**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.

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Quick confession. I've got a shelf (and a hard drive, TBH) full of games I bought, read cover to cover, got genuinely hyped about, and will almost certainly never run. Mothership, Spire, like four different OSR things, a gift campaign about SEC football, one Kickstarter brick I still haven't finished reading. For a while I felt kind of guilty about it, like I was doing the hobby wrong or just setting money on fire.

But at some point I stopped seeing it as a backlog and started seeing it as its own thing. Reading a really well made RPG is just fun on its own, totally separate from ever getting it to a table. A good rulebook is part game design, part worldbuilding, part art book. I'll read a clever initiative system the way other people read a good nonfiction chapter, get inspired, steal one idea for the game I'm actually running, and put it back on the shelf perfectly happy.

What finally made it click is that my home table only really runs one, maybe two systems a year, and thats the real bottleneck. It's not money and it's not interest, it's the group's time and their willingness to learn something new. So the play side of my hobby crawls along while the reading side moves as fast as I want. They're just two different speeds.

I dont think it's a problem anymore. It's two hobbies wearing one trenchcoat and I genuinely like both of them. Am I the only one who does this, or is your shelf a graveyard too? And does anyone else still feel a little guilty about the pile, or have you made your peace with it?

I lurk often and both here and RPG design there has been for at least the year+ I've been lurking, seen a lot of people looking for and creating TTRPGs with as little/few game mechanics as possible.

While I understand that there is obviously an audience for rule light I wonder if I'm just being blind and not recognizing that there is a massive audience of people who would rather use Improv over dice to resolve a scenario.

So, I guess my question or topic of discussion is:

What attracts people to games, with little to no "game" mechanics?

I'm a role-playing enthusiast with experience both running and playing various systems and campaigns (Anima, D&D and Pathfinder, Robotta, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire, etc.).
I also have a group of friends interested in role-playing, and I've tried introducing them to a few games, but they've never really taken off.
I've never managed to get them to read a rulebook or pay much attention to character creation; in fact, they seem more interested in playing than in learning how to play the game, which is understandable, but it leads to some frustrating situations (like not knowing how their own character sheet works) that have resulted in some bad experiences for both of us.
However, they're still interested in trying, so I thought the best option would be a simple system that can be easily explained and quickly put into play.
Any game and campaign recommendations? I was thinking about Fate Accelerated.

Hi all, so I have a few PDFs I've bought I'd like to make a paper copy of some day, however, I'm not sure what the best bookbinding method would be. The 10 page stuff is easy enough to sew together, but I'm curious what methods people suggest for the middle of the road stuff and how well it's kept up for you.

Hi there! I'm new to the rpg scene and really trying to get into it but because of how my brain works and social life in general just not being great I'm finding it tough to learn. I suck at learning things through reading, it takes a lot of mental energy to focus and even then I have to reread entire pages atleast 7 times. and given that rpgs tend to hand a million pages it adds up and can really kill any motivation I do have to know enough to run a game. I learn through doing and I find that often times what really helps me learn a system is via playing it as a player first.
So far I'd most likely be stuck as the forever dm with a small group of friends who are actually able to make minor amounts of time for games. So I was wondering if people here might have any advice or resources or anything like that for potentially ways of playing a system as a player while dming or cooperative dming. The systems I most want to get into at the moment are starfinder, 5e, and Wrath and Glory.

tldr: looking for games where combat has plenty of options, but no range/position/location based skills & abilities, that specifically isnt Fabula Ultima itself.

Clarification: it need not be a purely combat focused game, as long as the combat meets the criteria.

Good morning,

After experiencing Fabula Ultima, I realized that one of the biggest hangups in my game is map-based combat.

Are there any other combat-heavy games that are designed to have two teams lining up and duking it out?

Below are some parameters to consider (sorry for any redundancies)

What im looking for:

-Engaging character creation. Player's have plenty of options to choose from and cand craft a variety of builds

-Expressive Combat: player's arent just using the same ability over and over, they are able to utilize different strategies.

What i am not looking for:

-Games primarily designed for map play, even if it can be ignored. (No WFRP, Savage Worlds, 2d20 games like fallout rpg,)

-Nothing that relies on range bands, location-based attacks, positioning, etc.

-Nothing that requires referencing multiple tables for a single action (example: roll to hit, then roll to determine hit location, etc, etc.)

Hi, a couple of years ago I had downloaded an unofficial supplement for Mecha Hack called Mecha Hack Experimental Tech. It seems that I've lost the pdf now so I was wondering whether anybody knows where to find it again. All I remember is that it was created by someone named Dilarus.

Thanks in advance!

Howdy folks.

I've recently played through both Armored Core VI and Armored Core IV, and I'm now in the mood to play a TTRPG that would scratch the ich. Mutilated and scarred Mech pilots being guided by their operators or handlers to do various mercenary jobs in a dying world led by corporations.

Or, alternatively, could go with the professional armed Mech group route, like the Vespers and Redguns. Freedom fighters, maybe.

I've taken a look at Lancer, but I'm still unsure about it. It's just a little crunchy from what I've seen and I don't know if it captures the vibe, although I haven't looked at all the lore yet so maybe.

Thanks in advance!

hi! i'm planning my first ever campaign and it is an one shot. before fighting the final boss, the players need to find 3 organs that make the boss more powerful and destroy it (just like the mystic carrion quest in bg3). i'm thinking about making the mini trials/puzzles for each of these organs especific for each player, so everyone can feel useful to the quest.
i have an earth elemental sorcerer, a school of knowledge wizard and a nightwalker rogue, do you guys have puzzle ideas for each of these classes? for the rogue i thought of something with stealth, like using stealth to reach the organ, but i'm having a hard time thinking of something unique for the wizard and the sorcerer.
thanks already!

EDIT: im working with lvl 2 tier 2 players. the sorcerer has cinder grasp, rune ward and shadowbind and the wizard has book of ava, book of illiat, book of vagras and healing hands.

So, I had a really unique idea for a one-shot for my group of six players. The session will be entirely narrative-driven and focused on roleplay.
One of the core mechanics is that the characters are ordinary people working together at the same location, and the information needed to progress the story is hidden within the dynamics of the job itself. I want to design a fun mechanic where their "work" is systematized and serves as the engine for game progression, replacing combat encounters. I want this mechanic to involve plenty of player interaction—specifically regarding the exchange and use of information—while incorporating skill checks to determine specific outcomes and inject some chaos.
Do you have any recommendations for RPG systems that feature similar mechanics, board games that could be adapted, or any ideas sparked by this premise? Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

I received the Welcome To Night Vale rpg as a gift when it first came out. For anyone who doesn’t know, WTNV is a podcast set up like a community radio for a mysterious town in the desert. The whole podcast is stuff like, “a new dog park has opened in town! Don’t approach the dog park, the dog park won’t harm you”. Seemingly innocuous reports get weirder & your mind fills in the blanks.

The game uses essence 20 as a system (DnD 5e lite) & has no advice about setting up adventures or random tables to get things moving. The GM’s guide is one long combat session. It comes off as more a DnD setting with Night Vale paint on it than a dedicated game. The podcast is inherently built on ambiguity & darkness, leaving me no real roadmap to work with.

I’ve contemplated how to make a good game with it. The problem is, all of my ideas involve disregarding 90 percent of the game & completely making my own content. My friend seemed excited about the thought of playing it, but I don’t think I can make it work.