**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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I understand, conceptually, that the 90s were 30 some years ago- But it still hurts to hear.

That said- Any funny moments from recent games you wanna share to help soothe my old age?

I love vampire stories and vampire games. I think Vampire: The Masquerade has had a stranglehold of the genre for so long. I am also an Ann Rice and Interview with a Vampire fan. Great movie, great to atrocious books!

My concern comes with this new TTRPG. First, a large publishing company is kickstarting their nigh on finished product. I know this is basically the norm now but we must point out that it is shitty and buried actual projects that need to be kickstarted to even exist.
Second, the campaign is to back a Starter set and a setting guide. When you strip all the extras away that’s the meat of the game you are left with. No core rulebook is a big red flag that is dyed extra crimson as they refer to it as the first instalment in the immortal line. It feels, to me at least, like a nasty little money grab scheme. Selling off a full core rule set and default setting over multiple books and boxsets. Monetising the now liberated copywrite to a thirsty audience.

It seems a shame too because they are exploring mechanics with vampires that are sorely underestimated. Having a timeline of a vampires long life you can jump between decades sounds really fun. Based on the character sheet, brooding, obsessing and being taken along by your dark fate are all baked in.

Am I just an old man yelling at clouds? I’d back this project in a heartbeat were it a full core rules with the New Orleans as the core setting as part of that core rules. But the aforementioned reasons have put me well off until I see a core rule book on shop shelves.

EDIT: I have messaged Renegade about the New Orleans book being a core rulebook or a supplemental/setting book.

I didn't see these shared yet so thought to do so in case someone else will find them interesting.

Vincent Baker, co-author of Apocalypse World, talks about what games originally inspired Apocalyse World and what kind of different game "branches" have followed AW.

The talk is split between two shortish videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8DmKH8FSnY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0UZiAJAssQ

Hi, this time I am looking for a game for more theoretical purposes than actual playing.

I am writting an essay into TTRPGs and in my current part I am explaining how fantasies are created and represented, and a common theme I have notice is self sufficiency. Wathever is the fantasy the player is trying to portrait, the satisfaction with that fantasy is based in the capacity to portrait it regardless of context.

So for example, if your fantasy is to be an stealthy rogue that can't be detected by anyone, games encourages you to reach that fantasy through its mechanics by increasing your stealth and taking feats, talents, edges and equipment that makes you stealthy.

So I wanted to know if there are games, succesful or not, that break this convention: My fantasy is being stealthy and to fulfill that fantasy I need to rely on my companions creating distractions that allow me to sneak up.

This can also be in a combat sense, I am a support but my healing isn't determined by my statistic but by the statistics of my companions, for example.

Thanks for all the help!

EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION: I see some people hung up on the stealth example. What I am looking is for games where a player build is basically interdependent from other players.

Another example could be: A player wanting to be a healer depends in their companions taking a "I heal more when I am heal by others" perk/feat instead of having perk/feats that makes the healer heal more by default.

In the mood for some scheming eunuchs.

As the title says - are there any systems where you get at a decent amount of tactics while still working well in theatre of the mind? A lot of the systems that work extremely well without a battle map have the combat reduced to a cycle of: I attack, roll dice, go next (unless spells are involved). This means that the survivability of an encounter is reduced to PC levels and chance. What are the systems that encourage a thought out decision-making from the players without needing a grid?

As the title says.

This, this and another post about a GM creating some handmade letter handouts for his players which I can no longer find recently all followed the same pattern. The posts were made by accounts created days ago, usually with multiple posts in very unconnected but popular subreddits. Usually there were some random comments made on other posts, done in french for some reason.

The posts all had a very similar pattern of complaining about some personal issue that demanded either sympathy or advice from their readers, always written in the most self-hating tone possible. If they described players acting badly, they always ruled out the immediate option of talking it over like adults.

None of these accounts seem to have any interest in responding to comments on their post, despite writing posts that are quite long about deeply personal issues. By the way, they seem to have a lot of deeply personal issues, judging by their other posts on other subreddits.

