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TLDR: Younger players will just kill and loot everything, including each other, refuse to admit when they're overpowered and get mad if their characters are punished or killed. How can you guide them away from that kind of playstyle?

I've GMed about five or six campaigns for kids / teenagers and I just started another similar gig for a local school. Something that's happened with basically every group is that most of the players just play the game like they're playing GTA. All they care about is killing as many people as possible, acquiring as much loot as possible and just acting like bullies towards every NPC, and sometimes towards other party members.

I've tried many solutions for this over the years, with mixed results.

- Outright banning PvP combat. This is one I always stick with now: if I don't enforce this, someone is inevitably trying to kill someone else's character, and it inevitably ends with someone losing their character, getting mad and using their next character to plot revenge on their rival's character. Some especially sadistic kids will also circumvent that rule by just attacking whatever the other players care about, since the other player can't attack them to retaliate. I once had a player just kill the NPC sister of another PC because he was "bored" and said he could kill her because she was a non-human race, therefore a monster.

- Putting the players in front of NPCs that could easily overpower them. That doesn't usually seem to work: players either understand that they shouldn't mess with this particular character and just wait to meet someone else to become murderous villains or they try to attack the OP NPC until they win or their character dies. Obviously, they get pissed when their character dies, which makes them want to roll an even more murderous character. Some players are also comically bad at understanding that they're not playing on an even field and will insult or threaten to murder kings, to their face, surrounded by the king's guards.

- Wait it out. Ironically, this is what worked the most often. There sometimes comes a point in the campaign where players get very attached to a specific NPC in the campaign and they make them part of the gang, defending him against any threat. The game instantly becomes more fun when this happens, because at least the players have one thing they can interact with meaningfully... but sometimes it just doesn't, and those players just keep bullying everything they find until the campaign ends.

- Asking the players to come up with motivations for their characters that go beyond "becoming the most powerful" or "becoming richer". I'm trying this one out now, with mixed results so far. Some players (the least murderhobo ones) actually come up with great ideas, but the most murderhobo minded will just reflavor "I want to kill everything that stands between me and a gold coin" and still justify their character being a complete monster to everybody.

I'm always stumped when faced with this kind of behavior from younger players. I get that, at that age, you really want to break rules and to go on a power trip when you're constantly being told what to do by adults, and that you think killing people for no reason is the funniest thing ever, or that threatening to kill everyone who tries to split the treasure equally is totally fair behavior. But I'm really wondering how other people would approach this, as my experience with GMing for kids and teenagers is leading me to believe that this is inevitable and that whatever I'm doing to nudge them in another direction isn't working.

Before anybody brings it up, no I did not expect much better from this game and yes, I know it's been out for three years. But I've recently gotten to play it for myself and wanted to discuss some of its more questionable elements since this isn't the kind of TTRPG that gets talked about much here.

DICE

The game uses a 3d6 system with success on an equal or superior result to the target number: like most similar systems, this skews results through the middle and makes each individual bonus to the roll quite impactful, which is good for heroic systems like this one where characters need to feel good at what they do.

The Advantage/Disadvantage system works by stacking up to three times (with contrasting instances subtracting from each other), each instance allowing you to either throw a die again and choose one of the two results or having to re-throw the highest die and sticking with the lower result. While this does prolong individual throws, the fact that you only need to throw once for both attacking and dealing damage helps lower the amount of time spent, and admittedly it does feel good to use Advantages.

However, this all goes down the drain due to the critical hit system: of the three dice you throw, one is a red Marvel die, which substitutes the 1 with a Marvel logo. With an incredibly high 1 in 6 chance of rolling a crit (which is made higher with Advantage), one would think the benefit for critting would be relatively minor, but instead critting leads to double damage (which is always also max damage since the Marvel die is used for dmg calculation and the Marvel logo is equal to a 6), a bonus effect for many powers if they crit or an additional bonus granted by the GM for out of combat rolls. Even if the roll as a whole is a failure, a Marvel leads to something good happening to offset the failure.

This makes combat EXTREMELY swingy, as it's ridiculously common to both shave off a huge chunk of an enemy's HP and inflict a debilitating effect on them, and this rings true for both players and NPCs. To give an idea of how much this has an effect on the game, my first combat ever I crit 4 times and that's without counting the times other players crit.

