**Come here and talk about anything!**

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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.

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

Hi there. My name is Josh McCrowell, and for the last 8 years I wrote a game called His Majesty the Worm. It came out last month!

I'm holding a public AMA here to celebrate the release of the game and hold a retrospective about my experiences getting a book to print without traditional publishing or crowdfunding support.

What's His Majesty the Worm?

His Majesty the Worm is a new-school game with old-school sensibilities: the classic megadungeon experience given fresh life through a focus on the mundanities and small moments of daily life inside the dungeon. Food, hunger, light, and inventory management are central to play and actually fun. Tarot cards are used to create an action-packed combat system that ensures that all players have interesting choices every minute of combat: no downtime! If you like things like Dungeon Meshi or Rat Queens, you might find something fun in this game.

You can learn more about the game, and find links to buy either the physical or digital editions, on our website! Preview chapters (over 100 pages of content) are hosted on our Itch page, which is also linked from the site.

(When it launched, the physical edition sold out within 3 hours. The books are now restocked at Exalted Funeral! Whoops just sold out again. Sorry about that! You can sign up to be notified of the restocks on Exalted Funeral's website.)

How did you publish it?

Essentially, I worked one day a week on Sundays. I wrote the outline of a game and playtested it with friends.

I have a lot of skepticism around the way games are currently crowdfunded, and knew I wanted to avoid running my own Kickstarter campaign. Instead, I used Itchfunding to fund art, editing, graphic design, layout, copyediting, and other things I can't do by myself.

I put sample chapters, with very rough layout and art, onto Itch. Mostly, these were put up as pay-what-you-will (PWYW). Every time I accumulated enough scratch to pay somebody (e.g., commission a single piece of art), I did so.

Part of the above process was doing a lot of self-driven marketing. I can talk about that too.

When the book was basically done, I shopped around for someone to print it for me. Eventually, Exalted Funeral agreed to publish it for me and split the printing fees. Now it's out! Hooray!

So if you want to chat about the process of independently publishing your own game or learn more about the Worm, please ask me anything!

I'll be answering questions from 12:00 pm EST to 5 pm EST.

Update: Thanks so much for your questions and support, y'all. I need to step away now. During this AMA, His Majesty the Worm sold out (again!). You can sign up for my newsletter to be notified of restocks at the website: http://hismajestytheworm.games/

I'll drop back by later on to see if there's any other questions I can help answer about the process.

So, in my home games, I'm the type that very rarely wants to play in a published setting. Usually, I want to do my own thing, and have complete creative control over the world. As a result, I tend to make settings that don't exactly fit into any single game that could be reskinned all that easily. That's why for the last few years, I've basically been hunting for my 'white whale' generic system, something that allows me the flexibility I want to portray my world, whilst also remaining an engaging framework for my rather picky players.

Except, I can't say I've really found any of the systems I've looked into to be a good fit for me and my group, as each one feels like some sort of compromise in one area or another, and none of them really feel like they live up to the potential of what I want all that completely. GURPS, SWADE, Fate, Cypher-- all of the major players in the generic space just feel like they all fall short in SOME way, whether it be falling short to my own tastes, or to my players.

My players are trad gamers. Trying to play Cortex Prime nearly made their brains melt in confusion, and they continually struggle whenever I try to offload narrative control to them and loosen the GM reins a bit. They struggled against Cortex's immense amounts of narrative fluidity, especially in the realm of combat, where they expect a lot more crunch and verisimilitude. They come from a near exclusive D&D background, and so that's what they come to expect, and what they ultimately desire from when we dabbled into more narrative games. Things like tactical combat, player customization, verisimilitude, and traditional player/GM roles. Whilst I personally want to run a more flexible, narrative game, I know I would have to ease them into it.

Is anyone else having this frustrating issue? I don't want to compromise how my world works to fit a particular game, but I also don't want to compromise the needs of myself and my players to play a game that fails to fit all of our needs. Do you guys have any answers? Solutions? How did you find the game that worked for you, if at all?

CoC is famous among other things for having published pre-written not just adventures, but full-fledged campaigns that can last a group many sessions. Books like Orient Express and Masks of Nyarlothotep I hear repeated praise for over the years.

In my experience, most tabletop RPGs either don't publish any pre-written scenarios for GMs, or only publish them in the form of "single adventure" modules, not full fledged campaigns.

