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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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I was hyped to see Girl Frame, an rpg of trauma and queerness about being forced to pilot half-living mech suits in order to fight eldritch abominations, which I've been eyeing for a while, get recognition. This hits some really hard topics.

As a lover of weird setting and GMless card games, I was also very interested in A Land Once Magic, a setting that describes itself as post-fantasy, a world of molten metal where society exists only on magical powered airships fueled by elemental blood, to mostly quote the devs, because I couldn't have put it better.

Sickest Witch is something I did not know of until yesterday, when some of my friends were going through the nominee list and suddenly got smitten. It's a dark low fantasy game about, obviously, witches that grow stronger by hacking enemy body parts. It's gruesome and claims that people with old school DnD sensibilities will find themselves at home playing it, even though it makes no attempts to appeal to nostalgia. This kind of brutality reminds me of Mork Borg.

Mappa Mundi is a game that I was supposed to try twice, but the GM had to cancel last minute. It's an rpg where you play a Chronicler exploring and documenting the natural world after a calamity that happened a 100 years ago. There is no combat in this game. It uses cards, which a big fan of The Quiet Year, Dialect and For the Queen, I adore.

I am happy to see Midnight Muscadines get some love because while many might find the system somewhat clunky (using both dice and cards), the worldbuilding is top notch. It features a world where people once foolishly broke the sun and the land is kept alive by five of its shards, being otherwise left in eternal twilight. Magic is found in jams and the whole vibe is as darkly cozy as bundling up in a stormy night.

Deadline: A Clockwork Press is also pretty neat for a GMless game, mixing map drawing with worldbuilding in the vein of similar titles. Its pitch is that the story is woven through newspaper headlines and that as press you can both tell the truth or be unreliable narrators. Our group was yellow press.

Painted Wastelands got a Player's Handbook, it seems. This is psychedelic metal science fantasy/post-apocalyptic, just as Ultraviolet Grasslands, Grok and Vaults of Vaarn, with a good dose of inspo from the likes of Moebius. It is weird, surreal, dreamlike, at times horrifying and I really need to get this to a table. I haven't checked but I willing to bet it is NSR, as the previous setting book was for OSE and interestingly enough in comparison with similar titles it is a hexcrawl rather than a point crawl.

Rapscallion, which is kind of a mess of a book got somehow nominated for Best Writing. It's a PBtA Pirate rpg in the tone of Pirates of the Caribbean. I've written a review on it some time ago. Plays well at the table if only the GM can parse the rulebook.

From a cursory glance, there's also an rpg about performing a ballet routine in front of a eldritch abomination, a cooking show and goblin magical girls, which i would think would at least interest someone.

(Of course, there also bigger titles everyone knows about like Daggerheart and Legend of the Mist).

https://forums.giantitp.com/forumdisplay.php?59-D-amp-D-3e-3-5e-d20

I was a little surprised, but I guess I shouldn’t be. I have fond memories of 3.5. It was the first D&D logo I saw. Waxing a bit nostalgic…

Any other people with fond memories or current players here?

I feel like my journey started with d20 based games like Spycraft, Pathfinder, and DnD (3.5 and 4). But over the years I got really tired of the system and in particular for DnD and Pathfinder I didn't like the fantasy settings. Except for Dark Sun because it felt so different.

From there my coworkers recommended Demon: the Descent. And then I fell in love with it so much that I delves into the entire Chronicles of Darkness stuff and games by the same devs.

What about all of you?

So we all know about pirate-borg for the actual setting of pirates of the carribean, but if you where looking to run a game that has the absoluetely insane action set pieces (the sword fight in a wheel over the necklace of course comes to mind). What game would you pull out?

For me the answer is Genesys, thanks to the room the narrative dice and destiny points give for players and gms to escalate situations, but what would you use? obviously any setting game could work!

edit: just to clarify since most of the answers so far are tied to pirates, which is great, but also I mean any setting! Like could be sci-fi, fantasy, steampunk, etc. just other games that facilitate the same kinda tone and major set pieces as pirates of the carribean!

I know that this must be asked every other week or something like that, sorry in advanced.

AFAIK there are few dragon rpgs so I am looking to make a list. So give me your dragon games. Be dragons, ride dragons, hunt dragons, fight dragons anything and everything dragon focused.

Clarification: I am looking for dragon focused, in D&D you can fight, be and ride dragons but it's not a central thing, it's just a thing possible to do. So I prefer games where dragons (or similar) are a central thing.

yo yo, I'm getting nostalgic for the Dragonlance novels of my youth, and I've started rereading some. They're fun!

...but we all know Dragonlance as "that" setting, one developed basically to sell novels. One doesn't hear about actual play in the setting as often as other official D&D settings.