STATS

The array is the classic D&D set of SDCIWC, with the major changes being that each stat gets their own Armor Class and that HP is divided between the Resilience (Constitution) determined health and the Vigilance (Wisdom) determined Focus. These two stats are also the only ones that can't be used for offensive purposes, with Might (Strength), Agility (Dexterity), Ego (Charisma) and Logic (Intelligence) representing melee, ranged, magic and psychic attacks respectively.

This isn't too bad honestly, as it makes sense for characters to be better equipped at defending against what they're better at dishing out, and the distribution of damage types means that characters with a large Focus pool never feel like competition for Health-focused tanks; considering that Focus also works as a "mana bar" that characters can tap into to use stronger abilities, it also helps not discourage players from using it in fear that they'll reduce their own durability.

That being said, one of the first problems is that Resilience and Vigilance also get their own Armor Class, which is confusing because the parameters for deciding whether a power targets Resilience or Vigilance defense are never made clear and the whole thing comes off as way less intuitive than if each offensive ability simply targeted their respective defense. It also makes the subset of powers that allow characters to switch up their defenses (ex. using their Melee Defense in place of their Agility Defense) less effective because powers will target Resilience or Vigilance seemingly at random. Initiative is tied to Vigilance instead of Agility, which as the unfortunate side effect of making it entirely possible for a very fast character to be very slow at acting in combat.

But the biggest issue is that, due to a set of powers that I'll be discussing more in detail later, the actual ability scores matter relatively little, and the level-by-level progression feels rather clunky: at each level you get 5 points to raise your scores (which can be increased by lowering one of your abilities) but the score cap per level doesn't scale anywhere near this number: at lower levels, you'll handicap yourself by not specializing, while at higher levels you'll have more points than you know what to do with and be a jack-of-all trades god. YMMV on if this is good or not, but personally I'd rather players have more of a choice in the matter of specialization vs versatility.

POWERS

The game works by letting you select 4 powers per level through a skill-tree system, each level unlocking new powers to choose from and some powers needing previous ones as a pre-requisite. Powers are divided into groups (ex. Super-Strength, Super-Speed etc.), and if the powers you chose from are from a lower amount of groups than your level you get an extra amount of powers based on the difference. Powers from the "Basic" group do not count towards this difference.

As with the previous ability scores issue, there's a "fake balance" issue here: the game seemingly presents you with the choice of either specializing in a few sets or tapping into many for versatility, but the fact that many powers on the lower end of the spectrum are ridiculously underwhelming and that you get extra powers if you specialize makes being a versatile character not worth the effort.

The worst part about the powers though are the "Stat-Steroids", those being Mighty, Accuracy, Sturdy, Uncanny, Discipline and Brilliance. For the offensive stats, they increase the damage multiplier for their attacks and increase out of combat checks, while for the defensive stat they add damage reduction.

How this works is that once you've thrown the 3d6 to attack, you take the Marvel die's result and multiply it by the previously mentioned multiplier, then add the ability modifier. For damage reduction, you subtract the reduction number from the multiplier value, and if it reaches 0 all damage is nullified regardless of the ability modifier.

As you might imagine, this makes these powers practically mandatory lest your effectiveness and consistency suffer considerably: most characters will rely on at least two ability scores, and you can increase these powers up to a 4th rank. They're essentially the game's true ASIs. So again, there's a fake choice of either limiting a sizeable portion of your power budget to make space for a bunch of stat increases, or, again, handicapping yourself in the name of customization.

COMBAT

The rules for grabbing and throwing are confusing even for the standards of TTRPGs. The game makes it so that grabbing actually imposes disadvantage on attacks targeting either the grabber or the grabbed, and if an attack against one fails it is then made against the other. This means that grabbing is terrible for its usual purpose (locking down an enemy for your allies to hit) and seemingly intended to be used to procure a human shield for oneself, which isn't particularly heroic despite this being Marvel.

Despite an entire reaction as well as several interactions being dedicated to it, there are no rules for how launching a willing ally works. The knockback mechanic offhandedly mentions that characters with Mighty can add their damage multiplier to the knockback distance in increments of 5, and I suppose that is also true for launching allies willingly, but this is never stated outright (if it seems clear and obvious from how I'm putting it, I can assure you the rulebook isn't this transparent).

If one gets a Marvel on an initiative roll, they get an extra turn before everybody else. It sounds cool until you realize that this can mean having to sit through a ridiculous amount of turns for characters who've rolled low.

