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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.

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.

So, I've noticed a trend in this subreddit where the mere mentions of certain games or systems automatically get downvotes. Rather than just complaining about this, I thought I'd try to start a constructive conversation. What are some games or systems that you are tempted to downvote on sight? Why? And what games do it better?

For example: I'm not a fan of "generic" systems, whether they are narrativist (FATE) or simulationist (GURPS). To me, they feel bland and uninteresting. By trying to be able to do everything, they don't do anything particularly well. That being said, I've enjoyed games built on both of these systems (I played in an Atomic Robo mini-campaign and had a ton of fun), but find that the generic versions put too much on the shoulders of the GM.

Please, let's keep it civil and remember that these are just opinions!

I mean, sometimes, with various systems, I feel that the attributes don't fully cover everything they could, as if something is missing. I can't explain it well, but it's the feeling I get when I want to play D&D with a character who uses Charisma for magic, but I don't want to create a charismatic character. I know some would say that high Charisma doesn't always mean sociability, but if I always do well on social tests, then... what's the point of trying to roleplay him as a socially inept person?

Does that make sense?

I don't know what the best set of attributes would be for me to choose; I was just figuring that out a few minutes ago. And I'm not that familiar with that many systems. Something I can remember now is how cool I think it is that you use composure instead of dexterity to shoot firearms in VTM. And I didn't particularly like the system of Kult: Divinity Lost, but I find the attribute choices interesting, and the character sheet's aesthetic using the Tree of Life is quite satisfying.

SOLVED: The Hunt
by Leo Normington, Jr.

Ihad a game book from the late 1980s (If i remember correctly… may have been late 70s to early 90s, but I assume it was done after running man premiered in 87). It was a gift from a friend and I loaned it to someone else who had interest in DMing a playthrough. Unfortunately it disappeared and none of us can remember the title to track down a replacement. As I understand, it was a self-published game book that the creator would travel around cons trying to sell, but it never got published. It had a plain brown paper cover and black and white pages. The illustrations were rudimentary and reminded me of sketches I did in class in middle school. It was a post-apocalyptic death game TV show with different human contestants. It is definitely reminiscent of the running man. It was based not only around killing the other players or the elite hunter characters, but around how spectacular the kills are. Don’t remember much past that, but one of the illustrations had a guy with an uzi with a bunch of 1980s steroided action hero muscles (in my memory he was wearing a leather vest, jeans, and had a headband and a mullet, but I may not be remembering correctly). Anyone remember this game or the creator’s name?

I apologize in advance if this is sloppily written. This is mostly just a vent.

Yesterday my group had a session and I feel I've finally lost hope in this group. This is a group of friends I know in person, I've been obsessed with ttrpgs for years, and it took me forever to gather together a group to play together with, so when I finally got to sit down with a group I was ecstatic. I became the GM. It was my first time GMing but I felt I could keep up with practice and passion for the hobby. I feel I did good for my level, and I feel I've been improving with each session. Yet, as the game progressed we have had some major hiccups.

The first hiccup was one of the players, who was a lot more experienced in ttrpgs, didn't seem to ever enjoy anything I did. At the end of every session I only got criticism, not a single positive thing to say. Which I was totally down for criticism if it helped me at all. It all just came down to "I'm not satisfied with this." On top of that, the player would constantly micromanage the other players, and would shut down any ideas. My more quiet or shy players would totally shut down at times and stop roleplaying. We were all still new to actually playing, and I was new to GMing so we were all struggling to figure out the issue. I blamed my GMing.

Things got really bad with this player in the finale of our first little 8 session campaign. The final session had a lot more combat, which was something I was still struggling to make engaging, but narratively I thought I was cooking. They were cool and thematic, and they had interesting gimmicks and hazards, the issue with the combat was my players felt things revolved into hit, wait, hit, wait. Which I still do blame myself for. Anyways, when we reached the final boss, the problem player quite literally said. "Do we have to do this?" and I totally caved, I felt so guilty, and all the anxiety I felt before every session to live up to this players expectations went to the max.

Months later, even today I cringe thinking about that session. We moved onto another game and the problem only got worse, I think the player didn't like the system or something because they refused to even participate in the roleplay, and I eventually just cracked and decided to continue the game without them. As I realized how incompatible the player was with us and the rest. Essentially it took me that long to get some back bone.