As a lazy GM, I am very interested in the idea of someone having done most of the groundwork for me, and am curious about any other options out there in tabletop roleplaying for me to just buy a campaign and read it and go.

I am trying to understand why people love those because I'm having troubles comprehending.

I am not a tactical player, far from it. Instead, I'm much more about drama, party dynamics, tragedy and comedy in one, not entirely laser focused on the story and more about it being at least half-emergent.

The latter is especially important because I play to get immersed in the world created or portrayed by GM, so the "writer's room" approach of Fate and "genre simulation" of PbtA makes no sense to me as it's as immersion breaking as physically possible.

The problem is that I inherently don't understand those approaches, and I don't like that, I need to understand, so please, explain the appeal, cuz I'm having a tough time getting how basically writing a story together is even considered playing a game.

This post is not meant to be a troll or anything, I just struggle with understand other people as a whole and understanding little things like that helps a lot in the long run, plus, I want to play and enjoy more games, so if I can grasp the appeal of Fate and PbtA, I may have more games available to me.

I've been playing DND5e for half my life, and I still enjoy it. However, it's feeling stale and I've long been ready for a change of pace (specifically interested in Forbidden Lands) However, everyone in my group is a DND player through and through (save for one person who already has other groups going on)

I don't have the time or social confidence to join and get to know a group of ransoms, but I'd really like to play something new. I've yet to ask my current group if they'd be interested in smth new, which I probably will at some point, but I'm expecting no's.

I've been gming for a little while on DND, and I want to start a campaign set in the wild west. But DND wouldn't really work considering I want to limit the use of magic and some races. So what would work for my idea?

The checklist -

Decent rules for gunplay and combat

Investigation mechanics

Interesting creatures/monsters to fight

Can easily work in modern/contemporary settings

Can run ‘dungeon crawls’ in science facilities/haunted mansions, etc.

What system would you use?

As the title says. I considered maybe GURPS, but then remembered that only I want to play GURPs. I have BRP, but I've not really read through it. I don't know many other generic fantasy games admittedly. I feel like Pathfinder 2e doesn't work because it's not high enough power.

It’s the fucking D20 dice mechanic.

I’m 47 and have been playing since AD&D. But I’ve found myself in a situation where I feel like I have to min max my D&D characters for them to be fun.

When I roll up a fighter, I have to optimize every weapon, feat, and subclass for combat because 1)it’s such a huge part of the game and 2)even if your character is reasonably good at something, the d20 is so swingy that unless you’re TEH BEST you have these feel bad moments where your supposedly capable character comes off feeble because of the dice.

Those kind of ridiculous failures then make it hard to pursue the narrative ideas I have under-pinning the character.

To get around this I find myself playing characters with more open-ended abilities. Mask of Many Faces and minor illusion come to mind because they allow so much consistency and flexibility. But why can’t I have that kind of open-endedness or expect that kind of internal consistency with all classes?

I might try the whole “roll 3d20, choose the middle value” approach to kill some of that swingy-ness. Draw Steel seems interesting because of the 2d10 roll mechanic.

I’d love to play D&D, but that just kills it for me. Any other alternatives?

Edit: First off, thank you everyone for such an amazing discussion. There are discussions around everything from dice mechanics to DM style to whether I secretly love min-maxing.

This topic seems to be a Rorschach test of some sorts and that’s fair because the topic goes beyond just the dice roll. The reason I love this hobby is because it’s personal. It’s so innately human and everyone has brought that fully to this discussion. Thank you.

I cut my GMing teeth on running Shadowrun Anarchy, which, while not a perfect system really impressed me with its super tightly-written missions at the back of the book. A whole mission, cast list and three-act structure on 1-2 pages, designed to give you all the essentials, but with room for the GM to be flexible and the players to have a very clear mission but with minimal steering.

More recently I've played games like Mystic Lilies and Spire (with its one-shots book Shadow Operations) that come with 'Playsets', a similar deal of giving all of the necessary key people and places with some juicy scene starters, but otherwise being so open it feels like they wouldn't play the same way twice.

Do folks have recommendations for other games with similar mini-scenarios? I'd be interested to see what different writers/designers consider the essentials to convey for a unique-feeling scenario. I mostly play stuff in a urban fantasy/cyberpunk kinda space, but I'm down to gave scenarios of any genre a read if you think they're clever/elegant like that.

Edit: To specify, I'm interested in hearing about specific scenarios folsk have written, more than the games themselves - what makes those scenarios so elegant and effective, even in something shortform?