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Just checking in with the r/rpg crowd. What are you playing right now? Got a campaign that’s firing on all cylinders, a memorable character, a ridiculous table story, or maybe a game that surprised you?

Drop a comment and tell us what’s happening at your table. We’d love to hear it.

Has anyone run this? Curios to know how much the formatting and whatnot has improved from the prior edition. I see comments about long winded read aloud text, poor organization, and hard to parse maps from the original.

The redo looks awesome just want a first hand experience of useablility.

Interested in both the DCC and 5e versions!

That's basically the question in the title: what has this hobby given you?

I recently came across the same question in a Hungarian Reddit thread, and my answer was that, for me, roleplaying has been many things at once: a form of self-discovery, a psychologist, a confidence-building activity, a history, English and art teacher, and even a mentor in public speaking. But most importantly, it has been a source of new friendships and connections for someone who was once a socially isolated teenager with very little self-confidence.

Then I started thinking that this question might be even more interesting in an international community. We share the same hobby, but we come from very different political, social, and cultural backgrounds, so I'm curious whether tabletop RPGs have played different roles in people's lives depending on where they grew up and lived.

I'm especially interested in hearing from players outside Europe, or from cultural backgrounds very different from my own. Has this hobby given you similar things, or has it had a completely different meaning or role in your life?

So, I primarily play oneshots and some games I've had a blast with in recent months have been:

The Treasure at the End of this Dungeon is an Escape from This Dungeon and We Will Never Escape from This Dungeon: a very meta poetic GMless game about transformation and dungeon design. The base game contains 5 rooms (in nod to the five room dungeon) and four selves (player classes/archetypes that break the rules of normal dungeon crawling fiction like the thief literally pretending to have rules attached to their class when they are a cheat), although the supplement extends the number and possibilities.

The game goes like this, a player takes the role of a room, the others of the characters. The player answer the first question of the room then picks an element of design. Then fiction turns into a conversation until conditions are met to open a door and leave the room. Characters die on certain condition, can come back or the players create new ones. Players explore the dungeon until session time runs out taking turns being the room through the act of being the one who opens the door.

This sounds simple, but because in the base game there are only 5 rooms, you will always retread old rooms. That can lead to stuff like. There is a room with a puzzle of a lion and owl statues and moon and sun lanterns. The room is in twilight. Take the lanterns and place them on the statues whether to either let them forever sleep through their animalic habits or wake them up and kaiju fight. (I stole that, I confess) Return to the room. It is blinding day light. On the floor there is a mirror. Mage shatters the daylight into motes and then shatters the mirror into cracks. The muscle enlarges a crack so that we might slip through. There is a seemingly never-ending ladder and darkness. The mage throws the motes into the darkness to light what is below.

Return to the room. You are now in the lantern of a now sleeping sculpture. Break the hinges and open the door.

Dead House: I believe I got the title right. I played it at an online con. By the makers of Fiasco. A GMless game where you play through the winter of 1888. There are three seasons: Fall, Winter and Hell. It is a game that starts out with putting the locations and npcs on your board to create a map of the town. This isn't as freeflow as I would have liked as characters have deep links to one another and cannot just be randomly set. Same with locations. The goal of this part is probably to get acquainted with the cast.

Then the game follows answering a series of prompts, similarly to The Quiet Year, only darker. The first season start fairly unassuming, then it gets worse. People will die. A lot. People will go crazy. The aim is to reproduce despair. It's basically about a winter where the situation got dire as resources dwindled and people were left without food and wood to burn when it was blizzarding outside and they had no exterior help.

The characters are miserable too. They are layered people and many of them have been stuck in the small village due to circumstances and hate being there, especially the youth.

What I really liked despite being mechanically bareboned was that the story started telling itself and even though I started with rooting for certain npcs, in the end, I was killing them off and orchestrating their fates based on narrative logic and what would tell a better story. Only 4 people lived. I hated them all. It was a success.

