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Genuinely wondering, especially since I fell down the rabbit hole of unfulfilled Kickstarters.

Never fudge the dice. I don't abuse it but it definately happens and always makes the story better and/or winds up with the table having more fun.

I run narrative-driven games — atmosphere, choices, light mechanics. My group said they wanted exploration and freedom. So I built large locations by hand, wrote out the lore, gave each player a private notebook so I could follow their thinking.

Result: notebooks empty. The one who wanted exploration the most was convinced we had to follow the plot. Another buried me in lore questions unrelated to anything happening. A third just couldn't be bothered to think.

Is this a common thing, or did I set it up wrong? And if you've run into it — what did you actually do about it?

UPDATE:

Thanks everyone — didn't expect this many responses. A few points keep coming up, so putting them here so people don't have to repeat them:

Too much lore up front draws invisible borders. The "restaurant menu" analogy nailed it: hand someone a menu and say "or anything you like," they'll order off the menu.

Open-ended questions cause paralysis. Concrete A/B choices with the GM breaking ties works better. Set session times yourself instead of trying to accommodate everyone.

A deadline means nothing until it actually bites. Mine hasn't yet, so the players had no reason to treat it as real. Running a timed obligation alongside "you're free to explore" pulls in two directions at once. That one's on me.

Some groups just can't do sandboxes, regardless of what they say in session zero. That's not a failure on either side.

Still reading everything, just not replying to all of it. Appreciate the time people put into this.

After decades of wanting to give D&D a shot, I finally got a group of 4 players and an experienced DM together. Session zero was fun and I really enjoyed building my character at level 1. However, the DM and the other players seemed to have zero interest in building an adventure group with a common goal.

By level 8, the campaign had kind of unraveled and none of us really had any idea of the plot of the module. All 3 other players had at least some experience, with one having a subscription to Beyond and many if not all of the extra books and modules. The whole time I was playing, it felt like I was in a glorified character builder where the other guys were plotting to build a specific archetype and have their characters do very specific things; one guy would even throw crazy “can I do/make XYZ with my abilities” at the DM, who would agree, then the player would rub his hands together in excitement. They‘d offer suggestions on what skills/spells to select and be disappointed if I didn’t go with their ideal build for my character. Ultimately, I decided to remove myself from the campaign because it just wasn’t a fun adventuring experience.

TLDR: I thought playing with experienced players would improve my experience because they could explain some rules, but it turned into them bringing long-plotted character builds and plotting to mess with the DM, who went along with it.

Looking for something with actually engaging combat (not just chucking opposed dice pools or things like that), but that isn't just an index of abilities, powers, or builds to choose from. Something with at least some kind of tactical depth and player expression.

Back in the 80s I played AD&D, DragonQuest, Star Wars D6, and a pile of other TTRPGs with more charts and tables than a tax manual. Today my group plays D&D 5e. I’m not a huge fan of the system, but it’s what they were running when I joined, and I like the people more than the rules. Ironically, I would have loved 5e combat back in the day. The simplified combat would have sped things up enormously when we were doing all the math by hand and flipping through books to find charts.

But we’re not playing with pen and paper anymore, we play online. I’ve got a D&D Beyond subscription, a Foundry server and a Roll20 account.

I just re-read the DragonQuest manual on my iPad, forty years after reading the paper version. It struck me that the game’s old reputation of slow combat doesn’t really need to apply in a modern VTT environment. All those situational factors that once bogged things down could be handled instantly. You’d just tick the boxes that apply: Target Stunned, Attacking From Behind, Charging with a non‑Pole Weapon, Attacker Fatigued, and so on. The system would update the chance to hit in real time. Click “Attack,” and it instantly rolls, determines the outcome, pulls the correct result from the proper chart if needed, and displays the effects.

Facing, movement, attack type, height differences, etc would become meaningful tactical choices without adding friction. The crunch becomes strategy, not bookkeeping.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do with this realization. Is there a crunchy fantasy RPG with good VTT support like I describe above? Not finding DragonQuest supported anywhere. Hackmaster has limited Foundry support. DCC and Rolemaster seem to have decent Foundry support, but are they just a digital character sheets or does it handle combat math well also? I like the idea of Crucible, an RPG designed for Foundry, but progress on that seems to be slow. Any other suggestions?

