**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.

That's basically the question in the title: what has this hobby given you?

I recently came across the same question in a Hungarian Reddit thread, and my answer was that, for me, roleplaying has been many things at once: a form of self-discovery, a psychologist, a confidence-building activity, a history, English and art teacher, and even a mentor in public speaking. But most importantly, it has been a source of new friendships and connections for someone who was once a socially isolated teenager with very little self-confidence.

Then I started thinking that this question might be even more interesting in an international community. We share the same hobby, but we come from very different political, social, and cultural backgrounds, so I'm curious whether tabletop RPGs have played different roles in people's lives depending on where they grew up and lived.

I'm especially interested in hearing from players outside Europe, or from cultural backgrounds very different from my own. Has this hobby given you similar things, or has it had a completely different meaning or role in your life?

Hi folks,

My group has spent the last 30-odd years playing Traveller and variants of BRP.

I had bought most of the Vaesen books over the last few years and was really looking forward to giving it a go. I finally got to run five published adventures including the one in the starter set but by the end, all of us thought it was OK but no-one wanted to play it any more - least of all me.
I found it to be really hard work to GM and my players were not terribly excited by the vague setting.

Slightly weirdly, I had previously run a couple of Alien one-shots with great success, so I was quite happy with the Year Zero ruleset.

What RPG have you looked forward to and was underwhelmed when you got round to playing or GM'ing it...and why?

Which TTRPG I should choose for game in setting Napoleon wars with difficult combat and health system, where every shot can be lethal. As reference I'm using "Guts and blackpowder"

I just inspected American Abyss (Which I'm very excited for), and I was wondering about running a TTRPG like said American Abyss: a TTRPG campaign set in a abandoned suburban area filled with unseen abominations of the people the once lived there. I was wondering if there are any good system which would be great for running this kind of horror. If there is, please do comment.

Just checking in with the r/rpg crowd. What are you playing right now? Got a campaign that’s firing on all cylinders, a memorable character, a ridiculous table story, or maybe a game that surprised you?

Drop a comment and tell us what’s happening at your table. We’d love to hear it.

Has anyone run this? Curios to know how much the formatting and whatnot has improved from the prior edition. I see comments about long winded read aloud text, poor organization, and hard to parse maps from the original.

The redo looks awesome just want a first hand experience of useablility.

Interested in both the DCC and 5e versions!

I've been looking at putting together a time loop scenario for something investigative horror-based, so I'm interested in the way that others have included mechanics to build tension, and I'm trying to find rhe ones that work best for me.

I'm not set on a system, but what I've seen so far in homebrew I've played was:

• Decreasing PC count, with players each starting with 2 characters, every reset deleting a randomly chosen character from the total party or rendering them nonplayable + antagonistic until everyone is down to 1 character, and then continuing the process from there.
• Increasing mental instability: played this in Delta Green. It included increasing sanity costs with each reset, along with picking up mental disorders.
• Injuries retained to some degree: I've seen this with damage, but it's been most effective in an ALIEN game where critical injuries were essentially retained and then downgraded into a lesser form of themselves.
• Later reset: instead of resetting back to exactly where events began, the players reset to some point forward of that point, with events between the previous reset point and the new one now set in stone.
• Instability of NPCs: With each reset, an increasing number of important NPCs become mentally unstable in some way, eventually culminating in severe paranoia and violence

So, I primarily play oneshots and some games I've had a blast with in recent months have been:

The Treasure at the End of this Dungeon is an Escape from This Dungeon and We Will Never Escape from This Dungeon: a very meta poetic GMless game about transformation and dungeon design. The base game contains 5 rooms (in nod to the five room dungeon) and four selves (player classes/archetypes that break the rules of normal dungeon crawling fiction like the thief literally pretending to have rules attached to their class when they are a cheat), although the supplement extends the number and possibilities.

The game goes like this, a player takes the role of a room, the others of the characters. The player answer the first question of the room then picks an element of design. Then fiction turns into a conversation until conditions are met to open a door and leave the room. Characters die on certain condition, can come back or the players create new ones. Players explore the dungeon until session time runs out taking turns being the room through the act of being the one who opens the door.

This sounds simple, but because in the base game there are only 5 rooms, you will always retread old rooms. That can lead to stuff like. There is a room with a puzzle of a lion and owl statues and moon and sun lanterns. The room is in twilight. Take the lanterns and place them on the statues whether to either let them forever sleep through their animalic habits or wake them up and kaiju fight. (I stole that, I confess) Return to the room. It is blinding day light. On the floor there is a mirror. Mage shatters the daylight into motes and then shatters the mirror into cracks. The muscle enlarges a crack so that we might slip through. There is a seemingly never-ending ladder and darkness. The mage throws the motes into the darkness to light what is below.

Return to the room. You are now in the lantern of a now sleeping sculpture. Break the hinges and open the door.