BALANCE

Possibly the game's single worst aspect, and it mostly stems from the decision of reducing the levels down to 6 in order to "simplify" things, which mostly ends up making things more complicated. These 6 levels feature a massive power disparity between each other, with 1 embodying average civilians or nameless mooks and 6 being made for cosmic-level threats such as Thanos. Going by this metric, levels somehow manage to feel like insurmountable differences and not all that relevant to what actually ends up contributing to the disparity.

Sure, the 4+ powers and 5+ ASIs that you get with each level-up, combined with the fact that damage multipliers scale with level, mean that higher-level characters gain a substantial power increase. However, neither health nor focus, for some reason, scale with level in the slightest: it's all up to how much you increase the base stat, meaning that a high-level character could theoretically still end up with the base value of a measly 10.

What this actually means is that you are forced to put ASIs into both Resilience and Vigilance, as well as to take your fair share of Stat-Steroid powers to make the most out of them. It is here that the true imbalance between levels rears its ugly head, because for some reason (I suppose to give players satisfaction through big numbers), health and focus are determined by multiplying the base stat x30, meaning that even with just 4 in Resilience the total health will result in a whopping 120.

Even a character with an equivalent 4 in Might will, without the Mighty power nor critting, at best roll 16 damage with an attack. Because of this, offensive Stat-Steroids are pretty much required to actually deal meaningful damage, which in turn makes defensive Stat-Steroids required to not be killed immediately, and as you might have guessed the whole thing makes higher-levels sometimes invincible when compared to lower ones by virtue of being able to take more of these powers.

Now, why is that a problem? Because the game does not have enemy statblocks, instead each NPC just uses the PC template for their sheets. This means that it is common for players to face enemies below or above their paygrade, with all the balance problems that this results in, especially since the encounter-building guidelines are hilariously undercooked.

The powers are horribly unbalanced compared to each other obviously, but it'd take too long to analyze those.

OTHER STUFF

As is often the case, despite the system presenting itself as apt for all kinds of situations, 95% of it is combat-focused.

There's a trait and tag system which is supposed to provide gameplay bonuses and roleplay guidelines respectively. Not only are many tags more akin to flaws that are supposed to be taken to gain inspiration (which should honestly be their own system), but many tags are worded as if they provide gameplay bonuses even when they're not supposed to, worst of all being the Immunity tag which seemingly allows a character to be immune to anything they want RAW.

OVERALL

Again, I did not expect much out of this system but it's honestly impressive how messy it is in manners which it didn't need to be, rather than being bad for the usual reasons.

A good few games include player-facing metacurrencies - resources not obviously extant in the game world that players can invoke to (usually) grant their players some kind of advantage: everything from heroic inspiration in D&D 5e to Fate Points in Fate to Bennies in Savage Worlds, and myriad others.

Less common however are metacurrencies used not by players but by the GM - I'm chiefly thinking here of things like Bite in Slugblaster, Suspense in Grimwild, or Discord in Tendencies: Spirits and Glamour - which allow the GM to introduce a significant or immediate complication or threat into the story.

I get how these might be controversial to certain flavors of GM - they have the ultimate authority over the narrative after all, why should they be constrained like that? Or, to paraphrase Quinns from his Slugblaster review, shouldn't a good GM know how to pace the game without such mechanisms anyway?

For my part though, I quite like them - the GM needs not always be above all possible game rules, and a lot of my favorites provide clear guidelines and courses of action for the GM to take (PbtA and FitD agendas, principles and moves are a softer version of this but still clearly in the same ballpark of making the GM's role more constrained but also consistent), and I think there's something to be said for gamifying the GM's side of the table as well, particularly in games which might otherwise strip back on such widgets if they, say, lack a complex tactical combat minigame.

What do you all think though?

I've got inspired by our GM giving cinematic names for our early games and started doing it to all our current games (and ones where we with the GM could find or remember enough information to remember what happened there)

The most recent game got the name "With the great power" because it was quoted by one of the PCs and at least three characters were looking for different means to obtain power.

Although the best title I've had is "The dungeon and a dragon" where we... Well.... Fought a dragon in a dungeon.

I wonder if anybody else does it.

EDIT: sessions, I meant sessions

In my experience, gods in many fantasy games are optional flair: a boon here, a quest there. Having done some reading on ancient Greek and Roman religion, I’ve found some connections that have been helpful in my games, and figured I would share.

TL;DR: Make them communal, give them presence at specific places and times, and keep them dangerous.

