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I received the Welcome To Night Vale rpg as a gift when it first came out. For anyone who doesn’t know, WTNV is a podcast set up like a community radio for a mysterious town in the desert. The whole podcast is stuff like, “a new dog park has opened in town! Don’t approach the dog park, the dog park won’t harm you”. Seemingly innocuous reports get weirder & your mind fills in the blanks.

The game uses essence 20 as a system (DnD 5e lite) & has no advice about setting up adventures or random tables to get things moving. The GM’s guide is one long combat session. It comes off as more a DnD setting with Night Vale paint on it than a dedicated game. The podcast is inherently built on ambiguity & darkness, leaving me no real roadmap to work with.

I’ve contemplated how to make a good game with it. The problem is, all of my ideas involve disregarding 90 percent of the game & completely making my own content. My friend seemed excited about the thought of playing it, but I don’t think I can make it work.

Howdy folks.

I've recently played through both Armored Core VI and Armored Core IV, and I'm now in the mood to play a TTRPG that would scratch the ich. Mutilated and scarred Mech pilots being guided by their operators or handlers to do various mercenary jobs in a dying world led by corporations.

Or, alternatively, could go with the professional armed Mech group route, like the Vespers and Redguns. Freedom fighters, maybe.

I've taken a look at Lancer, but I'm still unsure about it. It's just a little crunchy from what I've seen and I don't know if it captures the vibe, although I haven't looked at all the lore yet so maybe.

Thanks in advance!

I play DnD, and I'm finding it... Somewhat frustrating. Roleplay seems to have very little impact on the story, and characters don't seem to matter beyond that they're characters made to inhabit the story, and through which the players can experience the story. A town mayor will just as happily hire a barbarian who can barely speak as he will a nobleman to handle anything from goblins harassing some trade routes, to diplomatic escorts and protection details of visiting royals.

I don't have that many issues with that particular example, but I think it highlights the point: Backgrounds don't seem to matter. I'm currently playing a nobleman in Icewind Dale, and while I understand a remote area like that with lots of hardships probably won't care too much about maintaining etiquette, your background should have an impact on how the world treats you. I don't expect my character to be treated with reverence everywhere, but if he were a soldier, I'd expect him to be treated differently by a guard than if he were a sage, for example.

Roleplay often feel inconsequential, like I said. I don't get experience for dealing with a Speaker well, or defusing a situation involving a local. I'd like those things to matter.

The world is another thing: It seems static. This is a complaint of DnD in general, not Icewind Dale. Things happen, the PCs show up, and then you're allowed to handle things in whatever order you prefer. I don't have a massive issue with that specifically, but it seems as though the entire world just stops to watch what happens. Things generally need to continue rolling even if a farmer had a child go missing. Seeing the effects of "things rolling" beyond some farmers tilling a field would be nice.

I should mention, I'm a fairly undramatic person. I don't enjoy tacking on twenty different traumas to my character, so any systems that require those won't gel with me, but I'm always happy to hear suggestions.

After delaying Masks 2nd Edition, Magpie has a landing page up for their next Kickstarter up. This one for an Avatar supplement

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magpiegames/spirit-world-avatar-legends-ttrpg-setting-toolkit?ref=creator_tab

Honestly...if Cartel wasn't the final straw for me with Magpie I think this would be. Canceling an entire kickstarter when it was already being run with two previous Kickstarters unfulfilled is a bad look. To cancel it and turn around and launch another so soon isn't just a bad look. I don't know what to call this other than egregious and a total level of disrespect for their base.

I mentioned this in my last post about TTRPG assumptions I've needed to break, but one of my major assumptions has been-"Avoid older systems or older editions of systems, because those were written at a time when we didn't have a good grasp on tutorializing for newer players, and systems were more math/crunch based." Obviously, this is incorrect as back in the old days, books were written with the assumption that people had never played TTRPGs before, where as nowadays there's a lot of carry over between certain systems as TTRPGs have become more mainstream as a hobby.

However, this did leave me curious, as to what actually does classify a system as obtuse, or hard to learn? There are obviously systems that just fundamentally do not work like FATAL. Systems where the mechanics mostly (up to interpretation*) make sense but the book is poorly formatted ala Vampire 5E's core rulebook. And there are systems where there are so many printing errors and mistakes that the mechanics are a mess (What I heard happened with Shadowrun for a good while.) But I'm curious about what some of the broader issues that can make a system harder to grasp can be, as my perspective makes me blind to some obvious issues.

As I said before, I'm a newcomer to TTRPGs and someone who prefers narrative>Crunch in most cases. I really like to learn more whenever I get into a new hobby, so I apologize for asking what may be obvious or basic questions. I'm really grateful for the time and answers folks have to share.

Basically, just what do you like?

What cities do you feel most comfortable using? As a player, where do you enjoy visiting? As a GM, what do you like to use? What makes a city feel good and fun for the game?

Please, be subjective, go nuts. What do you like?

We spend a lot of time here arguing about which systems are "obtuse" or hard to learn, and lately I've been thinking the reading experience and the playing experience are almost two different games.

Mine was Blades in the Dark. Reading it, I bounced hard: flashbacks, stress, position and effect, the whole vocabulary felt like homework, and I put the book down twice convinced it was overengineered. Then I actually ran one heist and it clicked in about twenty minutes. The stuff that read as fiddly on the page turned out to be the exact scaffolding that made improvising a score easy. I went from "this is too much" to "why doesn't everything work like this" in a single session. I've taken flashbacks into other systems several times and it always seems to be a hit.

So I'm curious about everyone else's version of that. Not the system you love unconditionally, but the one your gut told you to avoid based on the book, that won you over once dice actually hit the table. And if you're up for it, what was the specific moment it turned?

Basically looking for a game where the PCs are just normal people, living in a small town where weird supernatural shit keeps happening and they have to deal with it.

So, the Seven Part Pact looks absolutely daunting and insanely fun. Unfortunately I can't commit to buying physical edition. I am considering to back the PDF, but I kinda doubt it is playable that way? I would greatly appreciate if anyone could share their experience of how to play this monster using only PDF material (what to print, what materials to buy, whether it is any fun pretending to be a wizard with a laptop, etc.)!
(Also, do I need to pay extra for their patreon to get a gameable PDF before 2027?)

Do you know any system that was made to be a one-shot machine, and don't have progression rules?

I know some in the horror genre like 10 candles and dread. But a less niche one, is there any?
Or a more generic one-shot system "should" have progression rules just in case?

Assume the players know what tabletop role playing is through cultural osmosis but they have no prior knowledge of game mechanics, are open to any genre and have not watched any games being played online. They have light board/video game experience and are likely more excited about the role playing aspect than crunchy combat.

***Edit***

since a lot of people are responding with "whatever genre they enjoy most" type of responses even though the imaginary player group are open to *any* genre, imagine this scenario is happening at a convention and you are a GM tasked with trying to convert people into tabletop RPGers and only have one game and one adventure to bring with you