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A friend of mine wrote this TTRPG taxonomy blogpost 😅 Not sure if we need more of these things. But hey, I'm just sharing this as a supportive friend.

The axes he presents in this blogpost:

• Horizontal: “we’ll wing it” ↔ “let’s check the rules” which represents mechanical overhead: how many procedures, interacting options, and tracked resources we need to manage
• Vertical: “good plans” ↔ "good complications" which represents the degree to which the system supports making complications productive, compared with improving our position and minimizing unwanted costs

When I asked him why he made this, he said "that’s what 10000 years of working in marketing does to you" 🤣

Weekend just passed I introduced a group of five people who have never played a RPG before to Dungeons & Dragons (via the free basic rules). They had a blast.

I consider myself a veteran, playing in high school in the 1980s (the old D&D red basic set) and over the years played or GM’d various systems. I stopped in the late 1990s as I moved to miniatures gaming; while I still collected some RPGs since then because pretty books, it wasn’t until about a year ago and the Alien RPG I tried and loved via an online one-shot, that I was bitten again by the bug. I mentioned D&D to a social group of which I’m a part and people expressed interest - most are at least board gamers so have some idea, and had notice the rise of the game through media (eg Stranger Things).

Before the session I made sure to learn the updated system best I could, then helped the group create characters, explained the basics, and ran a simple one-shot. They really enjoyed it, as did I, and we all want to play more.

I am a theatre of the mind GM, using minimal props. I had printed maps for the one-shot and broke out some board game figures to help the players visualise their relative locations but did not run strict movement/distance rules (it was all inside rooms so range didn’t really matter) and even then, they only came into play in the boss fight.

I’m left wondering though: should we stick with D&D or perhaps try another system?

I have the 2014 D&D books. I also have options on my shelf like Pathfinder 2e, Daggerheart, DragonAge, Blades in the Dark and The One Ring or even sci-fi like Alien, Bladerunner, Traveller, Scum & Villainy and a few more obscure like Lex Arcana or The Expanse.

While I might be itching to swap it up, all the players are brand new so I don’t want to confuse them or put them off nor force upon them my chosen system. Given how freestyle a GM I am, does it even really matter? I guess I’m just looking for some validation on whatever direction we go. :)

Tldr: should a group of brand new players with experienced GM keep playing D&D or try a different (newer?) system?

I’ve been running a bunch of investigative games lately and something keeps bothering me more than usual about published adventures. A lot of them are good to read and kind of annoying to actually run. Old topic, I know.

I don’t mean that I want everything reduced to bullet points, or that I don’t care about lore. I love lore. I like knowing why an NPC acts the way they do, what happened twenty years ago, what the cult believes, all that stuff but when I’m at the table I need completely different information.

I need to know what the NPC wants, what they know, what they’re doing right now, what they’ll do if the PCs interfere, and what happens if the players ignore them.
That is the stuff I’m actually using. “Actionables”
And I keep finding myself taking published adventures and making the same things over and over again: flowcharts, clue maps, NPC notes, timelines, quick references.
At some point I started wondering why I’m doing that work when it could easily come in the book. It really puzzles me why things are written like ttrpgs were invented yesterday and there are no written things about the difficulties GMs face every time they run a module.

If I change an NPC because I know my group will react better to them, that’s prep. If I add a scene or rewrite the ending, that’s prep too.
But if I’m taking 100+ pages of a published adventure and reorganizing the information so I can find it during play, that feels less like GM prep and more like editing the book after I bought it.
This is especially obvious to me with investigative RPGs.
I’ve run a fair amount of Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green, and the GM already has enough to keep in their head: clues, pacing, who knows what, what the players have missed, what the opposition is doing, whether the mystery still makes sense after the players did something completely unexpected.
So why isn’t the scenario giving me a simple technical view of itself?
I’d love every chapter to start with something like:
- what’s happening right now
- which NPCs/factions are active
- what each one wants
- what happens if the PCs do nothing
- critical clues
- optional clues
- timeline/escalation
- a basic flowchart

Then give me all the prose afterwards.
I will read it. I want it.
I just don’t want to have to mentally compile the prose into a usable scenario before I can run it.

Delta Green is generally better than CoC at giving me situations I can work with, but even DG sometimes falls into dossier mode. Cool to read, very evocative, but I’m still extracting the actual moving parts myself and I think videogames figured some of this out a long time ago.
Good lore usually gives you something to do with it.
In Baldur’s Gate 3, pretty much everyone understands why mind flayers matter because that lore constantly affects the game. Tadpoles matter. Ceremorphosis matters. Psionics matter. The factions around them matter.
Meanwhile the average player probably doesn’t care much about the difference between goblins and hobgoblins unless the game makes that difference relevant.
The lore can exist either way. But if it changes decisions, players actually absorb it.
I think RPG modules should work the same way.
Give me the lore, but give it handles.
One recent book that felt closer to this was Dragon Delves. I don’t think the adventures are necessarily amazing, but I liked that the book seemed to be asking a very basic question that more RPG books should ask:
“What does the DM actually need in front of them while running this?”
That’s really all I want.
A module should work at two speeds.