Are there any RPGs or expansions for one where you actually play as a dinosaur?

Hello, fellow RPG gamers, today i wanna show you one of my favorite brazillian RPGs, Assimilação (Assimilation, cover art), a post apocalyptic narrative game about surviving a world full of bizarre creatures and people that evolved beyond normal limits. Before we start, i’d like to apologize if there are any grammatical errors on the text, english is not my native language, cuz i live in Brazil of course. Also my autocorrect might change some words here and there so there might be some portuguese words here. I also hope this post doesnt get removed because of self promotion, cuz i just wanted to share about a game most people wouldn’t ever get to know outside brazil. So, without further ado, lets get into it!

the setting

The setting of assimilation turns around an event called “the colapse”. The exact nature of the collapse is left ambiguous on purpouse so the GM can full in the gaps with their own explanation, but one thing remains untouched: the colapse brought the Assimilation with it. The Assimilation is pretty much a zombie virus but instead of making people go crazy, it actually accelerates their natural evolution process to an extreme level, so you could go to sleep one day and wave up with fins or scales, and depending on how many mutations you have, the virus could take control of your character, and that’s how people become actual zombies. Despite that, the player actually has some control over how much their characters give in to mutations, but I’ll cover that later on. So the vírus caused monsters to appear and people to go berserk, so the world ended, and now groups of people reunite to try and survivor this hostile new world that was born from the destruction.

The mechanics

Assimilation actually uses custom Dice with symbols, and they work kinda similar to genesys. The actual Dice rolling mechanics are a mix between a bunch of systems, like storyteller and l5r. Basically, the game uses d6s, d10s and d12s exclusively. These Dice all have custom symbols called success, adaptation and pressure. The success symbol, represented by a ladybug, is pretty straightforward: you get it on a roll, you succeed at whatever you were trying to do. The adaptation symbol, represented by a deer, is a little bit more nuanced, you can spend it to change your action after rolling the Dice, transfer one of your successes to an ally or cancel out a pressure. The pressure symbol, represented by an owl, indicantes consequences, if you roll a pressure the GM can introduce a drawback to your action, like making your ammo run out or making you take a bit of damage. Just like the storyteller system, the amount of Dice you roll is a mix of an attribute and a skill: your attribute determines how many d6s you roll and your skill determines the ammount of d10s. After all dice are rolled, you may pick 1 one of your dice to determine the outcome of your action, tough there are several ways to keep more dice. You can also choose to act by instinct and spend an assimilation point (which will be explained soon) to roll with Double attributes (like strenght+Strength for example) and swap all your d6s with d12s. Due to the d12 having more sucesses but also more pressures, this is a high risk, high reward option and may have extreme consequences. This all might seem a bit convoluted, but there’s actually an oficial dice roller which helps out a ton.

