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So let me preface this by saying, I am fully open to the idea that the answer to this is "West marches just isn't for you", not everything is for everyone and that's okay, I just have this nagging feeling that maybe I'm missing something

So I've done a couple of West Marches games. I did maybe 3 sessions before falling off it.

I'm in a group of people now that wants to do tabletop but we are all more or less really busy and one of them pitched a West Marches style game.

The reason I've always fallen off is because it just seems like a bunch of disconnected one-shots with 0 impact on the world around my character. The only connecting factor in my eyes was that they took place in the same setting.

The other thing is I really enjoy the story driven nature of RPGs - I find myself drifting more to rules light systems that favor that over crunch. I feel as though there's not opportunity for my character to really develop or engage these story beats.

Personally, I'd rather a deep story telling quest with stakes that has impacts on the world than a "go kill these goblins" style of quest.

Am I wrong in that is kind of incompatible with a West Marches style? Or was I maybe just in a bad West Marches game?

Edit: wow this blew up a lot more than I thought it would - I've come to the conclusion I was missing a lot of things as I suspected, maybe I didn't stick with it enough the first time or maybe the one I did was not put together well. Either way, I think I'm going to give it a try and possibly even GM some sessions

The official Neopets tabletop RPG was crowdfunded a while back for 426,484 USD across 7,561 backers. The playtest has been released to backers, and it is looking like a trainwreck so far.

• It is a 5e hack, joining the ranks of Doctor Who, Dark Souls, Phantasy Star, Nerds candy, and others. It uses 5e spellcasting mechanics, down to concentration.

• It is a bad 5e hack. "Defense" and "Endurance" are separate statistics, but "Magic" covers all social, intellectual, and magical prowess in one tidy package. The writers have tried to address this on Reddit.

• Despite combat being only a relatively small facet of Neopets, and despite the Kickstarter specifically promising extensive noncombat mechanics (e.g. "For those without a mean bone in their body, the system offers a way to play through pacifistically through [sic] any number of non-violent approaches"), the great bulk of the game's mechanics is about combat on a tactical battle map.

• There is a section about discussing with your group how much in-game sex they are comfortable with, which is some real degeneracy for Neopets.

• The premade adventure is hardly Neopets-like. It is more of a generic 5e murderhobo romp, down to killing bandits in the woods. "Depending on who is alive at the end of the encounter, information can be coerced from them" is a bizarre line to read in a Neopets game. (On a minor note, for some odd reason, one bandit refuses to wear a magic bracelet because it is too "feminine, regardless of what it can actually do.")

• There are payment problems with one or more writers. The entire Perks section simply reads: "This work has not been paid for by John Taylor of Geekify." (The playtest survey asks for feedback on Perks, which is impossible, when there are none.)

• The very top of the playtest document states: "John will steal anything you do with this project, and the people working on this have not been paid, had contracts forced on them, and John has not read nor understands these rules and demands more bullshit gets put in whether it fits or not." Geekify has already addressed this, at least.

It is hard to find more information about this. All I can dig up is these posts:

https://bsky.app/profile/keftiu.bsky.social/post/3me5mg4at7227

https://bsky.app/profile/flatluigi.bsky.social/post/3mebdfgnpvs2x

https://bsky.app/profile/sandypuggames.bsky.social/post/3mec3oz7iac2w

https://www.reddit.com/r/neopets/comments/1qyb1jg/whats_going_on_with_the_neopets_ttrpg_with/

How far can someone teleport? How fast can someone fly? How much can the super-strength guy lift? I understand that this is a narrative game. FATE Core is a game I like a lot, and I've played some PbTA. So I get that I could just wing it and come up with whatever I am satisfied with. Nonetheless, I'm halfway through chapter 4 and so far all I know is that a d6 is "above human average" and d12 is "godlike." And that's all I have to go on, other than how you assemble your three dice for the basic actions and Abilities. Assuming more explanation isn't packed into the Bullpen chapter, which I don't think it will be because the game is otherwise very good about telling you in advance what pages something referenced will be gone into in greater detail, how do other people adjudicate these basic, mostly out of combat, things?

