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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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There's less than 24 hours left to back Night Shift: Devil Division over on BackerKit.

We're currently sitting at around £230,000/$308,000 and the response has absolutely blew our socks off. We've unlocked Minis, Codex VTT Support, a Devil Division Manga, Custom Intro and Battle Music; with a final push to unlock Solo Rules at £250,000.

We'll be live streaming tomorrow for the end of the campaign, and hopefully going into overtime. Oh, and we have some Starter Rules available to download from the BackerKit page!

Come and get involved 🤘

I'm a relatively new player whose sadly been struggling to host my own game, even though I have a dedicated friend group who are eager to play more campaigns. I have the sourcebooks for Call of Cthullu through Drive Through, a physical MOTW book, and the Pathfinder 2e books through Paizo's website. But we're also looking to play games like DnD 5e, Marvel Multiverse, Starfinder, Fallout, and Cyberpunk RED as a way of aligning all our interests.

I've done one game on Foundry and it was overwhelming, my friend does prefer it, but I had a really hard time learning/understanding it. I'm hoping there may be a 'beginners guide' somewhere online or a tutorial, (I found the Knowledge Base page on Foundry, although it is overwhelming I think I just need to buckle down and read it. But that's just me and every TTRPG, I need to sit down and completely read through all the books in order to fully grasp them.)

I thought Roll20 may be the best system just to get started, but I've heard some general distaste for it due to the whole system of a monthly subscription. I would be okay with paying that sub, if it was easier/simpler to use compared to Foundry, and I heard my friend suggest another system which allows the DM to share sourcebooks, but I forget the name off the top of my head.

Another thing that just overwhelms me, even when using standard adventures is the proper flow of combat and adventures. The dice rolls and skill checks are very confusing to me. Even when I ran a combat light MOTW campaign, (we had fun even if it ended in my players being chased out of town.) I was getting mixed up on what situations were weird checks vs charisma checks. It's just very messy.

So as I prepare myself to set up a new campaign... my question is this: What system of VTT do you find the simplest/easiest to use for a complete newcomer? How can I better prepare myself to learn the systems without feeling overwhelmed by the length of a book and all the possible situations? What's the best way to simplify learning, beyond using the usual tutorial adventure?

I apologize if these are really basic questions, I just really want to do this for my friends and I am desperate to do it right.

A while ago I got obsessed with Patrick O'Brien's "Master and Commander" books about 19th century naval warfare. A big thing in these books, probably the biggest thing, is the "weather-gage" — having the wind at your back when you're facing an enemy ship. If you had the gage, that meant you controlled the encounter; if the enemy chooses to fight and not flee, they'd be sailing against the wind and have little maneuverability.

In RPGs, if the setting is a dungeon, this kind of situation obviously never happens. But for RPGs that take place at least partly on open landscapes, there are a lot of situations that remind me of the "weather-gage," where there's some threat on the horizon, too distant to fit into the mini-game of combat mechanics, but you still need to react quickly to seize some advantage.

• Your party is crossing the plain and a group of horsemen crest a distant hill, carrying banners of an enemy clan.
• You approach a town at night and notice that almost none of its lights are on; the town gates are open.
• You're driving or flying a car or spaceship and a giant monster suddenly appears in your rearview mirror/aft-reflector screen. The monster is faster than your conveyance.

I'm curious if y'all have ever come across a kind of generalized mechanic or homebrewed something for these kind of "middle-distance" encounters. A lot of games have scouting or chase mechanics, and rules for things like visibility, weapon ranges, various scales of movement speeds. And of course it's not a problem for rules-light or more narrative games to absorb into their mechanics. But for systems that have at least some crunch, I'm not sure I've seen anything that cohesively addresses this kind of encounter as its own Thing. At least not with anywhere near the sort of fidelity that (for example) fighting some monsters in an enclosed room.

The closest I can think of is the core mechanic of Agon, where the game involves sailing to troubled islands, you assemble a dice pool to reflect your approach and skills, you roll it, and this one roll's result determines whether you succeed or fail.

A friend of mine wants to run a game where we play as cops in a Modern / Urban-Fantasy setting (including more than just humans as a race option), but he doesn’t like D20 Modern and unfortunately Shadowrun might be too much of a mess for some of our group.

Can anybody suggest some ideas for what might work for his goals? He’s a big fan of Pathfinder but feels overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to put a square peg in a round hole by creating a ton of weapons and rules for a modern setting. As such I suggested trying to look towards other systems which he’s open to.

