**Come here and talk about anything!**

​

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.

​

----------

​

This submission is generated automatically each Saturday at 00:00 UTC.

I finally sat down and wrote the review for DIE: The RPG, especially now that Die: Loaded kicked off a couple of weeks ago and I wrapped my own short campaign. Honestly, this one was overdue.

DIE really stands out in the sea of fantasy RPGs. It is a game that pushes you to build a real human being first, then throw them into a world that knows exactly how to press on their bruises. It blends nostalgia, trauma, fantasy, meta-commentary, and honestly some of the best thematic class design I’ve seen in years. And yes, the Paragons are every bit as wild and brilliant as advertised.

I talk about all of it in the review: the brutal beauty of the Persona system, the cleverness of the Paragons, the emotional precision of the bestiary, the Fallen twist, how the game hits harder if you don’t know the comic, and why this isn’t really a power fantasy so much as a story about who we used to be when we first touched dice.

If you like character-driven games, emotional stakes, or TTRPGs that ask more of you than “roll initiative”, DIE is absolutely worth your time. And if you’ve played it already, I’d love to hear how your table handled the… complications.

Review is up now. Let me know your thoughts, and tell me what Persona-Paragon combo caused the most drama at your table.

So I've been craving more weird fiction with truly alien worlds, a major reason for this is for the long time I've been reading Kill 6 Billion Demons, a webcomic with so much beautiful and vivid strangeness to it.

Abbadon, the author and artist, does have an actual rpg based on the setting of the comic which I do own, but I wanted more recommendations for other strange worlds I can get lost in. Or at least worlds where you play as something more abnormal and strange than the usual things you can in rpgs.

I've come to the conclusion that while I like the archetype of the Ranger in media, I'm not sure what exactly I want when playing one in a RPG when it comes to mechanics. To I want to be better at exploration? To deal bonus damage to especific creatures? A Hunter's Mark? An Animal Companion? Magic? Traps? Dual weapons? Ranged?

As such, I want to see what YOU believe to be the best Ranger there is, an archetype and character class as old as dirty.

It doesn't need to have the name of "Ranger" or "Hunter" but you still need to look at it and be able to say "now THIS is a Ranger-like I can get behind!"

What do you consider the best RPGs that are faction-centric?

I have a faction-centric game design idea that I want to explore, but I strongly suspect the ideas I have may not be original.

The idea is centered around designing mechanics to make the factions the protagonists so the campaigns are more resilient with character death and player scheduling (west marches) and league-style play.

I have not played it, but I am getting Blades in the Dark to read. I have played Doomsong which is guild-centric.

Are there any others I should check out?

I was playing at a local game shop with some (nice) randos, and while talking about our home games i mentioned how we were hitting level 18 soon after like two and a half years of weekly playing, to which one guy was like "oh, pretty fast". It wasn't rude or anything, but it did catch me off guard a little for how fast he said it i guess lol. So now I'm curious about what the broader experiences are. It'll be a bit over three years by the time we finish the campaign depending on how long the final arc takes (our DM loves doing big ridiculous boss fights so it might be like 3 1/2 lol), is that not a lot of time for a narrative campaign? Is there an assumption or verbiage i missed and we were talking about two different styles of campaigning? I've heard of 10+ year campaign but are those THE standard?

Context for my perspective, if it helps: * I've been playing with two different groups once a week (so two game nights every week) for ten years, with multiple narrative campaigns between them. I haven't played with anyone else except in oneshots * One group crams a LOT of narrative into the games, the other is generally a more relaxed goofing around pace (except when its not lol) * Besides oneshots/short arcs (1-2 month games), our shortest campaign was finishing Curse of Strahd in 1.5 years, levels 2 - 9 * Our longest campaign was a sci-fi homebrew thing that lasted 3.5 or so years that we had to bail on bc there was too much scope creep, we were kind of burnt out on it, and also we had to kick a player and it ruined the vibes lmao * We like to switch up genres between games bc it keeps the flavors fresh, and ~1.5-2 years is when the most easily lured players start daydreaming about Next Campaign Ideas and the doomsday clock is set on "can we wrap this finale before the story fizzles and we switch games anyway" lol * Between the two groups' long campaigns (we do intermix on occasion), I have been in 4 campaigns that reached their full conclusion, vs 7 campaigns that either stumbled 2-4 months in or fizzled after 2 years

So I'm the dm of a dnd group of 4 including myself, sadly one of our players has to take a break and since its a small group id rather wait for them to come back then continue the campaign without them. Ive only ever really dm'd with dnd but I thought itd be fun to try out a new system. We also tend to play online a lot and usually just use dnd beyond for simplicities sake so something we can use for online is preferred but not mandatory. Thanks for the help in advance!

