**Come here and talk about anything!**

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.

----------

This submission is generated automatically each Saturday at 00:00 UTC.

Convincing Her:

When we first started dating I walked her through making a D&D character, but I was already disenchanted with D&D around that time so I never got a game off the ground. At the time she was willing to try, but as our relationship continued we defined some clear "this is your hobby", "this is my hobby", and "this is OUR hobby" spaces.

It wasn't until we were talking about Fallout recently that I convinced her to give Fallout 2d20 a shot. We bonded early on in our relationship playing Fallout 4 together, her playing it on her own as I watched. We tried Fallout 76 this year, but it wasn't for us.

I asked her if she'd be fine with trying a TTRPG set in the Fallout universe and she agreed. Mainly because she knew about the setting and wouldn't be as caught off guard with the setting material.

The Leadup:

I set it in the Fallout 4 universe as my wife was most familiar with that setting. I kept flip flopping through potential plot hooks based on the system:

• Establishing a settlement.
• Clearing out a Super Duper Mart of enemies.
• Dungeon delving into a vault

But all these options felt very "combat" focused with little in the way of interesting social aspects. I settled on:

• Negotiating trade with another settlement who then ask for the group to take out a Raider gang.

This was after a lot of talking with people on Discords and Subreddits. My wife also said she didn't want to play a 100% serious game which was good because my games typically lean into humorous moments to contrast with the serious moments.

The Game:

We took sometime to get started but we got there in the end. My wife played a Ghoul Trader (Elle), my sister played a Vault Dweller (Leslie), and my friend played a Nightkin Supermutant (Mary) using standard Supermutant rules since I didn't have the supplement with it. And their Pack Brahmin Moolan.

They started off in a Post-Fallout 4 Sanctuary Hills where the Vault Tec Rep was leading the settlement after the Sole Survivor left. They were charged with establishing a trade route with the Starlight Drive In)'s new leader, a free Synth named Top Dog.

To finalize the deal they needed to take out a raider gang called the Black Claws in Bedford Train Station. They scouted it out and figured out that their leader was also a synth. And they assumed the two leaders were sisters or synthsters.

Leslie volunteered to try to establish a dialogue with the raider leader to see if the situation could be resolved diplomatically. But had her face scratched by the leader who was in the middle of a cat nap. It was at this point the Elle theorized that the Synth had a cat cyber brain installed. They bloodily killed a few raiders causing them to flee and the vault dweller knocked out the cat synth with a laser pistol shot.

It was at this point the Elle theorized the synth leader of Starlight Drive In had a cyber dog brain. Which was confirmed when the leader executed the cat synth by tearing out her neck with her teeth.

Other Stuff that Happened:

• They mentioned scavenging on the way to the Starlight Drive In, so I had them come across a partially scavenged house with a few traps inside. Mary tried to sneak in, but ended up getting a complication which I ruled had her stepping in a bear trap and taking 1 damage. It wasn't plot relevant, but it was a way to get them used to the die rolling in a less high stress environment like a combat.
• Moolan was a party favorite and my wife enjoyed that Moolan was a sweetheart because I had the Brahmin boop them with her snoot when she was hungry and stuff. Even though she didn't do much except acting as the party inventory.
• "Behind the scenes" we established my sister's character as Vault Dweller Leslie because she knew nothing of the Fallout universe which meant I got to give her a fish out of water character with no strings attached.
  • The background for her was she was in Cryo sleep during a radiation leak that led to her entire vault being killed. And the vault experiment was designed to create the ultimate killing machine, which when only 1 vault dweller was left she was deemed the most deadly canidate to assassinate the Chinese leadership post-Great War, which given the state of the world wasn't going to happen.
  • I based her backstory on Lister from Red Dwarf.
• My friend was really into playing her Nightkin as a mutated woman, Mary. I had given her character a necklace of junk per the random story item table and wrote down "molerat teeth necklace". And she called it her supermutant's closest way to make a pearl necklace in the Post-Apocalypse.
• Through out the entire session, the players were trying to figure out what the twist was going to be. The main thought was that the settlers were going to be the actual raiders. Top Dog's reaction to them was "New people? I love new people!" and that immediately made them convinced she was a good person. 😅
• The moral choice of whether to let the cat synth stay alive wasn't as much of a moral choice because they recognized that cats are mean. But also they came up with a secondary way to complete the game by trading Brahmin milk to the cat to get her to stop attacking the settler's supply lines.

How I modified the system

The biggest thing was that I reduced the enemy health points to like 1 or 2. I did have an issue with timing in the end which left me with 45 mins to run the boss fight which wasn't ideal.

End Result

All and all a fun game, my wife enjoyed it (SUCCESS!) but wasn't sold on TTRPGs becoming a frequent thing for her. Her positives was the group of players she was with. And that it was fun to have my sister and our friend as it was a really fun group of people to hangout with.

Her main issue was how long it took me to look up rules and calculating dice rolls. This was the first time I ran Fallout 2d20 so I was flipping through my notes and rules on a few things. Additionally the 2d20 dice bot hadn't sync'd with my server when I added it, which meant we had to rely on rolling using google's die roller or a website die roller that didn't store die results (i.e. they'd roll, but then the numbers would disappear).

She's up for playing in one-shots in the future, but not anything long term. Which I call a win! My other players also had fun which I'd call a win as well!

I'm working on a punk TTRPG set in cislunar space above a contaminated Earth. How do I make sure the game is actually punk as opposed to just having a punk aesthetic?

I'm looking for ttRPGs to check out that in your opinion have the most coherent and easy to follow/understand layout of information and graphics.

Curious for some suggestions and specifically why you think it's so good.

Thanks in advance...

Can I get some recommendations for actual plays of Scifi rpgs. It can be any game as long as its scifi, I would like it to lean more serious in tone if possible.

I've heard a lot about Friends at the Table which has games in the scifi theme, but I kind of got bored of the tons of worldbuilding, maybe I should give it another try?

Do you limit it to two or three worlds? Do you play it like Sliders? Or do you set up a game of RIFTS and call it a day?

Hey folks! Which is the most lite rules-set you used to run a campaign with?

What's your preferred layout for TTRPGs? Do you like it busy, neat? I bought the Skeleton Crew version of the Vast Grimm core rulebook and it's so much easier to read without so much colour, pictures, and busy-looking tables all over the place. Do you find reading a book easier when the pages are not full of things that are not relevant to the reading itself? Or do you thrive in the mess?

Hello!

My friends and I want to give a present to our dungeon master for his birthday, but we are absolutely clueless about what to give him.

He is kind of rich, so it's even harder to give him something because he hasn't any trouble in buying things he likes, that's why I thought about giving a thoughtful rol-related present.

I would love to hear your suggestions guys, any ideas are welcome!

(Except dices, he's a loot goblin and has tens of pairs already. We could act as a functional party for once as a present, but that's no fun xD).

I'll be moving soon and taking a library of over 1,000 TTRPG books with me. This allows me to reorganize my shelves. I've been thinking about how best to do it. Last time, I organized it by genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, Super-Hero, etc.

This had some benefits, but also split some series that would probably be better together (the Cypher setting books, for example) and didn't work well with some cross-genre books (Over the Edge, for example).

How do you organize your books? Genre? Alphabetically? System? Publisher?