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It's bad, obviously. But SJG CEO Meredith Placko breaks down the numbers in a really clear and useful way:
https://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/2025-04-03

I‘ve got a couple of ongoing pledges I‘m worried about. What do you people think this means for fulfillment? Obvsly a lot of these are made in China.

How open or restrictive do you prefer your TTRPG settings?

Recently have been rewatching Lost and think an Island Survival based rpg would work. But also I understand that making a system around that type of mechanic is pretty limiting.

What if the players want to run the system in a Zombie Survival scenario or an Arctic tundra one. Etc…

A few years ago, Owlbear Rodeo was known as the most basic VTT you could get. You open the browser and you get a map, some tokens, and a die roller, and you can either use the basic features or upload your own images. That was it, and that was all it needed to be.

Recently, I checked up on the website again, and it's....more than that, now. There's a lot of advertisments for things like animated maps, it has a subscription service now, and I have to log in before I can use it. Seems like there's been a lot of changes since I discovered it.

Sometimes changes can be good. You keep the basic soul of the thing while adding a bunch of fun extras. But a lot of times you get a sense of feature creep, where the thing that used to be super basic is now super complicated and it pushes its old clientele out in favor of infinite growth. I haven't really explored Rodeo enough to determine which one it is, so I figured I'd ask a wider community.

Do you currently use Owlbear Rodeo? Did you use it in the past? Are you still using it or did you move away from it? Is it still able to run a simple, basic game in the browser or is it more complicated than its worth now? I'd love to get some insight from as many people as I can.

Basically the title. There are a lot of TTRPGs that people love and hate and love to hate and hate to love, but what is the one TTRPG or TTRPG system that you just purely hate and refuse to pick up and play again?

I wanna run a TMNT-inspired game about fighting mutants loose in a modern-day city. I've planned out a little of a DnD game in my head, but I realize that might not be the best system to play. I don't have experience with any other TTRPGs, but I have wanted to try out some new ones.

My previous list is now 4 years old and has been updated many times, including a bunch of suggestions from the last month, so instead of updating the old post this time I felt it is time to create a new post for new visibility.

Here is what I hope is a relatively comprehensive list of games that feature playing cards or tarot cards instead of dice in all or part of their game mechanics.

Games that use playing cards as a Core mechanic

• 52 Fates
• And You Will Rest Your Head on Your Parent's Grave
• Angakkuit
• Apawthecaria
• Back to the Beginning (1e) and (2e)
• Beat to Quarters
• C22 System
• Capers
• Castle Falkenstein
• Crash Cart
• Cold Dead Hands
• A Cool and Lonely Courage
• Delve
• Dog Bear
• Draw: A Simple Western
• Dust Devils
• Duty & Honour
• Exile Deal
• EXUVIAE
• FAITH
• Frankenstein Atomic Frontier
• Generations
• Grin
• Gun & Slinger
• Hands of Destiny
• Heaven & Earth
• Hillfolk
• The House Doesn't Always Win
• Hot Guys Making Out
• In a Wicked Age
• The King is Dead
• Legends of Avallen
• Love & Barbed Wire
• Merger
• Miserable Secrets
• mole.mole
• Monkey: The Roleplaying Game
• Motobushido
• Murderous Ghosts
• My Way
• Network 23
• Night Reign
• Nine Worlds
• Our Minerva
• Parselings
• Perfect Draw
• Praxis Arcanum
• Primetime Adventures
• Protocol Game Series
• Purgatory House
• The Quiet Year
• Rascals
• Route Clearance
• Saga Machine system (Shadows Over Sol, Against the Dark Yogi, Dime Adventures and Age of Ambition)
• Shonen Final Burst
• Sins of the Father
• Stealing the Throne
• Suited
• The Suits
• Swyvers
• Tadhana: A Filipino Tabletop RPG
• Terra the Gunslinger
• Through the Breach
• Tokyo NOVA
• Unbound
• UNOwned (uses an Uno deck)
• Upwind
• We Are Champion
• Westbound
• Wild Cards
• Wretched & Alone
• Zombie World

Games that use playing cards in some aspect of the mechanics (or as an option)

• Aces & Eights
• All Flesh Must Be Eaten
• Blue Rose (Tarot)
• Deadlands
• Deliria
• Dream Askew
• FATE
• Forbidden Lands
• The Ground Itself
• Journey
• Never Going Home
• Savage Worlds
• Sleepaway
• Steampunkers
• Twilight: 2000
• Vaesen
• Wolsung
• Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast

Games that use Tarot Cards

• 7th Sea 1e & 2nd Edition
• Alas Vegas
• Anomaly
• Artesia
• Blade of Arcana
• This Body of Mine
• Demon City
• Eidolon: Become Your Best Self 2nd Edition
• Engle
• Everway 2nd Edition
• Fate of the Norns
• Fortune's Fool
• Hidden Isle
• His Majesty the Worm
• House of Cards
• Nyx: An Interpretive RPG
• Psychosis
• Relics
• Royal Blood
• Sine Requie
• Tarotweaver: A Tarot Based TTRPG
• Weave
• You Are the Dungeon

