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I keep seeing games have starter sets, and then corebook, and then setting books, and, honestly, I feel starter sets just confuse things? Like, exactly how much of the game can you play with JUST a starter set? Cause it sounds like it's not everything you need, but the stuff to like, run the first game or three.

From a commenter who felt that the general attitude of players was this:

People are extremely resistant to the idea that the DM gets to run the game they want to run and that’s okay. I’ve been heavily downvoted many times on this sub because I said the DM should just do what they want to do and the players can either enjoy the game as it is or quit.

This OP opines that this the general sentiment of reddit. I am honestly amazed that this kind of attitude exists, and I don't think it's widely true. For sure, if you are paying your GM for the game, I think being able ask for the kind of game you want is fine, as it is a paid service.

But for GMs who give up their free time and labor to make a game, is it at all fair for players to be able to dictate what kind of game they get? I feel that is wildly audacious. I've certainly never encountered this from literally 35 years of running games.

I come from a mostly dnd background and I am looking for a system where you can modify existing spells e.g there is the fireball spell and you can adjust the damage, range and number of targets, obviously with a cost for example "more mana point", "longer spell casting time" or any other difficulty.

Is there a system like this?

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For those of you who have been to PAX Unplugged - how is the RPG experience? Are there lots of events with good coverage of gaming systems? Easy registration? Whatever you care to share.

My group just learned that PAX is coming to Houston next summer, so we are very excited - but no one has attended Unplugged before. Looking for first hand experiences.

This idea came to me in a dream.

The gist is, there's an earth-like world where the locals have very low-key powers (like the ability to always land on your feet/upright when falling). Theres also two embassies from both factions of a race of larger robotic beings who are in the midst of a civil war. Due to a funny coincidence, they've essentially ended up being content with using this planet as a neutral Istanbul-type deal. The robots trade tech for weird materials.

You see, the big problem is this giant humanoid colossus that's standing in the ocean and has its shoulders at an elevation of 45k-50k ft. It's bone-white, looks like a mechanical humanoid, and has been depositing monsters that crawl up the ocean/river systems to go eat stuff, usually people. Now it's fine with people getting aboard (if they survive the trip there) and blow-torching a hole to go exploring, because the monsters inside it will eat them 99% of time. But it's completely willing to respond in kind- a battleship that decided to fire a shell at it found itself and its escorts suffering a case of explosions. Recently, it's been escalating- the monsters it sends are becoming larger and larger. But humanity has not been passive; thanks to their trading partners, they've come up with their own giant robot suits to do battle and defend humanity in...ideally before thr colossus fully wakes up.

The mecha should have the agility of an Armored Core (maybe not to the ability to jump 50 m in a single bound, but the assistive , but that could probably be done via narrative feeling rather than explicit mechanics. I would like to have mech gameplay be meaningful (hordes of lesser minions, rival mech fights, larger/massive enemies), but I would also like out-of-mech gameplay to matter. I've heard that the Mecha Hack/Aether Nexus might be what I'm looking for, but I'm not sure which to go with. I get theyre made by the same group, but id like to know if theres any nuances that make one better than the other. Thoughts?

I have a setting in my mind that I would love to DM and that can be a little alterated for other things, but the principal is that this setting has no Sun, and because of that, the world is dark, dead, and very cold.

It is still a fantasy world, but it's dying, and well, there are not much that the characters can do. There are more things, like the old gods vanished with the Sun, and with that, the capability to cast magic, and so, the only way to cast spell is throught runes, that were basically how they were casted but they do not saw this. Or by using the "flesh of the world" (minerals) to become stronger.

Having all this is, I know, really specific, but I probably would change these settings for the system. The most important part is the first one.

Also, no DnD, Pathfinder or GURPS, please. Thank you

(Is this on the right flair?)

These last two months I have been running regularly into the challenge of running very short sessions of Fate. By that I mean two hour games or less. Partially this is because of all the demos I have been running for Criminal Spirits, but more challenging for me has been my own campaign.

My default has always been 3-4 hour sessions. These feel right and I'm very familiar with the pacing for them both in terms of plot and the fate point economy. But I'm running into what is really an obvious problem. One player gets home around 7:30. Another player works early and needs to go to bed at 10:00. Only the fact its run online makes the campaign possible at all. Even then, we are getting only about 2 hours of actual play time a session. It's forcing me to rethink how to pace everything.

I really like to run sessions with some level of story structure. That is, there's a rise, a complication, a climax, a payoff. That's BARELY possible in 2 hours, if you push it. Usually. Sometimes. With effort. I'm also however running into issues specifically with the use of Fate points. There aren't enough dramatic rolls to drain Fate points.

I am looking at needing to do one or more of several things, and I'm not sure I like any of them. Some of them are specific to Fate so I won't detail them here, but two of them are general structural and pacing things that apply to most games.

1. Force more perilous rolls and situations. The problem with this is it means you have to cut short long bits of roleplaying (and by long I don't mean really long, a 30 minute conversation between 5 people isn't that much talking). Often this can feel really artificial and it feels like cutting out some of the best parts of the game.
2. Abandon story structure within single sessions and let them end mid action or structure. However, I do not like this when sessions are happening every 2-3 weeks when things go right. All sense of momentum and investment is lost if you have that long a gap. Getting players hyped back up for a dramatic moment or stay emotionally invested between sessions is tough and unreliable. It also means there will be entire sessions in the build-up phase where nothing should really be that threatening to them.

Have other people had experience with these kinds of short sessions, and found ways to handle them well?

For those of you who have been GMing for a while, what are some things you wish someone had told you when you were just starting out?

It can be about session prep, improvisation, dealing with players, managing expectations, building encounters, handling mistakes, or just learning not to overprepare everything.

What advice would you give to a new GM today, especially something you had to learn the hard way?

I have a friend interested in those systems, but I really don't want to pull together yet another online game that falls apart within a month. Does either system lend itself well enough to running for just one person?

Context: I have a online group running for several years now, we rotate between GMs and systems, but most of the time people just show up with characters made with minimal information provided other than system and genre/broad setting. Most of the time it has been fine, we have fun, its a very chill game environment.

I am stepping up to the GM plate again when the current adventure finishes this weekend and want something a little more before we dive into the next thing. I want everyone to be in channel together and discuss their characters and have a more within the setting functional crew (doing sci-fi this time). While some of the general background I have already dropped in a discord thread, I am intentionally keeping it detail light because I want the players to tell me what kind of adventure experience they want while everyone is present and active instead of trying to just ask within discord and get maybe two of them responding. Sure I have a basic plot plan, but how they players get there could vary a lot. Since this is an ongoing group (one player swap, but someone we know) there is not much need to discussing problem topics, but I understand how that would be important for people not as familiar with one another. Since we do not do longer running campaigns we tend to keep things like character backgrounds really light, usually just asking for a few sentences and maybe one important character/npc relationship so the GM has a little to draw on if they need it.

What are your priorities when doing a session zero for a new adventure? Do you want to info dump as a GM? Do you want deep, well developed characters as a priority? Do you have a lot of table rules that need to be highlighted?