Dead House: I believe I got the title right. I played it at an online con. By the makers of Fiasco. A GMless game where you play through the winter of 1888. There are three seasons: Fall, Winter and Hell. It is a game that starts out with putting the locations and npcs on your board to create a map of the town. This isn't as freeflow as I would have liked as characters have deep links to one another and cannot just be randomly set. Same with locations. The goal of this part is probably to get acquainted with the cast.

Then the game follows answering a series of prompts, similarly to The Quiet Year, only darker. The first season start fairly unassuming, then it gets worse. People will die. A lot. People will go crazy. The aim is to reproduce despair. It's basically about a winter where the situation got dire as resources dwindled and people were left without food and wood to burn when it was blizzarding outside and they had no exterior help.

The characters are miserable too. They are layered people and many of them have been stuck in the small village due to circumstances and hate being there, especially the youth.

What I really liked despite being mechanically bareboned was that the story started telling itself and even though I started with rooting for certain npcs, in the end, I was killing them off and orchestrating their fates based on narrative logic and what would tell a better story. Only 4 people lived. I hated them all. It was a success.

Parsely: an rpg that mimics old computer text games. Containing 12 scenarios in the base book it is a game of few words. The players take turn controlling the nameless PC through a set of pre-written commands such as go north, go south, examine, take [object]. You even have the ability to save. The map is not visible and needs to be drawn by hand, lest you go in circles or meet dead ends like we kept doing in the jungle adventure. The adventures are very on rails, although they have several potential endings. What I mean by this is they emulate simple games and your actions are restricted. An adventure has several predetermined locations of interest, several predetermined challenges with most likely predetermined potential solutions, predetermined endings, etc. It acts as a puzzle on figuring out how to progress. It even has somewhat moon logic solutions, though most stuff makes sense. It can get very silly because of the extreme constrictions.

The Dunwich Horror: this is the name under which the playtest was offered. It's the GMless Cthulhu conspiracy board game. As with Carved from Bridlewood, it is a mystery without a preset solution, although it goes in opposite direction of that format. Where in CfB there are two mystery phases, the collection of clues and the theorizing, in The Dunwich Horror, the gameplay loop is that your characters, all playing pregen investigators have an evidence board and some preset named clues in the shape of lead cards containing locations, myths, npcs, etc. which you will through the course of the play tie in with cute little strings.

You start by doing backgrounds: the occult site you work for, your character intro. Then you arrive in the town and start investigating. You play out doing stuff at locations and trying to figure out things and you make a lot of shit up in an improv kinda' way. As you do you add a clue to the board, tie it together with other clues and dice roll for pushback. When pushback happens you advance on a three phase table and see the dangerous or supernatural consequences meddling with the eldritch create. These start tame, but get progressively more dangerous until your character's untimely demise or worse. You may also add more connections instead of clues.

Unlike Brindlewood Bay, you will theorize at every step of the way trying to figure out how everything fits in a hyperactive brainstorm. You will end up reviewing information and adjusting your beliefs as more suspects and clues are added and things are tied in. There is even a time of solace when the group can get together in a safe place to go over their leads and see how to proceed next. That happens in the middle, not at the end.

And in the last phase it becomes obvious that you are way over your head. You can at the end chose to kill off your character, go insane or worse or flee. But generally people pick the first two options cause Lovecraft.

I'm gonna be brief, I never wanted to use the new Reddit interface and always stuck to Old Reddit. Recently, it has been decided that logging in would be mandatory to use old reddit, another step further to try and smother it, to force people to go to the new shittier and more ad friendly interface. The days of old reddit are numbered, and one day they will pull the plug for good. If I can't use Old Reddit, then I will not use Reddit at all, which means I need a new place on the web to discuss RPGs.

Where are the other big RPG communities on the internet? Some friends of mine have suggested Discord, but I always felt that it was better for casual chat than long and in depth conversations, and debates. Also I vetoed places such as RPG NET because of their adversarial, and downright user hostile approach of moderation.

This post may mean trouble for my account, so if you have an interesting answer, give it quick.

As above are there any Invincible discord or other forums for the new Free League Invincible rpg? A place where GMs can share stories and actual plays of this new product?

Hello TTRPGers!

I'm looking for suggestions for a game system. Here's what I have in mind:

Audience: Middle/high schoolers

Play frequency: once a month for about an hour and a half each session

Consistency: Probably missing a random player each session

Campaign length: 6-9 months; 9-12 total play hours

Story: This is a little fuzzy. I'd like a story about different factions or characters with different motivations building a society together. I'd prefer little-to-no combat, instead relying on political and social levers to get things done.

Inspiration: If I could extend the game Ravine (see link) into a TTRPG game where the players may have competing priorities or goals, I think that would be ideal.

I'm flexible on the concept, but I'd prefer a game system that doesn't rely on a "big evil dude" that needs to be taken down. Instead, a game where the conflict comes from the world (weather, resource scarcity, etc.) and people who have different visions for an ideal outcome would be great.

I'm not even sure if this kind of game exists, but if it does, you all would be the group to know! Even if there's just a module floating around out there that could work, I can try to extend it. I'm just not a game designer and building something from scratch is waaaaay out of my wheelhouse.

Thanks in advance for your help!