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There is this person I once played D&D 4e alongside, long ago. By chance, I stumbled across him online and caught up. This person has been wanting to vent for a while about his side hustle as a paid 5e DM, and, for whatever reason, thought I would be a good listener.

At some point, I asked if I could share his story online, publicly. He agreed (citing that he highly doubts that anyone involved checks RPG-related Discord servers, subreddits, and such), under the condition that there would be no identifying information, no direct quotes aside from small phrases, no direct price tags, nobody trying to contact him, and so on. I have already run my posts by him.

I have no way of verifying if any of this is true. He could be fabricating everything. In turn, you have no way of verifying my own side. I suppose that is just how things go. I am sharing this story simply because I find it interesting.

• The DM has been doing this for nearly a decade, usually thrice a week, ~6 hours a session, in-person. He started off charging (X) USD per hour (for the whole group, not for each player), but gradually increased his price to ~3(X). The DM is aware that this is very high, but he gets away with it by relentlessly networking across a certain area in the U.S. where upper-middle-class 20- to 30-somethings are common. One current group, consisting of nobodies in the right-wing grifter sphere (who still manage to cough up money anyway), the DM charges ~5(X); he tells them that they are getting a premium experience, even when the DM is doing nothing particularly different.

• His clients are almost all white or white-passing, upper-middle-class, 20- to 30-something men. The DM freely admits that there is selection bias. This is probably the only demographic willing to pay such high prices for someone to run a game for them. Sometimes, someone brings a girlfriend, who may or may not play.

• The DM has run for 200+ players over the course of dozens of campaigns. No campaign has reached a proper conclusion.

• Group sizes are usually six or seven (I know, I know) players, but one or two almost always ghost on the session without sending advance notice. Players frequently show up for game night drunk, high, or both. Every single game thus far has ended with a critical mass of players ghosting and never showing up again. Fortunately, the DM insists on collecting payment beforehand; and yes, these players are indeed willing to just throw money away.

• Yes, many players mention Critical Role, Brennan Lee Mulligan, etc.

• The stereotypes of 5e-only players are true ~99% of the time. They either think that "D&D" is the only RPG in the world, or that it would be such a hassle to learn another system. They do not know how any of the rules work, they do not bother to roleplay, and they do not remember anything about the last session. (If you know how the rules work, you roleplay, or you remember events from the last session, then you are in the top ~1% of players.) They show up mostly for the very loose idea of "playing D&D" and having fun with friends.

• ~99% of the time, a player declares their turn in combat to be "I attack" or "I cast a spell" without specifying anything more than that (aside from the occasional "I cast fireball!" or "I cast lightning bolt!" even though the character could not possibly have the spell). The DM asks them to roll a d20; on anything but a natural 1 or 2, he tells them "You hit!" and the player gets excited. The DM does not ask them to roll damage. Sometimes, if he feels like the players will not be too dismayed, the DM tells a player who rolls in the 3 to 5 range that "You miss. This guy is really [tough/fast]!"

• The DM does not bother tracking anyone's hit points, and just tells players things like "You take some damage," "You are close to dying," or "You finally beat him. Tell us how you do it!"

• Players tend to panic and think that they are in a dire situation the moment the DM informs them that they take even "some damage." The tension ramps up even further whenever the DM says, "You are close to dying."

• A non-negligible number of players are really sweaty tryhards who know the ins and outs of damage math and tracking hit points... in video games. When it is time for "D&D," they simply turn off their brain, and all damage and all hit points are suddenly imaginary.

• Yes, players really do go crazy when someone rolls a natural 1, expecting something goofy to happen. They cheer when someone rolls a natural 20, expecting something absolutely epic. The DM indulges them.

• Players really do not know how ability checks, skills, or saving throws work. They get antsy if the DM tries to talk about the rules as actual rules, so he has learned to simply never bring up the rules to begin with.