Now comes to the second issue. Obviously scheduling is an issue for many groups, and I've been a hardass on coming up with some sort of measures for scheduling. Scheduling in the previous game was awful, maybe once a month on a random day. But now, whenever we do play I notice half the group comes an hour late, something that could be avoided. I even account for the lateness and they are still late. Recently its felt they're treating the sessions more like a party as they've been bringing alcohol and snacks, which was fine before but now it just feels like a lot more than previously. But at least the roleplay was good, and people seemed somewhat invested in the game. That's the part that confused me. Sometimes they feel like they're just in love with this as I am, and sometimes it feels like they hate being here. Last session was genuinely awful.

We started an hour late, two players were more invested with something on their phones (which I did call out in the beginning), and we basically took a break that was 1/3 of our time. Not to mention for some reason some of the players decided to sleep 4 hours the previous night? So they were exhausted. At that point I didn't fight it, I just rolled with it because I feel I gave up in that moment, I can't fight it anymore. It just feels like I'm the only one who actually wants to play, and everyone else is playing because I asked them too. It made me feel like that kid on the playground begging to play. I have set boundaries, rules, and expectations multiple times. I have been vocal with my frustrations, and there's just nothing. Which hurts because when the game is good, it feels good. They are totally capable of participating and having fun. Yesterday had some great moments!

To top it off, a month ago I joined an online group for the first time as I wanted more experience playing ttrpgs, I joined as a player to learn from the GM and have myself some fun. I think this may have hurt more than anything, this group is amazing. Everyone shows up, talk about their characters outside of sessions, the roleplay is fun, the game is fun. Not to mention the GM is actually amazing, I've learned so much to improve my own GMing. Yes, the group is more experienced, but what hits me the hardest is they actually want to be in this game. They talk about it AFTER the session, that's something I wish my players did. Whenever I bring it up I feel annoying!

There's probably some more I can add but that's the gist of this vent. I know the solution is to find new players, but I think I'm hesitant for the reason of wanting to play with friends, not being confident in my GMing enough to GM for strangers, and just how long it took me to find a group before. I think I'm just upset because rpgs feels like all I have at times, its something that keeps me going, its my passion. It really hurts when it doesn't go right, because life can already suck. I've only GM'd for a total of 17 sessions. It's been a year since we started.

As I'm sure we all do, I occasionally have an idea for a campaign or one shot (a gunman, journalist, and old ranch hand meet on the last cattle drive; Lizzy and the rain man meets Nyarlathotep; a bunch of dwarves, each with a claim to the throne,join forces to find their abandoned ancestral home).

I'll often end up spending months working on turning it into a one sheet, but I end up with a bunch of wasted effort, and sometimes the actual thing never hits a table because it took so long.

In my younger days I thought I could get around that with stacks of premade characters and locations, but I've found that rarely actually helps.

So the question is, when you have an idea for a campaign, what has been the most successful and efficient method you've used for getting it in shape to bring to the table?

https://www.reddit.com/r/daggerheart/comments/1sz6vap/the_future_of_foundryborne_navigating_the/

Not sure how many of you are aware of the Daggerheart system (Darrington Press and Critical Role's newest RPG) but there's been some significant discussions over their Community Gaming License and limitations imposed on the community because of it.

While the above post directly highlights the issues in the VTT ecosystem, there are ongoing concerns with the CGL in general, especially with creators in the space. The current license prevents the development of VTT resources - pdf and paper are their current formats of choice.

https://www.reddit.com/r/daggerheart/comments/1l2fvrd/daggerheart_community_license_issues/

Is a back and forth discussion on the benefits or merits of the CGL.

A possibly unintended side effect of the license is that while third party creators are welcomed, it is challenging for them to develop virtual assets to be used in online gaming. In this current age that is somewhat surprising.

It's also curious that Daggerheart, which was developed in response to the WOTC licensing woes is creating a closed online ecosystem. At its launch it was promised to be an open gaming license.

Both the DrawSteel and Pathfinder 2e gaming licenses are much more open than Daggerheart's CGL. It's understandable to want to keep control of an IP. Pathfinder does this by allowing full access to mechanics, and creators are free to create online content however they wish, but Golarion and its lore is excluded.

Daggerheart is one of the easiest systems to homebrew that I've personally used. It seems to have been designed from the ground up for third part creation. Everything, except for the license.

I don't think I'm particularly biased in this. I've very little skin in the game. I'm not a third party creator. I just like playing my games wherever I choose to play them and am surprised in the stance of a company that designed and funded a game during the OGL wave.

I have just launched my new Kickstarter for Petmon. You can find it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/covok/petmon/description

Petmon has been an interesting project that I've been working on for a while. It started in 2017 when I considered using "Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine" to make a Digimon fan hack. I put that aside after just the basic outline and focused on another title of mine, Friendship, Effort, Victory.

