The /r/rpg mods have made a few minor changes to Rule 7 to tighten up some loopholes and clarify some questions that we get asked regularly in modmail.

These changes should result in absolutely zero impact to our regular users.

The changes simply document common things that we are seeing in the queues and modmail and will allow us to moderate more effectively without having to explain the same things over and over in modmail.

We have not changed the definition of an active user, or what is needed to post promotion.

There are some minor grammar changes for clarity, and a few sentences were rearranged.

The following are the non-trivial changes that were made:

OLD:

Affiliate links must be clearly disclosed or they will be removed

NEW:

Affiliate links and other profit-sharing schemes are not allowed.

ADDED TO THE "WHAT IS SELF PROMOTION" LIST:

• Discussing "a game you are working on", with obvious intent to fish for questions or requests for details and links.

• Asking for features to include or feedback on a game, site, app, or tool that you are building

And the most substantial change:

OLD:

"If you are using a newly created account and start immediately posting to other peoples' work, then you may be seen as a self-promoter in disguise."

NEW:

"If you are using a newly created or inactive account and start immediately posting promotion of other peoples' work, then you will be considered a self-promoter in disguise."

This change is being made because we regularly get into modmail discussions with brand new or inactive accounts that promote a product to multiple subs, but claim "I'm not affiliated" when there is clearly promotion being made. We see enough obvious "stealth promo" that we are now assuming that promo from non-active accounts is self-promo. This doesn't change how we've been moderating these posts (we've been using this assumption for a while now), merely documenting the change.

Thank you.

The /r/rpg mods

**Come here and talk about anything!**

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This post will stay stickied for (at least) the week-end. Please enjoy this space where you can talk about anything: your last game, your current project, your patreon, etc. You can even talk about video games, ask for a group, or post a survey or share a new meme you've just found. This is the place for small talk on /r/rpg.

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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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This submission is generated automatically each Saturday at 00:00 UTC.

Tone might be an odd word for it, maybe feel. And it might not be specific to this sub, there is a lot happening in the world, but..

My peak of engaging with this sub was likely about a year ago, and I was lurkin' for a few years before that. This may sound naive to some folks, but genuinely I considered this corner of the Internet to be THE nicest online space I'd ever seen. No joke. It felt like people were safe to bounce ideas around, share enthusiasm or passion, there was a lot of discussion surrounding ethics and harm reduction both related to culture of play and then ai etc. Sometimes there would be a blunt tone used in instances where someone asked a VERY common question without either going in to detail or searching the sub first, but I swear that to ME (subjective ofc) it felt warm and engaging.

I post this strongly suspecting that I am going to receive snark. That is not a feeling I would have had making a post here a couple of years ago. Scroll down and look at the posts here, about half of them get down voted when they are clearly relevant to the sub? People asking questions about rules, or for recommendations, or talking about a game etc. I see WAAAY more snark here. Everyone has bad days, and these experiences can be more "sticky" on the mind than more pleasant ones, making them feel more prominent.

But that's all I have to say really. I really value the people in this hobby. And I really value this space. I see emotionally intelligent people here with passion and experience. However, it feels off as heck to me these days. I don't know if people are more suspicious online as ai accounts rise etc, idk if people need to shut down strangers because things in their life are hard to the point where they need to feel that control somewhere. I don't have any answers, or even data. It's speculation. But again, scroll down and see.

Just pause and think about how you're engaging with this sub. It IS a special place. It's hard for it to not sound condescending, but before you go and teach someone a lesson, just go and have a tall glass of water, look outside, stretch a little bit, and then see if that's what you still want to do.

Edit: whether you resonate with my experiences and perspectives or not, I want to thank you for caring anyways! I did receive some condescending digs in response to this, but that only made it all the more affirming to see people resonate with what I've said. And I also value the folks coming through to explain why they disagree in a respectful or kind way.

