work. It just changes that works nature.

It takes a while to read a dense, textbook on a fake world. And it is easy to forget details and need to refer back to it when planning sessions. That is probably just as much time as one would need to make their own world FOR only the details they needed to play that one campaign.

Because a world need not be fully realized. Just finished Spider light by Adrian Tchaikovsky. You pick up quickly the world is only as detailed as it needs to be for this one story. Nothing more, nothing less. Most of it is left undefined. Because it didn't matter for this single book. And that can be your campaign. Just enough for a single story.

When you get a premade setting, ideally, it can handle many, many tales. So, it needs to be massive, indepth, broad, but with missing pieces and mysteries to uncover. It's basically a show bible (not a religious thing, it's a Hollywood term) for your campaign. And referencing and retaining all that info is immense at times, especially as the realities of a 40hr work week and a social life compete for your time and memory. Absolutely have forgotten key details because work was bad that week or that one time I decided to run even though my boiler broke and leaked everywhere the night before. Bad idea that one. Fried brain.

So, it does really save you any work. It just makes that work different. You simply read something instead of creating it yourself. Frankly, pretty much the same with using a licensed setting.

Probably not saying anything novel. I have had an insomina attack this week and haven't gotten to bed before 3am for 3 days. Fried brain. But, felt like sharing.

The Short:

We're midway through a dnd 5e campaign set in Theros (Fantasy Greek setting). My friends are open to trying a new system which I've asked for as I love tabletop roleplaying but hate dnd as a system. Any suggestions would be great.

The Long:

• We're one gm and two players.
• My prior experience is mainly pbta - Stonetop & Monster of the Week.
• Needs to be fantasy, bonus points if it's a specifically Greek setting.
• Needs to be suited to campaign style of play.
  
• Ideally no character optimization/crunch as I hate the combat in dnd and mathy systems in general.
• Immersion is important to one of the players so ideally systems with character stats and abilities.
• Open to systems where players can contribute to worldbuilding as this has been a big draw of Stonetop for our other group.
• Story-wise, one of the characters is the prince of a kingdom and the other player is a servant in the castle. The plot involves vying for the throne, so systems that care about politics, intrigue, and relationships would fit well.
• The system I'm currently considering the strongest is The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power. If anyone has any experience with the system, knows if it would fit our setting, or knows of similar systems please let me know!

Hello Beautiful People!

I'm researching good adventures as inspiration. What are the most well designed ones? Not the most popular, just best in pure design. And why?

I've had a TTRPG group for a while, but it's only recently our schedules managed to match up, and we found a system we really enjoyed. (Vampire 5E, ironically-although I do mean to try 20th in the future.) And we have plans for the future, a Vampire campaign, a Daggerheart One Shot, a Call of Cthulhu campaign in October, and a Cyberpunk Quickstart in September. I want to try every system out there, but have neither the time, money, or players for it.

Still, with me finally breaking out of my inexperienced shell and into getting some more practice under my belt, I've been thinking a lot about all the incorrect and damaging assumptions I had going into playing TTRPGs, and how unlearning them has been steady process that has really helped me improve as a GM and enjoyer of TTRPGs. And I was curious to see if there were some other folks who had damaging assumptions they needed to unlearn before they could do better at playing TTRPGs. To give a few examples of my mistakes early on-

Bad Assumption #1) "The GM is solely responsible for the story-"

Something I learned from reading online, watching a recent video about "bad players" And reading the Daggerheart core rulebook is that, TTRPGs are ultimately collaborative storytelling. In the past I would stress myself out trying to prepare a Critical Role level quality story ("You are not Matt Mercer" is another lesson I needed a reminder of.) And just plan out for every eventuality, panicking when my players went off script in a dramatic way.

That is simply not true. The GM is the rule keeper and narrator, but they aren't the author directing the players place to place. Your players will react in ways that can guide the story, or they'll create their own backstories that bump in with things. You make the fiction together, it isn't just on the GM. Similarly to that-

Bad Assumption #2) "The GM has to have everything written ahead of time."

Boy howdy this was such a mistake for me and I am glad I corrected it. During my Monster of the Week campaign, I panicked and thought I did a bad job when my players accidentally murdered an old man and got chased out of town (even though they were laughing the whole time.) And during my first VtM session, we had a moment where one of my players fumbled and violated the Masquerade...But then I got some great advice from here, about sandboxes and not writing everything out.

So I tried it, my first homebrew campaign was to write out a core mystery via the setup and answer, 4-5 locations and a few major NPCs with a few details...and my players are filling out the details of the world. I'll make up new characters when necessary, and work around my Players giving me background details and backstories to introduce parts of them into the world. It's so far been working fantastically! (we're only two sessions in, but everyone's having a blast with getting their characters fleshed out, and I'm less stressed because i have the major beats ready, but things won't fall apart if my players do something unexpected. Speaking of-

Bad Assumption #3) "Things are only successful if everything goes according to plan."

