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Hi everyone. This is my very first time as a DM and I'm currently running a Pokerole campaign (basically d&d with pokemon).

As the title says, one of my players is passive during sessions: he doesn't speak much, he barely interacts with the sorroundings, with the pokemons and with the rest of the party.

I have 4 players in this campaign, someone has some knowledge in TTRPGs and some other is very new but none of us is an expert. We had 2 sessions for now (like 2 and a half hour each).

3 of them are curious with the sorroundings, the npcs I make them interact with, the pokemon they encounter and the challanges I give them, they spontaneously interact, discover and roleplay with each other and them there is the last one who seems to be carried by the decisions of the party, he doesn't role, he barely try to overcome the challanges I give them and he seems lost.

I know I can try to railroad him to make him do something but I don't like this approach because I feel like I'm forcing him to play in a way he doesn't like.

It makes me very sad because both him and the other 3 players keep telling me I'm doing a great job as DM and they are having fun but personally seeing him so detached makes me really sad.

If you have some suggestions and tips it would be very appreciated.

I've noticed that while PDFs are generally available, the formatting is generally for large screens and often grind my kindle to a freeze state due to internal links and stuff. While there are a good number that are useable, very few seem designed to work well. I'm curious as to why this is the case.

My mystery is a 2-parter. One is finding the missing woman (no sign that she's dead, just missing). When they do find her, she's dead, has been dead for months. So now, solve her murder.

Would it work if I made this one mystery where the question changes? Should her body be a clue?

Or do I need to make it 2 distinct mysteries with their own clues, solutions, and theorize. There is some concern that the players could eliminate the second mystery (her murder) with whatever their solution to the first one is.

Or do I need to drop the first mystery altogether and start with the found body?

I feel that as long as M1 is framed as "where", that it doesn't matter what they theorize, I can work with it. And if they add stuff that conflicts, she's alive working at Blockbuster, I can kind of ignore that because the question was "where". But, there is potential concerns about them theorizing she's gone in a way I can't recover from. Though, I don't know any. If they say she was lost at sea, I can have the body wash up. Still, there's a potential and maybe I should k.i.s.s.

I don't mean as the same game, but if there are any games covering those separate ideas.

And by overpowered demi-gods I thinking something along the lines of Exalted, Scion or Godbound.

So, I just finished Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky and was thinking about how you could run a game based on that.

Premise is that uplifted animals are the essential service workers (plumbers, electricians, garbage collectors, etc.) in human solarpunk cities. They're controlled by early conditioning and a drug that without it, they revert to non-sapient dumb animals.

They're largely on their own and have created their own societies in the interstitial spaces and have a number of rules, but there's Rule One - don't come to the attention of the humans, don't let them find out.

I know about Mutants in the Now (proud kickstarter backer) but was wondering what other games folks would suggest.

Thanks!

___

Edit: Because two kind redditors pointed out what do I want to do in the setting?

I've got a few ideas based on the book.

• Play a uplifted animal that is a freelancer - no guld or corporation - having to scuffle for resources and the drug that let's them keep thinking. They could be an investigator, or a specialist of some stripe, or just a good old fashioned mercenary.
  • Or less excitingly, run a coffee shop or offer other services the uplifts want.
• Another option would be playing a fixer, someone that negotiates and works between the various factions allowing the player or players to explore the city and meet the factions.
• Reporter. The uplifts want to know what's happening around the city and world, particularly what's happening with the other uplifts. Where it gets dicey is that there are humans that want to break Rule One and learn what's going on with the uplifts.

Rule One - basically it boils down to do the job without the humans noticing you. You can get up to whatever mischief you want off the job, but leave no evidence and make sure the humans don't notice. Which is why the Red and Gray squirrels are actively fighting over territory out of the human eye.

I did a "Jurassic Park" session for fun recently, but it ended up being pretty dissapointing and boring due to the fact that the players were all "average joe park visitors" pitched against literal killing machines.

It ended up with them hiking through the forest and running away every single time. It basically became "Man vs Wild but one dice roll away from death".

We still had fun because of the PCs being comically evil and using the NPCs as bait/dinofood and laughing at how dire the situation was, but apart from that it was clearly mid.

The whole point of the operations was the dinosaurs, but the only way for them not to immediately die was to have as little dinosaurs as possible

I struggle to find ideas on this one

Edit : thanks for the many suggestions, i'll look into dread/mothership /delta green

But in the meantime i think i'm gonna try, as many suggested, to have them use a pool of almost disposable characters (Darkest Dungeon style). I might even make up some crude "random generation" for those potential PCs

Also i'm probably gonna ditch the "one-shot" time frame

So, I make rpg campaign pretty often but it's always with my friend group, and even though it's not bad at all I'd like to play with some other people sometimes. The thing is that, well, I don't have any more friend to play with, at least irl. So I'd like to make a campaign with people online (like discord or something like that), but I don't know how to organize that (or even find people TwT).

For some context, I always create my own stories for the campaign and have my own world, and most of the time use a custom self-made system for dice/playing (but I don't mind regular system). I'd also ideally like to make text-only sessions (since I'm kinda shy when speaking + my mic is garbage) but it's really not mandatory (and I don't know if it would be weird that way ?).