This post was informed by my care for the hobby, the creators that make it what it is, this sub, and the community as a whole and the incredible insights, analysis, and just STUFF that make up the broader ttrpg dialogue. I hope my words didn't bring any discomfort. Remember to talk about what's inspiring you, bringing you joy, or intriguing you!

Edit 2: does Pathfinder 2E fix this?

I can't help but enjoy a slightly melodramatic title now and then. But I'm also not being entirely facetious here, the latest edition of this game is seriously up there and is increasingly becoming my go-to for games I run.

A little bit of backstory to explain what I mean. I got into RPGs back during my high school years with Pathfinder. 5e was out at the time I started, but in my area it didn't really take off in popularity until a few years later, so that and 3.5e were what you'd mostly find if people were running RPGs. It was my first exposure to the hobby, and I found the depth and breadth of what you could do utterly fascinating to me; at the time I was a hobbyist writer, and I was already into the video game style of RPGs, so perhaps the interest was inevitable. It was only a few months into my first campaign that I began exploring other options, and funnily enough the first game I ran was a Maid RPG oneshot, which was entirely silly. Fun game, that.

It was also roughly around that period that I met the group of people that would become my main playgroup for the next decade. We met online and made a few failed attempts at a Dungeon World campaign. I can't remember now why they failed, but they sure did. Not a single one ran to completion even though we all enjoyed the game itself. After that, thanks to one of the guys having a somewhat struggling wireless connection, I proposed an idea: why don't we run our live games through text? I had no idea that this would come to define our entire style or that it would shunt us down into more simplified games.

We tried several systems over the years. Silhouette CORE was amusingly our first attempt at a text game, which in the end fizzled out for perhaps obvious reasons. The next was OVA; it worked just fine, but after some time, one member of the group grew frustrated with how odd the probability distribution is for the resolution method, so that too was largely removed a few years ago. We also toyed with using WaRP, the SRD of Over the Edge 2e, and that's remained a mainstay for any simple game using a unique setting that happens to need just that kind of lethality. Oh, and we tried BESM once and ultimately weren't too big on it.

All of that eventually led us to Questworlds. I happened across the SRD about two years ago, and honestly the idea of conflict-based resolution was something that completely wowed me, since I truly hadn't seen it put in such a way before at all. We'd long struggled with combat and other high granularity conflicts taking hours in the format we played. Even in simpler games such as OVA, it was such that a combat would all but take up the entirety of a session, slowing the pacing of a campaign down to a crawl no matter what we tried to do to make it work. So when we shifted to Questworlds just last year, it was a complete game changer for myself and my players. Suddenly, we could have a high action game where a combat with your average group of mooks doesn't take half a session to resolve. The way the resolution method works, it was as easy as ending a combat scene in one roll if it wasn't that important, or even no roll at all if the players were meant to be tearing through threats until a real challenge that could change things were to arise.

I still love tactical combat and crunchy games, but in the current play environment I've got, using a tool that really fits the medium is just perfect. Aside from most conflicts being able to be resolved in a single roll, or being able to zoom in just enough to resolve phases of a conflict if you want things to feel grand and epic, the sequence rules make for a fantastic counterpart. For those events where you really need each action to have weight, or various twists and turns, it's an excellent tool to have in your pocket as a task-based resolution method, rather than the only tool that you have at your disposal. Not to mention that the system is just simple enough where the setting can instead be the guideline for how those rules are applied. All of these things and more just really clicked exactly the right way for me. To be honest, I'm enamored!

In any case, if you've made it to the end of this long, rambling post, I just happened to fall in love with a system that provided exactly what I needed for the kinds of games I personally tend to run. It's simple enough to not bog down in a text session. It's adaptable enough that, as long as it's heroic enough, I can run basically any and every setting I've made in it. It just encourages running and playing a campaign in the way that I've increasingly wanted to, and for that I've hardly been able to stop imagining how I'll use it next.