There was a quote about WOTC's other biggest game recently that came to my mind as I played more TTRPGs. "The joy is in the Gathering." I worried about my players in Vampire having a bad time because I couldn't tell the super serious, grim dark story that I felt was appropriate...But when I sat there, listening to us all crack up at our Malkavian's insane behavior, listening to the banter between our Nosferatu and Brujah, and the cackling outrage at a cartoon I made up called "Emi the Earthworm" as a background detail... It really clicked for me, even if the tone isn't perfectly grim dark, or the story goes off script, or you make a mechanical mistake... none of that is as important as the most important question-

"Is the game fun?"

Once I realized that, GMing felt a lot less stressful, and actually a lot more fun. I'm still trying to memorize the mechanics and tell a consistent story of course. But I ultimately realized we're all just here to have a fun time together, and that the "perfect campaign" is an enemy of the fun. So I'm glad that I've been able to adjust that much.

Bad Assumption #4) "Older systems Are More Obtuse to Learn and Should Be Avoided"

I don't know how I got this into my head, maybe horror stories about how convoluted older pre 3.5 DnD was, and my struggles to learn 4E as a teenager? But for the longest time, I had it in my head that old TTRPGs were made exclusively for people who lived and breathed TTRPGs, and were thus written with a lot of mechanics assumed instead of explained, and more of a focus on mechanics or things I struggled with-like math.

By contrast, I automatically assumed that newer TTRPGs were made in the post Actual Play era/explosion of TTRPG popularity. And as such, that they would be written for a more casual/general audience and thus be easier to learn. This was why I picked up 5E over 20th (Well that and I could find the physical book, and hadn't realized 20th was on Drive Thru.) This is, frankly a nonsensical belief and I really need to one day go back and try an 'older' system before I make those kinds of assumptions.

Finally, Bad Assumption #5) "Trust every review, and only play the most widely praised systems."

I hate that I made this assumption as I know better in other media, video games, books, and shows/films. Reviews are not always to be trusted, especially on forums where negative accentuation is both rewarded and encouraged. But being new to TTRPGs, I was scared of making a mistake with my money and time, so I let myself read every review, especially the negative ones and let them get into my head.

I ended up hearing and repeating takes on books and systems I was interested in, but got negative reviews for "Cyberpunk RED is poorly optimized, Crooked Moon is too bloated, Ryuko's Guide to Youkai Realms should be avoided cause Kickstarter books are risky, Cosmere is just a 5E Hack-etc, etc, etc." I realize I don't have the time, money, or audience to buy and try every system I'm curious in. But I should be more careful about repeating what I hear, especially when I can't play the system itself.

Everyone has a different style of play, and different things they enjoy (I for example dislike a lot of crunchy/math systems and prefer games where we don't need maps, and can focus on telling stories with the players.) So what may be one persons Jam may be another's Kryptonite (Draw Steel looks cool, but on the outside it seems very crunchy/map heavy so would be something I don't enjoy.)

That's not to say reviews have no value, but part of getting into TTRPGs as I've discovered is figuring out what you enjoy about them, and your preferred settings and systems can play a large part in that. Once you know, it's easier to get better at figuring out what you enjoy when you get some more experience under your belt-if that makes sense.

Anyway, those were 5 embarrassing assumptions and mistakes I made and sometimes still struggle with as I get into TTRPGs. Did anyone else have to unlearn some bad preconceptions or behaviors as you worked through the hobby? I'm really curious!

There are a good few systems which necessitate the usage of a certain setting, such as the World of Darkness games, Cyberpunk Red, or Starfinder. What system do you feel does the best job of introducing its setting?

Of note, I do not specifically mean which has the best setting, but rather which does the best job introducing it.

What’s your favorite pre-written campaign in any system?

Apologies if this has been asked and answered in depth a thousand times.

My answer is the Arden Vul megadungeon in OSRIC/AD&D. Don’t even google it if you want to avoid spoilers.

We are 20 sessions deep in this Arden Vul campaign and I love it, but our group does relatively little role-play, and is highly tolerant to complex mapping and constant failure. We played the first 15 sessions using OSE and rarely survived to 2nd level. We switched to OSRIC because it was getting tedious for the DM to convert monsters and items.

This is my GOAT. I love the way the world reflects its history and fits together. Every location you explore tells you more about all the other locations and NPCs.

Our DM might disagree - he says it leaves a bit of empty space he needs to fill in, and thus more prep than he’d prefer. I think it’s the best-designed RPG setting I’ve ever heard of.