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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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Been in a cyberpunk mood lately due to playing 2077 and being an avid android netrunner fan for years now, and I'm now having the itch to run a cyberpunk game (one shot or campaign, not sure still) for my friends, and I was wondering what is this sub's favourite cyberpunk system?

I mostly have experience and preference with narrative heavy/rules light systems (bitd, heart the city beneath, mothership, etc.) so i've been leaning more towards cy_borg (that and the visual style) but i have also heard good things about Cyberpunk RED, but i still think it might be too crunchy for me.

This is a bit of a multi question post along with me expressing some frustrations but bear with me. I hope this in no way seems like I'm breaking rule #2, I'm not trying to question anybody else's enjoyment of the hobby, just a mismatch between my own experiences and what other people seem to do.

I really would like to watch something like Critical Role or another actual play, because in theory it should be something I love. RPGs are an incredible medium for improvised storytelling. But I've never managed to find one that I enjoy, partially because it just differs so wildly from my own experiences with RPGs.

I haven't played RPGs much in recent years, I have played some on and off short campaigns over the years, but mostly in high school 20+ years ago now. So as far as the modern hobby is concerned I may as well be a newbie and lurker watching from the sidelines. I got started with RPGs in the early 2000s before youtube, podcasts and videos online was a thing, and I live in a small city in a small country so as a teenager meeting others into the same hobby was reliant on me introducing them to it, meaning nobody had any preconcieved notions of what roleplaying actually is. I had no reference point beyond posts on some obscure online forums, so we made up a lot of it as we went along. We told some amazing stories, had very memorable characters, built worlds, drew maps. The one thing we never really did was act anything out. I know there's notes in the D&D 3.0 DMG about learning to put on voices or acting out scenes but they are pretty minor and I always thought it was an optional minor aspect of the hobby - neither me nor my friends ever did it. We told stories mostly in third person, more like reading and making up a novel collectively and less like improvising a play.

Enter Critical Role and other actual plays. There's professional voice acting, fancy props, sometimes even whole themed rooms. I found the whole thing honestly kinda crazy, and I just have never enjoyed it. I'm not wanting to insult anybody who does enjoy it, good for you, but I always wanted to see a group of people improvise a story together, not improv act. The often over the top acting (and often yelling) puts me off because it's nothing like how I'm used to playing RPGs. I'm aware of the whole Mercer effect thing, where people have unrealistic expectations of how roleplaying actually looks when they get into it, but I almost have the opposite thing where whenever I play with anybody new I always hope they're not planning on trying to push things that way, I prefer to feel like I'm focussing on playing a game and telling a story, not doing voices and acting out scenes. Again no hate to people who do enjoy that style but it's such a wild mismatch to what I grew up doing that it feels almost like an entirely different hobby.

So I guess my question is, how does roleplaying actually look at your table? Are things like Critical Role a style of roleplaying you aspire to do? Have many others had similar experiences or did I just grow up doing things quite differently? Do most people actually act out scenes and put on voices, or is it more third person collective storytelling? Are there any actual play podcasts or youtube channels that lean more towards the style I prefer, while still having a good level of quality and stories?

EDIT: Thank you to those who recommended 3D6 Down The Line, I've just skipped through a couple of their videos but it seems to be pretty much exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for!

I see Savage Worlds recommended here a lot when it comes to pulpy action games, whether fantasy, sci-fi, Wild West, whatever. I’m currently playing an Eberron SWADE game and I’m loving it. I appreciate the customizability of the system, and the players do badass stuff without feeling overpowered.

I feel like SWADE could even do Lovecraftian style mysteries and slow-burn horror with the right alternative rules. I guess it doesn’t do gritty survival, but I think it could with the right setting rules.

My question is what can’t Savage Worlds do well? Where does it fall short? And how much customizability and settings rules are too much before you should just switch systems?

Looking for...