Parsely: an rpg that mimics old computer text games. Containing 12 scenarios in the base book it is a game of few words. The players take turn controlling the nameless PC through a set of pre-written commands such as go north, go south, examine, take [object]. You even have the ability to save. The map is not visible and needs to be drawn by hand, lest you go in circles or meet dead ends like we kept doing in the jungle adventure. The adventures are very on rails, although they have several potential endings. What I mean by this is they emulate simple games and your actions are restricted. An adventure has several predetermined locations of interest, several predetermined challenges with most likely predetermined potential solutions, predetermined endings, etc. It acts as a puzzle on figuring out how to progress. It even has somewhat moon logic solutions, though most stuff makes sense. It can get very silly because of the extreme constrictions.

The Dunwich Horror: this is the name under which the playtest was offered. It's the GMless Cthulhu conspiracy board game. As with Carved from Bridlewood, it is a mystery without a preset solution, although it goes in opposite direction of that format. Where in CfB there are two mystery phases, the collection of clues and the theorizing, in The Dunwich Horror, the gameplay loop is that your characters, all playing pregen investigators have an evidence board and some preset named clues in the shape of lead cards containing locations, myths, npcs, etc. which you will through the course of the play tie in with cute little strings.

You start by doing backgrounds: the occult site you work for, your character intro. Then you arrive in the town and start investigating. You play out doing stuff at locations and trying to figure out things and you make a lot of shit up in an improv kinda' way. As you do you add a clue to the board, tie it together with other clues and dice roll for pushback. When pushback happens you advance on a three phase table and see the dangerous or supernatural consequences meddling with the eldritch create. These start tame, but get progressively more dangerous until your character's untimely demise or worse. You may also add more connections instead of clues.

Unlike Brindlewood Bay, you will theorize at every step of the way trying to figure out how everything fits in a hyperactive brainstorm. You will end up reviewing information and adjusting your beliefs as more suspects and clues are added and things are tied in. There is even a time of solace when the group can get together in a safe place to go over their leads and see how to proceed next. That happens in the middle, not at the end.

And in the last phase it becomes obvious that you are way over your head. You can at the end chose to kill off your character, go insane or worse or flee. But generally people pick the first two options cause Lovecraft.

I'm gonna be brief, I never wanted to use the new Reddit interface and always stuck to Old Reddit. Recently, it has been decided that logging in would be mandatory to use old reddit, another step further to try and smother it, to force people to go to the new shittier and more ad friendly interface. The days of old reddit are numbered, and one day they will pull the plug for good. If I can't use Old Reddit, then I will not use Reddit at all, which means I need a new place on the web to discuss RPGs.

Where are the other big RPG communities on the internet? Some friends of mine have suggested Discord, but I always felt that it was better for casual chat than long and in depth conversations, and debates. Also I vetoed places such as RPG NET because of their adversarial, and downright user hostile approach of moderation.

This post may mean trouble for my account, so if you have an interesting answer, give it quick.

I've been looking at putting together a time loop scenario for something investigative horror-based, so I'm interested in the way that others have included mechanics to build tension, and I'm trying to find rhe ones that work best for me.

I'm not set on a system, but what I've seen so far in homebrew I've played was:

• Decreasing PC count, with players each starting with 2 characters, every reset deleting a randomly chosen character from the total party or rendering them nonplayable + antagonistic until everyone is down to 1 character, and then continuing the process from there.
• Increasing mental instability: played this in Delta Green. It included increasing sanity costs with each reset, along with picking up mental disorders.
• Injuries retained to some degree: I've seen this with damage, but it's been most effective in an ALIEN game where critical injuries were essentially retained and then downgraded into a lesser form of themselves.
• Later reset: instead of resetting back to exactly where events began, the players reset to some point forward of that point, with events between the previous reset point and the new one now set in stone.
• Instability of NPCs: With each reset, an increasing number of important NPCs become mentally unstable in some way, eventually culminating in severe paranoia and violence

A friend and I are looking for something to facilitate some RP, and I was wondering if there were any rules light systems for playing James Bond-style Cold War spies. I’ve already looked a bit into Spycraft and Classified, but we just need something that we could pick up easily

I'm struggling to understand how leaving regions in The Last Caravan is supposed to work. Per the rules, for most regions there is a specific narrative condition you have to meet so that your caravan moves to another region. The narrative arcs are very specific, so I could easily imagine scenarios in which:

- characters fail to fulfil the conditions;

- players and characters are not invested enough in the premise to engage with the condition (say, because of their faction alignment);

- some in-game events preempt the narrative premise (say, because of the faction conflicts).

