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I like to think I've dabbled in a fair few RPGs and I'm open to trying anything once. But one thing I've yet to try is mixing and matching systems and settings. I pretty much just stick to whatever comes out of the box.

I know when it comes to the D&D-likes, d20 and OSR games there's a huge culture of doing exactly this, which makes a lot of sense as there's plenty of family resemblance there. But a lot of modern games come with in-built setting flavour so strong that, to me, it feels like I'm "insulting the chef" if I mess around with it too much? and that's maybe limiting my GM experience?

I'd love to hear peoples' experiences/recs with mixing and matching setting-and-system, either when it went well or when it went horribly. The more unexpected the mix, the better! Has anyone used a PBtA system to run a story-heavy Spelljammer game? What about a Shadowdark delve but you're humans in the world of VtM?? Lemme know!

PS: What got me thinking about it is going back and reading the setting lore in 5e's Saltmarsh book. Truly one of the best "small town" settings in D&D in my opinion, but from first reading I always felt that 5e's super-heroic game had left the setting behind somewhat.

There's one particular story where an assassin practises some batman-style secret meditation effect so he can slow his metabolism and lie in wait in an attic for weeks before dripping a single drop of poison through a crack in the floorboards into his target's soup or something. Incredibly evocative stuff, but I know my players would just ask something like "Why didn't bro just bring some goodberries" or something lol.

I've read dozens of OSR or adjacent games, and something of a consistent frustration is that many are very similar with only one or two interesting mechanics to differentiate them.
To alleviate this problem I'm creating something of a Frankenstein's monster OSR ruleset for personal use, and I'd love to hear suggestions for your favorite mechanics. I've found that what I really enjoy is systems that have rules for as many situations as possible, but that those individual rules aren't very complicated.

(Don't worry if they're contradictory or not strictly OSR, I'm just brainstorming at this point)

So far I've got:

- Most of the combat system from Block/Dodge/Parry

- The "players state what they're afraid of and the GM makes it worse as a consequence of certain types of failure" mechanic from Public Access

- Going to 0 health giving you permanent wounds which reset health from Mothership

- The Tetris inventory system from Mausritter

- The one-line spell descriptions and exhaustion filling up inventory system from Knave

- Backgrounds coming with highly asymmetric abilities/traits from Songbirds

- The stronghold system suggested by Colton Terry in this blog post

I'm reading the Sixth World Almanac even though I don't play Shadowrun and I love it! Do you know any other books that focus entirely on lore instead of gameplay or adventures? Can be either history or current lore

/u/ravenhaunts' WARDEN is a setting-neutral RPG based on Pathfinder 2e. I have been following its playtesting for a while. A few days ago, it was fully released.

https://ghost-spark.itch.io/warden

So naturally, I decided to run a few test fights. All of these combats had only a single PC, but that is fine, because WARDEN explicitly has an encounter type tailored to only one or two PCs. The three fights were:

• Flintlock musket vs. special forces. This resulted in the PC one-shotting both special forces enemies in quick succession despite the Reload 3 of a flintlock musket. Very impressive, considering that this was a 0th-level PC.

• Assault rifle vs. five non-natty halberdiers. The outcome here was the PC getting dropped by the mooks, while having taken down none of them. Scale armor is just too much for an assault rifle to overcome, even with the Sunder action, it seems.

• Holy sniper rifle vs. six non-natty halberdiers, in the same enclosed space as the previous battle. This was, very specifically, a showcase of just how important it is for an optimized combatant to add a Special Damage Types (e.g. Aether, Dark, Holy, Psychic) to their Strikes, because according to the author, doing so causes said Strikes to completely bypass Armor. Quite unlike the previous fight, the PC here trivially crushed the opponents, decisively proving that Special Damage Types make a humongous difference against Armor (and that, somehow, a sniper rifle is better than an assault rifle even in a tight space).

Goofy results, I know. You can read about the precise details of these fights here, in the following document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pxTxGFn1DaKARndEq3v4WKvcgBSO3qlJJhWBIn-Uqw8/edit

why should I pick either over the other in terms of mechanics.

