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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.

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.

I was thinking about the upcoming 5.5e World of Warcraft book coming out later this year (which, despite myself, I'm hype for), and how WoW has had around 2 and a half adaptations into TTRPG form so far.

That got me to thinking about other major fantasy or non-fantasy franchises that have gotten adaptations. Including Bethesda's own Fallout, which has an official Mophidius adaptation.

Yet, somehow, through it's 30 year history as a franchise; The Elder Scrolls has never gotten one official TTRPG release. Not a full bespoke system, and not even a d20 adaptation. Just...nothing. Only some fan games and adaptations over the years.

There isn't really a greater point here honestly. It's just kind of mind boggling that a game franchise with such deep ties to TTRPGs in its origin/systems, with a world that seems tailormade for a TTRPG adaptation, just never got one. You'd think there'd have been at least ONE at SOME point, you know?

Anyway, I guess for discussions sake, any ideas on why that is? Any other "seemingly obvious" franchises that somehow haven't gotten an adaptation into TTRPG form?

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?

there are a few games that have a reputation for being scary and unapproachable, either because their rules are very dense or their playstyle seems too different from the norm, or just by word of mouth. right now I can think of ars magica - outside this sub, I only see people mention ars magicka to talk about how difficult it is to understand, though in my experience those people have never even read the book. in my experience this reputation often scares players away from even giving the game a chance

what systems do you think have an unfair reputation?

Hi RPG folks!

I’m looking to discover reviewers and journalists from the RPG scene.

Who are your favorites?

I love game mechanics a lot. I also enjoy roleplaying a lot, too. To me, game mechanics serve as the foundation to which good roleplaying opportunities can be built on. However, it seems to me that in a lot of popular discourse surrounding RPGs, there's this tension between "rules" and "roleplaying." The common sentiment of "rules getting in the way of roleplaying" is an example.

Does anyone know why this is?

Hi everyoneee!

I've only played one TTRPG before (DnD), and even though it was years ago, I would love to play again. My birthday is coming up in November and I thought running a short, few hour long game would be a fun excuse to get my friends together. However, this would be most of our first games and my first time running one. I was hoping to be able to host a group of anywhere from 6 people to 12 (less realistically). I also really would like to have a more fantasy/fairytale like experience? Something cute, fun, and easy.

I'm not super set on a specific TTRPG so if anyone has any suggestions on one that would be easy to learn and is also flexible/customizable that would be so helpful.

TLDR - new gm, looking for short easy ttrpg for 10ish(?) people

Thanks (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)🩷

One thing I've come to learn and appreciate as I've gotten more into TTRPGs is that the hobby has it's own language that's been a bit tricky to learn. That's not exactly unique to it though, every hobby I think has a kind of unique language that requires some learning for anyone approaching it for the first time, but with TTRPGs it's been really noticeable for me.

I've spoken before about the term 5E hack having little meaning to me as someone who hasn't played 5E, or understands the issues with it. But I understand that it's a shorthand for those who are more experienced with the hobby/language. OSR has been another term that's been fun to learn, in particular figuring out what it means to distinguish from non OSR games. Narrative vs mechanical has been fun as well, especially with how systems blend the two.

This came to my mind while I was reading some reviews of Renegade's Power Rangers system (Superhero month on Drivethru, I thought about it, Invincible, or picking up some modules for Marvel Multiverse.) And while I struggled with understanding some terms of the language, I read a review which mentioned some issues with the game without using strictly RPG language (namely that it doesn't give a lot of tools for creating Rangers or villains outside the teams/villains established in the book.) And I appreciated that as someone still learning.

Still, today I wanna talk about language in TTRPGs. What are some common terms that you think a newcomer should learn when getting into the hobby? What terms to do you think became 'ingrained' as common language, the way rougelikes or rougelites have been in video games, and what terms do you think are poorly defined in general discussion?