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My understanding is that Pathfinder is second-best-selling RPG in the US.

Reading through many threads on here over the years I see requests looking a system that I think Pathfinder or Starfinder might be a good fit, and sometimes I won't see it even mentioned once.

So, I'm curious why such a popular game is brought up so infrequently. Is it because so few people in this subreddit play these games? Is it because there isn't a lot of love for these systems in this subreddit?

In my perusal of the Internet, I've noticed Pathfinder is kind of it's own little RPG subculture. I see people talk about playing a number of different RPGs. But the Pathfinder people I meet seem to only play Pathfinder. I never hear someone say they play Pathfinder and Savage Worlds, or Starfinder and Traveller. Which is fine. There are plenty of 5E addicts out there. Nothing wrong with Pathfinder addicts. You do you. But it makes me feel like Paizo doesn't live in the same RPG sphere as all the other role-playing games.

I’ve seen very little talk about this game despite how good I think the Beta is, so I wanted to take a moment to gush about it.

The Eternal Ruins is a game about exploring and every so often making a cozy camp in an endless maze of ruins, with heavy Ghibli, Zelda vibes and some Dungeon Meshi vibes. It uses the Wild Worlds System from The Wildsea.

Things I really like about it:

Exploration scenes
Travels are usually done between one location and another, with the DM setting a Track that marks progress, with players taking on roles like Forage or Scout, and the GM rolling to generate locations each time a travel sequence ends. These are not new mechanics if you are familiar with Forbidden Lands, Heart, the City Beneath or even Mythic Bastionlands, but where The Eternal Ruins shines is how the locations interact with the camping scenes.

Instead of being merely narrative, each ruin feature you roll as a DM comes with additional mechanics that often impact how easy it is to make camp or explore the location. This means that players have meaningful mechanical choices on whether to explore or make camp at each location they arrive at.

Maybe they found a very safe location early in the day, making camp then would mean having to travel at night. Maybe they found a suboptimal location at the end of the day, do they stay there or do they push their luck and risk not finding a better location before the day ends?

Camping Scenes

I’ve read a fair number of camping rules and mechanics, and none have captured so well the cozy vibes of a communal cooking pot surrounded by explorers sharing stories like these ones.

Cooking not only allows you to fill your hunger track, but using additional edible resources, the players can create a pool of “flavor points” with which they can go shopping for positive effects that will accompany them for the rest of the coming day. Other cozy tasks include sharing stories to restore hope and crafting camping gear that makes cooking or healing easier or sleeping more restful.

Nonviolent Combat Mechanics

I’ve seen a ton of games go for the “talking things out is always an option” approach to combat, but it’s usually relegated to roleplay scenes and never as deep as the physical combat. In TER, the nonviolent option is actually mechanically supported with as much depth as the physical combat.
Each enemy or hazard has two “HP bars,” a Challenge Track and an Accord Track. Actions taken to parlay or nonviolently deal with a creature lower its Accord Track, while attacks lower its Challenge Track, with each enemy often having different lengths of each track, different protections, and special rules.
Moon-Mask Foxes, for example, have a short challenge track, but the difficulty to hit them is increased due to their speed, their accord track is longer, but if you use a sweet edible resource as part of the action, the difficulty is lowered.

Like The Wildsea but Better?
Finally, and maybe this is just a thing with me, but if you ever played The Wildsea due to it’s cool worldbuilding and concept, but had trouble with some of it’s more open ended resolution mechanics and travel rules, which was definitely the case for me, TER seems to keep all the cool flavourful stuff of the system, while streamlining it and giving you a more direct and mechanically concrete resolution for each of the cool actions you can take and fixing almost all the problems I had with the previous system.
Of course a lot of people love The Wildsea as is, but I've seen a fair number of DMs report that they struggled with the same things I did.

That's about it. I've been having a ton of fun with the system and wanted to give it a shoutout while the Kickstarter is still running, while also introducing some people that might love the system but haven't heard of it yet.

I’ve been playing RPGs regularly since late 2019. I’ve lost count of how many sessions I’ve played. I finished Curse of Strahd (which lasted 3 years), played many one-shots, and now I’m halfway through Masks of Nyarlathotep. I’ve always been the DM among my friends, because I’ve always loved being the game master, coming up with stories for my friends to experience. I’ve always been very easygoing and open to other people’s ideas, and I’ve always had a lot of fun doing it.

But recently I’ve been feeling a bit tired. Since I’ve already read all of MoN and now I’m running it based only on my notes, my RPG effort has mostly been about thinking up stories I want to organize. I have one with a Stranger Things vibe and another set in the Wild West, and I really want to run an original D&D campaign, so that’s where my effort has been over the last few months. This weekend I played a one-shot run by a friend, and besides feeling happy, I also felt very tired, and I realized I’ve been feeling this way about almost everything related to RPGs. I was excited about buying a 3D printer and running a D&D campaign completely off-screen, but now I just feel frustrated, thinking my world idea is bad, not unique or original at all.

