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Mine is that I don’t get the appeal of “always hit” mechanics like in Nimble or Draw Steel. I’m sure there are very good reasons to use it, and I don’t doubt the games still work, but I just don’t have a problem missing an attack sometimes.

Lately I've noticed that a non-trivial amount of fantasy TTRPGs have been including some manner of playable merchant (or similarly-named) class as a player option, despite how that archetype is typically thought of as an NPC-only role.

The big examples currently in my head would be Tactiquest, Fabula Ultima: Natural Fantasy, and Vagabond (where a class straight up called a Merchant shows up, typically with boons pertaining to handling inventory and money as a form of support). The Wildsea: Storm & Root also delivers with its Marketeer post, which offers similar deal-making and resource management benefits.

Curiously most of these games take some or a lot of inspiration from JRPG video games, where, as I undestand it, the concept of a playable merchant class is a bit more established than in most of Western-style fantasy (across both tabletop and video game spheres).

And now I'm kind of curious if there's more, and how such classes (or playbooks, or archetypes, or what have you) play!

I'm the type of person who knows very little about the history of the systems I play and mostly creates my own worlds. For me, the most valuable thing is the rules (obviously a certain "why" of things being the way they are is necessary, but I don't like/usually get too involved with the history of the systems). This is coming from someone whose favorite system is Mage: The Ascension.

I read through books for mutants and masterminds and thought the power system offered a lot of options but was a little rules light, I'm looking for something with plenty of options for my players to build their concepts, but that is a little crunchier, help a gal out?

Some of my favorite has to be jinxed, from fallout. Where everyone around you has a higher chance of their failures are critical but you also have a higher chance of critical failures.

Or also from the pen and paper fallout, which is incredibly hilarious. Bonsai- through careful nurturing, you've gotten a small fruit tree to grow out of your head and once per day a fruit will appear in your inventory.

So you’ve established all player characters, their connections to the world, and to each other. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, a character is retired or dies and the player wants to build a new character. Now, the plot has been going on for a bit, so it makes it much harder to plausibly explain how this new character’s goals align with the party’s, how they join the party in the first place, and how they’re connected to the world in a way that makes them feel interesting without a second session 0.

How do you guys handle it when one of your players has to create a backup and introduce them to the plot?

I've been noodling on a game for a few years whose elevator pitch is "you are your ideas". Not in the burning wheel sense of a character made from beliefs, but in the sense that individuals don't matter. The game is about directly challenging the impact of your beliefs on the world, and how the world impacts them in return.

The original concept for this was that I wanted to replicate the feeling of Isaac Asimov's Foundation (the books, not the show), in the sense that the players would all be responsible for shepherding a crumbling society through forecasting and manipulating structural forces rather than individual heroic action. "do your ideas make sense for the outcomes you want", more or less

I won't bore you all with too much detail but the rough gameplay loop looks something like this:

1. Each player represents a group seeking political power (a merchant house / cult / noble house / mercenary band / refugee coalition / criminal gang / etc.)
2. Like a character, these groups have distinct traits:
   1. In Burning Wheel fashion, they have beliefs (how they think the world works) instincts (specific if/then descriptions which define how that group responds to certain situations) and connections (relationships with other groups)
   2. They have stats which double as resources. Like reputation / goods / population / stability / satisfaction / etc.
3. There are a bunch of NPC groups that have the same beliefs/instincts/stats as player groups.
   1. These need to be created by the GM initially, although players can have input on the creation of new ones, or on how old ones change over time (when their stability gets too low, they will collapse and become a new group (or multiple, if their population is high enough)
4. The state of your society is an average of all the stats of all the player / NPC groups (ex: your societies stability is an average of all the groups stability)
5. The GM and the group will define at the start (and add more over time) universal truths about your society and what it means when certain stats go up or down on a societal level (ex: "we all hate war gods", "low reputation, stability and goods leads to crime" etc)
6. The GM will layout a decision tree of if/else statements (maybe 3 levels deep) that specify what happens if certain triggers are met. for example "If crime gets above X point, a religious group will do Y. Else, refugees will flood the city". The exact values of those variables get decided by the GM when time passes based on what makes the most sense given the available NPC groups
7. Players pick what actions they want to take to influence the situation ("I want to bribe the cult of the snake to stop stealing grain", "I want to dredge the canals to ease intra city travel"), and If reasonable, the GM will deduct resources based on the scope (a la Nobilis). Players may be forced to take actions based on their group's instincts.
8. Once everyone has picked something to do, the GM tells them how the world changes. If what happened was sufficiently different from what they expected to happen, players can change their beliefs. NPC groups and universal truths will similarly change if appropriate
9. New stats and connections are gained by beliefs changing or being proven true
10. GM shifts the if/else cards down a level
11. repeat steps 7 - 10

So my question mainly is:

- Does this sound fun? If not, what would you recommend changing to make it fun?

- Does this sound like it solves the original goal of "challenge your beliefs"

- Have you heard of any similar games that have mechanics I could crib?

Hey y'all, this is pretty specific, so maybe y'all can't help me, or maybe ya can, but...

What are your favorite "Locked Box" scenarios?

Essentially, the idea of a locked box scenario is you get a ton of characters stuck in one room together. They may or may not know each other, but there's usually something they have to do before they can safely leave.

Two of my favorite examples are "La Cena", a Kult: Divinity Lost scenario, where a Cuban-American family in the 1950's is stuck at the dinner table together by some unseen force, or "Cabin Fever", a Cyberpunk 2020 scenario where the players were part of an operation that unleashed deadly gas, and get stuck in a room filled with other suspicious people, including a guy about to go cyberpsycho...

Anyway, love this genre. Any other "locked box" scenarios y'all are aware of? I feel they do especially well for one-shots.

Does anyone have any experience/advice on running a "sandbox mystery" campaign? I'm looking to drop my players into a city and have them stay there and in the nearby environs for the entirety of the campaign, and have them untangle a bunch of different supernatural mysteries that the city is just rife with (some of the mysteries will be interrelated, some not/just cospatial+cotemporal). I'm mainly familiar with running premade investigative scenarios that are typically quite narrow/bounded; does anyone have any advice and/or resources to enlighten me on this topic/subgenre?

Hi.

I have been watching a bunch of ttrpg’s online, listening to podcasts, etc. for the last five years. I’ve never actually played a game (except for one time many years ago in high school when I sat in on a friends game and “helped” my friend play- I don’t remember much about that).

In a few weeks, four friends and I are going to a cabin for five days. I thought this might be the perfect time to try out a ttrpg. My friends are very creative, some are into video game rpgs, we are all really into storytelling and fantasy, but none of us has ever played a ttrpg.

Is there an rpg board game that is heavier on storytelling than combat that might be good for absolute noobs? With a fairly simple game mechanic? I am excited to try gm-ing, but I can’t imagine putting together a campaign for the first time.

Thanks so much.

Edit to say: I think I mean like a “game kit” as much as a board game. Something with maybe premade maps, characters, adventure, etc? I think we need some hand holding for the first time.

Good? Bad? Somehow devolve into a battle royal?