Games that use a proprietary card deck

• A Thousand Faces of Adventure
• Atma
• The Brokenhearted
• Clockwork Dominion
• Dialect
• Dragonlance: Fifth Age
• Dungeon Solitaire: Labyrinth of Souls (Tarot)
• Fiasco (2019 edition)
• For the Queen
• Free Market
• Gamma World (7th Edition)
• Invisible Sun
• Juggernaut
• Lace & Steel
• Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game
• Mouse Guard
• Paranoia: Red Clearance Edition
• Phoenix: Dawn Command
• Sign
• Spindlewheel
• TORG
• Torg Eternity
• The Yellow King
• This Thing We Started
• Winterhorn

If you have any suggestions to add to the list comment below. Please provide a link to a page where it can actively be purchased. I don't think I will include games that are out of print and no longer available for purchase.

The stakes were high, but they were also personal. The villain was complex yet profoundly broken, selfish, and evil. The final battle was hard and punishing but my players won. Best of all we managed to improvise an ending that was tragic, bittersweet and hopeful. We all felt like we had made something real.

Obviously, as this was my first full campaign, I made some boner mistakes over the year of runtime. I have a full list of things to improve upon the next campaign I run. That said, I am pleased with how it all turned out. And yes, I'm ready for a break. I'm looking forward to being a PC again. More to the point, I can't imagine telling anymore of that story. It's completed. I feel gratified by this, as if I have accomplished something.

And yet, today I also feel really sad. Perhaps that's a silly response to the end of a game, but it's how I feel. Oh well.

I am interested in new campaign. We, my players and i, in a dnd campaign but i wanna change settings. I have an idea that is 1930s noir vibe with magic. Do you guys know any game that is fitting for this set up?

This is mainly a question for US residents. Without getting too political (even if I have to control myself), how many of you think they will pause getting games produced outside of the US under the threat of tariffs? Is it even a factor in your decisions? Will you wait and see if we’re still here in a month? Will you specifically look for games produced in the US? And… do you generally know where most of your games are produced?

The games I ran weren't long 1 - 20 level campaigns. They were short 1 - 3, 4, 5, or 6. Or a 3 - 7 adventure. They were fun the majority of players were cool peeps. Only about four people who I figured wouldn't be welcomed at any table based on their behavior at mine.

So what worries me about the Pf2e and DnD is that during the times when I was running the short adventures. The majority of them would refuse to play anything else whenever a player was missing a session due to whatever irl stuff. Just something to play as a table since we kind've reserved the slot as a group. So might as well do something.

It was so bad that I learned to just ask at session 0 who want's to play another rules lite system if a player misses or do they just want to play without the missing player. And again the majority voted for the latter. which is cool but man missing out on some cool games in the hobby.

To continue when the adventures inevitably end and I say "Ok i'm going to run another idea. As I said in session 0 this campaign is not a promise to lvl 20. If you're interested in the other campaign idea here it is. Lmk if you want to play in it."

All of them more or less are more interested in continuing to play their PC's. Which is completely understandable and fair. I get it players are attached to their PC's and what to continue that fantasy cool. But I was genuinely interested in other ideas and themes. So offered every party my notes, thoughts, and general everything for their particular parties campaign. And said if you all want to continue any of you feel free to step up and GM. I'm going to do another idea. None of them stepped up.

But the real kicker and what worries me the most about the Pf2e and DnD community. Only one of my players over entirety of my GMing career offered to run a game for me. In a system I wasn't running form. And it was cool and of course i took the opportunity to play for a bit. But 1 out of like 400? Something I just wanted to share and hopefully I am a statistical anomaly.

Edit:

I believe there is some misunderstanding.

I have no complaints about my players. Nor have I ever asked my players to run for me. To clarify when i ended my short campaigns. So I can run other campaigns ideas as a GM in the same systems. I offered the party if they want to play they have to roll a new pc. Understandably the majority of them didn't have interest which is fine. So I offered my gm thoughts and notes to any of those players so that they can run for that group while I go do my campaign idea. None of them took the offer to run for their particular party.

If they had great I would've left on to do my other campaign idea and they would've continued with their particular cast of PC's and setting. But that was never the case. It was always purgatory for them and I moved on.

So I only ever asked them to play in another system whenever we had a missing player. I never asked any of my players to play in a longer form type of campaign outside of DnD and Pf2e.

Edit 2:

As eloquently put by u/Shot-Combination-930

. . . they don't have to continue the same world to continue the game. Using the same party is continuing the game, different universe or no, unless you invent a new history for all the characters explaining how they got the power, items, etc they got in the previous play. You could even have a diegetic reason for the world changing, but IME people that want to keep characters are fine with discontinuities.

The options are:

1. Make new characters to play with the same GM.

2. A player becomes GM to let the group (minus previous GM) continue playing the same characters (in the same world or a new one).

3. They stop playing.

It sounds like they want 2 but effectively pick 3.

No one does 2 even though they want to continue playing with the same group.