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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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I was watching Jacob's newest video and he was talking his the mechanics he made about how his players would take classes to learn new abilities. He called it "bloated" but I thought it was really cool. I love slice-of-life mechanics because I feel it immerses you more in the world.

If I can start, my favorite slice of life mechanics that I have seen are from Iron Valley, which is a third-party adaptation of Iron Forge that themes itself on Stardew Valley. The "Try Your Best" action is like making an Iron Pact. Without getting into the nitty-gritty (you should check it out yourself), the "lose" condition is not death or even complete failure, it is just the loss of time. The game keeps a calender with events and if you take too long to complete your own "Do Your Best" action, then you might have to wait until next year to try for something again.

What is a slice-of-life mechanic or slice-of-life game that you thought was interesting?

Me and my group are, yes, min-maxxers. Love some roleplay, but love some numbers going up.

For such a group, which you consider are the best at doing so without felling boring or too much like a chore?

Specially for Fantasy

EDIT: Thanks a lot for the suggestions. The ones that caught me the most where Lancer, Shadow of the Weird Wizard and Fabula Ultima!

Context: I started playing 30 years ago in 1996 in Western Canada (the South of the Interior British Columbia to be precise). Back then, in that place, we referred to the rules mediated interactive stories we were telling each other as pen and paper role-playing games when we needed to distinguish them from similar games on consoles or computers. In most online discourse these days I see the term table top role-playing games. I know that this change didn't happen overnight. It's very likely that both terms were used simultaneously. He'll, it may not even be the most common, and there's some other term out there that I've never heard before, so I want to take a little informal survey.

The questions:

When did you start playing?

Where did you spend your formative year playing?

What term do you use to distinguish from similar media, such as CRPGs and JRPGs?

Do you use a different term for different contexts (talking with your friends in person vs online conversations in places like forums or Reddit)?

Has it changed over the years?

This week's RPG is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying [4th]!

Have you played it? Have you run/GM'd it? How did it go?

What's your favourite memory from the game?

What's the best thing about the game?

What's the worst? How would you improve it?

How does it compare to other Warhammer rpgs?

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Last week was Neon City Overdrive. Join us again next week for CBR+PNK!

When I was in college, I went spelunking. When you go spelunking, you wear a helmet with a lantern headlamp on it. I didn't think I'd need it because the cave entrance was 12 feet high.

I was wrong.

First off, you don't realize how dark dark is, until you're in the dark. That headlamp was like a pin poking through one of those black canvases that they use to cover baseball fields when it rains. A spot of light. And an empty void choking it out. Except it isn't empty— it's living and breathing and full of life. (And in a ttrpg, it's full of life that may want to take your life. And your headlamp/torch leads it all straight back to you.)

And if your headlamp flickers off for a moment, it seems like there'd be more light if you just gave up and shut your eyes, rather than straining to make out shapes in the dark.

So, I'm complaining about wearing this stupid helmet, with this stupid light, struggling to see anything.

I turned my head and *BAM! Then I turned it back the way it came from to tell my classmate how lucky I was to have this helm—*BAM! Then I jerked back, surprised by the sudden onslaught of—*BAM! *BAM! Two whacks in a row. That helmet was taking a beating. And I thought the ceiling was still at 12 feet, somehow.

Long story short, that cave didn't want us there.

So, ttrpgs and the dark: The dark doesn't want you there. It doesn't want your light. The dark in a ttrpg isn't just there, it's actively hunting you. It's stalking you, clawing at you. It's a monster in its own right, and not one you can swing a sword at. Certainly not win against. All you can do is bring enough torches and lantern oil.

And a helmet.

The dark should be scary. It should be unnerving and unknowable. It should be confusing. You don't see in the dark, you smell. And nothing smells right. And you hear—sort of. Unnatural noises. And you're never quite sure where they came from. You wish you didn't hear them, because they haunt you. You feel the walls with your calloused hands, and the uneven ground with you cold, wet feet, hoping nothing reaches back. And every time you point your light at something, you hope you don't see it.

If you're excited to dungeon crawl in the dark, your missing out on the fun. If you're sweating at the table, now you're ttrpg-ing in the dark.

Tracking light, or flipping the perspective to become a darkness countdown timer, is one of my favorite game procedures. Something as simple as checking boxes on a track each turn can feel so profound, given you know what's going to happen if you get to the end of that track, and you're still down there.

What's your favorite "darkness" procedure/mechanic/idea?

Anyone know of a subreddit specifically for designing ttrpgs, getting feedback on mechanics, and potentially even getting playtesters?

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!

I wrote an essay about how my philosophy of GMing shifted over time from “storytelling” toward something closer to divination.

Instead of treating the GM as an author controlling narrative arcs, I’ve become more interested in using random tables, dice, and world simulation to discover the story alongside the players. The GM as an oracle rather than a writer.

The post talks a lot about Dolmenwood, encounter tables, indifferent worlds, player agency, and why I think victories feel more meaningful when the setting doesn’t bend itself around the protagonists.

Would love to hear how other people approach this style of play.

https://bocoloid.blogspot.com/2026/05/from-storyteller-to-oracle-of-delphi-on.html

Its art used DIY paper hand drawn grid dungeons. Just wondering if anyone has seen it. It's indie.

I found it a few years back and lost the link to it. It was really interesting and I wanted to give it another look. It had rules on DTRPG, it's own site, everything. It's not one of the well known Five Leagues games or anything. Sigh...it's surprisingly hard to find.

Edit: It had a very "heavy metal/DCCRPG" art style. It was also explicitely designed to be a miniatures game more than anyhting else.

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!

One of the group of players I regularly play with have been reading a lot of murim nettoons or like korean webcomics and they would like to play a game that kind of work like that.

So like learning different martial arts moves and increasing power through strengthening their inner energy.

In some ways it seems like it is a world that would work very well with d20 kind of rules, because people in these comics also level up.

I have been thinking runing it with either pathfinder using the “Path of War” rules or the 5E naruto rules and then kind of tweaking those systems a bit, but I was thinking if there is any systems out there that already focus on these kind of comics.