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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.

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)

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?

Planned to do a Cyberpunk themed campaign, and what system would fit better than Cyberpunk itself, right? But in all seriouness, is Cyberpunk itself a good RPG system overall? And which version of it do you recommend? RED or 2020?

Preface. I LOVED Arcanum Of Steam and Magick Obscura.

A CRPG where technology reinforced the natural laws, while magic exploited loopholes or bent those rules to work. Meaning in lore AND gameplay sufficient quality/quantity of technology nullified or caused magic to backfire. And a strong enough arch mage would be banned from using steam trains since their existence could cause the act of boiling water to move gears sometimes cease to follow the laws of physics. Mages throttle the heavens. Technologists tend to turn into dumpster diving mad scientists that build spiderbots and throw grenades in the face of dragons.

Meanwhile martials just become super human. Sure they can't teleport/heal/whatever. But being able to tank/dodge most anything and bludgeon flaming elementals to death does the trick half the time.

Are there any TTRPGs that treat the "split" between archetypes in interesting ways like that without 1 style suffering irrelevance? Or toolkit systems that "could" do something like that?

I really want to run some horror scenarios where the object isn't to investigate and discover the terrible truth, it's just to get out alive.

I'm not looking for published scenarios for that, although that's welcome. I'm more looking for advice on how to run such scenarios.

I had an idea for a star wars old republic era campaign wich theoretically would allow for both Sith and Jedi carachters or just Sith carachters , and im looking for a system wich sould do this well. I chdcked out the WEG d6 system but the force rules about the dark side seem like they are meant to simulate light side carachters falling , not as much playing as a sith , since dark side there works similairly to cyberpsychosis in Cyberpunk where you get penalties the more bonuses you accept and eventually become a hostile npc. Yes i could remove the turning into an npc part but i still want to look at other options since ive heard the WEG force rules arent great in play overall.

While i check other systems out , does anyone jave experience running dark side or mixed games? What systems support it? (Im also looking at sw hacks of systms like gurps)

As the title says i'd likes to try a DCC adventure. But i ' m aware that DCC Is too crunchy for my actual taste and time. Is Flail by games omnivorous a valid alternative for a quicker and simpler but similari experience? Have someone tried this?

So, pretty straightforward. What are some TTRPGs, both new and old, with the most complex rules you've ever seen? To the point that they need heavy house ruling or are downright unplayable?

Are there any Add-Ins that are useful to you as a GM or Player? I just discovered that Add-Ins are available in OneNote and was wondering if the community has any insight.

I'm not currently considering migrating to Obsidian or any other app.