**Come here and talk about anything!**

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.

Hi, everyone!

TLDR: looking for tips on getting into RPGs as a whole "adult" (40+) that was always interested but never had a chance to play.

For various reasons, I never had a chance to get into playing, one of the big ones being that none of my friends were interested. I was looking into them in my teens, but couldn't find anyone to play with. I gave up and never pursued it again. Thanks to YouTube and the internet in general, I would like to try again. I have been looking into a few games I am interested in, and I even bought some books. I think I have a decent level of knowledge and understanding of the mechanics, just no actual experience.

I am not sure how to find people to play with, as none of those in my circle are interested. Most local game shops that I found seem focused on kids and younger players. I would prefer to play in person, however, I am open to online games, but I don't know how to find a more mature group that would accept a complete beginner. Thinking about being the old person in a group of kids is giving me major anxiety. I tried to play solo games, but I couldn't get into it.

Is it too late to get started? I would love to hear about experiences of players in a similar situation, and if you were successful in getting started at a later stage in your life.

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https://mountainmissive.substack.com/p/mountain-missive-nr-7-3fd

A new Mountain Missive (blog post) is out. This is a Prismatic Wasteland Random Blogwagon special edition, in which I talk about randomness versus chaos in game design and more importantly the design of a cave generation system, the Cave Rave Manifesto. It's a system that focuses on storytelling and draws parallels between going to a rave in a warehouse and going spelunking in a cave.

My completely free OSR game Mountain Resonance is about alpine survival horror in a 1930ies mountain country suffering from colonialism. Its rules are based on Mothership/the Panic Engine.

Get Mountain Resonance and its supplements for free on itch.io or RPG Trader, and sign up for the upcoming print run on Kickstarter I'm at about a third of the magical threshold of kickstarter sign-ups for ordering more original art for the book. The expanded version will feature many tools for the game master (like the full Cave Rave Manifesto) and the campaign "The Cost of Summer", in which you summit a mystical mountain to sacrifice what is most precious to stop a neverending winter.

Hey everyone. I’m looking for a stalker like ttrpg and I’m having trouble finding anything, so far I’ve looked at S.T.A.L.K.A.N, Twilight 2000 4e, and Mutant year zero but none of them really work for me.

Stalkan feels incomplete and both twilight 2000 and mutant year zero seem to not be available in the United States.
If anyone has suggestions I’d love to hear them, thanks in advance!

I'm going to be playing SWADE (Savage Worlds) for the first time on Saturday. So, I'm trying to wrap my head around the system a bit in advance. I'm trying not to be a min-max jerk, but I am a numbers nerd. So, I'm looking at the distribution of the rolls with the wild die.

For those unfamiliar, you get the better of 1d6 or your skill die on any given roll. Skill dice can be D4-D20. If you roll the highest number on a die, you "ace" and can roll again and add. It's after this process that the best of the two is determined. Generally, there's a target number with 4 being normal difficulty to meet or exceed. Veterans of the system, please let me know if I have missed anything important.

This brings us to the weird corner of the probability chart. A difficulty 6 is more likely to be made with a D4 than a D6. With just a single die, it's about a 2% increase. This is a weird artifact of how the "ace" works. Adding in the "wild die" shrinks the gap, but by only a few tenths of a percent.

I know this is just in one place and the curve works as expected elsewhere, but this seems like a common spot to land. This is where slightly skilled people encounter moderate difficulty.

Am I missing something? I can't be the first person to notice.

i am looking for a good old west rpg. Only one i know is deadlands…

A few days ago, I made a post about how hard it can be to find committed players online, and I was honestly kind of “happy” to realize I’m not the only one struggling with this.

The reason people gave was basically what I already suspected: when you have a large number of people responding to a recruitment post, the chances of weird people showing up increase a lot.

And yeah, that happened almost immediately.

On the same day I made that post, I opened recruitment for a 5e one-shot. Out of the people I interviewed, there was one person I really liked, two I’d say were okay, and one absolute character.

This guy basically kept saying he was a GURPS specialist and spent the whole time talking about how amazing GURPS was. When I said I personally don’t like GURPS because I find it too simulationist, he replied with something like: “That’s because you haven’t had me as your GM.”

Also, his motivation for joining my one-shot was apparently that he wants to run D&D 5e himself in a Harry Potter homebrew setting, but he hates the system, barely knew how to make a character sheet, and was already working on homebrew because he intends to run paid games.

