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Starting last June, I made a series of very poor decisions involving a Chronicles of Darkness living world server that I joined and proceeded to ST in. I would like to share my story, so that others can avoid making the same mistakes.

I entered the server by the end of June 2026, back when it was first getting started. I started roleplaying with a PC soon thereafter. Come the 4th of July, I ditched my PC in favor of full-time ST duties. I was the only person in the entire server who opted to be a PC-less, full-time ST.

The hierarchy of the server was as follows. There was the head ST, henceforth referred to as "the Big Cheese" (and no, that was not their actual username). The Big Cheese did a lot of genuine, meaningful, appreciable work as ST and as server runner, and I must credit and admire them for that. However, they also liked to play PCs, and they had a lot of PCs: 22, last I checked. These PCs were entirely separate from the Big Cheese's NPCs, and the Big Cheese really did like to get these PCs into a wide range of scenes.

Below the Big Cheese were their three friends, nominally acting as moderators. Only on rare occasions did they do any STing. For the most part, they just played their share of PCs. One moderator had 9 PCs. (To be clear, this was abnormal. The one non-ST player with the most PCs had "only" 6 PCs. The bulk of players had only 1 or 2.)

Finally, below the Big Cheese and their three friends were random people who volunteered to be ST. During my stay in the server, there were three of us. It felt like the three of us were doing vastly more work as STs and server runners than any of the moderators, and yet we had significantly less say in house rules and rulings than those moderators. One of those three volunteer STs, other than me, left due to their own grievances and dissatisfaction.

The server ran Beast: The Primordial (the head ST's favorite by far), Changeling: The Lost 2e, Demon: The Descent, Deviant: The Renegades, Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e, Hunter: The Vigil 2e (which the head ST disliked, yet allowed as a concession), Mage: The Awakening 2e (which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be the most problematic by a huge margin), Promethean: The Created 2e (whose eponymous Prometheans had most of their drawbacks heavily neutered), Vampire: The Requiem 2e, and Werewolf: The Forsaken 2e. There were lots and lots and lots of third-party books available. Also, mortal humans, including hunters, could mix two templates at character creation.

In theory, different game lines were divided between different STs, giving each ST a well-demarcated responsibility. In practice, this was seldom the case. Differing availabilities meant that each ST had to run every game line. Furthermore, since the PCs in a scene were often of mixed character types, each ST needed to be reasonably familiar with the rules of every game line; for example, I once wound up running a combat for a mage, a vampire, two werewolves, and a Beast, each of which were activating all sorts of scene-defining abilities.

Chronicles of Darkness games are absolutely not well-balanced. Each game is full of rules and character options that are poorly balanced, ambiguously written, or both. This is exacerbated in a crossover game with different types of supernatural PCs.

The Big Cheese and the moderators wanted some semblance of balance, so they varied the starting XP based on supernatural type (e.g. mages got the least), and put up an extraordinarily long list of house rules and rulings. Some were understandable, but many were puzzling and arbitrary overcorrections. The list grew longer and longer with each month, and several additions felt very knee-jerk.

The list and its additions incited many arguments. Whenever a player, especially a new player, questioned the house rules and rulings, the Big Cheese got very grumpy and standoffish. Two of the moderators would pile on and belittle the person asking about the house rules and rulings. To their credit, they eventually gained some self-awareness and cut back on such behavior, but arguments and dissatisfaction over the house rules and rulings still happened.

Despite the above efforts, there were still major rifts in PC power. Some PCs, even within the same supernatural type, were vastly more optimized and thus powerful than others. The Big Cheese and the moderators knew this, of course; the Big Cheese openly described one PC from a moderator as "easily among the most powerful characters on the server." Because noncombat rolls did not quite have the same stakes as combat rolls, combat optimization was the only optimization that mattered.

It did not help that the Big Cheese and the moderators made resource management nonexistent. They wanted a player to be able to play a single PC across multiple scenes simultaneously, sensible timeline be damned.

