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(Sorry, english isn't my first language)

I have this friend who really likes to play the campaigns that we (We change the DM time to time) make, but it's impossible to play with her.

All of her characters are arrogant, womanizers and jerks (I don't mind characters like that, but everytime?!) and their behavior is making me stop wanting to play because it's just messing things up for the group.

Example: I've made a one shot where everyone were Goblins and they had to do simple things like steal a chicken. Everyone was having fun, until she decided that her character left the group because he wanted to flirt with fairies??? In the end, 2 of the 4 of them died, and she only appeared at the end of the fight scene.

On other campaign, the one that we are playing rn, her character is a huge dumbass, that because of him, the rest of the party always get into a fight, and in one of those fights, we killed the brother of a key NPC.

EDIT: Thank you all for the suggestion, and as some comments said, I didn't phrase it properly, but my question was "RPG is a group game, all characters that this player makes are jerks who can't accept no for an answer and put the party on very annoying situations all the sessions. How can I tell her to stop that?"

EDIT2: I spoke with her, she said that she would make her characters less idiots now, but we are okay, thanks for everything guys!!!

I’m an artist who gets plenty of work from the super rich.

A lot of them are a part of terrible shit. The people and environment suffering for their gain.

But face to face, they’re lovely educated people who support the arts and actively want to support a young artist - send Christmas cards and take me and my family out for dinner. But after a bit of research you find out they’re totally fucked.

A villain who’s in every other way a good person makes campaigns a lot more interesting.

That’s it. That’s my insight into the land of the mega rich.

Buckle up, it's a long one.

I wanted to love Triangle Agency, but on Tuesday night, I walked into running my final session feeling utterly defeated. No game that I’ve ever run has made me want to give up as much as Triangle Agency. After weeks of frustration with the complex rules, hidden mechanics, and lack of organization, this festering mess of a game, like a zit on prom night, was finally coming to a head. I sat at the table and wanted to cry. Weeks ago, it had become clear that this wasn’t the game for me. My players, however, were having a blast. So what worked and what didn’t about Triangle Agency?

The Good

As a firm believer in the “shit-sandwich” method of giving critique, allow me to lavish some genuine praise on the game.

The game is very much a mix of Control, SCP, and Severance. At its core, it’s a highly customizable mix of corporate horror and humor. The grinding mundane of the office versus the chaotic energy of the anomalous. That alone drew me in.

Then there’s the book itself. The book is a stunning artifact. The art is gorgeous. The presentation as an in-world employee manual is clever and gives both the GM and players a good idea of the sort of world they’re entering. It’s funny. It’s layered. It’s creepy in its bland corporate speak. And all of that is before you encounter the entity that starts to interrupt the bland corporate speak to tell you that you’re being lied to. If you open the PDF version, you can read the redacted text. How freaking cool is that?

The game also has some interesting mechanics. Having players at the table play important NPCs is a fun way to keep players engaged in each others’ PCs, and, at least in my game, led to some hilarious characters that I would never have dreamed up. That would be a fun mechanic to see in other games.

Player progression is also interesting since players have to make deliberate choices about their advancement on certain tracks while giving up others. Quite the novel way to replicate the prioritization we all do in our day-to-day lives. The rules for succeeding on a dice roll are straightforward. On a single success, you do it (though the GM might get a little chaos to spend...)

The Bad

No Index

The gamebook needs an index. The beautiful book, bursting with creative joy and wonderful ideas, is utterly useless in play unless you’re going to post-it note the thing until it looks like confetti or re-read it cover to cover before every session. Without an index, it is impossible to keep track of every single place the authors have hidden NECESSARY INFORMATION.

Need to know how dice rolls might change based on an upgrade your player got? Fuck you, GM! It’s behind the playwall, and you shouldn’t be looking at that anyway. Deal with it. Need to quickly reference something? Hahahaha, nope! Enjoy a mostly useless table of contents instead (Some of the pages don’t have numbers! So zany!) God, what are you, some mindless, corporate drone who needs her world to be rigidly organized? Vibe with the chaos, cupcake!

The Playwall

The playwall documents make up a large part of the book. These are rules, upgrades, and tidbits of information that the players unlock as they progress. Unfortunately, the authors have scattered important information about the game setting/world in the playwall documents (again, without an index or any sort of GM cheat sheet), so it is entirely possible, even likely, that your players will uncover information that you, the GM, did not even think to look for because there’s no index and because you have a life and a job and can’t reread the fucking book cover to cover every week. When I'm running a game, I'm dedicating time and energy to share something fun with my friends. I don't want to fight the game to do this.

I will note that my players really liked the playwall documents, so your mileage may vary.

