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2 years ago, I dredged my memory for positive and negative takeaways from every RPG I had played up until that point. Being unable to predict the future, I stopped there... but I've been secretly editing that post ever since to maintain a personal log of RPGs played. I've accumulated enough new entries that I'm ready to share them on their own.

Several of these are games that I have, or intend to, post about individually. I always like reading actual-play posts and strive to contribute more of them.

• Mausritter, running the Vitacernis one-shot for friends.
  • Rose: Loved the fusion of Knave/Cairn/Into the Odd mechanics. Combat was fast and deadly. Inventory was fun to manage. The one-shot was fun.
  • Thorn: Without a lot of item variety or player creativity, I can see combat getting same-y.
• The Wildsea, running a campaign for friends. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: Unsetting questions. I often ask for player input, but "Tell me something that might be true" was really powerful. It gave me explicit permission to adjust player contributions, and let players contribute wild ideas without stressing about continuity up front.
  • Thorn: Playing in someone else's hyper-unique world was a miss for me. Too vast to internalize, too distinct to easily add to. The lack of obvious tropes didn't help.
• Alice is Missing, playing a session with the expansion characters on the official VTT.
  • Rose: The music. Also, text-based roleplaying actually let me get into character, which I struggle with in-person.
  • Thorn: Too freeform. A lot of plot threads never developed because other players didn't pick up on them. More mechanics to help the web of plots congeal would be nice.
• Monster of the Week again, this time GMing the Jeepers Creepers one-shot for friends.
  • Rose: The setup is wonderful for inspiring cool characters and groups. We had a whole secret society and cryptid podcast inside an hour.
  • Thorn: Combat. With so much focus on the mystery of "What's going on?" and "How do you defeat the threat?", compelling fights did not break out. Extra frustrating because many player abilities were focused on fights.
• Shadow of the Demon Lord, GMing the Dark Deeds in Last Hope and Dead by Dawn premades as 3-shots for 2 different groups. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: Boons and banes worked so well. The system overall strikes a sweet spot between lightweight and option-heavy. I would definitely try it again to replace D&D/PF for a campaign.
  • Thorn: Level 0. For a system with so many options, I don't understand why it encourages you to begin play with none of them. It was neat to let gameplay influence novice path choices, but not a worthwhile use of our limited gaming time.
• Triangle Agency, playing in a 4-shot micro campaign. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: A Legacy-esque TTRPG with its own cohesive mechanical identity. It felt very un-like D&D, and the mechanical differences were very well justified. If you want a legitimately new TTRPG experience, look here.
  • Thorn: Memory issues and PvP. So much player-facing material gets unlocked as you play that it accumulates into a bit of a tangled mess, difficult to reference. The system and setting also encourage a lot of diverging player agendas, which is great for some groups but not ours.
• Atma: A Roleplaying Card Game, playing in a 5-shot micro campaign.
  • Rose: I got to play my own game! But serious, the character variety remains a huge highlight. Lots of cool and unexpected pregens.
  • Thorn: Rotating characters every session prevents you from getting attached, even with an overarching plot. This was a nuance of how the micro-campaign was structured.
• Daggerheart, playing in a small campaign. Write-up coming soon.
  • Rose: Lots of fun character building options for what is ultimately a fairly lightweight, narrative RPG.
  • Thorn: Too many options to be streamlined, but not enough meaningful difference between options to be crunchy.
• Cosmere TTRPG, playing 6 sessions of the official Stonewalkers campaign. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: Making best-selling novels out of your campaign's setting is one way to ensure players have actually read and internalized it!
  • Thorn: All that official lore can lead to "story lawyers" and be a damper on improv.
• Castle Noth, running 2 playtests of a rogue-like Castlevania-like OSR module I wrote. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: This was hands-down the best time I've ever had running an RPG. All the joy of worldbuilding and improv (since I wrote it), and all the depth of a prepared module (since I wrote it ahead of time).
  • Thorn: Information density in the book is uncomfortably high, and font sizes/margins are uncomfortably small. I overdid it on trying to eliminate whitespace.
• The Quiet Year, playing a one-shot.
  • Rose: Very light but strong rules. The "1-2 sentences" restriction and contempt tokens are both doing heavy lifting to keep an otherwise freeform experience tightly on track.
  • Thorn: The mechanics don't help players break the habit of playing favorites, i.e. revisiting the topics that they themselves introduced and find most compelling.
• Microscope again, playing 5 sessions to prep a campaign world. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: Communal worldbuilding is amazing! We have a rich world that everyone's versed and vested in.
  • Thorn: 5 sessions worth of lore starts to burst at your mental seams.
• Brindlewood Bay, running a two-shot of premade mystery seeds from the rulebook. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: We really enjoyed the clue/theory system. The GM can throw clues out without thinking too hard, and the players get all the "Aha!" fun of devising a compelling solution that links them.
  • Thorn: Playing as old ladies was surprisingly hard. They aren't action heroes or authority figures, so "What can I do?" didn't equate to a lot of typical player actions. Also, the open-ended story seeds are neat but very sparse (by design); lots of gaps to fill in.
• Blades in the Dark again, running a weekly sandbox campaign in our communal Microscope setting.
  • Rose: I'm forcing myself to use Position/Effect this time, and I appreciate that it foregrounds the risk/reward prior to rolling. More than once, it's helped get everyone onto the same page.
  • Thorn: I still find the rulebook to be disorganized and occasionally vague.
• Cairn 2E, running the Rise of the Blood Olms one-shot on a whim.
  • Rose: Despite being new to Cairn, we rolled random characters and finished the session in 2 hours. Many one-shots fail to deliver that.
  • Thorn: Combat was very dry without the stunts from Castle Noth (AKA gambits from Mythic Bastionland). Combat felt like a failstate as a result, which was appropriate but not necessarily fun.

