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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.

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This submission is generated automatically each Saturday at 00:00 UTC.

Looking at the website today was really disheartening. The entire front page is full of near identical "books". The same shamefully gross covers that have been popping up every single day! Can we put pressure on Drivethrurpg as a community to finally end this?

My favorite go-to RPGs are Pathfinder 2e and Starfinder 2e. I love the tactics and strategy and lore and well written adventures. It's great. But, PF2 and SF2 really lend themselves to prepping a pre-written adventure, or sitting down to write my own. They tend to require maps and planning encounters and picking out loot. I love it, but it's work.

What I'm really itching to do is stretch my improv muscles. I used to do improv comedy shows, and I miss that fun and spontaneity. I want to find something that is low prep, or even better, zero prep. My dream is to be able to spin together adventures on the fly. Action! Suspense! Danger! All off the top of my head, inventing as we go. I'm also quite a fan of heists; I've rewatched Leverage more times than I can justify. I also don't want the system to be too light; I still like mechanical crunch, and I want my players to have interesting choices for their characters.

Given my love for heist stories, I've been considering Blades in the Dark or Scum and Villainy. Is Band of Blades any fun? Another possible avenue I was considering is Outgunned - it seems designed for high action impromptu games. I've also been following the design of Dungeon World 2; would something like that or its predecessor scratch my itch for a low/zero-prep action adventure game?

I'm wondering if folk have any other suggestions or ideas. I do understand that "help me figure out what I want" is an inherently broad question, I'll try to answer questions and comments as often as I can.

I’ll be starting up a game in November, and I’m wondering how long it took others to go from starting as Knights Gallant to completing the City Quest, and how often folks were completing myths / gaining glory. If your players took interest in controlling their own holdings, do you feel like that slowed things down? Also wondering how many knights players rotated through, whether through combat or old age. Thanks

I have been reading the resources of Dune AiTI and need someone to talk me down on trying to run a game of high fantasy (homebrew setting) using Dune house rules with daggerheart for running missions.

Where players are the elite figures of their House (kingdom/guild/etc) and decide on the course of action for it and then change to a group of operatives to tackle the missions they themselves purposed on the macro scale.

The setting could be reversed as well of course, using daggerheart to resolve missions on a sci-fi setting (like Dune setting)

So tell me why this is a very bad idea.

I've been DMing three dnd tables since august 2025 and one of them is finally coming to an end (the other two probably will be unfinished due to scheduling conflicts).

What makes it feel bad is that two pcs seem to have gone through some heavy flanderization as of late, as one of them just cares about drinking and the other is incapable of not cracking jokes at importunate times.

Another player clearly doesn't care, as he doesn't pay attention to what's happening (the second and third to last sessions heavily featured his backstory, yet when I was recapping he kept interrupting me to ask when this and that happened, and the other players had to back me up because he couldn't remember anything he did!). I've talked to my players about this, but they swear up and down that they're going to get better, but it never does.

They don't know saturday will be the end, they're just aware the campaign is coming to a close, but luckily I managed to sew everything together on the last session so now it's just the last battle and what their characters will do next, so it won't feel like it came out of nowhere.

I'm also tired of DMing dnd, I have nothing against it but I want to go back to Call of Cthulhu for a few months, and also DM Dark Heresy (which I've been playing for a while now at a fourth table).

Edit: After this, I don't plan to DM for this group anymore.

fala pessoal, beleza?

então, tô procurando algumas ideias de plot, como o título já diz, pra um RPG apocalíptico que se passa na época medieval. queria algo diferente dessa vez, estou muito acostumado com apocalipses em épocas modernas ou futurísticas com essas ideias de zumbis ou alienígenas, por isso tô com algumas dificuldades de fazer algo "fora da caixa"

tenho o costume de fazer meus próprios sistemas, então só preciso de uma ideazinha de plot mesmo!! vou jogar somente com minha noiva (eu mestre e ela player, ela tá afim de fazer um duque mas ainda vamos ver isso direito), e sinceramente não vejo problema em fazer diversos NPCS ao mesmo tempo, caso o plot precise de MUITOS deles

também não tenho preferência em um gênero, tipo terror, drama e afins, sejam livres nas suas ideias de plots

desde ja fico muito agradecido!!

TL;DR: I think i broke myself and should take a break from GMing for a while to rethink whether or not my style is healthy for me.

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Preamble:

If you read on, this way madness lies.

Jokes aside, i really just needed a place to get this off my chest and felt that maybe someone else is in a similar situation and can take away some sort of insight from this flow of concious rambling.

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I've been playing TTRPGs since 2018. I started with DnD and throughout the years moved away from it to test the waters of other systems. Throughout this time i wanted to improve myself to be the best GM i could possibly be. I love this hobby because it brings me so much joy to craft either narratives or maps or pictures for tokens and all the fun interactions that i can have with my friends.

Since i'm living in the middle of nowhere, i only ever really played online games. Which to me, is the world of TTRPG that i know. I tried running some offline games over the years, but those usually fizzled out due to everyone needing to travel quite a bit to meet up to play.