Historically, a god was often inseparable from a particular community and its way of life. You could not be Athenian without participating in the festivals, rituals, and ceremonies of Athena. It wasn’t about thinking Athena was the best; it was about who and what you were. So: what god do the people here tie their lives to? What diaspora community brought its god with it? Who welcomes the cleric with great joy, and who sees them as representing their rivals?

The gods were also encountered at specific places and specific times. People met their gods at home altars, at temples on festival days, and at holy sites like the sacred oak of Zeus at Dodona. In the myths, gods often took human form or spoke through prophets and oracles; they did not always appear as grand mystical figures in the sky. Maybe a god has temples all along the coast, but inland there is just one shrine in a village nobody has heard of. A party member who can reach a god more freely than that is a special thing, and people should treat it as such. At the same time, having the eye of a god is not always the best thing.

Gods rarely favored humanity as a whole, and some offerings were simply a way of saying “stay away from me.” A god favoring a mortal or a group of mortals is something people notice. It also comes with expectations, and that favor can turn. In Greek myth, Athena backed the Greeks through the whole Trojan War, then wrecked their fleet on the way home after one of them desecrated her temple and went unpunished. Give the god clear expectations and implied consequences. Something as simple as “the first sip of any drink you take belongs to me” can go a long way toward keeping a character’s devotion present in the game. Care should be taken to make sure the rules don’t become an unwanted burden on the rest of the party.

Are there other historical ways people interacted with the divine that you like to use at your table? Some relevant sources are in the comments for anyone who wants to read more.

My wife and I aren’t part of a gaming group at the moment, but I’d still like to occasionally run something for her. While she’s played D&D, what sparks her interest the most would be something where you play as an innkeeper, or where you farm and forage like Stardew Valley. It’s preferable for it to have an easy entry so we don’t spend forever learning new rules. Does anyone have any suggestions along these lines?

Wow! In a month Mythborn has become a silver best seller. Thank you all for the support. All the money is going straight back into our next Mythborn book's development which will focus on Narrator resources and even more character options.

Mythborn: Heroes of Greek Myth is a Legend in the Mist setting book for players to help you create mythic heroes of ancient Greece.

So I'm a beginner and I've played dragonbane before. Now I wanna DM a session myself but I don't know which one may be good.

All my knowledge is heavily anime based, especially the Isekai ones, so I am thinking a fantasy one fs. But with an extensive beasteary, character selections, spells and everything but also so that it doesn't get too complicated for me to host it. Also one which would let me add custom spells/monsters/events myself. (Note: The adding of custom part comes secondary and not so necessary to focus on).

I wanted to host the RPG session with some mechanics/monsters/spells from the animes like Re:Zero, Meshoku Tensei and Konosuba.

Any suggestions?

Exactly what it says in the title.

Im trying to run a game of modern magicians and started my reading with Mage.

Im specifically looking for something dark and dangerous (original i know)

Ive made a previous post and had lots of recommendations for Unknown Armies over Mage, however ive also been reading about Kult Divinity lost and while I still think im mostly set on UA, It would be cool to have some feedback on what each game excels at (between Kult and UA)

Thanks guys!

Hello !

I hope the question fits the subreddit.

I have been looking for a more narrative-oriented system for a campaign I want to make for my group. In short: this would be a superhero-themed campaign, largely inspired the universe from the books Worm and Ward by Wildbow.

I'm not looking for a crunchy system, as I know neither me nor my group are really into tactical crunchiness right now.

I have already checked a few narrative systems for ideas, mostly Blades in the Dark, Wildsea and PiCO, and City of Mist (and even a short-lived dive into Triangle Agency).

I have been reading the rulebook for Grimwild: Community Edition, and find the Moxie system interesting in its ideas, though it is very clearly oriented towards a kind of classic fantasy theme/vibe.

I know if I choose the Moxie framework, it will obviously need some tinkering and adaptation of my own, by I was wondering if any one had already tried to also use the system for a goal it was not made for, and/or if there were any precautions to take or pitfalls to avoid in that endeavour.

Thank you for reading!

Hi! I bought the core rulebook to eclipse phase 2e a while back and wanted to tap the minds of those wiser than I when it comes to running the system, specifically as part of a more cyberpunk/mystery themed campaign. The system seems really crunchy but I love the flavor, setting, and have a few ideas for campaigns to run.

I have some experience with running 3.5e & 5e DND, as well as Delta Green. Is there anything I should look out for?