What about you?

Rpg Trader is a new competitor to itch.io and drivethrurpg. It already has had a few bundles offering some decent titles, but its catalogue is still behind but evergrowing. It has better search features than itch, besides the fact that it doesn't show the corebook as first result and you need to often select games from categories to see it quickly. Tbh, it kinda' has gone under the radar. One of my friends is a simp for it, but otherwise, I don't see it much mentioned and I tend to forget it exists. I wonder if it will ever have the strength to compete.

It is very creator friendly with 80% of each sale going to them and total ban of AI content. So I do want it to thrive.

I am aware this is very specific but Id thought I should try anyway

I've had the idea of GMing a game where players form a military unit responsible for exploring an abandoned facility or an impossible space, like a DND party would explore a dungeon in search of loot, or like those movies where a group of soldiers is sent to an isolated location ala Resident Evil 1, DOOM (2005), Aliens 2, etc.

I'm still trying to find a good system for it. My first thought was Delta Green, but I have no experience with d100 systems and it feels more geared towards "open" investigation than dungeon crawling. I also looked up Military game suggestion thread, and it seems most of them are either post-apoc, vietnam war, or WWI/WWII focused and that's not exactly what Im looking for

I usually prefer more FITD or PBTA style games but I'd be down for some crunchy grid-based map combat

Think about the worst sessions you've ever played in. What was it the GM was doing or not doing that made it suck? Curious what the common traits and actions of shit GMs are, if any. I suspect there will be recurring themes of agency denial and hyper-competitiveness. What else?

The biggest connecting thread for me has been that all of the awful games I've played in have been convention games. But within that, what made them bad?

Lack of preparedness, cluelessness on the GM about system or scenario, coupled with an inability to improvise.

The other big one would be a feeling of arrogance just oozing off of them. I felt like I was just being dragged along for the ride with somebody whose favorite thing in the world is telling me all about how great they are.

Basically I am relatively new to roleplaying. I have been playing for a year and it all started because I started going to some meetups that have a teacher, she teaches us improv tools, writing narrative, new rpg systems, etc. We sometimes play campaigns, sometimes LARPs, etc we do a bunch of cool and fun stuff related to roleplaying. The point is that the teacher invited me to her private roleplay table, and it was fun.

Now, she has invited me for a long term campaign and I started to feel some pressure to perform better. She is an amazing master, has a lot of experience and plans a lot of her campaigns, she writes a ton of lore, characters... She even invented a new language for this new campaign (it has aliens, etc). So I have started to feel some nervousness, like I'm not giving enough, I wrote my character and put effort into that part. But now that it's time to play I feel like I just go and improvise, which is the whole point of playing but I just feel like I could be doing more

I don't know what I could do to show her that I appreciate all the effort she puts into the sessions and the campaign, I am looking for advice on what DM's would like from their players, what could I do to put more effort into this campaign other than simply going to the sessions. Thanks!

This came from a discussion between me and a friend d making a ttrpg, which is an attempt to mix card games mechanics like magic with your more traditional ttrpgs like D&D, using no dice in the proces Thought im and NOT a card game player, I understood his fighting mechanics (pretty much magic, really), but his skill check mechanics (thought i understood) were not only different from the combat by a large margin they didn't felt connected at all (only by the fact both need you to draw cards and see what you get and what tags they have).

