**Come here and talk about anything!**

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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.

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

**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.

MCDM have confirmed that the VTT for Draw Steel will release as a Steam store exclusive available for $30 per person, or $20 for players that buy it during early access (and discounts on one copy for people that already purchased the game).

The VTT includes the base rules and quickstart adventure, though doesn't have a "player only" version with just the rules.

It's an expensive option for a group to use ($210 for a group of 6 players and a director, or $200 if the director purchased the pdf of the rules before April), though MCDM seem to be positioning this as an option for superfans rather than people trying to work out whether this might be the system for them:

"The Codex is not for people who want to play Draw Steel online with their friends. Folks who want to do that already have lots of free options. That's why we recommend Owlbear Rodeo!

The Codex is the "I want to fly first class" experience. The Codex is for people who want to use the Codex. There's no "player version" or "director version," there's one product. We think $30 for a first class flight is pretty good!

Folks who want to buy the Codex for their players? We'll have a bundle you can buy with a discount. And you can always buy Steam Keys for your friends."

I’ve been prepping a Deadlands campaign with SWADE and I feel like I’m missing half the context all the time.

The books constantly reference American history, geography, folk tales, stereotypes, real people, but almost never explain any of it. It just gets dropped in like you’re supposed to already know.

I’m not American, so I don’t. My entire “Old West” knowledge is basically Sergio Leone movies, so when the book implies something is obviously dangerous, or that a certain group has a certain reputation, I have no idea what that means in practice.

Same with the legends. They get referenced, but not really explained. And I genuinely can’t tell which NPCs are real historical figures, which are myths, and which ones are made up half the time.

It ends up feeling like the book is constantly winking at me and I’m just not in on it. I still get surprised when I look something up and realize something or someone in an adventure was actually real.

Has anyone else run into this with semi-historical games? Especially if you’re not from the culture the game is based on. Do you look things up, ignore it, or adapt it for your table? How do you deal with that gap?

Ok, before you break out the pitchforks, hear me out. This is NOT a solution for everyone, but there IS a bit of logic here

Your players have just created characters. These characters are still strangers to them, as well as everyone else. In addition, the world is new to your players as well. So, they have a sandbox, but the players might feel listless and a bit unmotivated.

That's where a session (or perhaps up to 3, max) of canned adventures in your world can help. Like a rock rolling down a hill needs time to build up momentum, so does the sandbox. A light on-rails adventure can serve as that push. It lets the players get a bit more familiar with the starting area, the situation of the world, and let's them try out their own character.

The idea here IS NOT to set up the 'main plot' of the sandbox. The small canned adventure could be something as simple as getting a stolen trinket back from a bandit camp. Instead, it's just about giving the game a bit of time to get into a flow state, potentially setting up the other points of interests, looming threats, political state, etc. of the area.

I have been finding Kevin Crawford's Proteus Sector for Stars Without Number to be an interesting space opera setting (or technically sub-setting, since it is merely one sector of the much wider Stars Without Number setting, wherein the galaxy-spanning empire known as the Terran Mandate has collapsed due to the psychic cataclysm called the Scream).

Before the Scream, the Proteus Sector was home to the New Dawn Movement. The party was considered radical, even by the standards of the Terran Mandate, for its extreme experiments in genetic engineering. The Scream did not hit the Proteus Sector all that much physically or psychically, but the collapse of the Mandate did. After a great deal of internecine strife and wars, the NDM dissolved, leaving behind three polities:

• The Great Pact, who maintain most of the NDM's legacy, which is to say, exploiting genetic engineering in the most tyrannous and blatantly evil manner possible.

• The Pure Alliance, who utterly reject genetic engineering due to their specific brand of "Catholicism." (It is not quite Catholicism as we know it. Their elite covert operatives are "fedayeen.") They are perfectly fine with cybernetics and the Imago Dei: "Catholic" artificial intelligences, virtual intelligences, and robots. Greatest among the Imago Dei is the Pure Alliance's head of state, an AI pope inside a capital ship.

• The Protean Alliance, who are like the Great Pact, in that they make ample use of genetic engineering, except that they are more humane and ethical about it.

Some worlds are neutral. These include Themis, a paradise world with a huge population. "Unexpected metadimensional flux" sealed Themis off from space travel, causing its technology to degrade to "modern-day Earth" level. Today, the flux is gone, and the Proteus Sector's three great powers are fighting over Themis: peacefully, for now.

The Proteus Sector is defined by its relationship with genetic engineering.

• Some people are "Augs," whose eugenics grant them superhuman abilities, at the cost of some glaring deficiencies. Yes, they are playable as PCs, counting as a partial class.

• Some people are "proles," baseline humans who have been remade (as already-born people!) into lesser forms, or sidegrades. For example, the Clipped are docile drones and are definitely unplayable. Conversely, merfolk are swimmers with sonar, but are blind; they are playable.

• The Great Pact is defined by being egregiously evil about this. Their Augs rule over masses of proles, including a significant number of Clipped.

• The Pure Alliance is horrified by genetic engineering. In some cases, such as the Pure capital world, the people recognize that Augs cannot be blamed for their own birth, but any Augs on said world had better be vocal about denouncing their own heritage.

• The Protean Union tries to have basic decency in its ample usage of genetic engineering. For example, they are not so gung-ho about converting non-Augs into proles, and the Protean capital world has a sizable and well-respected population of merfolk.

