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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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I know I kinda talked about this before but now I kinda wonder if I'm some kind of coward for wanting to avoid RPGs themed around some inevitable downward spiral for either your character or society. Reflected in the mechanics by sanity, money, corruption, humanity, esc. But also in setting and lore, too. Doesn't a dystopia inherently assume we're all just slaves to history?

I feel like my perspective on life and the world is actually already pessimistic and nhilistic enough. Mildly fatalistic too, I think everything is cause and effect and that if a better world was possible, it would have happened already.

I’ve noticed that newer GMs sometimes put a lot of work into figuring out how to connect different adventures into a campaign. One thing that’s easy to overlook is that the adventures don’t actually need to be related.

I’ve been using a simple four adventure structure for this, mostly with published scenarios. Figured I’d share it here in case anyone finds it useful.
I find this works best with one-shots or short adventures that take no more than two sessions. The idea is to have a recurring element show up often enough for the players to remember it and notice how things are changing.

What I do is pick a recurring element and let it develop in the background of otherwise unrelated adventures.
It could be an NPC, a faction, an artifact, a cult, or even an entire kingdom. The important thing is that it doesn’t need to be central to the adventures themselves. Sometimes it’s just a conversation, a piece of information, or something the PCs happen to encounter.
I usually think of it as a short, four adventure arc.

In the first adventure, I introduce the element and give the players a reason to remember it. In the second, I show them another side of it, preferably something that changes how they understood it the first time. By the third, it starts affecting the PCs directly. Then I use a fourth adventure, usually something I write myself, to bring that element to the foreground and give the whole thing some kind of resolution.

For example, in Delta Green (it can also work on any investigation game), I’ve been using a recurring handler (basically the guy giving the PCs their missions).
He starts off as a fairly understanding guy, willing to overlook small mistakes and help the agents when things get complicated.
But as the campaign develops, they begin seeing another side of him. They discover that he has no problem abandoning agents he doesn’t trust when it serves his purposes. At first, those are other agents, people the PCs might not even know.
Then, during a later operation, the PCs find themselves in exactly that position. Suddenly, the guy who’s been helping them all along doesn’t seem quite so reliable.
That gives me enough material to eventually run an adventure centered around this character, where the PCs have to confront what they’ve learned about him and possibly the organization they work for.

For a medieval fantasy game, you could do something similar with an entire kingdom.
Maybe the PCs visit a kingdom that seems like a fairly decent place. In another adventure, they hear about people disappearing near its borders, or villages being abandoned. Later, someone they know ends up fleeing from that same kingdom, and the PCs discover its rulers are doing something pretty terrible.
By the fourth adventure, the kingdom itself becomes the problem. Maybe they get involved in a rebellion, confront whoever is responsible, or even decide that the kingdom has good reasons for what it’s doing.

You could do the same with a quest giver who keeps asking for help, a magical relic that keeps showing up in different places, or pretty much anything you can develop over several adventures.
The nice thing is that none of the published adventures need to be connected. I can run them largely as written, introduce a little information related to the meta plot here and there, and let the players build their own understanding of what’s happening.

It also keeps preparation manageable. PCs might die but the players still know the meta plot. I’m not planning some massive campaign with dozens of interconnected clues. I’m just developing one element across a few adventures until it becomes important enough to deserve its own scenario.
And of course it doesn’t have to be four adventures exactly. You could do it with three or six, or use an existing published adventure as the finale instead of writing your own.

One thing worth mentioning, especially for newer GMs, is that I’m not planning how the players will react to any of this. I’m just developing the element and introducing new information as the campaign goes on. What they decide to do about it is up to them.

Cheat sheet:

Adventure 1: Introduce the element

Adventure 2: Show another side of it. Challenge the players’ initial understanding

Adventure 3: Make its consequences personal. The PCs now have to deal with it directly

Adventure 4: Make the element the central conflict of the adventure

It’s a pretty simple way of building a short campaign out of published and homebrew adventures without forcing them into the same story.

I originally created it for the solo but not alone bundle a while back to benefit suicide prevention and mental health in gamers. It would eventually go on to be a printed deck where you combine some prompts, choices and resource management with a simple PBTA inspired die resolution.

I had a pretty successful Kickstarter last year and now The Game Crafter put it as their deal of the day! It is in the 1% of most sold projects on their site.

Hello!

We have been working for the past year or so (on and off) on our game, PokeTTop! PokeTTop is a tabletop Roleplaying system that is designed to recreatePpokemon in a TTRPG setting, focusing on providing fast-paced tactical combat through creative teambuilding and unique combat mechanics that makes you feel like a proper trainer.

While there are already several Pokemon TTRPGs out there, including the PMD&D a lot of people here play, we wanted to patch up an area where we felt none of the other systems properly fulfill. PokeTTop is easier to follow compared to many of its contemporaries, with almost all of the complexity focused on the battle system. PokeTTop is not directly based on any specific system, but uses mechanics inspired by systems we are familiar with.

We're currently looking for players and GMs interested in trying out the system, providing feedback, or simply taking a look at what we've made!