A Narrative Game Crushed by Its Worldbuilding

Triangle Agency wants to be a narrative forward game in the vein of PbtA. It gives the GM and the players a vaguely defined world that they are free to flesh out and interact with. PCs are built in a way that is similar to PbtA playbooks, and their abilities are very much left to player preference and creativity. All good.

Unfortunately, narrative flexibility gets crushed by all that juicy worldbuilding the developers hid in the playwall documents. There is a lot of information in there that fundamentally alters the world you and your players create. As described above, none of that information is patently obvious or arranged in a way that would help the GM. You know, the player whose role it is to help describe the world and guide play? The player who might need to know some of that information to set up fun encounters for her players? Lol, nah. The game just blindsides you. All that flexibility goes out the window because now there’s the URGENCY and some super valuable information about what all of that is and what it means for the Agency.

If you’re going to create a narrative game, do that. If you’re going to create a game with a very specific world, do that. But please, for the love of a nat 20, don’t do both and then not give the GM a cheat sheet that clearly describes the game setting/world. There’s playing to find out, and then there’s whatever this is. It wasn't fun. It was frustrating.

There were also too many levers to pull in the game. This thing has three separate progression tracks, various ways to earn in-game upgrades, after-action reports, chaos effects, merits, demerits, and probably a partridge in a pear tree I forgot about. I made a call to not use the after-action reports and the game still felt like too much. And again, no reference sheet. With all this sitting atop a narrative style game, it's too much.

In sum, pick a lane, Triangle Agency.

What would have improved the experience?

As you can probably tell from my rant, an index and a GM cheat sheet would have been immensely helpful. Just something, anything to give the GM an anchor in the game setting so that running the game was more fun and less an exercise in misery and patience.

Before my first session, I printed double-sided sheets with the core rules about dice rolling and Quality Assurances for my players because the game doesn’t give you one. That would be too ~*normal*~ for Triangle Agency. Triangle Agency is very much style over substance.

tl;dr - Not a fan.

If you don’t want to read a GM purging her feelings about a game, stop here.

I’d consider myself a decent GM. I’m flexible. I say “yes” to a lot of my players’ ideas. I want the players, my friends, to have fun. I’m not out to railroad, and I’m very comfortable with narrative games. If you couldn’t tell, PbtA games are my jam. I enjoy collaborative storytelling.

At the start, I approached Triangle Agency with energy. I digested the rules and made that cheat sheet for my players. I tried to wrap my head around how to create anomalies. I envisioned scenarios the players could encounter. I even made a powerpoint to welcome the new agents to the Agency family. I wanted this to work because my table is phenomenal, and Triangle Agency was exactly the sort of game they were stoked about.

Triangle Agency broke me as a GM. All of that excitement vanished under an unuseable book, changing rules and worldbuilding, and a system that hates the GM.

I hope you can understand how embarrassed I was showing up to the final session with less than a paragraph of half-assed, handwritten notes and no idea of what to do. I felt like I’d let my players down. They deserved so much more than a GM who couldn’t muster the same excitement they felt for the game and just wanted the whole thing to end.

Out of the eight or nine sessions my group played, I enjoyed running two of them. Triangle Agency took everything I like about gaming, balled it up, and tossed it in a triangle shaped trashcan like a bored office worker. It was a frustrating, demoralizing experience. In the hands of another person, I'm sure this game can sing, but unfortunately, that person wasn’t me.

I help run a gaming club (we set up in July 25). We’ve got a couple of regular groups of Dnd, and when it’s busy, we have a third table.

The recurring thing is: our members always turn up saying “I want to try system X”… and then we all end up playing D&D anyway.

We have managed to run a few sessions of Blades in the Dark, which went down really well, so there’s clearly an appetite for other systems - it just never quite takes off.

I’m wondering how other clubs/groups handle this.
Do you:

• Run a dedicated one-shot table for non-D&D systems?
• Have a published game schedule in advance so people opt in?
• Or just accept that D&D is the default gravity well?

I’d personally like to get more variety on the table without it feeling forced or like I’m dragging people away from what they’re comfortable with.

Any advice welcome - thankyou

I enjoy the legen of King Arthur, but I'ver never read L'morte D'Arthur or whatever it's called. I'm no scholar of the legend.

I do like the recent family BBC tv show Merlin and much prefer the more fantastical elements of the Arthurian legend.

One thing Merlin did really well was present the idea of the 'Old Religion' (ie pagan magic) which Uther Pendragon had outlawed on pain of death. In fact in the show Uther is really the villain (with genuine motivations).

Anyway.

How good is Pendragon RPG for just such a game? Or is it really for people who want a more accurate scholarly Arthurian RPG?

