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So, for context: I'm a GM most of the time, and I like running medium to high crunch games, like Shadow of the Weird Wizard, Savage Worlds, Lancer and Pathfinder 2e - all games that have many different player features, (magic) items and sometimes different conditions to keep track of. And, for the longest time, I've been mostly a purist regarding accessories other than the character sheet, player notes and some digital tools (as long as that player can keep focused on the game, instead of their phone), seeing everything else as just a fancier way to show the same info we all already have at hand, either in the books or in the sheet, and that can be written down if I think it might be useful rule to have noted down at all times.

Then, in comes Daggerheart, I got my copy earlier this year because I was curious what the fuss with the system was all about and ran a short adventure to my players (3-4 sessions) just to test it out. The system is good, it's similar to 5e with a different dice mechanic and much sturdier narrative support, comparatively, and I think I like it enough to run it again at a later date. But it isn't the system itself that I am excited about now, it's the cards: character creation and leveling up was sooo smoooth for a new system with many different player options, I really enjoyed just giving the cards to my players and having them sort it out among themselves which options they wanted to look at, and which ones to pass around. Also no double checking the book to see an ability during play, everything they needed was just there, without having to write it all down (which would've also cost us more time at the beginning).

All of that would have been much different if it was just the book with the info in it, passing hands while everyone tries not to take too long with it, and though I admit we could go straight into playing if I sent them the pdf and asked everyone to create their own characters before the game, I really wanted to see how easy (or hard) it was to create a character, and although it is not pbta or FITD levels of quickness, I was pleasantly surprised by how much the cards helped streamline a system that has a level of crunch that I am used to, and know that would've taken more effort without them.

So now, here is my new stance: I love cards, how they streamline character creation and referencing the rules, I'm happy Daggerheart shipped them alongside the book and made it basically mandatory to use them, because otherwise, I would have never even thought about using those (I actually now wish daggerheart had more cards, for adversaries and magic items, since as a GM, i basically never get to use them). I'm now planning on buying all cards I can get my hands on for PF2E and Savage Worlds, also perhaps making some custom ones for Lancer and WW. I'm also thinking on expanding my horizons on accessories, and might get them some spell slots counters or maybe some thematic bennies as gifts, but I'm not sure yet.

TL;DR: Daggerheart made me love cards in rpgs, and broke some biases I had about rpg accessories for players

What's a mechanic you wish more games would have?

I feel like a lot of people going from DnD to non-DnD systems expect Encounter Balancing rules and Monster Manuals.

For me, descriptions of how an enemy fights in combat. It lets me think of new ways to run combats in a way that my players might not have seen before.

Background, I've been playing in-person D&D with friends pretty regularly for five years or so, I've run short campaigns in other systems like BITD and Daggerheart in that time, and just recently joined an online DH game with a group of lovely strangers.

I've realised that I actually find running a game less stressful than playing in one. As a GM, I feel comfortable jumping in, narrating, building, and I rarely come out of a session feeling bad about it. I make a lot of mistakes but I'm confident everyone had a good time.

However, as a player, I come out of games with a lot of stress about whether I had been a good player or not. This has especially come to the for in the new online game I'm playing in, in which I've quickly realised I'm one of the more outgoing players. When the GM asks a question or poses possible actions and it hangs in the air for a long time, I'm desperate to jump in and be active, but I also don't want to overwhelm the other players and hog the spotlight.

I try my best to throw to other PCs based on the situation, and when I've had a long scene or a lot of input, I'll go quiet for good long a while to let everyone else have their moment. It's not like everyone else is super passive either, but a combo of me being exciteable and also not good with silence means that I'm constantly second guessing if I should have jumped in or should have stayed quiet. Combined with reading a few people in places like this complaining about players with main character energy ruining games, it means I'm coming out of sessions that I've had a lot of fun in, then really worrying over the next few days if I had been a good or bad player.

