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2 years ago, I dredged my memory for positive and negative takeaways from every RPG I had played up until that point. Being unable to predict the future, I stopped there... but I've been secretly editing that post ever since to maintain a personal log of RPGs played. I've accumulated enough new entries that I'm ready to share them on their own.

Several of these are games that I have, or intend to, post about individually. I always like reading actual-play posts and strive to contribute more of them.

• Mausritter, running the Vitacernis one-shot for friends.
  • Rose: Loved the fusion of Knave/Cairn/Into the Odd mechanics. Combat was fast and deadly. Inventory was fun to manage. The one-shot was fun.
  • Thorn: Without a lot of item variety or player creativity, I can see combat getting same-y.
• The Wildsea, running a campaign for friends. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: Unsetting questions. I often ask for player input, but "Tell me something that might be true" was really powerful. It gave me explicit permission to adjust player contributions, and let players contribute wild ideas without stressing about continuity up front.
  • Thorn: Playing in someone else's hyper-unique world was a miss for me. Too vast to internalize, too distinct to easily add to. The lack of obvious tropes didn't help.
• Alice is Missing, playing a session with the expansion characters on the official VTT.
  • Rose: The music. Also, text-based roleplaying actually let me get into character, which I struggle with in-person.
  • Thorn: Too freeform. A lot of plot threads never developed because other players didn't pick up on them. More mechanics to help the web of plots congeal would be nice.
• Monster of the Week again, this time GMing the Jeepers Creepers one-shot for friends.
  • Rose: The setup is wonderful for inspiring cool characters and groups. We had a whole secret society and cryptid podcast inside an hour.
  • Thorn: Combat. With so much focus on the mystery of "What's going on?" and "How do you defeat the threat?", compelling fights did not break out. Extra frustrating because many player abilities were focused on fights.
• Shadow of the Demon Lord, GMing the Dark Deeds in Last Hope and Dead by Dawn premades as 3-shots for 2 different groups. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: Boons and banes worked so well. The system overall strikes a sweet spot between lightweight and option-heavy. I would definitely try it again to replace D&D/PF for a campaign.
  • Thorn: Level 0. For a system with so many options, I don't understand why it encourages you to begin play with none of them. It was neat to let gameplay influence novice path choices, but not a worthwhile use of our limited gaming time.
• Triangle Agency, playing in a 4-shot micro campaign. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: A Legacy-esque TTRPG with its own cohesive mechanical identity. It felt very un-like D&D, and the mechanical differences were very well justified. If you want a legitimately new TTRPG experience, look here.
  • Thorn: Memory issues and PvP. So much player-facing material gets unlocked as you play that it accumulates into a bit of a tangled mess, difficult to reference. The system and setting also encourage a lot of diverging player agendas, which is great for some groups but not ours.
• Atma: A Roleplaying Card Game, playing in a 5-shot micro campaign.
  • Rose: I got to play my own game! But serious, the character variety remains a huge highlight. Lots of cool and unexpected pregens.
  • Thorn: Rotating characters every session prevents you from getting attached, even with an overarching plot. This was a nuance of how the micro-campaign was structured.
• Daggerheart, playing in a small campaign. Write-up coming soon.
  • Rose: Lots of fun character building options for what is ultimately a fairly lightweight, narrative RPG.
  • Thorn: Too many options to be streamlined, but not enough meaningful difference between options to be crunchy.
• Cosmere TTRPG, playing 6 sessions of the official Stonewalkers campaign. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: Making best-selling novels out of your campaign's setting is one way to ensure players have actually read and internalized it!
  • Thorn: All that official lore can lead to "story lawyers" and be a damper on improv.
• Castle Noth, running 2 playtests of a rogue-like Castlevania-like OSR module I wrote. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: This was hands-down the best time I've ever had running an RPG. All the joy of worldbuilding and improv (since I wrote it), and all the depth of a prepared module (since I wrote it ahead of time).
  • Thorn: Information density in the book is uncomfortably high, and font sizes/margins are uncomfortably small. I overdid it on trying to eliminate whitespace.
• The Quiet Year, playing a one-shot.
  • Rose: Very light but strong rules. The "1-2 sentences" restriction and contempt tokens are both doing heavy lifting to keep an otherwise freeform experience tightly on track.
  • Thorn: The mechanics don't help players break the habit of playing favorites, i.e. revisiting the topics that they themselves introduced and find most compelling.
• Microscope again, playing 5 sessions to prep a campaign world. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: Communal worldbuilding is amazing! We have a rich world that everyone's versed and vested in.
  • Thorn: 5 sessions worth of lore starts to burst at your mental seams.
• Brindlewood Bay, running a two-shot of premade mystery seeds from the rulebook. More thoughts here.
  • Rose: We really enjoyed the clue/theory system. The GM can throw clues out without thinking too hard, and the players get all the "Aha!" fun of devising a compelling solution that links them.
  • Thorn: Playing as old ladies was surprisingly hard. They aren't action heroes or authority figures, so "What can I do?" didn't equate to a lot of typical player actions. Also, the open-ended story seeds are neat but very sparse (by design); lots of gaps to fill in.
• Blades in the Dark again, running a weekly sandbox campaign in our communal Microscope setting.
  • Rose: I'm forcing myself to use Position/Effect this time, and I appreciate that it foregrounds the risk/reward prior to rolling. More than once, it's helped get everyone onto the same page.
  • Thorn: I still find the rulebook to be disorganized and occasionally vague.
• Cairn 2E, running the Rise of the Blood Olms one-shot on a whim.
  • Rose: Despite being new to Cairn, we rolled random characters and finished the session in 2 hours. Many one-shots fail to deliver that.
  • Thorn: Combat was very dry without the stunts from Castle Noth (AKA gambits from Mythic Bastionland). Combat felt like a failstate as a result, which was appropriate but not necessarily fun.