The Big Cheese and the moderators ruled that whenever a PC entered a new sequence of scenes, the PC would just... fill up to fresh: full Health, full Willpower, full Mana or Aether or whatever, full 1/chapter abilities, the works. Non-Persistent Conditions, too, vanished every real-world Monday. So naturally, PCs went nova and burnt through resources all the time. Ending a sequence with 6 aggravated damage and a stack of non-Persistent Conditions meant nothing at all. This distorted game balance even further. (Permanent PC death was not on the table. The server's setting had a gimmick of resurrecting PCs for a price. During my time in the server, no PC died.)

As a result of the Big Cheese being both head ST and the player of a staggering 22 PCs, there were conflicts of interest. The server had no safeguards against the Big Cheese giving their PCs as an advantage. I do not think they ever did so intentionally, but there were many moments when it felt like the Big Cheese was unconsciously placing a thumb on the metaphorical scale. These included:

• Giving rulings that set precedent that favored their PC.

• Preemptively building a PC with favorable rulings in mind.

• Laying down interpretations of setting lore that favored their PC. Because the Big Cheese had final say over the truth or falsity of any given piece of lore in the books, the Big Cheese could leverage that authority to vindicate whatever their PC was doing at the time. For example, one of their PCs went on a fervent crusade to defend X controversial subject; shortly thereafter, the Big Cheese made it canon that defending X is the morally and ethically correct thing to do.

• Having major NPCs support their PC, sometimes within the same scene. For example, when one of their PCs went on a fervent crusade to defend X, the single most personally and politically powerful supernatural resident of the city just so happened to endorse and support the PC in the same scene, and decry everyone who dared to stand against X.

• Directly overruling me, while I was STing for one of the Big Cheese's PCs, if I established an inconvenient plot point. Twice, I tried to inject some nuance by suggesting that defending X is not so clear-cut, and was overruled.

(X is, of course, fetches. They wanted to protect all fetches from changelings, and they wanted their PC to be in the right.)

• There was a fighting tournament. The Big Cheese had a PC as a contestant, and so did a moderator. When the Big Cheese's tournament host NPC laid down the rules for matches, they just so happened to significantly favor the Big Cheese's PC and that moderator's PC.

My biggest and most regrettable mistake was not realizing how much of a commitment this would be. STing this game was a daily, high-intensity commitment: running multiple concurrent scenes, devising and portraying NPCs, piecing scenes together into wider adventures and plots, adjudicating rules and rulings (always a necessary evil in a game as jankily written as Chronicles of Darkness, triply so with our overly long list of house rules and rulings), checking in with other STs, helping new players assemble sheets, reviewing sheets for approval, and more. Engaging with this game absolutely devoured my time, effort, and inspiration.

This might not have been so bad, but I had obligations to other games. I put two play-by-post games that I was GMing, with two players each, on hiatus for over six weeks. At the time, I did not tell those four players the true reason why I was putting their games on hiatus. This was absolutely horrid of me. I have no excuse for being so hyperfixated on STing for this server that I simply had no time left to run those other games. I have since come clean to those four players.

I am the sort of GM who strongly prefers tightly balanced, unambiguous rules; the shaky balance of Chronicles of Darkness games, and the well-meaning but ultimately troublesome attempts to "fix" them constantly grated on me. Similarly, I was constantly bothered by the Big Cheese and the way they played their 22 PCs.

I stuck around for months as ST, giving this my best effort. I could have done something else with all this time and effort (e.g. actually attending to those two games that I put on hiatus), but because of some strange sense of sunken costs fallacy, I decided to stick it out. Only after months did I realize that I was choosing to be in the wrong place.

Hours ago, I put in my two weeks' notice. I announced my departure as ST for that server in a fortnite's time. I hope things will get better there.

And I hope I can pick those other games back up.