Have you ever gotten tired of RPGs at some point in your life? Did the excitement come back after a while?

I currently play RPGs with my group of friends almost every week, all still young, finishing university, looking for jobs, etc.

However, we are unfortunately decided to start running 3 different adventures at the same time, so we don't have the space or time to try new games, something we really want to do, specially me!

I want at least see one that would be good for me to GM (even did a post today looking for options), but I can't get the time to see if it would be a good fit or not, and I don't wan to delay 3 whole adventure just to get the feel for a new game that we may or not play.

For an idea, I want to look into:

• ICON
• Legends in the Mist
• City of Mist
• Nimble
• Shadow of the Weird Wizard
• 13th Age
• Dragonbane
• "X" Without Numbers
• Savage Worlds
• Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells/Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells
• Chasing Adventures
• Mythras + Classic Fantasy

Should I just be patient?

Technically I'm not trying to self-promote, but it's definitely close enough so thought I'd play it safe.

We've got a crowdfunding campaign going live in March and have started advertising in America and Australia. I'm Australian so that made sense, and the audience in America is huge. Recently I was asked if I wanted to advertise in the UK as shipping there would be expensive but the game seems to fit the vibe for players over there.

So just wanted to check in and see if that's true from other people's perspective.

"Gilmoril: Technogothic Nightmare is a table top role-playing game designed for 1-6 players, combining the monster hunting, mystery, and aesthetics of The Witcher, Bloodborne and Horizon Zero Dawn, with a few twists of its own.

Gilmoril is about being an expert hunter of robotic creatures that take on the forms of mythological monsters. Each has a set of behaviours and motivations which are used to define what kind of monster it is. This in turn is used to determine how you can ultimately destroy them."

I don't really want to link to the backerkit page because that's not the point of the post, but I do want to show off some art to help you understand the vibe so I'll link to the collection on the website: https://www.talesuntoldrpg.com/portfolio-collections/my-portfolio/gilmoril-technogothic-nightmare

So from your experience, does this project fit with the vibe of the UK tabletop scene? Thanks for any answers in advance, and if you don't have an answer but read this far anyway, I appreciate it!

I've been thinking of running a short DOGS game or oneshot, but I'm getting caught up in the NPC prep and feel like I'm doing something wrong. I'm wondering anyone who's GM'd this before (or the original Dogs in the Vineyard) has any tips on why this seems so much harder than it needs to be.

It seems like any NPC who is a potential source of conflict needs a LOT of traits. Looking at examples in the book, I'm seeing about 6-10 traits/relationships/etc. each. The fact that this is the same amount of detail as a PC makes me feel like I'm missing some form of NPC abstraction - for example, you wouldn't make every DnD NPC have a full set of PC classes and feats. NPCs are typically less complex than players.

It also doesn't really seem like something you can make up on the fly - you need to know what the relevant traits are at the start of the conflict when you're rolling the pool, not as you're using the individual traits. So if you're making an ad hoc encounter, you would need to stop and determine quite a few traits in the moment, which seems like it would slow down play.

When I sit down to prepare a session, I just end up with a massive list of blank traits I feel like I need to fill before the session starts (which kind of feels like it needs each character to have an unreasonably detailed backstory), and it quickly feels like an unreasonable amount of prep for a single session of play. For people who have run it before: is this just a really high-prep system? Or is there a level of NPC simplification/abstraction that I'm missing?

Hey folks,

I'm thinking about putting together a ttrpg campaign for some friends of mine, and setting it in the Fallout universe (or one very similar) in our home city. I've been looking at the Fallout ttrpg system, and also considering using Kevin Crawford's Ashes Without Number which I also like.

However, this particular group, broadly speaking, tends to prefer rules-light games, or at least games that aren't so crunchy and are a bit more free-form, like Fate. I could just try to run it in Fate, but I'm wondering if there are any other options out there. So, are there any ttrpg systems that you all would recommend that are fairly free-form and on the loosey-goosey side, but that would be a good fit for a post-apocalyptic/Fallout type vibe?

Thanks!

So, I was looking up some stuff regarding this game and... the website is no longer there!

Did they go completely out of business?

I've been DMing Pathfidner for about 2-3 years now and everybody in my group is slowly getting tired of it. The biggest problem we have is the crunchy and slow combat system. Fight scenes just drag for us. Is there any system that has simillar vibes to Pathfinder but more dynamic? We also play Warhammer so could AoS Soulbound be a good alternative?

So I really like Necromancy as like a concept (like a lot. Raising the dead has always been a cool concept to me) and I've been looking for ttrpgs that have Necromancy and don't try to limit it or cheapen it to "evil magic that pcs can't use because it's evil." What are some games that have the coolest use for necromancy for PCs?

My group has a running joke that I am preparing an uber crunchy game for our next campaign (we switch pretty regularly). I'm probably going to run the next one and I figured that I could "prepare" the group for gamified accounting. So, what has been your experience?