• Maybe the archetypal tiefling bard is popular in other communities, but not this one. Here, it is mostly bros playing "male human [fighter/barbarian/paladin]," with the occasional wizard if someone is feeling spicy.

• Players love to be showered with magic items that simply sound cool from vague descriptions, even though the DM never actually explains their mechanics (because there are none). Swords brimming with flame, frost, or lightning are usually smash hits.

• Since players will seldom remember anything from previous sessions, the DM just randomly throws the party into wacky action scenes, often as paper-thin as "You are in the king's castle when all of a sudden, a dragon attacks!" He does not even bother trying to maintain a consistent setting, whether published or homebrew.

• The DM frequently gets told that he is the "best DM ever!" even though he is fairly sure that these people have played under nobody else.

• There is minimal demand for non-5e DMs. If you want another RPG, look elsewhere.

Make of this what you will.

I'd made a thread last year asking if anyone knew what was up with Cartel, the PbtA game Magpie crowdfunded back in 2018, and backers finally got some news today. Unfortunately, it's the bad news we'd all expected for a while. A few excerpts below (emphasis NOT my own, it's in the original text):

I’ve got some tough news to deliver today. I am officially canceling the remaining Cartel stretch goals, namely Amigos y Enemigos and Sin Fronteras. We will still be releasing the CD of narcocorridos (Corridos de Durango)—read below for more—but that will be the last release for the Cartel Kickstarter.

Over the past few years, I’ve been slowly chipping away at the remaining work needed to release these stretch goal materials. I was able to collaborate with some amazing creators on them…but there’s still so much to be done—editing, graphic design, etc—and the financial headwinds have only gotten worse with the tariffs, the war in Iran, etc. [...] At some point, I have to admit that these remaining pieces are no longer viable on any reasonable timeline. And more importantly, you all deserve to have a definitive resolution instead of an open-ended project that never actually finishes.

For everyone who supported the now canceled books—either through a pledge level or via add-ons—I would very much like to make this right for you. While all the money for this project has long been spent bringing it to life, we are offering the following options for every backer affected by the cancellation of the physical books: 100% refund, delivered via Paypal (or other electronic method) or 150% refund, delivered via credit to the Magpie Games webstore.

If you backed at a level that included either of these supplements in print—or added one/both of them to your pledge at any level—please fill out this form to claim your refund/credit[...]

This is the final update for the Cartel Kickstarter. From this point forward, we consider this project to be closed—we won’t be updating it, and we won’t respond to comments. If you need something that’s not addressed by the above, please email us at [info@magpiegames.com](mailto:info@magpiegames.com).

The last update before this had been all the way back in October 2024, and that was after no updates in 2023 at all, so this isn't terribly shocking... but backers *did* previously receive several playbooks from Amigos y Enemigos and a playtest playset for Sin Fronteras' Berlin spinoff, which seem like they'll now never see a public release.

At least the story's over now, I suppose. Woof. My condolences to all my fellow backers; the whole reason I backed this initially was for the Aztlan playset in Sin Fronteras that we never saw any previews for.

I'm interested in something I could potentially slot into my already established scifi game, but if it's in another system I'll take a look at it too. I played the system for Pirate Borg and while it was cool, it felt like it had something lacking for a straight conversion to scifi. I don't want a full board game or wargame necessarily though.

TLDR: VERY GOOD.

I am making this post as when I was looking to purchase from Exalted Funeral I'd seen some posts floating around here and there about slow turnover rate for orders, slow or lacking responses from their customer service representatives etc. I understand that people will post when something goes awry and not necessarily every time everything goes as expected, but before I ordered I wanted to do some due diligence.

I live VERY far away in the world, if an item is missing from a delivery to me then getting that rectified can be more of a hassle than it is for many, so despite the Exalted Funeral site clearly stating which items were in stock, I sent them an email just to double check before ordering..

I received a reply within 1 day. No signs of ai customer service, just a warm reply that got straight to the point. I then proceeded with my order.

