**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’ve never seen this type of campaign when I’m interacting with the western(by western, I guess I mean NA) RPG community, and I think it would be fun for me to introduce this eastern type of campaign on this platform.

Now, since there is no concept like this(at least not one I’ve heard of) in western community, I’m going to refer to it as opera campaigns. The idea of the opera campaign is that it has a coherent story of its own and players are merely side characters to the story. The character taking the central stage will be an npc controlled by the game master, and most of the game will revolve around this one npc(and most of the time, the npc’s mental struggles and suffering). The players will merely be this npc’s friends o acquaintances who for whatever reason the specific campaign states get involved in the conflict and is there to witness the story of this npc.

For the players, they control their characters just like in any other campaigns but they’ll have that npc protagonist controlled by the gm being a part of their party. And very often(by that, I mean most important and emotional scenes) they’ll be locked into a “cutscene”, in which the gm narrates a prolonged action from that npc protagonist(it’s often an interaction between the bbeg and the protagonist, both played by the gm, or significant moments to the protagonist). “Watching” these “cutscenes” feels like watching an opera, which is why I can it opera campaign. And of course, these campaigns are extremely railroaded with almost no freedom in the direction of the story whatsoever since the protagonist is that npc, not the players.

Now, I was giving the most archetypical description of opera campaigns. It’s a spectrum just like every other types of campaigns. Some campaigns allow more freedom while some less. I know how abstract what I just described seems, so let me explain through the most recent campaign I had with my friends.

In that campaign, the other 3 players and I played as classmates of a teenage wizard character, who was controlled by the gm. So all four of us just did normal human things to solve mysteries while the teenage wizard used magic to fight evil forces. Eventually, we learned about the teenage wizard’s past, fear, trauma, and the campaign ended with us accepting the wizard as a flawed person who was also our(characters’) friend.

The appeal of this is that it has a complete story with coherent themes, and it’s like reading a novel with your friends while playing as characters in the novel. I’ve never seen anything similar in western campaigns, and I’ve watched countless actual plays and read modules. And don’t get me wrong, this type of campaigns is only a sub-genre sort of thing in Japanese and Chinese communities, too, but it is a sizeable one, and you can certainly find a good amount if you are shopping modules.

Anyway, I don’t really trust in my own ability to explain the concept, so feel free to ask me about specifics.

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?

Hello everyone!

I’ve been thinking about my next campaign and have been mulling over character creation guidelines for my players.

A question that’s been on my mind lately, though is how genre-savvy should the characters be?

For example, is it wise for a GM to have people bring monster hunter type characters to something like Curse of Strahd, for instance? Would you allow a PC who recently left a Cult of Nylarthotep in Call of Cthulhu? What do you suppose the limits of how ‘genre-savvy’ the PCs should be are?

My buddy hates grunt fights, like HATES hates them, primarily running them. He constantly laments how he wants to run more games but dislikes the tedium of having to run grunt encounters or generally go through dudes that Do Not Matter:tm:. What systems could I point him towards that would work well for primarily narrative focused things and combats only occurring for big climatic clashes or bosses?

A boss rush ttrpg, I guess?

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.

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! 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.

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!