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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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In Brazil, Saint George is informally celebrated as the patron saint of tabletop roleplaying games. Unlike an official religious designation, this is a creative and affectionate tradition born from the gaming community. The connection is purely symbolic: just as the saint is a warrior on horseback who defeats a dragon, RPG players see him as the ultimate archetype of the heroic adventurer facing monsters and challenges.

https://www.rederpg.com.br/2011/04/23/salve-sao-jorge-padroeiro-do-rpg-brasileiro/

https://mundotentacular.blogspot.com/2011/04/salve-sao-jorge-padroeiro-dos-jogadores.html

I played my first ttrpg the other day. I had a blast. The DM ran it very well and everyone was inclusive and seemed to be having a good time. I'm definitely hooked and ready to get back in.

One thing I did notice though was that there seemed to be a contrast between the way I wanted to play the game and the way the rest of the group wanted to play.

I wanted to focus on solving the main quest mystery. I wanted to recruit allies, undermine enemies, and find clever solutions to problems along the way. I wanted to do reconnaissance on the evil criminal org and find out how they worked so we could infiltrate them. If a particular situation seemed dangerous I wanted to try to discover more about it before I engaged it further. I definitely roll played as best as I could too though.

The other players, while they did slowly get around to being interested in the main quest, seemed to want to do more of what I would call frolic in the setting. They wanted to go crashing through out of the way haunted graveyards. They had somewhat lengthy conversations with major NPCs regarding personal matters to their characters. If there was a statue on the wall with an evil aura surrounding it they wanted to walk over and grab it. They tended to want to go into situations by kicking down the door, bursting in, and announcing "we're here what happens next".

I want to be clear that none of this is a complaint about the way anybody played. I had fun and it looked like everyone else did too. But I did feel like I had to gently steer the group back on track at times and we sometimes walked away from critical NPCs without asking what I felt were the right questions(or any questions).

So being new to ttrpgs is this just a player dependent thing? Is the way the other players played the game pretty standard or are play styles pretty diverse across the community?

Here in Canada I realized

1. Fandom II of Ottawa is moving & perhaps closing, its last (of two) original owner died. Opened in 1978 I believe. Super popular 1979 - 1987. Hopefully they will find a new location & stay open.

2. My local game store suddenly stopped displaying RPG materials, is focusing on comics now. (People buy comics?! What?). I suspect Diamond was their main RPG supllier. They dropped Magic: The Gathering events years ago.

Even Indigo (bookstore chain) and Walmart seem to have scaled down or dropped RPG offerings.

How is your local game store doing these days?

For DCC & others sometimes we get PDFs when buying hardcover books, I don't see how retail stores can compete.

One of my favourite thing about systems where the line between combat and everything else is blurry to non-existent and sometimes even combat dedicated mechanics are not a thing is the integration of action sequences in the narrative and the elements they contain.

I was thinking how much of a blast it is to find yourself in a chase in Blades in the Dark. The clocks run out and the guards (or whatever enemy) catch on to you. That's when a fight ensues, but as the goal is getting away with your skin unharmed and your loot safely tucked, disposing of all the enemies is not important. It is to escape. This rephrases the whole narrative.

It is similar when you find yourself fighting to get your friendly npc from the claws of a velociraptor in Escape from Dino Island or dodging a pterosaur as you are crossing a rope bridge. You fight so that you can run.

Imagine another sequence, a galleon on your tail as the clouds darken and the wind picks up, heralding a storm. You are in the Kraken's territory and your ship is smaller and faster. How do you set the monster on your enemies as you make your dastardly escape? Several games can do such a sequence, but having played it, I had the somewhat confusingly written Rapscallion in mind.

Or imagine yourself getting chased by stampede of rainbow centipedes in Slugblaster or in a race with a rival team that would do anything to win (besides actual murder, because even they wouldn't go that far).

Wildsea is also good for ship chases, if the sea is the canopy of trees one kilometer or more tall. Totally-not-Davy Jones is chasing you in his ghost ship powered by the leviathan heart of a tree octopus. He's gaining on you and you might have to engage at one point. But can you really take on The Flying Dutchman? Should you risk it or should any fight be a tiny encounter as you reposition yourself in a better condition to flee?

This kind of questions and setups are always really fun for me as they normally involve a flurry of quick decisions and actions where combat is only one ingredient of a dish. Most of my experience with chase fights have been narrative games as you might have guessed from the examples, so idk how this would work in more traditional type of games.

I'm curious to see what systems you enjoyed this trope in.

Could I ask, if someone there know, if there are some TTRPG shops in Wroclaw (Poland)?

Hello everyone! I just finished up seven blog posts in seven days disassembling and reassembling Paizo's first and signature Adventure Path, Rise of the Runelords. The idea is to create the structure of an AP I'd want to run, and is system agnostic (in fact, I won't be running it in PF). If you have played or GMed the campaign, or just like long-form storytelling, or even are just curious what those Paizo APs are all about, I hope you'll check it out.

