**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.

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)

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 without completely blowing up that friendship (mainly because I don’t want to cause problems for everyone)?

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?

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?

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.

As many people of my generation and heritage, I'm a huge fan of the Heroes of Might & Magic series of video games, but I've also long had a fascination with their parent Might & Magic games.

For the unfamiliar, a notable aspect of Might & Magic (one that's basically entirely absent in the Heroes spinoffs, or in the newer games in the franchise after the Ubisoft reboot) is that beneath the facade of classic high fantasy - dwarves, elves, dragons, undead, the whole shebang - the setting of the games is, in actuality, a science-fiction one: the Ancients were a powerful spacefaring civilization who created all those magical creatures and the worlds they lived upon, they had a war with another species called the Kreegans (who resemble, and are literally presented as, demons), which severed connections between their worlds and caused their civilizations to regress to medieval technological states.

So whenever you would adventure in those games, every now and again you would encounter security robots or technological weapons left behind by the Ancients, or dungeon crawl through an old crashed spaceship, and the main antagonist of the first several games in the series is an android, even though he doesn't obviously look like a sci-fi robot. That sort of thing.

Over in TTRPGs, I've always been fond of science-fantasy that's a much more...obvious mix of the two (Starfinder was one of my favorite RPGs for some time), but lately I've been wondering whether any tabletop games take a similarly subtle approach to combining the two genres in their worldbuilding.

Honorable mentions I want to get out before the comments do:

• the elves in Pathfinder's Lost Omens setting came through magical portals linked to another planet in the solar system, ie. they're basically aliens (and yeah, Numenera's crashed spaceship is a big Might & Magic homage, among other things)

• Numenera might count? Aesthetically it's a little too obviously technological for my taste, but "layers and layers of ancient tech so advanced it's basically magic to the modern-day inhabitants of the world" is kind of there as a vibe

• The Electrum Archive, with its bygone Elders and some rare advanced weapons and magical ink they've left behind, has some of this that I quite liked

• Can't forget the grandfather of it all, D&D's Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. It's a one-off module rather than the basis of the entire D&D cosmology, but it's still a classic.

Hello Everyone!

As I see it, the difference is:

- Quickstart: Rules and a short adventure are in separate sections of the document.

Example: Household.

- Tutorial: Rules are incorporated into a short story, and you learn them step by step.

Example: Fabula Ultima.

What do you think: which is the most useful and why?

Thanks fo your answers!

I'm DMing a Fabula Ultima campaign with all the atlases (High Fantasy, Natural and Techno) for 3 months now, it is nowhere near the end but one of the players is getting more involved in his work and we are going from a weekly game to an almost monthly game.

I'm thinking of DMing another campaign to the same players minus the overburden one, but I want something that feels the exact opposite to what we are playing now. Call of Cthulhu and other high lethality games would be the logical answer, but I want something that is still able to play a middle to long term campaign.

What you suggest would be the best system to completly change the mood of the table?

Hello

I'm looking for some recommendations on software I could use to make character cards for a miniatures game. I'm super inexperienced, but I don't mind learning, but nothing horribly complex. Something that looks clean and it doesn't need to be flashy.

Is there a free software option that is user friendly?

Appreciate any suggestions.

I run games for lots of different people and I noticed that some of them bring their own rituals from other tables. The one that stands out is to hold a hand to their head when talking out of character. I've never said anyone needs to do this, and have never done it myself. I guess it's just habit with them. To be clear, I have no problem with it and actually find it kind of endearing.

What are things your table does, or other players do, that are unique?