I might be wrong about some of these, but I would advice people to be skeptical about the stories that get posted here, and not let it distort their view of how other people actually play or interact. Bots like these can make dysfunctional groups seem way more common than they actually are.

I'm a veteran RPG enthusiast, and I'm looking for a game where adventuring and/or monster slaying is inherently mutagenic/corruptive for some reason. I'd like starting characters to be relatively weak and human, but the more they adventure, the more twisted/monsterous they become (at least physically). I'm open to all kinds of games, from PbtA to OSR, but I'd like the base gameplay loop to be classic adventuring, and I'd like a flexible progression system. I want the mutations/corruption to be a part of the game's progression system, not just a possible flavor of a normal level up system, bonus points if it's dependent on what kinds of monsters you were exposed to in some way. Defy the Gods is kinda similar to what I'm looking for, but I'm looking for more "adventurers VS the wilderness" vibe and less "underdogs fighting a corrupt society"

Also, if you know a system that you think can be slightly modified to accommodate this concept, I'd be happy to give it a try (I'm considering using City of Mist's Mythos/Logos system as a base). Edit: also, if you know of a similar mechanic I could adapt into an adventuring game, I'd love to hear

My favorite games include Pathfinder 2e, Blades in the Dark, CofD, CoM and GirlFrame, but I'm open to trying new styles

Hey people. I wanted to share about my role play warmup experiences. I have been doing it for quite a while now and this is not a subject that I see a tone of discussion about.
I am doing this as a player (I am also a DM for other campaigns), the DM give me a 15min slot at the beginning of the game to do it. At first it was the classic "answer in character" but it quickly turned into full scenes that ended up cannon.
Here is two example of what they transformed into :

• I was playing a psychic witch, at the beginning of session players (and NPCs) were dragged into her mind and "interviewed" by a spirit. The interviews led to more scenes where - with the DM approval - we would drop lore on others/ myself or the game in general.
• For the next campaign, i wanted to change to formula of the "dream" thing. My DM suggested that I play gods of the game,summoning the hero to asked them questions about their adventure. In one of those encounter they decided to free some monster. The world of the gods was now at risk so from now one the hero would follow the adventure of another groupe trying to slay that monster. They would eavesdrop at some key point of the parallel story where they were not the main charters.

All the table find this warm ups very fun and we agreed that our sessions are better after this. What do you think about this ? Have you had something like this at your table ?

Shadowlands Games have been on the recieving end of frustrated backers accusations of dishonest and even fraudulent communication for quite a while.

Comment sections have been filled with angry backers suggesting that claims about a backlog at their printer is at best dubious.

Especially their campaings of Scions of the Dark Goddess for Call of Cthulhu and the Terraforming Mars ttrpg are suffering from delays.

Up to a point Shadowlands Games has so far cancelled and refunded the most vocal critics, effectively silencing them as they are then unable to participate in the campaign comment section. With the company's suspected financial trouble, this practice appears to have been stopped.

The bio page of Shadowlands Games used to show all their different campaigns, but recently they edited it to remove Scions and TM from it.

The campaign pages still exists, but now you have to search actively for them by name, rather than having acces to them in the company's biography.

Last night, I ran a game for players who never played the game I was running. I gave a basic overview of the rules and how to use the dice bot we were using.

We started, which usually means I have the players introduce their characters by describing how they arrive, start their day, order their coffee/drinks/food, etc... Something that I find helps players get a feel for their character.

I was deciding who should start us off and just told everyone to roll for initiative, not for Combat but just to see who will start us off.

Then I realized "Rolling for Inititative" helped a lot because the players got the handle of how to roll the dice, determine how to calculate a success vs a failure, and any mistakes made were early enough to correct quickly in a way that helped make the game later on run smoothly. Plus the dice bot wasn't intuitive and let them Learn the basic commands.

Probably something other people often do, but the benefit of using this to also teach players how to use the dicebot seemed like an additional benefit.

PS, my phone won't let me see if I'm bolding words correctly so I apologize if everything after Rolling for Initiative is stuck bold. 🙃