So, I'm interested in hearing about what people have done with it. We don't need campaign logs here, and GMs and players alike are welcome to contribute. What's a cool thing you did in a campaign? A snippet you remember? A location or encounter you prepped? I'm interested in what system you used, too, just to see what people have done.

Thanks, folks! And don't forget--the black moon is out there.

Hey everyone,

I’m on the hunt for some fantasy settings or modules that use a hexmap for exploration.

Ideally, I'm looking for something where the map is heavily keyed with dungeons, landmarks, or cool adventure sites, paired with solid random encounter tables based on the terrain.

Just to be clear: it doesn't need to have something written for literally every single hex on the grid. A setup similar to Forbidden Lands, where you have points of interest and specific adventure sites scattered across the map, is exactly what I’m looking for.

I’m totally open to both official stuff and fan-made/community projects (like, if someone made an awesome amateur hexcrawl for Dark Sun or something similar, I’d love to check it out).

I'm a big fan of old-school sandbox exploration, so lay your best recommendations on me!

Thanks a lot!

Hi all! I have just one player this week, and I want to play a duet one shot with him.

We've been playing together for 20 years, so we're on the same page, so much so that I wouldn't mind trying a new system!

What do you recommend that's quick to learn, suitable for a one-shot, and can be played by two players, GM and player?

I know, it's a very specific request 😅

I’m quite fond of the idea of magic being dangerous business, and would love to get recommendations of systems or settings where that’s a key component.

I’m looking for things more akin to Dungeon Crawl Classics imprevisibility instead of “magic has a cost” vibe of Kult, Delta Green or even Stonetop. The tone I’m looking for is more like “if you cast a spell you’ll likely get what you’re looking for but it comes with unpredictable twists”.

What do you know is like this?

I've never understood the point/appeal of the open world sandbox style. However, I recently had a bit of an epiphany, so here's my attempt at a take:

Sandbox campaigns are about living an alternative life in a fantastical world.

You grow up, find work, develop relationships, go on adventures, travel, craft things, build alliances, etc. However, there's no guarantee this will ever lead anywhere "big" the way a more narrative campaign might. Then again, that's how real life works, too.

Sorry if this seems obvious to anyone else, but it's taken me a long time to realize exactly what the "point" of sandbox / West Marches games are.

I'm one of those people who doesn't understand something until I can put it into my own words.

I realize this topic has been done to death. I got excited and wanted to share.

Hi all,

I've been playing ttrpgs both as a game master and player for the better part of 7 years. The system I play the most (probably not super surprising) is D&D 5e 2014, but after so many years I feel like I've seen all the game can offer and it's left me wanting something a little meatier, but there are so many options out there, I'm hesitant to invest time learning without first knowing that they're going to be worth it in the long run. I have experience with a few other systems: I've played a fair bit of Powered by the Apocalypse, Kids on Bikes, Vampire the Masquerade, Daggerheart, and Star Wars 5e. I like elements of all these games, but none have quite scratched that itch enough for me to switch over from D&D 5e.

My biggest complaint is that everything in D&D 5e feels very streamlined and same-y to me.

Character builds can only mechanically vary so much before you've seen all the different flavors of wizard, fighter, etc. While subclasses are a nice, thematically cohesive way to give the player some variety, they also limit the number of mechanically creative choices you can make when building a PC.

I would love a system where character build customization can be open and complex. I've heard a little about GURPS, and it seems like players can spend points to create moves/abilities and modify their properies (damage, number of uses, range, etc.). This type of thing seems really appealing to me. I also like the idea of more modular number increases, like with D&D 3e/3.5e's skill increases being based on character class and intelligence rather than a flat proficiency bonus that's exaclty the same on everything.

Combat also feels very boring run rules-as-written in 5e without serious overhaul from the GM. There's little reason for a player to deviate from the optimal set of actions in a turn. A melee fighter will get within 5 ft of an enemy and attack over and over again with their strongest weapon, standing unmoving in that spot, until the creature is dead, then do the same with the next enemy. Sure every once in a while a creature might resist a damage type and a sorcerer might have to switch their go-to firebolt for frostbite, or cast a bigger leveled spell on a harder encounter, but more often than not, characters tend toward a single, optimized set of actions an only incentivised to deviate when their bread-and-butter is ineffective.

I really want a system that encourages adaptive combat. Where the objective and the players' means to obtain it vary from encounter-to-encounter. I would love to have player characters and enemies constantly reacting and adapting to each other, players rewarded for working in tandem with one another, and better rules for things like elements of the terrain that interact with the players to either give them advantages or drawbacks and make combat feel varied.

Aside from character creation and combat, I'm looking for something that still emphasizes the roleplaying element and gives mechanical and aesthetic incentive to create rich characters and settings. I'm a fan of more hard-rules games, favor fantasy or setting-neutral systems, and want a game that rewards high player and GM investment.

Please let me know if you have any recommendations that fit the bill for what I've described.