So, how about you? Have you found a game that happened to hit just right for you? What was it, and why was it that way? Whether it's crunchy and tactical, procedure heavy yet rules light, a storytelling game where you're like a coauthor, or anything and everything in-between. Let's share a little bit of positivity about this ridiculously varied hobby!

TLDR: Questworlds cool, what games do you like?

I am looking into the topic for the purposes of informing my own design principles on combat. I am someone who really enjoys engaging tactical combat, though I feel that as a component it can often feel tiring in the medium of TTRPGs. The purpose of this post is to spark a conversation on what exactly makes people like or dislike tactical combat, as well as an exploration of if it would be possible to bridge the gap between those looking for deep tactics and those who do not get any enjoyment out of it.

I think an obvious issue with many popular "tactical" systems is that they get lost in the crunch of combat, making the experience tiresome for everyone no matter their preference on tactics. This is something that is barely even debatable, so I think it would be safe to exclude it from this conversation. When we discuss possible ways to make tactics more approachable, we should assume the system is not a mess to actually run in a timely manner.

What are your specific pain points with tactical combat? Does it have to do with its prevalence and expectation in games where other parts are more enjoyable? Do you enjoy similar combat systems in videogames or other board games? If you dislike tactical combat, do you have any positive experiences with it or is it always a slog? Do you prefer another "minigame" system of handling combat, and if you do, what makes it more enjoyable for you?

Tell me about the very best and worst of the experiences you've had with tactical combat and your best guesses as to what made them so. Every response is appreciated!

Hi all,

I'm working on a research project concerning TTRPG mechanisms, and am looking to see if there's an existing catalog of rpgs/systems that have been inspired by Vince Baker's now out of print game, 'Dogs in the Vineyard' (published in 2004 iirc).

I have a few written out, but I'm hoping to expand on the list of games that I have listed for it if possible.

Thanks all in advance!

This week's RPG is The One Ring 2E!

Have you played it? Have you run/GM'd it? How did it go?

What's your favourite memory from the game?

What's the best thing about the game?

What's the worst? How would you improve it?

Is Legolas the hottest of the fellowship? Or Samwise?

.

Last week was Shadowdark. Join us again next week for Traveller!

I and my table love DnD but we've been playing it for years now and want to give some other games a shot. I'm leaning towards something a little more grounded with less powercreep where the players don't go from fighting a small bandit camp to killing god. Maybe something kinda swashbuckly with minimal magic even. Thanks for any and all suggestions!

Hi y'all,

My friends and I are making a system-agnostic space opera TTRPG for our own table as a fun experiment, and we've been looking for inspiration for certain aspects.

Current topic is about spaceships and space combat, and I guess we've been struggling to find any decent baselines or ideas to refer to (that are not a mess or too number-crunchy).

Any good suggestions? Or would it be better to come up with a whole new thing ourselves?

Edit: Wow I wasn't expecting such fast responses and with so many different suggestions. Keep them coming, and thank you very much!!

I have had this desire lately to just shake up my own player groups, who are very stuck in playing trad games (especially PF2) by putting them through something completely different, like a scene-setting game like Fiasco or a extremely narrative game like FAE, just to force them out of the mindset of playing a trad game and maybe give an injection of, I dunno, whimsy into the people around me.

But I just have this nagging feeling that it might not actually work. Heck, when others have asked about the same thing, I've usually said not to do it for the heck of it (especially when for some reason people want to do it with FATAL or something, yuck!).

Anyone got experience with doing radically different oneshots or short games, especially with like positive results? I think for new players, obviously doing something very different (from 5e) can work as a good way to expand horizons, but does this work for established groups and players?

ETA: Yeah, I'm ESL, it's palate cleanser.

So in my next session one of the NPC’s is a hyper intelligent alien possessing a young boy. I was wondering of ways i could show how unused to this body the alien is, and odd little behaviors they could exhibit which could reveal that they aren’t human.

I could give more details if requested but I was hoping this could be something that could help Game Masters role-play “things pretending to be human” in general.