Friend and I who are usually stuck as forever DMs in our groups want to play DM less for a change so we can both play. We play D&D 5e but if anyone knows good, easy to learn GM less systems we could try that would be great!

Most rpgs will have either a pre-defined world map or just have the GM make something pretty much by themself, but I’ve read 2 RPGs that specifically tell you to make your own map and how to do it, and I’m curious to hear about other games that do something similar.

Fabula Ultima doesn’t have many hard rules about how you create your campaign world, focusing more on general principles and some questions to consider like scale and the level of technology, but it is very insistent on the world map being a collaborative project. At the start of a campaign each person must add at least 1 nation with a few details about that nation’s culture and at least 1 major historical event. Very straightforward, but it’s a nice touch that makes players feel more connected to the setting.

Root RPG on the other hand, takes a more standardized and procedural approach. Being based on a board game, the GM is told to generate a 12 space “board“ by starting in one corner and rolling dice to determine how many roads each space has until you have 12 “clearings” on the board, after which the GM chooses which factions from the board game to include in the campaign and determines which clearings each faction has control of at the start step by step.

This is very important because managing faction relations is a major mechanic for the players and the conflicts between factions are generally the main thing that give the players something to do. The board will also shift though out the campaign as there are rules for the factions fighting over territory and resources when time passes and the players actions can have major impacts on the grand schemes of the factions. Personally I think it’s a fun mini game for the GM but I can see it feeling like a chore for others.

What are your favorite systems for creating a map?

I've seen some games that use tarot instead of dice before, but they're generally "draw a card and look up what that result means on a chart". My goal is to design a game where the world and plot are constructed by the GM's legitimate interpretation of the symbolism of the cards, using them as complex writing prompts to create a story.

My main question is this: should I try to design a system that doesn't restrict the GM to what's in the cards, or should I lean into the "fate" aesthetic and have the limited options/heavy guidance be the game's gimmick?

In addition, I'm trying to decide if the players should draw cards to determine the outcome of their actions as well. It would leave a lot more room for abuse, since there wouldn't be a definite pass or fail and it would be up to the player to decide, but having them roll dice while the DM is doing complicated spreads seems a bit lopsided.

I have always been fascinated with how TTRPGs and Video Games influence each other. When I first got into D&D, at 14 it was like a veil lifted from my head and suddenly I saw D&D references and pieces of its design in almost every game (I was mainly playing RPGs). But then as I got more and more into it, as I started to look into older editions and other games, I also saw the reverse, pieces of video game design scattered throughout various TTRPGs. Perhaps the most infamous and poignant example of this would be D&D 4e.

It was this fascination and a course on adaptation theory that convinced me to write my MA on adaptation theory in and from TTRPGs, looking at videogames, at movies, but also at how some pieces of media have themselves been adapted into TTRPGs (Star Wars, Call of Cthulhu, The One Ring and many many others). The more you look into it, the deeper it goes. This present article is a side project I did while writing and researching for my MA thesis. Done more approachable then the stiff academic writing, but still exploring the same thing. In part at least, cause with this one I am only focusing on the bidirectional influence of TTRPGs and Video Games, starting from the very beginning of both mediums and gradually moving towards the present.

I hope you will enjoy it and that you will find the subject at least half as interesting as I did! I am really looking forward to see your thoughts on the matter!

I just want to play without adapting the world of Berserk.

Just sorta curious about the whole thing. Some of the stuff I've found online doesn't seem like it'd fit very well, like the GM doing all the dice rolls, as well as varying viewpoints on how much crunch or narrative should be involved.

The games I'm looking at right now are Pico and Stonetop, both of which are far more theater of the mind type games instead of super crunchy battle maps, with combat encounters that are intended to go over quickly. But at the same time, they aren't hard turn based games where I can say "okay Bob, it's your turn, give me your reply. Now the goblin does X, Slagathor you're up now" since both games are more about focusing the spotlight on someone and moving around more fluidly.

So, suggestions? Experiences? Should I just bite the bullet and work harder on getting people to actually fucking show up to the games they agree to play?

Can anybody suggest some RPGs which provide a framework for engaging and enjoyable non-combat knowledge-based actions without magic in a game that involves combat?

I have often wanted to play a game which enabled both combat-focused and knowledge-focused characters to meaningfully contribute to the narrative, but I am only familiar with D&D-like games that essentially relegate knowledge-based actions to either “being able to do magic” or simplistic “survival” actions. I would some actions such as “research” which help the party prepare for a combat, acquire some sort of resource, advance the party’s goals, etc. in a meaningful way that would also provide as much engagement as combat for the martial characters.