What then?

I could easily see that failing to fulfil the requirement also allows you to leave the region, I could imagine that hooks should be replaced with different ones to make sure players stay invested etc. I could imagine that if players just ignore the hooks, I could advance some clocks. However, FiTD games tend to have rather tight design when it comes to their basic play loop, so I've been wondering whether I'm not missing something fundamental. Maybe it is intentionally possible to just not go any further with the caravan and "loose"? Maybe there are some developers' clarifications or games with similar mechanics where the intent was clearer?

I guess that the issue is so pronounced, since the characters are supposed to just head towards California, so there seems to be a fair amount of possible drama around just leaving some people in need behind you without engaging with their problems and it seems that this should be a genuine in-game possibility.

I've been indulging myself recently in some of Trevor Hendersons art work, and it came to mind whilst I was browsing that I would really enjoy to run a cryptid themed horror TTRPG for my group. I made another post on this recently but once again Obscure: Found Footage Horror TTRPG came to mind (It's really niche though it was played by Mystery Quest so that peaked my interest), but I'm unsure if that would be any good for a cryptid centered horror session. If anyone can think of any good Cryptid themed horror TTRPGs, that would be great!

Bonjour,

Je cherche un jeu med fan où sont mêlés Osr et Pbta avec de l'émergence et une narration collaborative pour un mode de jeu en table ouverte (West March)

J'ai lu en diagonale Dungeon World, Shadowdark, Black Sword Hack, Blades in the Dark auxquels je trouve des qualités mais quelque chose coince à chaque fois. Mes buts étant:

1. Ne faire aucune préparation
2. les joueurs créent leur univers au fur et à mesure, potentiellement avec des questions
3. les conséquences des actions sont laissées aux joueurs
4. je veux qu'il y ait du challenge
5. J'aime la graduation dans la résolution, pas juste échec ou réussite
6. Pas 50 mécaniques à gérer
7. Un accent sur le développement fictionnel des personnages
8. Un accent sur la politique, conflits d'intérêts etc
9. L'univers continue d'avancer indépendamment des joueurs même s'ils peuvent accélérer ou freiner les événements.
10. Je préfère ne pas me reposer sur des tables aléatoires ou des oracles.

Le problème étant de ne pas faire un collage de différents jeux mais d'en trouver un seul qui combine tout cela avec potentiellement une ou deux choses à adapter si ce n'est pas possible.

Je ne suis pas contre un jeu sans MJ

Vous auriez des idées ?

Edit: holy hell, I didn't expect SO many suggestions, you guys are the best, thank you so much!

I started playing d&d from 3.5 and also played enough of 5e. It has a lot of cool stuff, but also a lot of stuff that I hate. It's difficult to check new systems and judge them without actually playing a little and there are a lot of them... I'm sorry for a lot of words here, but if you have some time can you guys recommend a good system based on my specific nitpicks?

1. I hate that a lot of stuff is there just because it was always there, not because its good game design. Like fireball is intentionally OP because its iconic and sort of a "brand" and taking any alternative feels bad. Spell slot system just feels outdated and too cumbersome for new players. I want the system to be built with good game design in mind, not "we have to save 50 year old legacy" bullshit.
2. Whole system build around resurrection being a common tool. Death is not dramatic, its just a resource. Also because of that i have to come up with bullshit reasons why specific important npc or backstory character cannot just be brought back. Or why nobles aren't just reviving everyone important for them every day. Death should be important and dramatic narrative moment and permanent. And i can't just homerule "there is no resurrection magic" because the whole system is built with resurrection as resource in mind and I would have to rebalance all of it basically making my own system.
3. Opportunity attacks kill all dynamics in combat when dynamics is already one of the weakest parts of ttrpg. Its a stupid mechanic that leads to "come close, do not move, roll dice until one of you is dead" the optimal tactic which is extremely boring.
4. Improvising cinematic cool shit is usually less optimal in termns of raw rules. Its always better to strike with your longsword than smashing a chair into enemy's skull because "improvised weapon is d4 and longsword is d8". This discourages creativity.

