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(Aside from "RPGs in general" jokes, of course.) I was just thinking of this because i can remember (back in the day ) someone wanting about $16 in 2025 money for "ship's deck plans" that were mostly rectangles with a hex-map in them. And that's it. (You used to get people doing that. And 'warehouses' that were a slightly more squat rectangle, with a door on the side.)

Biggest RPG rip off you've ever encountered?

Hello! I am interested in playing Old Gods of Appalachia and usually when I get into new games I like to watch actual play to get familiar with the game. Do you fine people have any recommendations for good actual play content of Old Gods of Appalachia?

Anyone else remember when, just after Y2K, two young men from Ontario were arrested for plotting to kill police and claimed they were just playing the "Rifts" RPG by Palladium?

http://www.theescapist.com/brockville4.htm

I have seen a good deal of a few AI-heavy games in the past several months. What do you make of this trend?

The real smoking gun for me is when the advertisement uses the same old hallmarks (curly apostrophes, long dashes, "not X, but Y," oddly "business sales pitch"-like tone; any one of these would be innocuous, but encountered all together, they are suspicious), yet the actual GM communicates in a much simpler style... only to occasionally flip back into long, AI-generated responses, such as in-game.

There is one up right now.

This game takes place in the world of Dispatch—a living, breathing city where danger erupts without warning and heroes are the thin line holding everything together. I’ll be your DM, but in this world, you’ll know me as your Dispatcher. I’m the voice in your ear, the one who tracks the chaos, the one who sends you and other heroes into the field when Manhattan needs you most.

Your missions will range from capturing dangerous villains to rescuing civilians, stopping escalating threats, uncovering hidden plots, or confronting unknown anomalies. Dispatch calls don’t wait. They hit fast, loud, and unpredictable. When that call goes out, you suit up, step forward, and answer it.

Using Daggerheart’s Duality system—Hope and Fear—we’re shaping a flexible, evolving ruleset that grows with both the world and your characters. Every mission will test your skills. Every choice will shape the city around you. And as the story unfolds, we’ll refine and expand the system together, adapting it to the heroes you become.

This is a world where your decisions matter, where Hope fuels your rise, where Fear pushes back, and where every Dispatch shapes the next chapter. You’re not just playing a character. You’re becoming a symbol.

I am actually in this game, and the GM has been using AI-generated messages extensively. For example, the GM posted a long, long, LLM-generated summary of the Daggerheart rules. (Why they felt the need to do so, I do not know.)

Said summary includes awkwardly phrased lines like:

► Duality Blessings (Doubles)

Rolling matching numbers—1:1, 7:7, 12:12, or any matching pair—creates a moment of powerful cosmic alignment. This is always an automatic success, regardless of the threshold. You also gain 1 Hope and remove 1 Stress. Doubles represent the world synchronizing with your intent, allowing you to carve through fear and doubt effortlessly.

Despite this being their first time ever playing or running the system, they also posted some questionable homebrew mechanics that would have a significant impact on gameplay. When I pried and asked about the mechanics, it became clear that the GM did not even know how the core dice roll rules even worked.

So in other words, this GM is also outsourcing their understanding (or "understanding") of the rules to LLMs. Why even play tabletop RPGs at that point?

Compare this to the GM's non-AI-generated messages, such as:

Alright but you have to do me a favor.

I think streamers are cool but they feel like more male stalks them and ask for weird things while influencers are cool but get more attention from female… if you are playing a woman. V tube gets a lot of hate but the most fans.

I can already see 1 story problem which ever route which will get your story going or maybe just something small to deal with

And:

Alright well hope you have fun make your character ill be here if anything

And:

Use abilities skills whatever comes to find. Just when you roll either low or fear it will have consequences of course

When I asked the GM why they were using LLMs, they said:

No I only used the AI to help me correct any misspelling and condescending what I’m saying.

This seems to be much more than correction of misspellings, though.