What about you?

I'm sorry if this is a repetitive topic or something like that. I looked at the wiki, researched some keywords in the sub and didn't find what I was looking for

I want something very specific. I like that tactical combat like in DnD and similar games, but I also want a game that is not JUST about combat

You can say "but DnD is not just about combat, you can do so much with it!" But when you actually look at the rules its like, investigation? Roll a skill dice. Negotiation? Roll a skill dice. Combat? Pages and pages of rules and even entire books dedicated to monsters for the players to kill

I want a heroic fantasy that dedicates more time to interesting social encounters, investigations (I know gumshoe, but then we have the opposite problem, where the combat is not very good. At least in the ones I know) and if it has mechanics that help you connect and interact with your backstory like the icons in 13th Age, even better!

I know we don't need mechanics to make these things interesting, but when the mechanics support the roleplay it feels so much better

Does such a system even exist? And if it does, does it work well or is it too convoluted?

Thank you in advance!

So, soon going to run a social/Game of Thrones-esque social/war game in Fate Core. I'm doing prep now; group and I have already discussed major themes and all that. There are five players in the group, and while characters have not been made yet, the group leans towards social and "intrigue" types, with one guy as a martial character probably, so perfect for this game.

Anyway, just as a question to the crowd - how many named NPCs do you usually prep for more social games? In the past, when I run such games (and I run them a lot) I usually try to have three "faces" per faction or organization I think will be important, usually typifying some aspect (hah!) of the group that I want players to see (for example, if I have a noble house, one NPC will be the heir that follows in their father's footsteps, another the brother that thinks this way is all wrong, and their court priest who wants to secure the house with some sort of noble marriage of said heir).

Which means, in a typical game, I might set up, say, 15-20 or so named NPCs. Don't do stats for them (maybe a handful); I generally do this on the fly at whatever level to challenge the PCs.

So how many do you prep? How in depth d you get?

I am aware this is very specific but Id thought I should try anyway

I've had the idea of GMing a game where players form a military unit responsible for exploring an abandoned facility or an impossible space, like a DND party would explore a dungeon in search of loot, or like those movies where a group of soldiers is sent to an isolated location ala Resident Evil 1, DOOM (2005), Aliens 2, etc.

I'm still trying to find a good system for it. My first thought was Delta Green, but I have no experience with d100 systems and it feels more geared towards "open" investigation than dungeon crawling. I also looked up Military game suggestion thread, and it seems most of them are either post-apoc, vietnam war, or WWI/WWII focused and that's not exactly what Im looking for

I usually prefer more FITD or PBTA style games but I'd be down for some crunchy grid-based map combat

Basically I am relatively new to roleplaying. I have been playing for a year and it all started because I started going to some meetups that have a teacher, she teaches us improv tools, writing narrative, new rpg systems, etc. We sometimes play campaigns, sometimes LARPs, etc we do a bunch of cool and fun stuff related to roleplaying. The point is that the teacher invited me to her private roleplay table, and it was fun.