Q/A

What are the main features of PokeTTop?
​

• Tactical, Grid-based Combat:
  • Instead of replicating the standard 1v1 or 2v2 combats from the mainline Pokemon games, we've created a system intended for all players to work together, sending out 1-2 Pokemon apiece. Movement and positioning are just as important in combat as your Pokemon's attacks, and the ability to control 2 Pokemon at a time allows for unique combinations of support, offensive and defensive pokemon.​
  • Several moves and abilities have been reworked to fit within the grid-based system with some aspects inspired by Pokemon Z-A's battle system and other TTRPGs.
    • Abilities themselves take even more of a role in combat, with Pokemon growing to eventually use three separate abilities that all grant you unique abilities.​
  • Trainer Actions allow you to insert yourself into combat and feel just as important as the Pokemon you control, from allowing your Pokemon to gain an extra square of movement, to removing a condition.​
• Simple Book-Keeping:
  • PokeTTop has much more streamlined progression compared to other Pokemon TTRPG systems, with predetermined stat growth and move progression.
    • The system still allows for player choice through feats, held items, TMs and natures while making overall bookkeeping far easier.​
  • Combat has far less legwork per turn with only a few simple operations needed for each attack, and far less variables needed to be tracked during combat.​
  • Additionally, this allows for far easier GM preparation, with stat-blocks being easy to create, and simple guidelines to make encounter-building easier.​

In addition to these features, PokeTTop has all sorts of other features, from Trainer classes that can unlock unique and powerful abilities, to all sorts of original moves and abilities, as well as a long-term exploration system that makes every trip through a route feel like a journey.

While we are happy enough with the current rules to release PokeTTop, it is still in development and we'd love to hear from other TTRPG fans, either players or GMs. We are open to constructive criticism, and we have run several playtests to make sure combat can succeed.

Main Manual Link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/d374az7p281pq9o4cgvek/Version1.1.pdf?rlkey=phpgafdu7xdrqvrtyfavthow9&st=wqdqcfkl&dl=0
Pokedex Link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jngjwzglbu8wy5hioi5n5/Pokedex.pdf?rlkey=wz1rpogqh6alpgc5wh7wnlmtz&st=aax4zqxy&dl=0

Would love some suggestions on a game for a more unqiue group of players.

I have a friend group of creatives (authors, etc) who want to try a tabletop, but are less interested in the combat aspects and more interested in the roleplaying/story telling aspects. I can obviously just run a story heavy/combat lite oneshot in dnd/pathfinder, but I'm curious if there are any systems that would be accesible to newer players (obviously with me boning up on the rules and helping) that were less combat focused that you would recommend?

I am completely new to RPG but a school counselor recommended NTYE to my 8yo and he was dying to play so I got it. We (me, my 8yo and 6yo) attempted the first recommended game and now I am SWEATING. If I wasn't trying to figure this out for him I would give up.

1. Can someone please explain to me how in the world you defeat the monsters? Is it their health that you have to get to zero? Is it that you have to roll the dice at the listed level as many times as their health says? So if its a level 3, health 3, you have to roll +3 three times? I just don't understand and I find the directions very unclear.
2. The tokens. When do these get used? Do they only get used if the characters want to "try harder"?
3. Can characters choose different actions? For example in the first story the game uses (the dragonsnot falls one) one kid wanted to look at the buttons on the random device thingy and the other wanted to just cross the bridge.....do I need to get them to work together or can they choose separate things?
4. How in the WORLD do you know if something needs to be rolled? My 6yo was going on and on about all of the things he was doing with his batmobile throughout the story (putting special grip tires on it, strapping it to his waist while crossing the bridge so it could turn into a parachute in case he fell, etc. etc. ). At what point do these things count as actions that need to be rolled?
5. At the end of the game during the celebration they each got one more "fun".....why? Do these carry into the next game or something?

Needless to say my kids were sorely disappointed when we finished the first game and it was 100% because of me and my skills. *facepalm*

I've been playing with my group for almost a year. We're playing a complex political intrigue sci-fi game using the SWN system. There are a LOT of moving parts, to the point where I'm shocked our DM is managing to keep track of it all. We even had to make our own fandom wiki to keep track of information.

NOW, my question: I'm the note-taker, and I'm in the process of consolidating/organizing it so we can actually figure out what the hell is going on. Aside from literally getting out a corkboard and red string, how would you organize this information so we, as the players, can start making sense of the big picture?

Currently, I have a lot of the info in a document. I thought about having a spreadsheet with all the info then having a column of "tags" to sort by (so, for example, we can filter info by anything that's about a specific organization and/or person). But I wanted to know if there was another, potentially better, tool or system you would use if you were doing this.

This campaign has been so much fun, and the mystery has been a huge part of that. We all want to give it the respect it deserves by putting the puzzle pieces together. But, man, there are so many pieces.

I've been collecting ttrpgs for about 7-8 years now and I haven't found a good bookshelf in my area that was large enough, strong enough, or affordable enough for me to display my ttrpgs on. Any suggestions? Preferably something easy to build or prebuilt and easy to move.

I just recently found Liminal Horror's website and I've been considering buying for my group, except I don't know any of the concepts it's meant to carry. I was thinking to myself that it was like Mothership: a engine made to carry a specific genre (Like how Mothership is made to emulate Sci Fi horror adventures). If anyone could tell me what Liminal Horror is about, the whole shtick of it is or anything else, please do.

KaijuCon 2 is less than two weeks away: Saturday 24 October, Nagoya Prime Central Tower, 10am to 9pm.

Over forty tables across three time slots: Call of Cthulhu, D&D, Delta Green, Warhammer, Exalted, Dungeon Crawl Classics and more. Many run in English, many in Japanese, and some in both. Most welcome beginners.

Our special guests, Michael O'Brien of Chaosium and writer Royce Wilson, are running games too.

Advance tickets are 2,500 yen, and you can come and go as you like.

Art by Kasumi Lang.

I picked up the starter set and was hoping to play it with a few friends that have played ttRPGs before but aren't what I'd call hardcore tabletop players. So far it seems a bit...overly gamey?

I'm wondering what the general opinions on it are and the big pros/cons for new-ish tabletop players.