**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.

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You read a game, it sound amazing. You bring it to the table, it all falls apart.

What was that game for you and why did it failed? Do you think it was a misunderstanding, a mismatch in playstyle, bad design, wrong group or something else?

For me it was 7th Sea 2e. I really liked reading it and I was excited. But I think the design was weird and cumbersome to run, and I also didn't quite understand the pacing that the game was trying to do. I think it has good ideas, but a very bad execution in communicating how it should work. I also saw the actual play with the designer and I understood even less, so there's also that.

What was for you?

Public Service Announcement:

The purpose of kickstarter, and other crowdfunding sites like it, are to give creators enough money (and therefore time) to design their product, as well as fund other costs such as art and layout.

It is unreasonable to expect a designer to design the product for free, and to use Kickstarter only to pay for art, layout, or other logistical costs. Design is work. It deserves payment. If someone is on Kickstarter trying to sell a product, they're trying to go professional (by definition). It is unreasonable to expect them to create simply as a labor of love.

Big companies (like MCDM, Darrington Press, etc) have warped the public perception of what Kickstarter is by putting forward nearly finished products. This raises people's expectations for how far a Kickstarter project should be developed, which warps the perception of Kickstarter into just another storefront where people post their finished products.

This raises the bar so high that it alienates the very designers that Kickstarter was designed to help out: small creators.

Please support your small creators. If the idea sounds good and they have put fourth enough info to let you know that they are likely competent, they shouldn't be required to show any more than that.

It's called Kickstarter, not Kickfinisher.

Yes, that's risky. But it's supposed to be. This is the place for the brave to fund the future. Without us willing to take the risk, thousands of small creators will never share their new ideas with us. We're taking the risk for our own benefit, and that of the entire hobby.

If that's not for you, that's okay. But let's keep Kickstarter/crowdfunding serving its intended purpose: to fund projects from the beginning.

Thank you.

- Matthias

Please advice! No fantastic elements — just a "real life" detective. Preferably set in Victorian England. And a good scenario (typical murder mystery) for it.

Someone will comment with something that's just silly or just absurd. I'm not looking for just absurd. I'm looking for full-on dada

If you're not sure what that is, here's a Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

UPDATE: I appreciate how many people in this thread truly understand dada

Hi folks! I'm a GM who has had alot of fun hosting fantasy and comedy rpgs. My girlfriend has always very sweetly supported me in the hobby, but has never had any interest in joining a session in part because she's not really comfortable in genre fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror).

But then the other day I mentioned that there are historical RPGs with a much more grounded setting, and she's found a hint the idea intriguing, which makes me want to try out a more grounded/mundane game as a one-shot and she if she'd like to attend!

Thanks to this sub's Historical Game suggestions, I've got plenty of systems to read through for ideas, but I admit I'm a little in the dark about how to run a grounded TTRPG. I'm looking for any of the following:

• Tips for running a historical game.
• Stories for what your historical game was like.
• Recommendations for favorite systems or settings.

Any help is appreciated!

If it helps, my girlfriend's interests center around themes like exploration (think Darwin or the Corps of Discovery), women's stories, queer stories, and Victorian or Medieval settings. She'd probably be more tempted by games focused on relationships or discoveries, rather than combat, and I'm probably looking for very rules-light games that can make for easy one-shots.

One thing I've seen a lot in my discussion threads here is the idea of a system being designed for certain things, doing them really well or not well. IE-DnD as heroic fantasy, but struggling to do say-horror as an example. Ironically reminded me of an old descriptor of the Frostbite game engine as an F1 race car, doing one thing really well, and everything else poorly.

But recently, I've been thinking about this with my playgroups VtM campaign. For context, we've been running 5E (due to me picking up the book physically at a store.) 5E is designed to focus more on the personal horror aspect of Vampire, mechanics like the hunger dice, and lore changes putting the emphasis on you trying to survive in a world where you are hopelessly outmatched. It was divisive for that reason, although it does have it's own fanbase now, thankfully.

Thing is...my players and I haven't focused on that so much. As a GM I've been focused on the broader lore of the WOD and the political shenanigans...and my players have ended up bantering so much that we've become "What we do in the Shadows."