I guess I'm just wondering if other people have had this experience, or if you were able to get over it, how? I'd love to just be able to enjoy myself unequivocally because I do really love TTRPGs.

I've been wanting to run a game set in the present day (or close to it) about investgative journalists digging into outrages and human rights abuses. Going to dangerous places, meeting interesting contacts, getting as many gory details as you can without the people in power getting wise and chasing you down with guns. I also want to emphasize the act of reporting and make getting the story out there and spreading it around - or failing to - a factor. Maybe a particular story goes viral, support and money come in for the next job. Maybe it languishes and you're hard up with nothing to show for your work.

group is pretty well-versed in a variety of systems from crunchy trad stuff to card-based indie storytelling. A couple of my players **really don't care for PbtA/FitD/CfB games**, however. I definitely prefer **low mechanical overhead as a GM**. The main things I want to emphasize in this game are:

- The psychological toll of the work wearing on the characters - from fear, from witnessing horrible things, and from the ups and downs of readership and outside support.

- Player skill-based info gathering and rewarding clever plans the players come up with. My group (including myself) are definitely the type who prefer to, for example, spend a session meticulously planning a heist, then spend the next session playing it out, seeing how it goes wrong and trying to adapt, as opposed to having the planning done in flashbacks.

- Player characters that are very good at their jobs from session 1.

- **De-emphasizing combat**. The PCs are journalists, not fighters, and will have to rely on their resources, connections and quick thinking, not guns, to get them out of dangerous situations.

Hey fellow DM's,

I’m the dev behind Ambiance Architect, a free audio engine for DMs who want more convenient control over their game’s soundscape and music. Yesterday I released an update (v1.7.0) that adds real time reverb.

It's made for use at the table. Allowing you as a DM to not have to switch between tabs for audio management.

Since i can't post a video showing what it does i'll put in a youtube link

https://youtu.be/qkfRynvvOpc (the link shows a short video demo of the new real time reverb function)

Features include:

• Running local audio as music
• Integrating with the spotify player to control music as you play (requires paid spotify account)
• An integration with Freesound so you have access to a massive free library of sfx & music without leaving Ambiance Architect
• Acoustics (reverb and muffling sfx)
• On enter/On exit sfx triggers
• Looping background sfx
• Distance based sound with emitters
• Randomizing the audio on emitters to prevent repetitive soundscapes
• Non destructive editing of music and sfx
• Exporting/importing scenes, zones and playlists to easily share your soundscapes
• Image placement from your own files or pixabay
• And more!

If you want your game to sound like the attached video, you can grab it for free on Itch here:https://ambiancearchitect.itch.io/ambiance-architect

A full video tutorial covering setup and scene creation is available on the itch page/youtube.

I'd love to hear what you think 🙂

As above: So Below

I'm mostly curious to see what games keep people the most invested in the world, and what encourages them to do things other than adventure, even when the game's primary focus is on adventure.

That said, if you know of any RPGs that forsake combat entirely while still being in a fantasy or sci-fi setting, I'd be interested to hear about them too.

EDIT: After trying almost 7? recommended free image editors or paint programs for Linux, none of them worked for what I wanted until just now, Lazpaint seems just fine! I could do all I wanted, fast and intuitively and it is tiny. But will experiment with that as well as MapTool as suggested by /u/Gustave_Graves

I'm running a mega-dungeon for my friends, i never play online, always in person at the table. Use my laptop and a big connect monitor. I have tried fog of war on Gimp and Owlbear rodeo and other free VTTs. But gimp and all VTT's I have used, all of the ones I have found are either: paid or online only, or not intuitive/bit hard to use, heavy on memory or system resources, not great at full screen/bunch of stuff to sides or above the actual image, like tools and such or just simply do way more than I need them to.