-Good for mostly episodic adventures (don't have to do a multisession dungeon crawl to challenge players)

-Player characters have unique superpowers but aren't so powerful that regular goons aren't a threat

-Fun, hopefully quick to execute combat

-Enough things going on with the rules for out-of-combat stuff that the gameplay isn't just "roll to see if you succeed"

I was thinking of using the Cypher system with their superhero supplement. I'm also open to system that aren't specifically designed with superheroes in mind

My new TTRPG JourneyMon: Monster Trainer Roleplaying is out now on itch.io:

https://ilgingell.itch.io/journeymon

r/rpg in particular has been a wonderful community to talk with and learn from, so after years of seeing other indie designers talk about their project here it's kinda wild to be on the other side of things this time!

To introduce the game to folks that didn't back the Kickstarter...

What is JourneyMon?

JourneyMon is about going on a journey with your friends, recruting monsters, and engaging in exciting monster battles. It's a genre that many will be familiar with in video games, most notably huge franchises like Pokemon and Digimon, plus some recent indie hits like Cassette Beasts and Monster Sanctuary. This isn't the first TTRPG to tackle the genre by far, but I think it has a few unique things going for it...

• Episodic Structure: JourneyMon is intended to emulate saturday morning cartoons about monster training, rather than strictly aiming for the video games themselves. Sessions of the game are structured with procedural Prologue, "main show" and Epilogue that work with one-shot and campaign play.
• Zero Prep Worldbuilding: The Prologue of every JourneyMon episode leads the players and GM through a collaborative world building exercise, during which you'll generate a region for your episode to take place, a key NPC, and a "monster of the week". The GM has a few extra tools to generate plots if they need it, too.
• Battle System: JourneyMon has a zone-based tactical system that's designed to work more or less seamlessly with the narrative framework of other scenes. All you have to do is sketch out a quick layout of your scene with the major narrative elements, and populate each of thoses elements ("fields") with an effect. It can be as simple as certain monster types gaining buffs, or more complex things with conditions and triggers. Overall, though, the system is quick and punchy, and doesn't require any sort of grid or minis.

You can try the free Quick Start Guide to see for yourself, if you don't want to commit to the full handbook.

Or even just check out the free materials to see the full trainer classes.

I hope you enjoy the game, and if you have any questions about the game or the design philosophy, I'd love to hear them!

I don’t think there is any that is like 100% for body horror but I know a lot of horror systems incorporate body horror. which does it best?

Doing a little bit of googling, I'm not seeing any supplements for Into The Odd. I'm not interested in the system itself, moreso the adventures. The vibes fit perfectly for an Ironsworn dungeon crawler I'm trying to run. Im attracted to the strange and unique dungeon design. In the core rulebook they give you an intro adventure called The Iron Coral, which iirc involved a dungeon made of an amalgamation of living sea life and machinery. I thought that was so neat and creative. What I really liked about it was that it was, well, odd. So what I'm looking for is either more Into The Odd adventures like that, or really any dungeon from any system that has a unique, creative, weird concept. Any recommendations?

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).

Hi, I'd like some help with a part of my campaign. I've only been mastering for about a year, and because of school commitments my friends and I haven't been able to play very often.

First, though, I should give a bit of context about the setting and the system.

We're playing 7th Sea Second Edition, using Navigavia as the setting. It's an Italian setting book for 7th Sea published by Need Games, featuring a low-fantasy pirate setting.

In this world there's an island inspired by 19th-century England mixed with and Mongolia, except that instead of coal there's a substance called sault (the coal of this world).

I like making changes to the published setting so that my players can't simply read the book and know everything about a location before they get there. I think it makes discovering new places more interesting.

For example, I changed sault so that it's somewhat similar to Shimmer from Arcane, mixed with gasoline. It's a substance that can be used both as fuel and as a drug. It's processed in illegal factories where both adults and children work, and during the refining process, direct contact with the substance and its fumes causes chemical burns. This was originally meant to be more of a background detail, but my players have decided they want to dismantle at least the factories that refine it into a drug.

The problem is that I'm not really sure how to make this storyline interesting.

Right now it feels like it would just be: gather information in the criminal underworld, find a factory, destroy it, figure out who's in charge, and repeat. The issue is that this isn't the first time they've gone into shady neighborhoods to gather information before beating up some villain, so I'm worried it'll end up feeling repetitive and boring.

I've already thought about tying this arc into one of the PCs' backstories, but none of their backgrounds really fit.

Do you have any advice, ideas, or suggestions that could make this short story arc more intresting and entertaining?

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?