They openly claim to be "a 24 year old DM married marine Veteran," and they allege that they have "been a writer for 10 years."

They are trying to turn Dispatch into a game of Daggerheart and have homebrewed a number of questionable mechanics to try to make it work... and even then, I am doubtful that they are faithful to Dispatch.

For example, all of our PCs are assumed to split up (bad idea in general, doubly so in Daggerheart where Fear accumulates on a group-wide basis), and each PC has to make two separate rolls to make it to a location in a timely manner.

When I asked the GM why it would take two successful rolls just for a single PC to make it to a location in time, the GM responded:

Have you ever had to shot a M240 machine gun after running up a damn hill while your squad leader’s yelling you’re a pussy because you sprained your ankle after hiking 20 miserable miles, most of it uphill, with an 80 pound pack digging into your shoulders the whole time? Man, my lungs were burning like I swallowed jet fuel, my ankle felt like it was held together with hopes and bad decisions, and that pack kept sliding, smashing my spine every step like it had a personal vendetta. Sweat’s pouring into my eyes, rifle slipping in my hands, and the only thing I can hear besides my own ragged breathing is my squad leader screaming like I personally offended the Marine Corps by existing. And then, as if the pain parade wasn’t enough, you gotta drop to the dirt, set up, and start firing like your body hasn’t been begging for death for the last three hours straight, all while thinking, “Why the hell did I sign up for this?”

I think I can handle the stress of some dice on my phone.

I lied I didn’t carry a M240 but M320 and my M27 I thought the M240 was funnier. No disrespect brother but all for fun and giggles. Let’s have a good game!

This is not the first time I have talked about this exact topic.

This is not the first time I have seen a GM outsource large swaths of their duties to LLMs, and I doubt it is going to be the last.

I have fallen in love with this game's lore and setting; it has inspired me to GM a game that takes place in the setting. I am having trouble finding the right fit for a world like this, and I thought it would be a good question to ask you all. So what ttrpg System would work well for the setting and lore of Deadlock?

Completely setting aside my issue with online GMs outsourcing their duties to LLMs, I have been finding it to be a poor sign when a pick-up game's GM expresses an optimistic desire to run this super-grand, super-ambitious, epic saga for the ages. I think it is deeply unrealistic to expect that a group of people semi-randomly assembled together will miraculously have the chemistry, investment, dedication, and scheduling necessary for a game to last for years. I think that lofty ambitions and expectations transform into rapid burnout when they meet a much more prosaic reality of mismatched preferences, availability issues, and decent-but-not-fantastic roleplaying.

This goes triply in a play-by-post game, where it might take several months (if not over a year!) just to complete a very short, bare-bones adventures. This is also exacerbated by rookie mistakes like taking in more players than the GM can handle, or writing in homebrew mechanics that substantially upheave the core rules without prior experience with the system. I recently joined one such play-by-post game wherein the GM expresses a desire for a grand-scale campaign, has taken on seven players, and has presented extensive homebrew despite having zero previous experience with the system; I doubt it is going to end well.

I have much more confidence in a GM who is willing to simply say, "We will do a quick adventure together. If it works out, we will consider a longer campaign." Indeed, I have had much more success with such pick-up GMs. (This is assuming I do not just play with people I already know, which I also do.)

So I've been running a Feng Shui second edition game for a little over a year now for a larger group. I think I'm ready to wrap up the storyline in the next few months. I've had the wandering eye, so we're probably going to try a different game.

I want to offer my players a choice of fantasy or pulp adventure. The pulp game, if they choose it, will be Pulp Cthulhu. But I need to decide on the fantasy option

So here's my question. What's a good system for running a fantasy game that is 1) easy to learn 2) moves quickly and 3) can handle a group as big as seven players

Feng Shui has managed all of this for us pretty well, I just want to try something different

Bonus points if can get a physical core book plus a PDF for less than a hundred bucks

I was talking to a buddy of mine about TV shows the other day, and he mentioned that a character on a show he was watching ended up dying in the series rather quickly and it seemed a little off. We did some digging and found out that the actor wanted to get out of the show so that he could have the time to work on other projects.