Thanks in advance !

I just recently finished a Mothership oneshot and ever since I've been itching to try to get into more horror TTRPGs. In this spree trying to find a good one, I found Mörk Borg (I've now brought the core rulebook for Mörk Borg) and Obscure. I had a look on the website and dug around a bit, and it seems the barely anyone has ever heard of it. If you want a link to the website you can click it here, but I was just wondering if it's worth getting. I'd be so grateful if anyone who's played it could tell me what it's like.

I have a couple of questions about the TTRPG, Midnight Muscadines.

One of the guilds that you can join, gives you a familiar …but there’s no page that shows you the list of available familiars that you can choose from. There is a section called “creatures and folks” but that lists (in alphabetical order,) alllll of the creatures in the game, and all of the “folks” that you can choose from to make your character. It’s really confusing, because I don’t know which ones are available to be used as a familiar.

My second question is about the concept of “burning cards”.. should everyone in my group have their own deck of cards? I have one deck of cards that I bought from the publisher’s website for the game specifically… am I supposed to use that deck of cards for all five players?

I've created a workflow on my PDF purchases, which I will describe at the end of this bullet list. But here is what I would like to see RPG publishing companies do to PDFs they sell to customers:

• Convert all images in the PDF to RGB. I have a script that does this, and it seems to really speed up image rending, especially on slower hardware. It also makes the images "pop" a little more when viewed on computer devices, since computers display things in RGB and not CMYK.
• Hyperlink your PDFs. The table of contents, the index in back and any references to other sections of the book. If you reference another page in the book, or another chapter in the book, please make the text a hyperlink to that location in the book.
• Please number the page labels in the PDF properly. When I use the Go To Page option in my PDF reader and tell it to go to page 35, it should not go to page 37. Page Labels will let you label PDF Page 1 as the cover, and any front matter pages such as the TOC and copyright pages with i, ii, ii etc. And you can label Page 1 as Page 1. So when I tell it to go to Page 35. It actually goes to Page 35.
• Please include proper metadata in your PDFs. PDFs support 2 types of metadata. Basic metadata is 4 fields: Title, Author, Subject, Keyword. There is also XMPP metadata that will allow you to enter much more such as publication date, description, publisher name, etc. At a minimum, please at least fill in the 4 basic fields. A lot of ebook apps on tablets read these fields and name file using this when you import it instead of the filename.
• If your pages have a background on them, if possible, please include a PDF with just a white background. This is easier for some people to read and is way more printer friendly, if someone wants to print out a few pages from your book to have at the gaming table.

PDFs are just a subset of PostScript. And PostScript is just code that describes a page. You can manipulate a PDF using scripts. That's pretty obvious, since PDF editors exist.

I've actually created Python scripts to do a lot of this stuff for me. When I get a PDF, I do the following with scripts:

1. Convert all images in the PDF to RGB.
2. If it's a Mongoose or GURPS PDF, I have scripts that will hyperlink all page and chapter references as well as the TOC and index,if it's not already hyperlinked.
3. If it's a Castles and Crusades PDF, I have a script to either remove the background completely or move it onto it's own layer.
4. I have script that applies proper page labels to a PDF, so that Page 1 is actually Page 1.
5. I have a script that will pull metadata from DriveThruRPG and tag the PDF and write a Grimmory sidecar file.
6. The conversion to RGB can sometimes really increase the side of the PDF. If it gets way too big, then I have a script that will do light compression on the PDF and can usually cut the file size down as much as 50% with almost no loss in visual quality when reading on an iPad.

The last thing I do is drop the PDF onto my home Grimmory server (https://grimmory.org/). The server reads the sidecar file and properly imports all metadata, and I can access my PDFs from either in the Grimmory Web UI, or use the OPDS feed built in the app to get the files on my iPad, iPhone or computer.

This is all made possible by Bundle of Holding and their insane deals.

So, I had this idea for a one-shot where every player has a secret they need to keep hidden while trying to uncover the secret of a specific other player. The concept is that they have to interact with the rest of the group to gather information about their "target's" secret, but they have to be careful because they might—or might not—be speaking to or revealing information to the very person trying to expose or silence them.
The mechanic I have in mind involves making it clear at the start of the session—both in-game and out-game—that someone possesses a key piece of information regarding another person's secret, though not the full picture. Each player is assigned a single target, creating a "cycle of accusations" within the group. I plan to give each player a card containing this crucial clue about someone else's secret and then instruct them to begin investigating. Additionally, throughout the game, I intend to use dice rolls to randomly reveal details about the secrets (for instance, if Player 1 is trying to uncover Player 2's secret, Player 3 might receive a clue useful to Player 1, forcing them to interact to obtain it). In this way, I plan for the session to unfold and progress entirely through player interactions, the way they filter the information they share, and how they roleplay their characters' paranoia about being exposed.

Do you have any suggestions, ideas, or observations regarding what I have in mind? Do you think it might work? Any new ideas, suggestions, or feedback are welcome.