Here is the start of the series (the blog is free... it's simply too much text to paste here):

Deconstructing: Burnt Offerings (Rise of the Runelords Book 1)

Recently sat down with my group, same people I've been playing PF2e with for a long time now, hundreds of hours between us. We started comparing thoughts on the system, and I'm slowly arriving at the conclusion I want to share.

On paper PF2e is excellent. Three actions, four degrees of success, tight math, everything in its place. And Paizo's APs are some of the best tactical content on the market. The first few hundred hours of PF2e are the best d20 fantasy out there, no question!

But the better you know the system, the more this strange feeling creeps in: every fight starts to feel roughly the same.

Not in terms of content. Encounters are different, monsters are different, biomes are different. We've experimented with mythic, with non-standard objectives -- "stop the ritual", "rescue the hostage", "stage a fake battle" -- on top of normal Low-to-Extreme combat.

The sameness is in the cognitive texture of every turn. We're solving the same puzzle every time. How many actions on a Strike vs. something useful. Whether to Demoralize. Whether to Raise a Shield. Where to stand for flanking. Plus one or two actions from your build. Every turn, every fight, every session.

The strangest part -- classes start to feel similar once you see the math through them. The flavor's different, the abilities are different, but the actual decision space on your turn collapses into the same shape.

The math is so tuned that surprises have almost stopped happening. They still do, occasionally, but more because we're real people playing a tabletop game with friends than because the system generated anything. Fights look beautiful, run smooth. But that smoothness has started working against the system -- the moments where something goes off-plan and creates a story have become rare.

And it gets stranger. Even when the GM tries to break the pattern with a non-standard encounter, the math is so narrow that any deviation either snaps back to template within a round or breaks balance in an unpleasant way. So the plateau isn't about lazy GMing or repetitive content. It's the system itself, IMO.

For comparison:

PF1e -- those off-plan moments happen constantly because the math is uneven. With system mastery the GM and players can collaborate on basically any kind of game they want, with table buy-in. Draw Steel surprises because villain actions and Malice were designed to break predictability. PF2e is the one that hits a plateau, and it hits it because predictability is what the system was designed for. Which is impressive engineering. Just not what I want at hour 400.

The thing I keep coming back to -- Paizo went hard on clean balance and it put them in this odd middle position. PF1e wins long-campaign d20 for me, even now. People play with one group for years and keep finding new combos, new concepts. You have to like that style, and you need a GM who builds for the party rather than just running stat blocks. With that kind of GM, PF2e fights back. The system actively resists it after some "knowledge point".

What's interesting is MCDM tightened the math hard with Draw Steel too, and the game isn't simple. But they went all-in on tactics + cinematic combat, and left everything else either simple, dramatic, or absent. Paizo landed in the middle. They started moving away from simulationism but kept a lot of "sacred cows". That middle is where I think the issue lives.

The encouraging part -- looking at recent APs and newer classes (Daredevil especially), it feels like they're drifting toward Draw Steel territory anyway. Curious what PF3e looks like.

AI Notice: I typed the whole text myself word by word in my native language first and then I used Claude to translate while proofreading extensively. The experience and the thoughts are original.
Sorry if it doesn't sound like a native English speaker (and I'm not sure if it sounds AI-ish). But it's two times better than my English skills allow for such complex thoughts.

I want to run a campaign in the setting of persona series. Mostly I want to focus on the first two chapters in question about enemies and how personas affects on real world. Also it would be middle-aged world.

Can anyone tell me what's the differences between two ttrpg system's: Revenant: Heart's Guise and The velvet book. I red the revenant one, so I can't decide should I try velvet book or stay on revenant heart's guise?

P.s. I am Russian with translator and some kind of English knowledge

Ok, this might seem like a dumb question, but I never had the opportunity to discuss this with anyone, so I'm not sure.

When you make a character in an RPG, you make their history, their personality and traits. My question is:

Do you guys tend to change the personality or behaviors of your characters as the adventure progresses?

Currently, I am playing in a cyberpunk RPG where my character is a narcissistic asshole who has a massive debt, and during a heist mission, he almost REALLY died (like actually losing my character); he didn't die just because 2 players of my party had helped me, thus said, i am currently thinking about next session my character starts being more grateful to the ones who saved him, even thought he gets his ass whooped almost every mission lmao.

Basically, I started my GMing sporadically eith CoC running mainly one shots and a few short campaigns, I've tried my hand at Star Finder, DnD 3.5, 4, and 5e, WoD(VtM, DtF, CtD), CofD(MtAw, DtD), Public Access, Mythic Bastionland, as well as DCC and I want to run Invisible Sun. The thing is it seems like my play group prefers my GM style for horror games instead of anything else. They aren't rude or saying anything in bad faith of course they just note that I seem to be in more of a flow state when it comes to the creepy and the macabre. What are suggestions you all might have at running more fantastic and surreal games?

I've got groups that are interested in tactical combat games, and I have experience with pf2e. I recently got Draw Steel books and they seem more up my alley, but I haven't played it yet. How does Draw Steel compare to PF2e I'm your experience? Is the combat more tactically interesting? Is it easier or harder to prep for? And how does it stand up to long term campaigns? Would really appreciate any insights!