For me, it's Viking-inspired settings. Feels like the last few years have seen an oversupply of games with a Viking aesthetic.

we play every 3-4 weeks and every session starts with me summarizing because nobody remembers anything. I've tried sending session summaries, asking players to take notes, making recaps part of the game nothing sticks. Last time someone asked "who is this guy?" about an NPC they'd met twice. I've thought about using a campaign wiki or NPC tracking but not sure if it's worth the effort. What do you all do?

For me, the classics of roleplaying are things like: D&D, Vampire: The Masquerade, Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, and Fate.

They seem to have "stood the test of time" and are actively still around.

There are games I feel that are more so novelties that aren't likely to stick around for longer than their initial release. Typically I'd point to licensed games based on non-TTRPG properties. Like no one is waiting for the 2nd edition of "Men in Black: The Roleplaying Game" from the 90s/00s. But there are Kickstarted/crowdfunding RPGs that seem like one and done.

Basically any games that already exist in some other medium that were made into 3e/3.5e clones. So like Monte Cook's World of Darkness, the World of Warcraft TTRPG, the Wheel of Time RPG, just to name a few examples.

While only two GMless games have been nominated at the Ennies, Deadline: A Clockwork Press and A Land Once Magic, I own both and have played Deadline, with a session for the other one planned soon.

Lately, I have tried older GMless games with my friends, some I have mentioned in my previous posts and comments like A Complicated Profession, The Treasure at the End of this Dungeon is an Escape (...), Fiasco, Dead House, The Dunwich Horror, Wanderhome, A Christmas Belonging, various hacks of For the Queen. I am also going to play Decomposer and the famous Polaris soon and during this year have tried oneshots or twoshots of some Belonging outside Belonging games such as Our Haunt and Extra Ordinary.

This subgenre has been getting a lot of dev love with so many niche games with fantastic pitches being available on itch, although I have played very little of them so I cannot speak for their quality.

And I noticed an uptick of requests for GMless recommendations here recently, which received wonderful suggestions in general. Not just the usual, Microscope, Fiasco, Alice is Missing, Ironsword, i'm sorry did you say street magic and The Quiet Year, but also Dialect, Fall of Magic, Annalise, Beak, Feather and Bone, City of Winter, Archipelago, Kingdom and Follow among others, just to name the titles I have either played or own.

As in the title i want to find a game where everyone is a necromancer. Modifying bodies and doing evil.

Hello everyone, I'm new to the world of Table Top RPGs and Solo Table Top RPGs. I've been trying to play this game Alone Against Nyarlathotep which is a solo RPG game ala "Choose your own adventure" but I have a few questions. I just had one play session and I just finished the 1st day. I'm not sure if I'm playing it the right way or as intended. (I know that the spirit of table top games is to play it however you like but my brain needs law and order). So I hope someone may shed some light on these questions of mine:

1. If I fail a dice roll and the prompt returns me to the same entry before the dice roll; am I allowed to try again? What is barring me (aside from the time aspect of the game) from trying again and again until I succeed?

2. When I'm out and about adventuring, especially if I'm outside of the main house, and if a scheduled event comes up, do I really just magically teleport back to the main house?

3. The gamebook states on page 8 that "If you pass a skill roll, tick the adjacent box with a pencil". If I do that, what happens? I checked the internet and the interwebs say that the investigator will improve during the "investigator development session". When and what is that? How much will the investigator improve?

4. Do you guys have any tips on how I can enjoy solo RPGs more aside from playing mood music? :)

I have seen Mork Borg pop up in different threads, sometimes as something that gets recommended to play and other times as something that gets recommended to avoid.

I am generally curious to know what you guys think of the Borg games (Mork Borg, Cy_Borg, Pirate Borg, Corp Borg, ect.). What do you like about them? What do you hate about them? What do you think can improve them? What are your house rules (if any)? Why would you recommend them? Why would you not recommend them? That sort of stuff.

I am new to the TTRPG world, and quite frankly, extremely overwhelmed. I am wanting to create my own TTRPG as a gift for my husband. His favorite game is Forbidden Lands. I have general ideas, but could really use help kicking this off the ground. Any tips or tricks for doing this?