I can respect that, but it also got me thinking about times that I talked to a GM about taking my character out in a game because I either got a new job, had to move, or other IRL things.

What have you guys got? Are there any times where you wanted to have your character killed off just so you could do something else? It could even include being put on a bus or Chuck Cunningham syndrome. Sometimes we just want to leave games because life happens and there's usually a story behind it.

Hi everyone! I’m looking for some help choosing a system for a cyberpunk campaign I’m planning. Here are my constraints:

• I have a lot of people interested in playing, but I’m not comfortable running large tables — 5 players is my upper limit.
• I’m not a fan of the “big crew of mercs/corpos” setup where the party is basically a D&D group in a cyberpunk world. I struggle to create interesting stories with that premise.
• My players have only played D&D so far.

The campaign concept:
I want to set it in a cyberpunk city (maybe Night City, maybe The Sprawl — still deciding) where a major event is unfolding over time. This event would open up opportunities for different actors to push their agendas, gain political or economic influence, form alliances, etc. Some of these actors would be the PCs and the factions connected to them.

Gameplay-wise, each week I’d ask players what their characters are doing. It could be something simple like “I spend the week developing a piece of malware,” or something big like “I’m going to infiltrate this prison.” Depending on the action, I’d either resolve it using mechanics or schedule a session to play it out. Characters’ goals might align or conflict with each other, creating cooperation, competition, and faction-level play. This format lets me include more players overall while avoiding the usual five-person gang structure.

With all that in mind: what systems should I look into?
I prefer narrative-forward games over heavy simulation, and I’d rather avoid generic systems. For this campaign, I’d like something with enough mechanical depth to give players interesting build choices — not ultra-lightweight. Still, I’m open to all suggestions!

Thanks in advance!

I was cleaning out some boxes from our move three years ago and found a folder full of old character sheets. One of them belonged to a Gristletooth Ogre with cannibalistic tendencies whom I played in a Changeling: The Lost campaign.

It was an incredibly dark game—and an even darker character. Her name was Ginny Sweetbreads, inspired by Chef April Bloomfield (you can Google her). Ginny ran a gastropub in Chicago’s Meatpacking District called The Cutty Black Sow, specializing in offal and off cuts. I almost called it The Abattoir, but that was a wee bit on the nose.

She had a slightly unhinged devotee named “Amuse Bouche,” who had sworn an oath to serve Ginny faithfully as helpmate, lover, and keeper of secrets. In return, Ginny swore to eat her on the night of her 30th birthday.

Looking back, I must have been going through some rough shit at the time—because damn.

I have been researching PBtA style RPGS to see if they would work well for me. but ive come across a few hangups that are snagging at me.

the biggest thing is the idea of things being made real by bad or good outcomes to moves. i understand that happens to an extent in any rpg but i like there to be a direct causal in world relationship between things. i like playing as an inhabitant of the world, not as a writer or director. I like things to make sense WITHIN the world itself. maybe im misunderstanding things.

for example, one scenerio i have seen talked about is what exactly discern reality does. some say it creates a new reality based on the role and some say it reveals the new reality. but in my head its frustrating that it just... arbetrarily makes things happen?

lets say you use discern reality to see if an enemy is hiding a weapon, my current understanding is that a bad role could make it have one and a good one COULD make it NOT have one. but that makes no sense. you are checking for danger, either the danger is already there or already NOT there. why should what amounts to the perception roll CHANGE what WILL be there?

i like the rules light nature of these games, the ease that you can run them, but it chafes at me that its effectively shrodingers ogre? that the world can change in ways that dont originate from the world itself.

can you guys help me understand? or am i better off with a more traditional system approach?