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I played Descend Into Avernus recently and couldn't handle it.

I realize you can talk to your players off role, but mine have fun murderhoboing and I have fun gming for them.

I guess my question is more about what sort of pushback would be reasonable in-universe. It strains their disbelief a bit too much to have town guards that are essentially police forces, especially if their power scales up to present an appropriate threat to the PCs.

As the title suggests, 2 out of the 5 players at the table had never played GURPS and I personally had only GMd it once. We led the players through character creation, a short adventure and finally in this episode we've tried to give our thoughts on the system from the viewpoint of how it feels to play for newer players.

Firstly, on a more macro scale, it kind of surprised us how actually playable GURPS is as a system. We expected to get into much more trouble while trying to teach it to new people, but the logic of it slotted into place rather fast.

The rest I'll mark as seperate headings

• Combat

It's arguably more tactical than something like D&D or Pathfinder. Just the fact that you have to think in a more granular time frame makes every turn count, but also makes it harder to pivot plans once everything goes tits up. That and the penalty scaling at range for firearms (or any ranged weapon actually) was surprisingly not as cumbersome to deal with as it seemed at first.

• Skills

This one was a bit more contentious - personally I like a skill list. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it limits roleplay, but rather provides guardrails and direction for how to approach problems. From the other side of it, some of us felt that with this massive skill list a lot of time was wasted on bellyaching over skills that never ended up being useful in the first place. Often times you can't even mitigate that as the GM by saying what might or might not be useful without spoiling some of the plot elements.

• Character creation

Leading on from the previous point, we "cheated" a little bit and used templates for our characters with freedom to modify to taste. But even then, the character creation was not as painful as we were led to believe. The logic is pretty easy to understand and we fell into the min-maxing side of things rather easily.

• 3d6 resolution

It's great! It gives a very nice Bell Curve distribution - rolls even out around 10 and crits (and crit fails) are rare. It also means that early points in a skill are much more valuable than hyper specialization... which we did anyways, since it seemed cool.

• Simulation

GURPS has a reputation for being simulationist for the sake of being simulationist, but in our experience, the simulation did somewhat help enhance the versimilitude of the game. However, since GURPS is so modular, you can go into to excruciating detail with things that are of minor consequence. The GM can put a stop to a lot of it by picking and choosing what and to what degree their game will simulate.

• Genre mixing

This might be the biggest strength of GURPS. We played a modern(ish) explorers team in an Ice Age and those two settings meshed together with 0 problems rulewise. In the episode some of the veterans go a bit more in depth on this topic, but safe to say that it's the most successful genre mixing that we've seen in a system.

• GM workload

We found the game easy to play, but hard to GM. Much in relation to the previous point, the GM has to do a lot of prep work to pick and choose what rules to play with, but also the fact that you don't really have good guude to NPCs. Every single meaningful NPC has to be handmade. Sure, a skilled GM can cut down on a lot of that since they know what is likely to be needed and what is not, as well as estimate some skills/stats without writing them down, but if you're just picking the game up, it's going to be a hell of a learning curve.

• Conclusion

It's not half as scary as it sounds. Yes, it's simulationist, but it's not that way just for the sake of being simulationist. There is actual thought put behind the rules - a sort of faux-real world logic that is surprisingly intuitive even for new players to pick up. It's a staple of the scene for good reasons!

We set out to prove that GURPS can be taught at the table and I'd say we succeeded! You can come listen to our more in-depth thoughts on the Dicey Discourse podcast (Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcast or any other podcast platform)!

Edit: formatting

I run a "D&D" game at my local public library. It takes place once a month, and it is a 4 hour session. The game is open to everyone, so it is basically an open table month to month. It usually attracts 4 to 8 players per session.

I started playing D&D with B/X in the 1980's. I got back into D&D several years later with 5e.

At first I ran D&D 5e for this monthly library game, but I found 5e to be bloated and slow, especially with more than four or five players. As a GM, I also hated the "press a button on your character sheet and immediately solve the problem" aspect of 5e.

We then switched to Shadowdark, which plays faster than 5e, but so many of the adventures published for it are grim and dark and filled with doom and gloom and I prefer a more lighthearted, heroic, swashbuckling game. I don't really want high levels of lethality found in many OSR games. I had criticisms with D&D 5e, but I did like the 5e death save rules. The 5e level of lethality is fine with me for this type of library game.

I like the concepts and tropes of D&D. Traditional, Tolkien-esque fantasy is what I like most. I also like to run games with fast, fun, cinematic action scenes. Actual roleplaying would be fairly light, but not non-existent. I also like adventures big on exploration. Having the PCs go on an adventure and interact with weird and interesting things and watching the players come up with clever solutions to puzzles and obstacles is probably my favorite aspect of "D&D".

I prefer lighter rules as opposed to crunchier rules. I want something that is easy to teach to newbies. Easy and quick character generation would also be nice.

I also suck at creating my own adventures, so I am ideally looking for a game system that has a published set of fun one-shots or a rough adventure path that I can run every month without a lot of prep. But players may come and go month to month, so I want to be mindful of that as well.