When I’m prepping, I want the full thing: lore, context, psychology, atmosphere.
When I’m running, I want the machine underneath it.

Note: I might be mixing a little bit the usual topic “actionable pieces” with “modules written as stories”

So my favorite level range in DND 5e is 3 to 10 due to the scale being more personally meaningful but you have more wiggle room with death and bouncing back aka more plot armor than OSR. And also by third level you get access to the toolkit to make your class your class. Any good games that excel in that range?

An arcanepunk fantasy setting and campaign centered on social exploration, mysteries and deep, meaningful stories. With rulesets for 5e, Forged in the Dark and Savage Worlds.

Already written and published in Czech last year, this crowdfunding aims to bring a revised, full-color version to English-speaking audience.

Make your way through a city of wild magic, from the destitute docks up to the rich uptown manors, overcoming hazardous magical anomalies, back-stabbing politics and mysteries better left forgotten.

• 33 detailed NPCs to interact with, with full-color portraits and plenty of hooks to get your players invested

• A much larger supporting cast with rich faction play

• 16 non-linear adventures with supporting mechanics and many sidequests to connect it all into a sandbox campaign

• A setting written to allow for a large degree of flexibility and player agenda

• Postmodern fantasy that is not afraid to balance serious themes and whimsical humor

• Gives the feeling of "Discworld meets Arcane TV series"

• And lots of magical cats!

The bundle contains two full-color system-agnostic volumes and separate rules supplements for running the campaign in Forged in the Dark, 5.5e and Savage Worlds. Early backers get a bonus digital adventure set in the testing grounds of the Kalusa University.

Our small indie studio has been creating RPG stuff in Czech language for more than 10 years. For the artwork, we also try to hire local artists. This campaign is already tried and tested by our community and we hope that with your help we can create something truly memorable for the international scene.

No AI.

Backerkit link: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/remorker/kalusa-the-enchanted-city

Hey folks! Are there any games out there worth having a look at with a "toss-a-coin" basic resolution mechanism?

Hi folks,

It has been a time that I am thinking about something...

I love Blades in the Dark, especially the core dice rolling resolution, but the whole system it is too crunchy for our group.

I love City of Mist / Legend in the Mist, especially the themes/tags character building, but not the 2D6 rolling resolution & move system from PbtA.

I was wondering if anyone has seen or think about an hybrid simpler system:

• The caracter is builded in the same way as CoM/LitM, with themes and tags,
• For a risky action: just mage a roll (no moves),
• A roll is xD6, x equal to the numbers of tags related to the action,
• For the result of the action, check the die with the best value: 6 = success, 4-5 = partial success, 1-3 = failure.

What is your opinion?

And are there any sci-fi high, fantasy ttrpgs you recommend (like space druids or something ha)?

I’m looking for an rpg specifically for 1930s-1940s mystery men.
1939 Batman, The Shadow, The Spider.
Specifically mystery men operating in a city, not globetrotting pulp stuff.

This Sunday will mark the epic conclusion to Chronicle 1 of a vampire larp that I've been running with my partner for ~16 weeks, holding gathering every other week. During that time, we've been doing downtime actions between every gathering (a pace I'm told is crazy). We do this so that players have new things to talk about at every gathering. It's been fun since most of the plot stuff happens during downtime actions on the off weeks, and gatherings are a time for sharing information, brokering deals, and sometimes major announcements.

One thing that makes our group interesting is that almost all of the characters are intellectuals rather than fighters or social characters so they've really been engaging with the plot and its associated puzzles. A result of this is that people don't really look for combat solutions to their problems. It's to the point where the first time we called a blood hunt, everyone gave the Prince a thumbs up and returned to what they were doing (he was not the most highly respected Prince).

At our most recent gathering, the new more respected Prince called a blood hunt, and we did the first combat encounter of the chronicle - 7 gatherings into the game. Our group collectively opted to use the optional narrative encounter rules rather than actually playing out the encounter move for move. This let us wrap up the actual combat lightning fast and get back to the plot things that were really more interesting.

All this to say that it has been crazy refreshing to run a mostly pure roleplaying game rather than a nitty gritty combat simulator. Anyone else have similar experiences?

Does anyone have much experience with World Anvil? I have been looking at it, tried to use it a bit and found it to be sort of confusing.

What are other peoples experiences with it as a campaign tracking tool and world building tool?