5.1 Tons of "you don't get to play the game" effects. I could see "mind control" effects kind of fun if you just tell your player "now you get to pvp legally, have fun". but stun/paralise? okay, you took time out of your week/month to come play the game and now you just sit there for half an hour doing nothing while other players take their turns because you failed a save. Or maybe even more if you fail your consecutive save. Great game design guys.

5.2. Roll to hit is basically the same shit. Fighter waits their turn for 20 minutes after all spellcasters doing their shit, rolls 5 and 7 on his two attacks and can go make coffe feeling he didn't do anything.

5.3. Saving throws are weird too. Either you wasted your only 5 lvl slot and nothing happens, or enemy just stunned you (see 5.1). I get it that "save or die" effects are less common now, but they just became "save or suck" and you still don't get to play the game even if your character sheet is still technically there. Maybe some gradation system could be cool, dunno.

1. A lot of character archetypes just suck in terms of player fantasy. Wanna be a cool necromancer? Okay, you can summon...1 skeleton. When you're at least lvl 3. And after 1 round of combat he is dead and you're just slinging fire bolts again. Wow, thats definitely what I imagined when I wanted to play cool necromancer. Sure...

2. DMG says the system balance is build around 6-8 medium difficulty encounters per long rest. When you're trying to play anything other than tightly packed dungeon crawl (but remember, D&D is not just dungeon crawl anymore, its versatile system and you can play any type of game with it!!!) you usually have on average 1 meaningful combat per day. So either martials feel shit because spellcasters go nova every time, or you have to come up with bullshit 6-8 combats per DAY, which take several sessions. Wow, we've been playing this campaign for a year and it's been...3 days in game time? and all pcs are suddenly demigods now even though we _just_ entered this dungeon. Sure you can tell "use gritty realism rules", then its the other way around. Your wizard casts their 5 spells in 1-2 in game days...and the rest of the week just spamming firebolt and feels like shit. Maybe we could balance character classes without spreading them between "short rest based" and "long rest based" so I as dm dont have to fucking juggle this balance myself every time I try to make a story?

3. It feels like lvl20 is there mostly for marketing purposes trying to sell you godlike power fantasy? who actually plays at these levels? All i ever see online is people saying its basically impossible to make actually good games at this point and system is just broken.

4. Lorewise its cool that humans live 80 years and elves live 700. But I do not buy that an elf with 250 years of life experience would find any common ground with an 18 year old human. Have you ever tried to communicate with people 10 years younger than you? It already feels like talking to a toddler, imagine 250 year difference. And also they both get to cast 2 spells a day? Come on...

5. Can I have a cost for every magic item please? If I want the "they are rare and not really tradable" feeling that dmg tries to force on you, I can do it myself. But why the fuck do I have to actually come up with item cost myself if i need to?

What I actually like:
11. Complexity level for new players. 5e made it reasonably easy to learn the game. I would be okay with a simpler system, but probably not more complex one.
12. Large bestiary of cool thematic monsters made over the years. But I could just steal these into a different system...
13. (dis)Advantage system is pretty cool
14. Its kind of actually good in being middle ground base for different types of games. Yes, it sucks in lots of specific ways, but in general it feels like you can combine different elements into a single game fairly well.
15. 5e has made a good job in lowering the amount of random "+1" effects that I have to track for every little thing. pathfinder sometimes feels like im doing math homework instead of actually playing the game.
16. I like rolling dice other than just d6s. Although my favourite d12 is still too rare...
17. I like generic heroic fantasy as main focus of the system

I mean, technically I could come up with homerules fixing these things...but I feel like it would be easier to just fucking make a new system from scratch. I mean there has GOT to be a system that already exists and doesn't have these problems?
Thank you so much if you read this far.