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Hey everyone,

I am running a campaign with the german "Splittermond" system and i realised i find it frustrating. It is a rather crunchy system with a lot of numbers and calculations. It makes improvisation and especially combat so much harder than, say, my dearly-loved Shadowdark. My players do not want to lose the great class-less system (it comes with rather easy modular character creation) of Splittermond and the "balance" that 2d10 instead of 1d20 bring. They also like having specialisations (survival, performance...) instead of just having 6 stats.

Do you have recommendations for a rules-light, rules-medium game that we could transfer our campaign too?

I'd love to switch to Shadowdark, but the players want to keep the mortality in the hero-tale cosmos. Is there any OSR game that is not as deadly but flexible and easy to prep?

Thanks in advance : - )

Okay so I have recently been in a bit of a Greek Mythology kick, and I wanted an RPG to be able to play a god character, I generally prefer systems that are on the medium to heavy amount of rules, but I am okay with a lighter system if it is really good for the concept.

I have heard of godbound and scion 2e but godbound is osr, which doesn't feel like it would fit very well, and when I looked up discussions about Scion I saw lots of complaints, not helped when I noticed that I would need to buy four books to be able to play on the god level, so i am a bit wary of possibly wasting money, so what do any of you​ recommend?

What can you say for or against any given system? It doesn't have to be godbound or scion if there is another system you heard of that you think is better for this then I am all ears.

I'm thinking about running an Open Table/West Marches this summer for a large friend group of mine and was wondering what system/setting would be a good fit.

I discovered over the years I have an extremely hard time coming up with adventures/campaigns when I am by myself, but when I have something to riff off (either with a system/setting that leaves a lot of blanks and/or my players that roleplay and talk amongst each other) running and prepping come very naturally and I can run a fairly decent session.

The most successful campaign I've ran to date was with Lady Blackbird, because it had a very clear goal and established characters while leaving more than enough blanks for me to go ham with my own ideas.

I'm specifically looking for a system/setting that also require much prep and doesn't knock me over the head with 300+ pages of lore or campaign modules since I find those very hard to digest and they don't spark my imagination.

Does anybody know of any other systems/settings that fit this bill?

I'm personally thinking about Mythic Bastionland but I'm not sure if it can work as a West Marches.

Thanks! :)

To all GMs and fellow players, I have a question. Have you ever met a specific type of player that knows a lot about the system you're using, maybe they even help you/your GM run the campaign, but they themselves never actually hosted any campaign? If so, what do you think about them? How are they like? Any notable moments?

I'm asking because I am this type of player, I started playing RPGs without actually knowing much about them. One of the first systems I played was one from my country, which the universe's story is based on the campaigns the actual creators of this system have played before. I never read the system, nor watched any episode from the campaign, so I went in basically completely blind, receiving some assistance from my GM. In that same year, I learned so much about the system by just playing that my GM basically made me his co-GM, and I started to help them with rolling the dice, checking some rules, helping other players create their character sheets when the GM is busy, making homebrews, etc. To this day, I still help other GM friends with their campaigns, and have never really hosted a serious campaign yet (too much trouble IMO).

Edit: Alright, seeing the comments, I see that people had two types. Either they were backseat GMing, rules lawyering and were pretty annoying to deal with, or they were a really helpful player that kept the game's pace in check. I hope that I didn't come off as the first one with my post and replies.

Me and my group were looking for a fun cyberpunk system to try and i remembered the fact shadowrunner is a world where fantasy meets scifi and also cyberpunk so wanted to give it a whirl atm im looking between 4th anniversary ed. And 5th ed. My main questions are which is a smoother run for new gm to the system, which one offers more bang for my buck outta the core book and finally which has more prebuilt campaign books/optional books for.more char creation stuff

To give a example my two buddies messed with cyberpunk 2020 i think the one and their set up was one dude was a fixer owning a bar and head of a gang with the other being one of the two bouncers of said bar, and the fixer had agumented vampire teeth that injected neruotoxin so i was wondering if that sorta set up was possible in shadow runner?

Hi, does anyone have any suggestions for good post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk, or sci-fi hexcrawl games? I'm looking for some for my campaign, regardless of the system.