Years later, I went back to it and went "wow, this is a great idea." I reached out to Jenna Moran and got approval to go forward. A lot has changed since then -- hence why I now dub it running on the Pet Engine -- but I'm still grateful to Jenna for letting me know it was safe to go forward.

Obviously, I don't have the Digimon license so we moved to a more generic concept of "pet monsters". Originally, it was actually called "My Pet Monster," but that was apparently a line of teddy bears made by Hasbro. Yeah, had no idea. Had to rename the game.

The playtesting started in 2021. We had two campaigns. One was run by me. And, well, it was messy back then. If you've ever made a game, you know that it never works on the first draft. The first few months of playtesting was devoted to constant rewrites. But, eventually, we got something that worked. Once I was confidant, I asked one of the players to run a campaign for the same group with me as a player. Amber was super nice and did that for me.

We had an awesome 1.5 year campaign. There was so many highlights. And seeing the game from the player's perspective helped me fix a lot of problems on the other end. Like, there really wasn't any good reason to call on the power of darkness originally. I had to really make that an attractive option for players to take the risk.

But, we had great moments. My favorite is still when Penny, my character, went all "Jerri from late season Tamers" after forcing her partner, Klank, to evolve and had a Darkness Burst. Basically, Klank became a monster temporarily. The reconciliation we had later that let Klank finally, properly evolve was great. Felt like a moment from one of our biggest inspirations, Digimon.

It's worth noting that it is funny launching the game now. I decided to not update the intro where I discussed the gaming landscape in 2019, but, when I started dev work in 2019, there were only about 3 or so Monster Taming games on the market. I listed all that existed at the time, like Animon. Since then, I'm happy the genre has exploded. It feels like we all independently had the idea around the same time and are all coming to market now. Guess that makes sense, really.

Still, I feel proud of Petmon and I think it has a place in this gaming landscape. It does a lot of things differently. From its focus on being easily hackable to any style of Monster Taming to its very strict focus on the narrative of a child growing up due to their experiences in the monster world, Petmon is something different. It's something that came from somewhere else, but I really feel I made it my own.

I really hope people will enjoy it. I am a lifelong fan of Monster Taming. I remember watching Digimon on Saturday mornings and being the weird "Digimon kid" at schools. I remember Monster Rancher and Medabots and all those other shows that tried to get us to make our parents buy useless toys and games. I wanted something that created the same experience you got following that show, week to week, seeing these kid characters grow.

Like, Mimi my favorite character from Adventure for just how much she changes from a selfish kid into a sincere, caring person. I wanted a game that would help groups have that kind of experience at the table. Yes, I know some will say you can do any story with any rules, but there is always a difference between fighting the system to have your story and having a game that supports that kind of story.

If you are wiling to take the chance, I very much appreciate it if you consider backing Petmon.

Due to the new updates to rule 7 of this subforum, I don't know if I can respond to comments on this post. But, I made the Kickstarter page very honest on a lot of the mechanics. I hope that answers most of the questions.

I feel like this is probably an obscure request, but I have wanted to run a TTRPG that can replicate the feeling of the Marvel Contest of Champions video game.

I'm open to any suggestions.

Next week will be the final session for a campaign I've been running for over 2 years now with a group of 3 wonderful players on a biweekly basis. About 40 sessions total (some days were missed) but a complete story from start to finish.

While I'm sitting here hoping that the ending will be satisfying I was curious:

- if you've run a long campaign, how did its ending go?

- what has been your most satisfying campaign ending? (Player of GM perspective)

- what do you like to see in a final session?

For context on the campaign: it was a "treasure planet" themed campaign with finding a treasure map and being hunted for it while trying to find the treasure. They are now at the ominous temple the map leads to in deep space and will finally try to claim their prize.

Whle heating up for our last game, I've found this great supplement by Virdian on Itcho, that resumes the game rules in a few pages:

https://viridianvoid.itch.io/triangle-agency-cheat-sheet

Now, if someone knows of a supplement that provides 1d20 1d12 randomizing tables, lemme know! Would love to have tables to support GM prep and generate stuff on the fly containing..

• co-worker NPC names,
• local branch features (weird and otherwise) ,
• anomaly visual features,
• anomaly impulses,
• mission locations,
• in-mission complications,
• ray gun variant forms,
• sanctioned attires for office work,
• optional objectives,
• resonants' anomalous visual cues,
• regional competitors/rivals,

etc.

And we're back with episode 4 of our Chuubos Exocolonist actual play:

Episode 4 - (YT, Podbean) - our Exocolonist stalk Sol and get shocked by how busy she gets every day.

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