assimilating

Now this is the core of the system, as the name suggests. Every character has something called a “tug of war”, composed of an assimilation level and a determination level. Both of these values depend on one another: the sum of both of them is always 10, só if one Goes up, the other one Goes down and vice versa. Most characters start at 1 assimilation and 9 determination, but depending on the Campaign and the character’s abilities, they might start with more or less determination. These levels also determine the amount of points the character can spend on each score (so, for example, a character with 9 Determination also has 9 DPs to spend). APs are restored after every scene and are used to activate mutation powers or acting on instinct. DPs are restored after every rest and are used to keep an addicional dice on a test or activating specific mundane abilities. If a character Goes to 0 AP, nothing happens except that they can’t use anymore mutations until the next scene, but if a character’s DPs get to 0, they mutate. When this happens, the determination value of the character is Reduced by 1 the next time they rest, and therefore their assimilation value is increased by one. The character then just roll a d10+one d12 for each Assimilation level they just attained and keep all of the dice rolled. This is going to determine the amount of mutation cards drawn for each mutation type. For every success rolled, the character draws from the evolutive adaptations deck (hearts suit), which grant benefits like increasing attributes. For every adaptation rolled, the character draws from the adaptative mutations deck (diamonds suit), which grant power at a cost (like breathing fire, but your voice is now super deep). For each pressure rolled,n the character draws a Card from the inoportune mutations deck (swords suit), which are strait downgrades. Each Card value has a specific mutation related to it, and the character can spend up to 6 symbols rolled to increase the mutation’s level. For example, a character rolls two sucesses on the Assimilation roll. They then draw 2 cards from the hearts suit, getting the regenerative mutation (8 of hearts) and the senstive mutation (ace of hearts). The player can now choose to spend one point in each of these mutations or spend all of their 2 points in only one of them to get a stronger effect. Additionally, if a character accumulates 10 pressures on Spaces cards, the Assimilation takes control of the character permanently, but these assimilations can be removed of the character fullfills one of their purpouses (for example, if my purpouse is to find a Beach and in one of my expeditions involves a beach, i can delete 1 pressure off of mutations from my character). Overall, this jeans that the character can choose to give up on their determination to get more power, but the more they do so, the easier it is to lose control, so it’s pretty much a blackjack game of mutations.

conflicts

Conflicts are pretty straightforward here. Theres no initiative, all players characters act at the same time, and then the conflict actions are resolved. Conflict actions are also kinda randomly determined, each specific conflict has an amount of dice they roll every turn (like 1d6+1d10+1d12, or 3d10, or 2d10+2d12. The amount of dice and their size ia determined by the conflict difficulty and conflict type. Assimilated creatures, for example, roll more d12s than other threats). Differently from the players, the conflicts keep all of their dice at all times. Each conflict has specific activations which cost specific amounts of each symbol. An attack, for example, costs 2 pressures to Activate (could be less, could be more, depending on the amount of damage). Activations that harm the PCs cost pressures, activations that help the threat or change the situation cost adaptations, and activations that benefit the PCs cost sucesses. All conflicts also have a special activation called “supression” that is activated using the sucesses that PCs roll against the conflict, usually by fighting but depending on the nature of the conflict it could be something else, like running. I think this system is pretty cool and incentivises the creation of threats beyond combat.

conclusion

Overall, i really love this system and love it even more because it was made in my homeland brazil. I think it’s really unique and really well made and wanted to share it with the whole rpg community. If this post Goes well, i might even cover some other brazillian RPGs, like paranormal order. Anyway, this is it, hope you enjoyed!

I love stories where monsters are the heroes, but are forced to live "underground" because society sees them as monsters and reacts with fear or violence, no matter how much good the monsters do. Stuff like Hellboy. Stories where the "monsters" are just humans at heart, trying to fit in, and their mutations or paranormal abilities are just a metaphor for traits that are "othered" by society.

Ergo, I love the "secret society" aspect of Vampire: the Masquerade. But, the worldbuilding of that game takes a very different direction than "misunderstood monsters". The average Vampire in VtM is very much evil (even if they don't see if that way). You treat people like herd animals and kill them and drink their blood.

To be clear, this is not a moral qualm. It can be FUN to be evil! But, I AM curious: are there any good RPGs out there where the PCs are monsters, but it's a little less "Sopranos" and a little more "Nimona"??

I'm developing an RPG in this vein myself, but it hasn't occurred to me to ask and see what (if anything) in this vein might already exist.

I burned out on DMing some years back, and I've had anxiety about doing it again. Any advice to try it again? I've been wanting to get together a group for either D&D or Pathfinder 2e (which I find is easier to DM than 5e)

So I am finally updating my GM Screen after a few years. It's a simple 4 panels plastic sleeves to hold papers. Yet pulling out the prior pages was painful, and now there are ink stains all over the inside of some of the sleeves.

I printed 2 images I thought were cool (Kill Six Billion Demons, Allison "slays" the dragon) but after being there for years clearly the ink rubbed off the plastic. How would I clean this without damaging the screen?