For those of you who ran Microscope to generate a campaign world to play in, can you tell me how the experience has gone?

I've played Microscope as a one-shot previously, and the experience was... fine. Very neat, very different, but nothing extraordinary. However, my current group is now playing it with the explicit goal of creating a world for a Blades in the Dark campaign. We made a few house rules up front to help ensure that the timeline meets our gameplay needs. Halfway through, I'm loving it! It has all the joy of worldbuilding, plus the promise of getting to live it with throughout a campaign, plus the benefit that because everything is crafted together, I know that all the players know and care about the lore.

For posterity, here are some of the tweaks we made. A few explicitly contradict Microscope's goals, but have been useful.

• We talked about ideas ahead of time. Beyond just crafting a "big idea," we actively discussed what type of setting and tropes we were interested in. Players were also very generous in steering our starting point towards things that I as the GM was most interested in, knowing that my excitement was going to fuel a lot of the sessions later.
• We talk during each other's turns. This is the big change. We agreed that when someone's turn causes dissonance that others believe might trouble our long-term goals, we highlight it up front. The goal is always to suggest tweaks that preserve the idea while reducing the dissonance, and so far it's been pretty successful.
• We simplified legacies. This is taken directly from some blog posts by the Microscope creator. Legacies exist to let players revisit past topics, so we changed this to "Make anything you want" and it flows great.
• We don't really do scenes. Inspired by both the author's comments as well as my past playthrough, we've completely skipped doing scenes as "roleplay it out." We have instead used them to briefly describe some pivotal part of an event in greater detail, or in a Quiet Year style of "Ask a question for the group to opine on."

We're about halfway through and I'm stoked to finish and play in our world!

Has anyone had any experiences with this?

Good? Bad? You damned dirty ape?

Also WEG D6 based!

(don’t know if SW WEG compatible lol

The Planet of the apes TTRPG

Got 2/3 books so far and might want to run it at some point.

I've played several games in Savage Worlds Deluxe over the years, but only recently picked up SWADE. In reading through, I was struck by how much I enjoy the game design, layout, art, and as cliche as it is now.. focus on fun.

Is there anything to not like?

It wouldn't be my go-to for more narrative type games, but for what it does it seems pretty hard to beat.

I'm going to create my first campaign for the game of Perils and Princesses 

Do you know of any hard sci-fi games that genuinely engage with science? I'm thinking about very far future, but also that bear in mind the actual nature of the universe, where faster-than-light travel is not a thing?

Looking into both fiction and science, it seems that almost every sci-fi genre handwaves FTL, because, well, it's essential for cowboys and pirates in space, isn't it?

It's so hard to imagine a very far future, maybe even interstellar game, in which FTL isn't a thing. Has it been done?

What is a game that you came away from thinking, “That is one of the strangest games I’ve ever seen, and it was awesome”?

A couple come to mind for me. Troika is definitely pretty out there in terms of the different player character options.

Lacuna Part One Second Attempt is probably the strangest. You play in a shared dreamscape. Any time something bad happens, your heart rate goes up. If your heart rate goes up too much, you wake up and are kicked out of the dream. And the dreamscape is protected by suit wearing agents with spider heads.

Hello everyone. Who played this game, can you give review? What things you like in system?

I'm looking for a scifi sandbox game where:

• Players can be bounty hunters, smugglers, grey area of the law types
  
• No any magic/psyonic abilities.
• Class-less system
• Made for longer campaigns, like 20+ sessions
• Not too crunchy, below DnD5e crunch.
• Human-centric, no aliens or space horrors.

I know of orbital blues, but I'm not fan of the idea of characters pretty much required to die, and it seems like that system is better as a one shot or short campaign.

Is traveller the best option for the requirements? Can Mothership be changed to be more human centric without all the horrors?