So yeah. That was something.

Anyway, the thing is: I schedule these interviews, but I don’t really know how to be inquisitive without coming across like an asshole.

In person, this is easy for me. It feels natural to approach someone and get a sense of them. But online it feels weird, because I’m not seeing a face. My PC doesn’t have a webcam, so I don’t require other people to use one either. Because of that, I get kind of awkward and usually end up cutting straight to something like: “So, what class are you thinking of playing?”

I know that probably sounds silly, especially since I’ve been GMing for 12 years, but it’s something that happens to me.

So, what questions do you usually ask during online recruitment? How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

I'm plotting something along the lines of Fables, The Sisters Grimm, Once Upon a Time, etc.: fairytale characters interacting in a modern, urban setting. Generally planning for it to be less combat focused than other campaigns I've run and focus more on social encounters and intrigue.

I just don't know what system to use and would like others' thoughts. The group I play with has used D&D 5e, Mutants and Masterminds 3e, and Call of Cthulhu 7th edition. We have used all of these games to run settings that are not what they're intended for. I personally have also had a very brief foray into GURPS with a different group and played a smattering of other ttrpgs that are far too genre specific to be relevant. I've also been looking into how Powered by the Apocalypse games work.

If anyone has any system recommendations I haven't heard of that would be a closer fit, I am happy to learn a new system. If anyone has reasons I haven't thought of not to use a modified version of any of the games I have played, that might save me a headache too.

I'm comfortable heavily homebrewing anything that might be a close fit. If using a system I'm unfamiliar with, this would be after running a number of one shots to make sure I actually understand the system. Please don't try to convince me that you should only use a game for what it's designed to do; I disagree and neither of us is going to convince the other.

I'm constructing a homebrew setting to run for my family — none of us are hardcore RPG people, so the world has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It needs to feel alive the second they step into it, without drowning them (or me) in lore. I won't say it's anything inspiring - It's an isekai-ish fantasy: modern people pulled into a magical world whose underlying "fabric" is slowly unraveling. Seems popular at the moment and an easy concept to start for role playing.

I ended up building it in two deliberate layers, and I'm not sure I got the ratio right.

Breadth - I gave the whole world a light pass: a few continents, a handful of nations and factions, the central cosmic problem, the big conflicts. Enough that whatever direction they wander, something is there - but I purposely didn't go deep. It's scaffolding. Key entities and their motivations, tied to organizations and their purpouse.

Depth - Almost all the real detail and effort so far I've put into a single entry point: a lawless frontier town called Crossings (I know, inspiring) where they'll arrive and probably spend the first few sessions. I tried to make it genuinely lived-in - the marchwarden who runs the place on common sense, half a dozen shopkeepers (baker, smith, ford-keeper, tanner, tailor, apothecary), a tavern owner who's quietly the local information broker, who feeds intel to whom, who's at odds with whom, what each of them did before they landed here, plus a few dated local events (a flood three winters back, a recent magical "tear," the arrival itself).

To get there I wrote a few short stories first - little 2–4k-word scenes from different NPCs' points of view (a market morning, a night at the tavern, the agent who meets new arrivals). Partly to find their voices, partly because it's just easier to know a town after you've watched a few ordinary days happen in it. Then I pulled the people, places, and relationships out of those scenes into an actual map of the town.

https://imgur.com/H6pOYJE
https://imgur.com/3NtUZlD

Here's the result and my actual question:
is this a sensible amount of depth for an entry point, or have I over-cooked one town while the rest of the world is a painted backdrop?

For those who've actually run beginner campaigns:

• How dense do you make the starting location compared to everything else?
• Where do you personally stop adding NPCs and relationships before it's prep you'll never use at the table? I don't have unlimited time
• Does "deep entry point, shallow everywhere else" work in practice, or do they immediately sprint off the edge of your detailed zone?

hello all!! i’m currently in a campaign of spire: the city must fall and i’m playing a carrion-priest! her current goal is to expand her church and eventually basically become the cannibal pope (lol) and i’m trying to make a recruitment poster for her church. i’m having a bit of trouble figuring out what i should write on it? does anyone have any ideas for how to recruit someone to the church of charnel (or propaganda for a cannibalistic religion in general)?

For those of you who didn't catch the onyx path publishing virtual con they announced a bunch of new books and at least one new game. But more importantly they also announced a 3rd edition of scion!!!!

I am so goddamn hyped. Scion my beloved <3