During the discussion on how to make it work, this question came to me: Has anyone TTRPG ever made two different mechanics for skills and combat checks? Closest thing we found was Two little Mice Household ttrpg (not the dnd 5e version) combat rules, and the only change ist that it limits the attribute you use (war) but not the skill you want to use, within reason, for the roll, the rest was literally the same as any other check at the game.

So I raise my question again: How common is for a TTRPG to have two different systems for combat and skill checks in the same game?

The introduction, you might say; whether it's titled that or not. Those first ~5 pages vary a lot between games. Often, they are the weakest part of the book, I think. Things like the dreaded "what is an RPG?" section are a drag. Protracted, back-and-forth examples of play tend to live there, too, and those are also often bad. World/setting descriptions or pitches might reasonably go there, but in a world where we are exposed to so much marketing for a game before buying it, isn't that selling what's already been sold? I suppose hyping up the game doesn't hurt, but how do you do it in a way that is complimentary, not redundant?

Personally, I prefer (player-facing) books that get straight into character creation. Mothership does this. "How to play" comes 10 pages afterwards, but doesn't suffer for coming second (third, actually, after "safety instructions.)

I'm not affiliated with the project beyond being a big fan of the game, but Mythworks has just launched the crowdfunding campaign for The Wildsea: Sourdown, a new >50-page setting book detailing the namesake region of Sourdown, home to the fan-favorite bloodline of tzelicrae, arachnid hiveminds in bodies of silk and scrap and discarded corpses.

Sourdown is a pale and bleak reach, a far cry from the usual vibrancy and life one might expect from the rest of the Wildsea, but that dearth of color has not prevented its locals from using it as a blank canvas for ambitions projects like large-scale silk-weaving or dreams of reviving the place through the power of alchemy.

^{Out of game, it's also one of the regions that has existed orally since some of the earliest Wildsea playtests, but never made it into actual text until one.}

It's a much more lavish treatment than the 10-page writeups you might see in the core book, with more locations and factions and player options (like the bee-themed tzelicrae offshoot, the hexicrae!), and even an adventure scenario to get players started in the area.

If you're a fan of the Wildsea or just weird and novel settings in general, it's a worthwhile investment for sure! As of the time of writing it's already most of the way towards its main goal, with some fun stretch goals on the way as well.

Hey everyone! Since our whole D&D group often can't make it to every session, we've decided to still meet up and play something different instead of canceling. I'm looking for TTRPGs that work well as 3-hour one-shots, can be prepped in less than a week, and ideally have pregenerated characters or a very fast character creation system. I'm open to any genre—fantasy, horror, sci-fi, mystery, comedy, or anything else—as long as it's easy to get to the table and fun for a single session. What are your favorite recommendations? Thanks in advance!

I am currently dming an Achtung! Cthulhu campaign, and one of the villains is Captain Wolfgang Reiter of the Nachtwolfe. He has shown that he will cooperate with the characters if it furthers his own goals (he very much doesn't want the Black Sun to reach their goal) but he's still a nazi, so he will betray the characters with no qualms.

This is exactly what he did. I sent the characters on a mission to retrieve two magic objects that the Nachtwolfe want to give to an American millionaire who wants to use them for his presidential campaign, and Reiter was the courier. This millionair has loaned a lot of cash to the nazi party before the war, and the magic items are his repayment.

The American courier was the son (Lewis) of said millionaire, who went to Switzerland to retrieve the items.

Unbeknownst to all of them, a regular spy of the German secret service was there to kidnap Lewis in order to make his father forgive the loan (she has no idea that there are magic items involved, or that magic exists at all).

In all this, Reiter convinced them that the regular spy was the courier, that she worked for the nachwolfe black sun, and that he'd help them, they never even thought to ask if he was lying or not, they trusted him blindly. This devolved in a very satisfying standoff and later a car chase, and now they hate the guy with a passion.

In video games, “yellow paint” is a distinct visual marker used to highlight the correct path forward in a level. It’s debated and often looked down upon by more “hardcore” gamers. Still, it gives environmental cues that keep players from wasting time on empty exploration and frustration, without resorting to literal arrows or a corridor map design.

When you run TTRPGs, what techniques do you use to guide players toward the most interesting plot points? I know some systems prevent wasted time and momentum loss (i.e., FitD games), but I’m asking veteran GMs for their tricks of the trade.