During my growth as a GM i eventually found the OSR and all the implications of play it came with. Mainly the Principia Apocrypha. And i sucked that shit up. I loved how it was requiring player skill over character skill. How a clever idea could win the encounter instead of the stuff that's on your character sheet. I felt at home within these boundaries.

But somehow I had the fixxed idea that to have a meaningful game, i could not get in the way of player choices - at all. And somewhere along the way I tread off the beaten path and lost the plot. Literally. During the last few years i think I've taken a wrong turn mentally somewhere. It's not that i'm not presenting interesting NPCs or plot points. I - and i am using that word quite in the literary sense - dreaded the next session. But only on the day where I should have run the game. Not during prep. Or when talking with friends about the plot.

I thought it could be because of low selfesteem. Sure, part of what i think makes me a good GM is that my players have fun. We do feedbacks just for that, so i know what they want, where i can improve and what they especially liked during a session.

I do session zeros to get everyone aligned of what we're going to play. The touchtones, the x cards, the themes that come with the settings we wanted to play.

But i got positive feedback, no one said that i sucked. So low selfesteem wasn't the reason either.

I thought that the players freedom to do anything they want was this holy grail that made my games great. During my first years as a GM i was running more linear games. Those games lasted years. But when i started to shift away from that approach, it all fell apart. I think a nice allegory is that i removed the red thread and unravelled everything.

That is not to say i didn't have fun or improved over the past years. But again and again my games faltered and died due to me not feeling up for the challenge of running what i feel i promised to my friends.

Their ability to do anything, in the beginning, didn't mean to me that i should have everything prepared. But that changed somehow. My head fills with these inane questions of "What if they go there?" "What if they talk to that guy?" "Would it be interesting or not to have this or that happen?" and it irks me in some way that i can't pinpoint.

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P.S.:
I think what can be taken away from this is that you are not locked into the way you run games.

Your style can evolve and sometimes it's not for the better and i think it's important to ask oneself "How did i use to run games and how am i running them now?" to find whether or not it's a healthy way to approach the hobby.

Stay safe everyone. Thanks for reading.

Recently, I remembered I own a copy of Jovian Chronicles from a humble bundle. Been in a Gundam game on Saturday so it came to mind.

Going through the Jovian Chronicles book and Silhouette Core (Jovian Chronicles is more of a setting's book for Silhouette Core despite saying Player's Handbook), my main thought was "wow, this is a cool setting and a cool basic resolution mechanic, but the rest of this is so clunky I'd probably not use it; guess it's a salvage job."

I call it salvaging or scavenging when there is a setting or premise that is awesome but the system isn't for me. In Jovian's case, it's a mix of a few things keeping me away.

The strong, 2000s versimilitude focus feels like a game from a different world. For example, you have a Build and Fitness Attribute make your secondary Attributes of Strength and Agility to differentate between being fat or muscular. Because being big can mean either, depending on your fitness. It's just not the style of game I'm into anymore.

Then, you got the "feature" of everything being in Silhouette and OGL making the book a mess. Can't hand that to players easily. Ironically, this was probably a clever idea back then for getting new customers, but constantly listing two set of stats for two different games is confusing to casuals. I get it, but I can't expect players to.

So, when this kind of thing happens, I call it salvaging.

As a GM, if I ever get the inkling for the setting, I'll just borrow the art and lore and run it in, say, Salvage Union or Battle Century G Remastered. The conversion work wouldn't even be that hard.

As a designer, I keep the cool mechanics I like in the back-pocket for a future game. I actually think a Skill being split into Natural Aptitude and Training isn't a bad idea, for example. In Silhouette, you have your Skill Rating and your Skill Complexity Rating. Skill itself tells you how many d6 to roll and Complexity is compared to complexity of the task and the net is added/subtracted to your final result. Kind of clever and I think you could do a lot with the idea.

I KNOW I am not alone here when it comes to "Game Scavenging."

How do y'all do it? Got any fun stories of it? Or, are you strongly opposed to the idea?

Of course, I come from D&D 5e, and one of the things that makes me sad about it is that when optimazing characters, the more attacks you can have is always better than 1 Big Hit normally outside Crit Fishing and stuff (not to the point of Min-Maxxing RP and Fun out of the game, of course. I simple like character building in a game sense).

I like making many attacks and becoming a tornado of pain, but I also like the BIG BONK of a really strong single hit. So I ask you, which are games that:

• Are similiar to D&D 3.5e/4e/5e (medium-high crunch with focus on combat + defined classes with unique vibes and niches)
• Either make Single Big Hits just as good as Multiple Attacks (or even enforces a rule of "Only one attack per turn")
• Favors a balance between Martials and Casters (I prefer Martials and dislike when they outshine Martial both and out of combat in every way)
• Not OSR (Unfortunately, those aren't my cup of tea)
• If possible, have good rules for Downtime outside adventuring into places and killing things (base building, territory management, item crafting, project planning, search doing, social linking, etc.)

Hi Folks,

this is a little bit of a ttrpg adjacent question. but i feel this is the best sub to answer.

I have been a little bit into exploring different world lores. it has been a lot of warhammer and then star wars. but i am curious what other peoples have been writing up.

any recommendations?