This has been on my mind the past week, and was part of what prompted me to ask if there was resources for making large dungeons earlier this week. I have been thinking on the only homebrew campaign I have attempted, and if I should use my notes again to try again, but that means identifying mistakes.

I am not the most experienced of GMs/DMs, my only real claim to fame is running LMOP all the way to the end without any issues in 5e. Hell, I loved it. 10/10 would run another pre-written module.

OGL Scandal happened, I left 5e, looked at many different systems and arrived on PF2e (Because I actually like Heroic Fantasy a lot), and I decided to try a homebrew campaign for the first time.

The structure was simple, set on an archipelago, and meant to follow the structure of a Ocarina of Time style Zelda game, with those styles of dungeons.

A prologue where the party recovers a stolen book (And witnesses the unsealing of the BBEG Lich)

Chapter 1, where the party explores the largest island, learns about the Lich, learns about the pirates infesting the islands, then explores a dungeon underneath the island, wherein they recover a piece of a key that let's the party access the phylactery.

And so, it was meant to go that way for a bit. Choose a new island at the players leisure, explore, find dungeon, get key, repeat. Eventually all routes converge on needing to take out the pirate captain for the final key, than kick the BBEGs ass at the bottom of the sea.

The idea, in my head, is that the out of dungeons, it was meant to be a lot more free form. Less prep, more scenario nodes as I try to organically leave clues and info into the parties path so they can eventually gleam where they should go to find a key. But when they enter the dungeons, it's much more classic, less narrativist and more simulationist/gamist. Very Zelda style, with a boss at the end.

And so, as per common advice given for GMs, I only prepped the skeleton of the Islands, the skeleton of the campaign outline, the stat blocks of the pantheon for clerics, and the OG plot hook and prologue. I should only prep at most, up to 3 sessions ahead. And so I did. And the campaign ran wonderfully for a few months. And nearly every single week I had to get ready for the next session, simply brainstorming a potential situation that the party could find themselves in, and then prepping a simple battlemap if it seemed like it would be prudent.

And every single week, it got harder. Just thinking of something new. Something interesting. I was never writing down pages, just notes to give myself anchors to kick off improvisation. And eventually, I hit the point where even thinking of prep actually started to make me freak out as I thought of the deadline. I liked running the game, but LOATHED having to prep it. Running LMOP in 5e was a joke compared to this.

At the very least, my players appeared to really be enjoying it, I think. At one point, a player told me how it's impressive that, no matter what the fuck choice the players made, I always had something at the ready to present them with, statblocks or maps, which I wore with pride. Almost nothing I prepped went unused, and frankly the party was more predictable then they thought. Mostly they were good at biting any plot hook presented to them.

We hit the point where the party was meant to hit the first dungeon, and I just... completely stalled. I made a floor, and couldn't do it anymore. Brain fried every time I tried to think. I told my group I just couldn't do it anymore. Maybe my ADHD was too much. The group pretty much disbanded after that. I don't do a lot of creative writing as a hobby, a lot of this was all new for me.

Thinking back, I think if I overprepped before even offering the game to others, it might have been much easier. Namely, prepping the dungeons completely (Yes, all of them), and just writing plothooks for outside of the dungeon. It would have meant that if I got burnt out, I had existing prep I could draw on, so it wasn't full on prep every week. I could have prepped that all without deadlines at my leisure. And then leaving certain areas very much unprepped for player agency and improvisation. And I could probably condense the content of each island to make a shorter campaign overall. And use simpler designs for the maps instead of Dungeondraft with handplaced assets, maybe dungeonscrawl with some symbols.

It was announced that all systems will just be reskins of 5.5e.

So I'm having an itch for a dark urban fantasy game about polical intrigue and being a monster that uses superpowers to kill other monsters.

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I love the Underworld and Blade movies, and I'm looking for something that fits that vibe. Which of those games would be a better fit?

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The Vampire splats for WoD/CofD, Curseborne or Urban Shadows?

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And are there other games besisdes those that could fit?

The Pelgrane Press newsletter talks about the system as if it's already out, and the option to buy a physical book doesn't say pre-order or anything but the PDF option still seems to be crossed out. Does anyone know if they're said anything about a release date?

Where in the universe can I get a copy of these books!? Its feel like borderline lost media!