Essentially all I want is to have a FOSS or free pretty lightweight app on Linux that runs natively and offline and does 3 things only:

a. Very easy to just fill up image/overlay with fog of war, fast

b. That i can full screen or half/screen adjust size of the window on easily, zoom in and out and move around image easily.

c. That allows me to erase fog of war easily as my characters explore, I guess that would mean that the "erase" tool cursor would have to be easy to quickly change in size (narrow short corridor vs huge room etc)

Perhaps someone knows a really simple image editing program that could do the above, I have tried several, but no luck. Thank you. :)

So I used to run a DnD game for my gf and a few others, which slowly fizzled out due to scheduling conflicts. We've talked about continuing the story with just her character, only problem is I'm burnt out on DnD as a system and am looking for something more narrative focused without as much crunch. Preferably setting agnostic too so we can just slot in our homebrew lore.

Games I've played before and enjoyed:

-Wildsea: Loved the character building and aspect system

-Mothership: Loved how the mechanics created tense survival situations, leading to dramatic moments

-Daggerheart: Loved the shift in focus towards storytelling compared to DnD, just built a bit too wonky for a 1 on 1 game for my liking.

Is there any game that supports 1 on 1 play that you could reasonably translate a DnD game into that prioritizes narrative play and social encounters?

I'm looking for newer Mechs TTRPGs from the last 24 months or so. maybe closer to last 16 months.

I think the last one I ran was Salvage Union when it was first released. What else has dropped since?

It's something I wanted to see if other people share the same feeling. I'm not trying to shill or trash the systems I'm about to mention, it's just something I notice: 90% of systems have completely boring and underwhelming monsters/NPCs.

Take a dragon in D&D (5e), for example. It has 3 attacks, it flies, and every now and then it breathes fire. So a fight with a dragon usually comes down to it staying close in melee, maybe flying around, and if the GM is feeling cruel, picking up players and dropping them from a ridiculous height. Sure, the GM has full freedom to play hit and run, but the dragon is going to boil down to exactly that.

The same goes for OSR systems, though I get that the design philosophy there is to keep things simple. The only systems I've read that made me look at monsters and boss fights and genuinely think "okay, this is really cool" were Draw Steel, Nimble, Dragonbane, CAIN, and Pathfinder 2e, though I find that last one a step below the other three.

Am I wrong for wanting monsters that are more fleshed out, with more going on than just "it hits, it bites, sometimes it flies, that's it"? I don't want stronger monsters for the sake of steamrolling my players. I want monsters that are interesting to run. And the system doesn't even need to be crunchy or gamist to pull that off: CAIN is fully narrative and has great monsters, Nimble is super simple and has great monsters.

Running interesting monsters and crafting an appropriate challenge for my players is part of the fun for me, at least. Yet I see most systems simply not caring about that aspect. My own table is a good example of this: my players love the way my monsters do unexpected and varied things, but that's because I spend most of my prep time rebuilding them from scratch. The final fight against Strahd had his entire stat block redone. I gave him a second and third phase, while also giving the players opportunities to use their abilities, and players who had run that campaign before said it was one of the best finales they'd ever had.

So anyway, does anyone else feel like monster design is the part that most systems just... leave behind?

Howdy! I am working on writing story arcs and adventures for a two-fisted pulpy treasure hunt campaign in the vein of stories like Indiana Jones, The Mummy 1999, and Uncharted. I am currently writing an adventure centered around dragons titled "The Serpent Spear" and I need some help figuring out the next step. Here's what I have so far:

• Background - Long ago, an Arthurian knight by the name of Sir Wigalois was travelling through northern Africa, when he stumbled upon a town beset by a dragon. He slew the beast, requesting that the local leader give his reward to the poor, and thought little more of it for ten years, and eventually the legend was absorbed into the legend of Saint George. After a decade, however, he came to learn that the creature he slaid was not some evil demonic beast, but rather just an animal, the last of its kind. Feeling great remorse in his heart, Wigalois travelled throughout Europe and Africa in search of lost dragon eggs that had fallen to dormancy, and through Celtic magical rites long since lost to time, brought them back to life, creating a hidden haven for the creatures deep within the bowels of the earth, so that they may one day seep wonder back into the world.

