**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 am currently staring down a recruitment post:

The system does not require a traditional GM. Everything will be generated on the fly, which means I’ll also be able to participate as a player instead of only running the game.

We’ll use ChatGPT as the narrator. Players will describe their actions, we’ll provide dice rolls and prompts, and ChatGPT will help narrate the results, rooms, encounters, monsters, clues, and twists.

The tone will be a straightforward fantasy adventure: dangerous dungeons, strange monsters, and an undead villain waiting somewhere in the dark.

Why? To what end? (Frankly, I get the feeling that the recruitment post itself is LLM-generated, too.)

This is not even the first time I have encountered LLM-based GMing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1lykmfc/i_played_in_a_game_wherein_the_gms_responses_both/

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1n263ja/i_have_been_seeing_more_and_more_players_and_gms/

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1pcxixe/i_am_still_seeing_players_and_gms_outsource_large/

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1pfcn78/i_bought_a_book_of_puzzles_for_rpgs_and_i_very/

So a while ago i found two posts on r/CuratedTumblr that were meant as prompts for creative exercises. They really stuck with me because they seem like great set-ups for a Urban Fantasy/Horror campaign!

• The first one describes someone acquiring a property and finding a letter written by the former owner. The letter includes a long and evocative list of things to do/avoid doing in this house to keep you safe from the many beasts and entities that inhabit it: "Never pick flowers from the garden without leaving an exchange". "Cover your mirrors or they will be seen as an invitation". "Don´t touch the apple tree. You cannot afford what they cost". That type of stuff.
• The second one (could not find the link) had a similar concept: Finding a used map of your city full of mysterious scribblings like "Don´t walk this street at full moon", "The sewers???" or "Bus line 78 leads to a different place than expected".

I think prompts like these are a great way to start a campaign and to serve as a central riddle that must be solved. Where does this bus lead to? What is in the sewers? What is guarding the apples in the orchard?

I think players would love this! They get a lot of questions to solve at their own pace, they are thrown right into the action und have a solid grasp on how much of the mystery is already known to them.

To the GM this is great because you can just throw a bunch of leads on the table without overwhelming the party with too much exposition/worldbuilding. The city/house starts out as mysterious to the players AND the characters while the prompts while the prompts will spark the curiosity to explore.

I think this would work great for GMs who love worldbuilding but don´t want to monologue at their players and are looking for shorter/middle length campaigns.

So I am looking at systems that do these things:

• Urban Fantasy, but not the steamy YA kind. Also not a fan of these "let´s throw all kinds of tropes together and see what happens" systems. I am looking for some cohesion.
• Horror, but more folklore than lovecraftian
• open to creative worldbuilding from the GM
• handles mysteries well, not just about fighting stuff
• tone i am looking for: scary, mysterious, strange, not always hostile but potentially deadly
• Media that I think of: Hellboy movies, the book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel, the film Pan´s Labyrinth

I have played Urban Shadows 2e, which is Urban Fantasy but cares much more about relations, favors and politics. Also I don´t care that much about romance, I am no good at these kind of stories.
I have played CoC, but this feels more in tune with fairy tales, folklore and such than world-ending, mind-bending Lovecraft.
I played Brindlewood Bay und know of The Between, but am unsure if open mysteries und prewritten character stories would work in this concept.
I have heard of Vaesen, but am unsure if it is too focused on Scandinavia and too...bright?

Thankful for all kinds of ideas!

Hey all

I have a friend who is really into the cyberpunk lore and videogame and she really wants to play an rpg within the setting. The problem is that I really don't like the crunchy traditional style of roleplaying that cyberpunk red and others seem to have mechanically. I enjoy playing and running games like blades in the dark and powered by the apocalypse where big narrative swings can happen without it being grid based combat and spending thousands of eddies in minute ways. I enjoyed playing the sprawl. Is there any game that lends itself to being adapted to cyberpunk lore without being a combat sim?

I'm a new GM, I'm posting here to maybe gain some insight to aid me in my GM journey. To keep it brief, prepping has become a bit of a slog recently. I spend a lot of time prepping for each session just for my players to completely blow through the things I have prepared. I think what I've narrowed it down to is that I tend to prepare exposition and information, and not tension. Exposition and lore drops last maybe minutes at a time when tension, creating situations, and presenting problems to my players create a longer and more immersive session at the table.