I find it to be an interesting setting overall. If there is one thing I have to complain about, it is that the Great Pact is a little too irredeemably evil. Even an amoral, mercenary-minded party will find it sketchy how the Great Pact's Augs look down upon baselines, and how using psychic powers in Pact worlds is punishable on pain of death (or dysgenic transformation into a prole). Admittedly, Kevin Crawford recognizes this, hence why the eight sample ideas for Great Pact patrons are all misfits or iconoclasts in some way.

I had a thought: what about a system that has "classes," but you could go a whole campaign without getting one?

Whether you think of "classes" as more the flavour ("Dark Knight") or mechanics ("a predefined package of abilities and/or stats") doesn't matter too much to me, but it would defeat the purpose of the discussion to define a class as just flavour. In that case, the discussion ends with namedropping your classless system of choice, which this sub needs no prompting for.

A few of my initial thoughts below.

My first thought as an answer to this was "archetypes" from Pathfinder 2e. Taking inspiration from that game, you could have an RPG where you take abilities from a generic pool. A "class" would be an ability tree within that pool. You'd have restrictions on how frequently you can dip into a new class (or penalties for how many dips you have).

As a different/additional take of the above, every class could consist of a central ability and all abilities that build off it.

If we played the idea of "class" in its classic form -- "pick one when you create a character and that's it" -- I'm wondering how a "none" option would look. Is there a generic pool of abilities for all classes and non-classed characters to choose from? What are the benefits of choosing no class, just more generic ability picks or some stats? Is it that a classless character is buffed or that a classed character has weaknesses? Now add multiclassing. What happens?

Hey! Me and my group just finished running a deeply tragic but genuinely life-changing campaign of Spire, and for our next campaign we’ve agreed that we generally want something a little more lighthearted and action-focused. Any recs for story-driven games good for running scoundrels-with-hearts-of-gold that are still capable of angst and emotional moments? I know this vibe can apply to a lot of games depending on how you run them, but one with that vibe baked in would be ideal.

Hello all. I'm looking to run a game centered around building, improving and running a settlement. Do you know of any systems or supplements that have good/detailed mechanics that I could either adapt o run as is?

Looking for a game to tell a Suneater/Dune type of story. Mostly a fun combat system. rules for space travel.

I want to tell a story with major key figures. various different planets to explore.

I don’t mind crunch and i don’t mind rules light so give me what you got.

I'm looking for a collection of tables that I can roll on to give me inspiration for how to stock a dungeon point crawl.

It takes me forever to start but once I have a basic building block, my imagination fires up.

I don't need layouts. Big tables of themes, dressing, stuff to do and see, etc. I've looked at a few OSR adjacent tools for dungeon generation and they just don't provide enough bones for me to riff off of.

If it helps to know; the setting is heroic high fantasy with magitek. Big thanks in advance!

First off, I love games in general: chess, cards, Monopoly, Risk, Azul, Hollow Knight, Hades I & II, and of course, TTRPGs. However, when it comes to RPGs, me and my group are all pretty much babies to the hobby, with the only games we have played being:

- D&D 5e/5.5e, because yeah. We hate the company, but love the game (when HEAVILY Homebrewed)

- Tormenta20, since we are Brazilian and this is just Brazilian D&D (stopped playing because its too much math and min-maxing needed to have a chance)

- 3DeT Victory, a Brazilian genre-less, class-less simple system with a heavy influence from anime, videogames and tokusatsu (quite like it, but doesn't quite scratch my RPG itch fully)

- Kids on Bikes 1e, which we... found a bit boring (sorry to the fans)

- Ordem Paranormal, a Brazilian mix of Tormenta20 + paranormal investigation (a mix our group thinks goes together like water and oil)

- Skyfall RPG, a Brazilian "mod" of D&D 5e for a more "Tragic Fantasy" storytelling (its just D&D with way harder combat and situations)

- Nimble RPG, which we only did a oneshot with the two first parts of the starter adventure from the GM Book (we liked the system in the most part, but hated the starter adventure, since we found it too railroad-y and unfair at parts for a newer GM to balance on the fly)

- Pathfinder 2e... which we only made characters and tested 2 combats with zero context (still we liked it a lot, want to try more at a later date)

In the future we want to try out Call of Cthulhu, Fabula Ultima, Daggerheart, Symbarum and Vampire: The Masquerade (or others from the same game world and system). Maybe Dragonbane, also. And we are currently playing 3 campaigns: a D&D 5e Strixhaven adventure, a 3DeT Victory custom adventure and a.... """Sandbox""" D&D 5e adventure (more so a "we don't have enough players tonight for the other adventures, so let's have some random fun with 8000 homebrews")

But... idk, something is missing to us, specially me. We love COMBAT, we love GROWING INTO AWESOME POWERS, we love FANTASY, FOLKLORE & MYTHOLOGY, we love CHAOS, we love TACTICAL COMBAT, we love a bit of MELODRAMA, we love EPIC STORIES OF EPIC HEROES, we lot LOTS & LOTS OF MAGICAL LOOT.

But we still hadn't found THE game. I also personally want to challenge myself a bit more. For example, I like a more gonzo "Tale of the Murder-Hobos", but I also like a "Dark Fantasy with a hopeful ending" (so not Grimdark misery pron), but I don't know how to DM such a game and am also quite squimish with anything gory, psychological or needle-like.

its there such a game? Should we just be happy with