Now, in 1936, t

• he players must retrace his steps and find his legendary lance, Ascalon, in a race against the Afrika corps to keep them from finding this spear, and then the sanctuary after the lance's true nature is revealed.

1. Start - Like all the best adventures, this story begins at the end of another adventure we don't get to see. Could be one big adventure with the whole party if its the next entry in a continuing campaign, could be a bunch of little adventures if this is the start of the campaign and we still have to bring the pcs together, ultimately its not a huge deal. After this scene wraps up, the PCs get a message from a friend of theirs, a professor of archaeology at Oxford. One of his star pupils was part of a dig in Libya, but he has inexplicably cut contact. The only thing that he sent back before going quiet was a small box containing a black fang, about as big as a banana and smelling of sulfur, carefully wrapped in cloth. Should the PCs express doubt or trepidation, he will put on some gloves, take the fang, and tear a hole through a small steel sheet with it, the fang apparently being completely undamaged.
2. The Tomb of "Saint George," Libya - The players journey to the dig and find it alive and bustling, with the expedition leader quickly catching them up to speed on what happened. They had unearthed a tomb, covered in latin inscriptions and dragon iconography, but riddled with dangerous traps, and one of them unfortunately killed the archeologist that the PCs were sent to check on. In his honor, the leader asks the player characters, well renowned explorers and archaeologists, to find a way past these traps. There are three chambers in the tomb: The Chamber of Flame, the Chamber of Claws, and the Burial Chamber. The former two I will explain below, but the latter is the most important. Once the PCs have bypassed the traps and reached the Burial Chamber, they find a sarcophagus, the lid of which is a grand statue depicting a knight slaying a dragon while an oddly reptilian angel holds him from behind, a sad expression on its face. As the player characters are staring in awe at this, one of them feels the barrel of a Luger against the back of their head, and hears the click of a gun's hammer. Turns out that the expedition leader is actually a nazi spy, as are all of the crew, having imprisoned or killed the rest of the expedition when they arrived. Nazis swarm into the room dragging the archaeologist that they had said died, a mousey Milo Thatch type of nerd (Basically an actual archaeologist rather than the Indiana Jones type). The nazi commander demands that the player characters open the sarcophagus in case its trapped like the other rooms. It isn't, and inside is a skeleton in armor clutching what appears to be an ornate lance head (not the showy cone shaped lances used for jousting, an actual military use lance, which is closer to a long spear) inscribed with serpentine motifs and something written in Latin. The pcs are forced at gunpoint to hand it to the commander, who gloats a bit before noticing the inscription. Unfortunately for him, the commander doesn't speak latin, so he holds the archaeologist at gunpoint while demanding the player characters translate out loud. I haven't hashed out what exactly the inscription says yet (Suggestions welcome), but the gist of it is that it mentions Cambria (the old Latin name for Wales) and that the lance's shaft can be found where red and white shed each other's blood for the last time. A bit of archaeobabble and the player characters can deduce that this leads to Dinas Emrys in Wales, famous for its legend of a battle between a red and white dragon. The Nazis take the player characters and the archaeologist captive, reasoning they could be useful for translation later, and drag them to camp. Once at the camp, the player characters can use the fang they obtained to cut their way out of their chains and orchestrate a mass breakout, which creates enough chaos for them to escape with the lance and the archaeologist.
3. Dinas Emrys, Wales - This is the one I am struggling with and need advice for. I think I want the baddies in this section to still be Nazi spies, here disguised as a lord and his retinue on a hunting trip, but I am not sure how to make this section appreciably different from the last one, how to make it more than just "Go into tomb, avoid traps, get intel, escape." I do know that I want the clue here, probably scratched into the lance shaft in ancient Welsh, to direct the pcs to Naples, because of the incredibly serendipitous timing of a painting being found there around when I was writing this, but am unsure of anything else.