Based upon everything I've said, I'm considering using Dragonbane with the adventure found in its boxed set. Or EZD6 with the EZD6 Book of Quests. I also like the XP/Leveling systems in Dragonbane, and in the EZD6 Brain Candy supplement, again, being mindful of players coming and going month to month. I'm also possibly considering Tiny Dungeon, but I didn't see a published adventure path or multiple one shots designed for it.

Would Dragonbane, EZD6, or Tiny Dungeon be good for this type of game? Would anyone here recommend anything else? Any recommendations for published adventures would also be welcome. Thank you!

I am just not getting it and neither is our group. This is our second session and it seems like we are all trying to shoehorn in tags and making stuff up. It seems like more of a story-telling game than an ttrpg, which is fine and I think my brain (our brains) are locked into OSR style play.

Perhaps I am not getting it or we are not getting it.

I really love the book and really want to enjoy it, but it seems like it wants to be FKR but with tags – which seems limiting. Perhaps I just don’t understand PbtA moves/tags.

Looking for advice or a good simple live play I could watch to figure this out. Because I am living in this frustrating zone of wanting to love something and bouncing off it. HELP. Thank you.

i started paying more attention to how much i was spending on rpg books and realized i had a pretty dumb habit of buying books just because they were new

with d&d, it was easy to justify one more sourcebook or adventure. then another one comes out and suddenly you've spent a few hundred bucks on a game you were already perfectly happy playing

so i've been trying smaller systems lately. some of them are ridiculously cheap compared to the big ones. a core rulebook or pdf and you're done.

but i'm not sure how much of a saving that really is. if the game needs several supplements, third-party books, or other stuff to keep things interesting, the price difference disappears pretty quickly

for anyone who's actually switched systems for financial reasons, what did your spending look like afterward? did you genuinely spend less, or did you just find a cheaper game to buy more stuff for?

So yesterday I was checking bundle of holding and I saw the 4 pdfs (Core rule book, two adventures and an anthology?) were on sale for $19.95.

I know that the core rulebook is $30 but the real question is if the trpg is worth getting whether to play it or use it as inspiration.

I remember being interested in it but the absurd price tags for the physical copies is too much since S&H isn’t even being considered yet.

So main questions:

• Is it a good trpg and by that I mean rule system and setting.

• Does it have suggestions for making your own mechs or strictly what it offers.

• Does it take into consideration characters and mechs or are characters are mostly just there to be a justification for skills.

• Lastly if you have read and/or played it how do you compare it to other Mecha trpgs.

Hoping to see some comments to help me decide because I’ve cut back on buying pdfs unless I really like them because I just prefer reading the physical books and keeping pdfs as digital backup units.

I’ve been designing my next planned campaign and came to the realization that my initial choice of RPG didn’t match.

For a magical university campaign I wanted something where the characters in session 1 are “who this person is right now at freshman orientation” but the character at the end would be “who this person is at graduation”, and the initial character would have almost to no impact on the final one.

Maybe you showed up on campus with an interest in necromancy and some knowledge from the village witch on the care of familiars but 4 years later you graduated with a degree in applied wizardry and a minor in field astrology. ;)

Most tRPGs give you a template in a class or strongly stated set of abilities and then you don’t replace them, you add onto them making them stronger, or you delve deeper into your initial theme.

University life is a place where people reinvent themselves.

So far I have only stumbled upon Legend in the Mist where you start with a pile of tags describing your character and as you play you replace them with new ones based on the evolving story.

Looking at other systems the idea pretty much rejects any class and level based tRPG as those model a different kind of character growth.

GURPS and Hero can let a PC go anywhere but still leave the initial concept there as the majority influence and the growth is often a power up.

Cypher 2E is too typed into following a path that was halfway picked at character creation. There’s some GM advice for letting people pock things outside if their focus but then it just becomes a little jumbled.

I suspect Mist engine is not the only truly horizontal progression tRPG, but it appears to be the one I have in my collection.

So that has me wondering if anyone has recommendations for any others to look at?

This may be one of the most wildly swinging sets of opinions across the entire TTRPG community. Everyone looks for different things and has different wants and needs.

Be it consistency, rules, players, or whatever.

But what are yours?

This is a small framework for generating a dungeon that I created combining techniques from u/Goblinsh and Sersa Victory.

I've been curious about Nechronica for a long time now but it looks like it's pretty darn obscure outside of Japan because of both niche mechanics and a niche setting.

For those who don't know it's a post-apocalyptic zombie girl RPG in a world where undead fungi cyborgs are the dominant form of life because everything else was ruined by massive amounts of post nuclear warfare.

And fair warning, it's firmly in the Japanese artistic tradition of ero guro. It's meant to be overtly offensive to mainstream norms.

Not just super violent but also super transgressive in other cultural ways. This probably contributes to why the most community I can find about it outside of Japan is limited to a single wiki.

But I'm curious whether the game itself plays well. I don't mind the ero guro that much especially not the way it seems to be presented in the actual lore.

Also interested in similarly over the top horror RPGs with maybe similar themes and aesthetics