**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.

I feel like, as I get into DND, I'm encountering a part of the TTRPG community that I struggle with. I'm a creative, I write as a hobby. I'm currently running a heavily rewritten Curse Of Strahd campaign where I rewrite basically everything. Even things I don't take issue with, I might rewrite just to get more of my creativity into the game. I love writing, so any excuse to write, I enjoy, and I'm doing so well, my players are having a good time, everyone's lines and veils are being respected, it's just all around a good time.

Yet, despite me being a GM of 10 years, with tons of experience across a ton of different systems, I am noticing an issue. Everyone is terrified of making mistakes. Every time I ask for advice, I get tons of advice on what not to do, and almost zero advice on what I can do that's new and exciting. No one is helping me write, I'm only getting hit with roadblocks and people telling me what I can't do. And often, what I can't do is different depending on the person.

I chalk this up to the Mercer Effect, weirdly enough. Everyone cautions you against doing something different, because it's not what people insist a DND game is.

I cannot imagine being a new DM who's trying to be, y'know, creative, because all you'll ever get is people telling you you can't do anything, and everything is a bad idea. But like, mistakes are part of the process, y'know? You need to write garbage to be a good writer. HP Lovecraft wrote some of the most influential horror of all time. He also wrote a story where a murder victim turns into a fly and buzzes around a clock and drives a man insane. Writing bad is a crucial step in writing good, and you gotta have games that fail, everyone laugh and you learn from it to be a good DM.

God knows I've run bad games before, but learning from them is what made me a good GM. Now I'm at a point where I communicate with players, I listen to what they want, I make sure everyone is heard and having a good time, and that's only possible because I learned from my mistakes rather than trying to obsessively prevent them.

I am giving you my permission! This goes out to any new DMS out there. Write cringe! Write dumb OCs and AUs so bad that AO3 would call them awful. As long as everyone has fun, who cares if it was dumb and stupid! Be free and be cringe!

A weird thing to judge favorites on, especially since you could read all PDFs on a phone nowadays. But I kinda appreciate RPG rule books that are more "hand held".

"Fate Core" and "Between the Skies" are still hundreds of pages, yet feel much nicer to pick up and page through compared to my much taller/wider BRP. Or even the DND 5e player guide.

With the former, I feel I can easily pick up and read even while walking around or moving. Which is nice.

So I was curious if anyone else had a favorite compact/portable book they would mind recommending!

So often I read a new TTRPG book and love it, but then find out that there’s no example of a character sheet anywhere in the book. I find that such an example is one of the best things to help explain what a game is about and keep things together in your head for why any particular rule matters or how it relates to the player experience. Since all my play is offline and away from the internet, this is extra frustrating since I can’t easily show a character sheet to players.

I haven’t been able to find any justification for this practice. Why is this done?

And what RPGs have been put together *with* a character sheet example inside their rulebook?

EDIT: I mean as in an empty character sheet, like what your own would look like before filling it in. Something easy to copy over. Although a filled-in example would be very helpful too.

EDIT 2: RPGs I’ve got that don’t have that include:

- D&D 5e

- all my PbtA games

- all my FitD games

- all my CfB games

- all my Borg games

- Dungeon Crawl Classics

- Worlds Without Number

- Dragonbane

been thinking about this after backing a crowdfunding campaign from a small press last year. the game itself looked genuinely interesting, niche setting, cool mechanics, exactly the kind of thing only a small publisher would make. but after the campaign funded it just went. quiet. sporadic updates every few months that basically said "still working on it" with no real detail. ended up getting a PDF about 14 months late with a bunch of placeholder text still in it. like actual [INSERT EXAMPLE HERE] type stuff in the final product. I get that small teams have limited bandwidth and cash flow is rough, but the thing that really got me wasn't the delay, it was that every time someone asked for a real status update in the comments they got a vague non-answer or nothing at all. that's the part that feels genuinely unprofessional to me regardless of team size. you can be a one-person operation and still communicate honestly. curious whether other people's bad experiences are mostly fulfillment stuff like mine, or if, you've had issues with the actual product quality, missing stretch goals, that sort of thing. also wondering if anyone has a rule of thumb for vetting small publishers before backing them.

Ja mestrei uma campanha de cyberpunk red que acabou sendo cancelada a alguns meses e minha experiência não foi tão boa quanto achei que seria sinceramente. Agora quero mestrar uma outra campanha onde os jogadores são adolescentes sem rumo pelo Japão se envolvendo em brigas de gangue e coisa parecida e estou com dúvida de qual seria melhor para esse cenário

Modiphius announced yesterday they are putting the Achtung! Cthulhu line on hiatus and it won't have any further development for the time being.

https://modiphius.net/blogs/news/achtung-cthulhu-product-line-update

They haven't closed the doors on the IP yet, their community program will still be active (2d20 World Builders), PDFs will still be available, and they might revisit the line in the future, but for now development will be paused, including reprints. So, now might be a good chance to get a physical book if you are on the fence since they won't be reprinted. They are also having a big sale (not just for A!C books) on both their US and UK shops.

For me, in Dark Sun I remove Elemental Clerics. Back in the 2e era, Clerics might have been necessary, but in 4e and 5e healing isn't as big of a problem in my mind.

As a player, sometimes it is hard to keep track of NPCs and contacts in investigative type systems. I'm always writing them down in my journal but honestly it isn't very helpful because you've got to flip back and forth trying to find them and a lot of times you just have a name. If the table only gets together every other week or even worse monthly, it makes it doubly hard. Any one come across a more 'professional' way of tracking NPCs encountered in session? I can always use individual 3x5 cards, but I'm also looking for something more polished that is system agnostic.

i'm prepping a campaign set in the marvel universe, inspired by absolute dc line up. i want to introduce skrulls (an alien species of shapeshifters) into the plot down the line, but i want to do it right, in line with the universe. this universe was "created" (more like rearranged) by doctor doom, and he took something from everybody. basically, this universe is more scary, tragic and dangerous. for now, my idea is to take inspiration from doctor who, specifically "midnight" and "the well". would love to hear some ideas

I'm looking for a horror game that you might be able to do minimal or even no prep at all, and where you can easily improv new places and enemies without extensive statting! I get lost in prep sometimes and want to run the genre without it.

I've noticed horror games are usually heavily investigation-centered (Call of Cthulhu, DG) or centered around dungeon-like scenarios (Liminal Horror). Investigation in trad games usually requires tons of prep and is packed with pre-planned details. Dungeons are usually pretty strictly codified before they hit the table. I'm assuming these are popular because they give the players something to do while the horror builds.

Back in the '90s I read a lot of fantasy gamebook / choose your own adventure books, and there's one I can't recall the title of. Maybe the RPG hive mind can help?

Towards the beginning of the story, you have to pick between several different companions. One of them was a rich merchant / noble type guy with a pouch full of gold. If you picked him, you immediately died in the next encounter because he couldn't bribe a mindless monster with money. However, if you picked a different companion, you could jettison them after that encounter and then choose Mr. Moneybags as your fellow adventurer for the rest of the book. Ringing any bells?

I've been searching through all the D&D Endless Quest, Fighting Fantasy, Middle Earth Quest, and Wizards Warriors and You books and can't seem to find it. It may be from a totally different series whose name I can't remember.