I will be running Mythic Bastionland soon and I'm trying to wrap my head around how the Myths work.

Obviously they're supposed to be a rather loose framing device for improvised and emerging narrative, I get that. But I'm unclear on how the game expects me to introduce them into the story.

Do I just open with clear "you have heard rumors about the Goblin in this Realm"? And clearly indicate that some specific rumor or site the players encountered is an Omen connected to this specific Myth? If so - any advice on how to explain that the players understand that the weird thing they saw was the Omen of the Goblin, and not just "villagers saw a weird dude in the woods, could be anything"?

Or do I just present the Omens, rumors and other clues, most not even mentioning "the Goblin" by name, and let the players connect them into the final shape of the Myth? If so - how do I differentiate the Myth-related discoveries from other things the players learn about the world? There's plenty to find out about the Seers, the Holdings, Landmarks, the intrigue of the Court, other wandering knights, etc. Not all of it ties directly to a Myth, and with 6 Myths and plenty of non-Myth things to find the longer game will turn into a convoluted knot, and a short one will not see a conclusion.

I've been wanting to run a game about being spies for a while now, but I haven't found a system that captures the vibe I'm trying to go for. In my searching so far, most games focus on spy-action or heist games where players have access to a network of resources and/or are highly skilled and they go out on action movie missions. This is fun but not what I'm looking for.

The kind of fiction I'm looking for is more about the stories of citizen spies. People who are not well-connected to an organization and your don't have any particular skills. They are constantly afraid of being found out and they can't trust anyone.

I think one of the best examples for the fiction would be TURN: Washington's Spies - a tv show about a cabbage farmer who teams up with some childhood friends to get information to the U.S. military during the revolutionary war.

If any of that brought a game to mind, I'd love to hear your suggestions

Whenever I see discussions on finding the right people among strangers for online TTRPG sessions, I see two bits of advice offered in the vein of:

• "Make an in-depth post and questionnaire to filter out low-effort responses."
• "Have a one on one chat with the people after the questionnaire to further shortlist only those you have a good chemistry with."

Only thing is... I searched for people on LFG and LFG_Europe for two different games in the past and each time, the total number of responses were 2 or 3.

The second time (for Mythic Bastionland), I even shortened the questionnaire but it made no difference. In the end, I just convinced my usual friends group to try the game and played it with them.

I'm curious: how did you get enough number of responses to start shortlisting from? Or was your experience in finding a group similar to mine?

I'm wondering if I got extremely unlucky or if I'm missing something.

Title. Been playing/homebrewing 5e for a long time, and I want to branch out into a different ruleset for my next campaign. I can't find any RPG that fits my needs while still being easy-ish to learn for my group. A few Year Zero Engine-based games like Alien RPG or Coriolis come the closest to what I want, but they're not perfect. That said, I really like the dice pool mechanics they're based off of, while still being on the rules-lighter side.

I've been giving serious thought to just taking the Year Zero Engine and adapting it to fit the challenges/mechanics I want my game to be based around, rather than trying to make an existing ruleset work. Is this crazy to do?

I just remembered that there's this young adult sort of Percy Jackson book, where the two main characters find out they're genies. So their parents send them to their uncle or something to learn all about wish magic and stuff. I remember something about them wishing cucumber sandwiches into existence, and wishing lobster dishes out of existence at some point. There's also a human butler who has one wish remaining from a total of 3 that the uncle gave him. I think that's what a basic summary of the book is, I only read about a quarter of the way through it back when I was in elementary school. Coincidentally, I never returned that book and I also lost it.

Anyways, because I remembered all that, I wanted to see if there's any games where you can play as a genie with wish-granting mechanics.

(Edit): Just found a Chronicles Of Darkness Fangame called Djinn: The Binding. Seems unfinished so far, though.