Hi all. I have a player who I am 100% certain has access to the published module I am running and reads up on the situations/enemies/challenges ahead. He doesn't seem to have involved any other players in it. It hasn't negatively affected the game in a way I've found meaningful. In my view he's only really cheating himself. But it still doesn't sit well.

Anyone been in this situation?

What did you do about it, if anything?

This is a friend group playing together if that's relevant to anyone's answers.

Cheers 🥂

So my SO recently got The One Ring 2e for us to play and I've been really enjoying what I'm reading about the system (our group's only just made characters). I just wanted to put some feelers out there for recommendations. Is there anything you recommend that is Sword and Sorcery with classes, races, and complex leveling like The One Ring? To be specific, I'm looking for something where the players have little to no magical abilities, and preferably with a similar amount of inventory management and traveling mechanics as The One Ring.

I've got that itch to find a new 5e alternative, and the magic system interests me a lot. Anyone play it? Any obvious balance foibles I'm missing?

I’ve been playing DnD 5e with my group for a long time, since May 2020, over 150+ sessions over Zoom.

Last year, I found myself struggling to put sessions together. I had hit a known problem: beyond a certain point, DnD 5e gets hard for some DMs to handle the combat because every player and many of the monsters have a huge array of abilities and it can be hard to balance.

I am not a very tactical GM. I love narrative most. My players are level 12 now, and I think we have gone beyond my abilities to DM DnD. My players have done nothing wrong and it is thrilling to see them overcome in minutes an encounter I had planned to take a whole session because they used their abilities in a way I couldn’t foresee. But that’s also draining for me.

So I spoke to them and told them everything. They were so kind and supportive, and had a lot of good ideas. It cemented why I want to play with them.

We made a plan. We will continue the current game until this arc ends, and if they have any character goals they will let me know so I can work those in. Then one of them will take over as DM for a bit and run a short campaign.

While this happens, I will look at some other games which might work better for our group, and run one-shots. It might be that we could use another system, or we might stick with DnD 5e but never go above a certain level (10 maybe?).

I don’t want to overwhelm the group with one-shots, so my plan is to find three, maybe four at absolute most, other systems to try. The group has six people which has already ruled out a few games (BitD/Scum and Villainy and Fabula Ultima) which I want to run but which don’t work well with six players. We play remotely and DnD 5e is the absolute limit of crunch we can take (sorry, Lancer). Narrative is everyone’s favourite bit but we need some rules to keep things coherent, and everyone likes to build the story and tone as a group (I’m not sure if a PbtA game will work but I might try one).

Current candidate systems include: Nimble 2, Fate Accelerated, The Wildsea, Cairn, but I like reading RPG books so more will probably present themselves.

So I suppose the point of this post is that a good group will be good to you no matter what and it’s always important and good to have dialogue if you feel like any part of the game is too much, even for GMs.

Hi all!

I'm looking for a game system that is similar to 5e that also ticks a few checkboxes (that i'll present here). Kinda don't want to deal with learning something more rules-heavy (like pf2e) nor do I want to play 5e. I want something nice, and fresh, that has minimal prep time so I can focus more on other things than just the system.

You see, I am an artist. I like showing my players pretty pictures and doing the more creative stuff. This means maps, pictures of places, characters, etc. The more time I have for that the better.

While I am presenting checkboxes here, feel free to recommend anything you think I might enjoy. It doesn't need to check everything here.

• Rules-light.
• Let's me easily use my own setting, NPCs, enemies, items, w.e, etc. (So, setting agnostic one might say, I think)
• Ideally classless, or has the option of being classless.
• Is designed with a fantasy setting in mind. (So, again, rules-light 5e alternative).

And that's really it. I don't wanna nitpick too much about what system I use. I really enjoyed Mork Borg but I find the system a bit too deadly and I'd like to have my players be invested in their characters and have them last.

Thanks in advance :)

Edit: Just found out about the game recs area. I'll be checking that out as well, but any personal recommendations are super welcome as well.

Was running a campaign for a lesser known RPG called SLA Industries which we have had to take a break from due to becoming a Dad. (Who knew kids take up so much time :p ), but occasionally I'll still get ideas for future campaigns which I'll jot down and move on.

However, I was watching Saw the other day and thought what would a Jigsaw type villain look like in this game, next thing I know, I'm designing trap, google random stuff like 'suicide gun from the Shooter film/TV show', coming up with a timeline of events and because my group would probably shoot him in the face without asking questions, I'm seriously considering creating a diary for them to find with his motivations in. All this for a game that we might not play again for a few years.

So, anyone else had an idea that spawns into a crazy rabbit hole of notes, google searches and madness