Does an rpg exist that doesn't trace it's mechanical core back to the OSR/Old School D&D, but still has a strong or single focus on dungeon crawling? I'm wrapping up running Hyperborea for 3.5 years, and most of my players and I are starting to become burned out on the whole OSR gameplay loop. What I'm looking for would be a game that either has strong support for dungeon crawling, or is designed from the ground up with dungeon crawling in mind.

Here are some things I'd like to avoid:

• Gold for xp: I like this in concept, but what I find in practice is that it makes the PCs to wealthy too fast. I like to keep the PCs poor so buying equipment becomes a much bigger deal. It's also a huge pain in the ass having to account for the vast sums of coin that a party of 3-5 PCs require in order to level up. It also slows the game to a crawl when the party gets back to civilization with all of their loot and then they have to divide it up and spend it.
• Vancian Magic: My players all unanimously agree that they dislike Vancian magic. After having played an OSR game for 3.5 years not a single player has found it fun. What we found was that fighters get to be fighters all the time from the beginning of the game, but magic-users can only do magic-user things once to a few times per day in the early levels. The system should support
• Rules-light: I and my players have found that rules-light games are not for us. Not that we necessarily want to play a super crunchy game with a million table lookups, but we've found that most OSR style games just don't provide enough procedures, or have a unified mechanic that makes task resolution elegant and easy to manage. Rulings over rules did not work with my group and we found that we essentially had to make up or borrow a bunch of rules and procedures from other systems which created a lot more work for me.

What I'd ideally like is a game with strong procedures and a focus on adventure instead of logistics and resource management. We did not find the issue of how to move a large treasure hoard out of a dungeon to be interesting, and inventory management always felt like a chore. Exploring dungeons, fighting weird monsters, and getting into shenanigans is more up our alley. Also, no one had any interest in domain level play, so the game should not try to shoehorn in or try to draw inspiration from D&D's wargaming roots. My assumption is that I could probably use a generic system like Savage Worlds, but I'm still curious if there exists a game that is designed from the ground up for dungeon-crawling, but without a mechanical lineage that traces back to old-school D&D.

Ever since playing the Icewind Dale crpg back in the early 00s, I've taken a strong liking to 'frozen north'-type settings ... but I've yet to actually run a game in one!

I think it's time I change that, and am looking for good content to use.

So, what's your favourite 'frozen north' setting? Is there a pre-written campaign, perhaps a hex or pointcrawl that you can recommend? ^{(Is DnD 5e's "Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden" any good, assuming I'd replace 5e with something else?})

Apologies if you have seen this question around I am genuinely curious as to what makes people take a chance on indie ttrpgs. Not trying to shill my own games just looking into what I should be focusing on.

As someone who makes ttrpg, I always get disheartened when I put my games on itch for a few dollars and it seems like no one is willing to pay even that to give my game a go.

My question is, what makes you decided "yeah, I'll chuck a couple of bucks at that" for an indie game?

I've only tied Hunter, but from hearing my friends go on and on about White-wolf RPGs, if you mashed Werewolf and Mage, you could make a Fist of the Northstar game.

Basically, you have a bunch of roid'ed out maniacs who use weird kung-fu magic to beat each other to bits and do everything from turning your skin into Iron, exploding heads, or cure blindness.

Me have and my players have been using cardboard standees for combat but have always used zone based distances. This has worked fine for my group as we have mostly played rpgs where tactial combat hasn't been a focus but now I want to checkout what the fuzz is about.

The problem is that I can't for the life of me find graphpaper with big enough sized grids. The maximum I have found has squares of 1 cm which is too small for the standee bases. There are templates to print for A4 papers but printing isn't cheap. As we are turbo-broke university student wet-erase mats are a little out of budget.

I therefore wonder how my fellow european gamers do grid based combat and/or have recommendation for big grid paper at reasonable price?

It's a good idea to not judge a (play)book by its cover but in the natural course of our hobby we're always judging a bit. The artwork, description, community, etc. may give us a certain idea of what to expect. However, actually getting our friends together for sessions may reveal deeper beauty and fun.

Have you ever been pleasantly surprised by a setting's depth/breadth?

What mechanic(s) didn't seem good before you actually tried them?

How much did your overall tastes change afterwards?