Now, she has invited me for a long term campaign and I started to feel some pressure to perform better. She is an amazing master, has a lot of experience and plans a lot of her campaigns, she writes a ton of lore, characters... She even invented a new language for this new campaign (it has aliens, etc). So I have started to feel some nervousness, like I'm not giving enough, I wrote my character and put effort into that part. But now that it's time to play I feel like I just go and improvise, which is the whole point of playing but I just feel like I could be doing more

I don't know what I could do to show her that I appreciate all the effort she puts into the sessions and the campaign, I am looking for advice on what DM's would like from their players, what could I do to put more effort into this campaign other than simply going to the sessions. Thanks!

Think about the worst sessions you've ever played in. What was it the GM was doing or not doing that made it suck? Curious what the common traits and actions of shit GMs are, if any. I suspect there will be recurring themes of agency denial and hyper-competitiveness. What else?

The biggest connecting thread for me has been that all of the awful games I've played in have been convention games. But within that, what made them bad?

Lack of preparedness, cluelessness on the GM about system or scenario, coupled with an inability to improvise.

The other big one would be a feeling of arrogance just oozing off of them. I felt like I was just being dragged along for the ride with somebody whose favorite thing in the world is telling me all about how great they are.

Im interested games that focus on things other then combat. Preferably where combat is not a mechanic at all. I get there are degrees of combat, blades in the dark, lancer, and DnD all have combat but timely different degrees and focus. What im interested in are games at the far end of the little to no combat side of the spectrum.

Thanks in advance.

This came from a discussion between me and a friend d making a ttrpg, which is an attempt to mix card games mechanics like magic with your more traditional ttrpgs like D&D, using no dice in the proces Thought im and NOT a card game player, I understood his fighting mechanics (pretty much magic, really), but his skill check mechanics (thought i understood) were not only different from the combat by a large margin they didn't felt connected at all (only by the fact both need you to draw cards and see what you get and what tags they have).

During the discussion on how to make it work, this question came to me: Has anyone TTRPG ever made two different mechanics for skills and combat checks? Closest thing we found was Two little Mice Household ttrpg (not the dnd 5e version) combat rules, and the only change ist that it limits the attribute you use (war) but not the skill you want to use, within reason, for the roll, the rest was literally the same as any other check at the game.

So I raise my question again: How common is for a TTRPG to have two different systems for combat and skill checks in the same game?

Rpg Trader is a new competitor to itch.io and drivethrurpg. It already has had a few bundles offering some decent titles, but its catalogue is still behind but evergrowing. It has better search features than itch, besides the fact that it doesn't show the corebook as first result and you need to often select games from categories to see it quickly. Tbh, it kinda' has gone under the radar. One of my friends is a simp for it, but otherwise, I don't see it much mentioned and I tend to forget it exists. I wonder if it will ever have the strength to compete.

It is very creator friendly with 80% of each sale going to them and total ban of AI content. So I do want it to thrive.

I'm not a backer, so I'm waiting on the game's release. However, I would like to know if the book has a guide on making supervillains? I mean, solo villains and the like.

That's the gist of it. The system is Daggerheart, and we just finished the Wish Thief one-shot. After the party decided to keep the MacGuffin instead of returning it to the King, the city went into a total lockdown: guards at every gate, the docks under heavy surveillance, a magical dome surrounding the city, and so on. On top of that, their actions have sparked a major civil war between several factions, with each seeking to get control of the city now that the king has lost his symbol of authority.

The party isn't at the very top of the most-wanted list right now, since there are other suspects who rank higher, but they're definitely still on it.

I've been thinking of two main ways they could escape:

• Impersonate a high-ranking guard and either board or steal a ship.
• Use underground tunnels, whether they're abandoned laboratory passages, forgotten smuggler routes, or just an old sewer system crawling with giant rats.

I'd love to hear any ideas for escape scenarios, encounters, plot twists, or what the aftermath could look like once they finally make it out.