And honestly? It's great, we're all having an amazing time of things so far, I check in and everyone's enjoying themselves. It's just a lot of fun, and really helped my skills as a GM to just keep the plot going while rolling with the punches, and making my players laugh and have big character moments in equal measure. We took a system designed for personal horror, and turned it into something else entirely.

So today I want to ask, what are some systems you've used in ways that weren't quite intended by the designers? Or more broadly, what are some systems you used for things that the system itself struggles with?

Pretty much in the title. For the majority of the time I haven't liked licensed RPGs such as Lord of the Rings because the settings seemed fixed and I though players would just want to do story as the main characters, or I'd just end up running an 'alternative timeline' which doesnt sit well with me.

After getting the Dune: Adventures in the Imperium on the premise that it was designed to run Non-mainline story games, I fell in love with it. As someone who like and read the novels, I liked the summary and write up of the line of events. It wasnt the stand out thing, but it has stuck with me. I ended up picking up the One Ring rpg and was suprised again by a wonderful timeline amd recap. This time it was more useful to me becuase I have only read Lord of the rings and the hobbit, not going into the other works.

I find myself now looking forward to the upcoming Wolrd of Warcraft DnD book for the possible break down of story into a time line. Having had a spotty relationship with the MMO, I am missing a lot of major lore points and this will be able to fill in gaps.

Are there other licensed RPGs that also offer similar break downs of lore?

Edit: spelling

I'm interested in people's experiences with long campaigns in games other than D&D and Pathfinder. I'm curious which games support long campaigns well, which are terrible at it, and which are in-between.

What do I mean by a "long" campaign? Let's say 40 sessions or so, typically a year or year-and-a-half, or longer.

Longer games lead to more-experienced characters and in most games more-experienced characters are more-powerful characters. I'm interested in learning more about which games handle that higher experience level effectively and how they do so.

I've had my share of long D&D and Pathfinder games; I've also had long Call of Cthulhu games (Masks of Nyarlathotep for the win), and fairly long games of Aberrant, Orpheus, and Vampire: the Dark Ages / Masquerade.

What I've found is that while yeah, D&D tends to fall apart (or at least change drastically) at higher levels / longer games, Pathfinder 2e doesn't; Call of Cthulhu certainly doesn't, as characters tend to fall apart just as much as they grow in skill, and nobody's got access to superhuman ability regardless.

Aberrant and Orpheus were somewhere in the middle, and Vampire handled a long game reasonably well. All three of these mitigate the power curve by virtue of abilities typically requiring a geometric increase in experience costs.

I'd be very curious to hear others' experience in this area. Which games really shine for long campaigns? Which ones fall apart after twelve sessions?

Hi guys. 7 adults 40+ years old and 1 kid 12 years old are asking to run a murder mystery game for them. Preferably w/o fantastic elements at all. I have no experience with murder mystery kits and in where I am you can’t find them at all. So I need a system and a module for it advice.

So I saw this ttrpg called Golden Sky Stores and I fell in love, mostly with the theme and feel, being that's it's cozy and more focused on small town adventures, and I've really only seen good things about it.

The thing is I noticed two kinks, one it's very old like most posts about it are 3+ years old and most posts on the subreddit are 2+ years old, so I don't really know where to look to play it or find a group, and second it looks like it's mostly played in oneshots or at conventions but I can't really go to those, plus I kinda want a campaign of it.

So I figured I'd ask, are there any games that are like golden sky stories that are actively played, and or is there a place where I could look for a golden sky stories campaign.

I'm about to begin working on a Cyberpunk Campaign, and for this one I wished to have portraits for my NPCs, most of them at least.

I wanted to know if there were any RPG marketplaces (like Drivethru or Itch) where you could either buy or get for free NPC portraits for Cyberpunk (The genre, not necesseraly the R Talsorian game) RPG Campaigns? I would especially like portraits that use an aesthetic style similar to japanese animes. I know that I definitly saw this kind of stuff but for VtM on Storyteller Vault, so I wonder if something similar is available for the Cyberpunk Genre.