I know that kinda sounds like I get it, but I don't actually understand the process to get there. I've read Don't Prep Plots series by the Alexandrian many times over as well as similar posts online and I can't seem to grasp the concepts they're trying to get at.

I've seen tons of videos and posts online talking about DMing as giving a sandbox to the players, or giving the players toys (NPCs, setpieces, problems) to play with, experiment with, and live in the situation I've given them. Fundamentally, if I want to create tension and meaningful choices for the players, I don't understand how I can not prepare branching outcomes and waste prep on outcomes the players will never see depending on their choices.

I am mainly confused by this. if I don't prep branching outcomes to the player choices, I don't get how i should handle unexpected and open ended solutions the players create, without improvising everything on the spot. Unless improv is really the heart of the solution to all of this? That seems extremely hard.

Example: the party is hired to export cargo to Awesome City, but upon arriving at the dock, the ship they were guaranteed is missing.

Sure I can come up with the problem, however, i dont understand how to prep for players potentially stealing a boat, fighting a crew, or investigating the disappearance.

What does the process behind "prep situations, not plots" actually look like structurally? Any advice is welcome and helpful!

I’m looking for a well-rounded setting to run high fantasy games in. Lately the impression I have is that a huge proportion of TTRPGs in fantasy settings (and maybe others as well) are set in dark worlds, with themes of horror, gothic horror, post-apocalyptic, survivalism, gritty, etc. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that and there are some that I have enjoyed, but it isn’t what I’m looking for right now, and it surprises me how much of what I find is in this vein.

Then a lot of what I do find that isn’t dark is on the opposite end of the spectrum: cozy. Which, again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with and I have enjoyed some of, but also isn’t what I’m after.

I’d like a setting that feels like it has a balance of both. Not a cozy world with only minor conflict but also not a dark, unforgiving world with unending conflict. I want a setting that has a mix of downbeats and upbeats, of darkness and brightness, of cute and terrifying, of hope and fear, you get the idea.

If I think about video games that I enjoyed growing up that had that kind of feel, I think of things like Skies of Arcadia, the Tales series, Golden Sun, Final Fantasy, Loom, Baten Kaitos, the King’s Quest series, and others. Games that had dark moments, places and people mixed in with moments that felt bright or heroic, or curious or beautiful or mysterious.

So far the thing that has hit the closest is the Dales setting from Legend in the Mist, which is one of the things that I like about it. It’s good, and I also enjoy it but I’d also like something that lends itself to more high fantasy. Eberron has come up in my searches, I don’t know much about it but am interested in looking into it especially if others might recommend it for this.

Would love to hear thoughts and recommendations!

There are plenty of RPGs with sprawling worlds filled with decades of lore on the history and geography and politics, with page counts in the hundreds if not thousands, and those obviously have their fans and communities.

But I'm curious about your favorites on the other extreme of the spectrum - the settings that are either small in scope (just a single region or settlement), page count (ranging in the single or double digit range), or perhaps even both!

How important is it for there be progression in an RPG?

Is it enough for the character to have money and agency. To be able to buy property and run businesses or are levels and xp a necessity?

What ways are there to make a player invest in their character and keep them coming back?

Anyone still playing Rifts?

Hi guys!

I've fallen in love with the storypath system since friday and my head is bursting with ideas on how to make some of my campaign ideas come to fruition!

As far I'm concerned, there is no material (at least that I've found) that cover fantasy, as in D&D-esque type of fantasy and I'm thinking on what are your takes on how to make it work in the system.

I'm thinking on making a dark fantasy adventure for my players as a first-dive into the system and then branch out from there. So, what advice would your care to give?

In many Space Opera works, there is this "Trope" which consists of having a giant planet sized space station which serves as a hub for all factions known in the galaxy. In Star Wars this station is Coruscant, in Mass Effect it's the Citadel, in Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9 it's the eponymous station.

My goal is to make a Spy Campaign inspired by John le Carré which is set entirely within the walls of said station.

Is there a RPG sourcebook for such as setting?

What’s the most memorable example of players massively overthinking a simple situation in your TTRPG games?

I’m thinking about those moments where the GM presents a completely straightforward obstacle, NPC, door, clue, or encounter, and the players immediately assume there’s some deeper conspiracy, hidden trap, or elaborate puzzle involved.

What happened, how far did the overthinking go, and how did the situation finally get resolved?