Once again, I live in a far off corner of the world. Online orders can take months to reach me. I received a notification very immediately that my order had been sent off, and it arrived almost alarmingly fast. All items present and accounted for.

So that's that. I am making this post for other folks like me who look in to this sort of thing and may have seen posts about Exalted Funeral that caused them some concern. Of course my experiences will not be universal, but I wanted to share my very positive experience in dealing with them to show folks that whatever backlog they were dealing with across a small team seems to have not led to further issues.

Sorry this is so long winded! Just wanting to give credit where due. If you've had doubts about ordering through Exalted Funeral then here is my experience with them. They communicated well, delivered very quickly, and I couldn't be happier!

Hi all, I have a question.

I was a big fan of Call of Cthulhu 7th edition, however after playing Masks of Nyarlathotep for 3 years i've grown to dislike the rule system a lot. However, I still really enjoy the general vibe the system brings and would love to continue gming games that fit that vibe.

I'm basically looking at an alternative rule system, maybe it helps to list my general pain points with CoC
- The combat rules are too vague and unclear, when are you considered to be firing into melee in comparison to point-blank, automatic fire calculations, too many different combat skills for every weapon type
- Too many stats/skills, so many of the skills are useless and barely come up (looking at you operate heavy machinery), even having played a 3 year campaign, we completely disregarded a good amount of skills, APP is also just useless and always your dump stat
- Magic just takes too much time, I like the idea of mythos tomes corrupting your mind and draining sanity and that casting spells takes sanity aswell, but even in a campaign that took more then an ingame year, we still had only a few spells learned across the party

I know of and have played Delta Green and I am a lot more of a fan of those rules, but I feel like DG rules don't apply as generally as CoC rules do. I know a lot of the rules could be houseruled and tweaked (we did that during MoN) but I much prefer to not do that and just have something that I can use out of the box.

I'm asking because I'm curious if there's any psionic focused game other besides CAIN as I'm already in a CAIN campaign. Bonus points if said TTRPG was released relatively recently.

Most of my experiance running ttrpgs has been with osr games, and I run in a pretty classic osr style, the world is the world, the challenges are the challenges, I make them before the players ever make a character, and they don't change after the pcs are made. I act as an impartial referee, trying to keep things "Fair" while the pcs solve the problems I already set up.

However, I often hear people talk about the difference between osr games and "oc" style games. The more critical role style or dimension 20 style, where the story is made around the characters.

I've played in games like that, and I've seen some critical role, but honestly I can't really wrap my mind around how you... do that. Its so opposite to everything I've done as a gm.

So I kind of want to give it a shot.

Do you have any advice for running "oc" style games (in however you would use that term)? What is your general method for prepparing for that kind of game? Are there any systems that help a gm with running that kind of game? Do you have any other advice for trying to run that kind of game?

You've heard the usual complaint before. That DnD asks too much of GM while not providing them with the necessary tools (which is true), but sometimes you hear a variant. DnD players are called lazy and blamed for not clicking with a narrative game, normally a PbtA, because they do not want to put in the effort.

My confusion stems from having had the opposite experience. As a player, I found DnD fairly crunchy and having a somewhat harsh onboarding as I had to take my time learning my entire spell list and reading everything over and over to make sure I didn't misunderstand the fine print when rolling my first two characters (a Circle of Stars Druid and a Divination Wizard, respectively). And even before that, I spent days researching builds because I knew DnD games are a time commitment and I didn't want to chose the wrong and be stuck with it.

After the game started I continued thinking of how to use my spells creatively (and I don't mean TikTok meme crap) and looking for any synergies with the rest of my team (yeah, I know DnD isn't the best game for this). In combat, I was a controller and, outside, utility caster and I took my roles very seriously. I enjoyed it, but I felt that it was a decent amount of effort.

On the other hand, I took to narrative games like water. A lot of what is claimed to take more effort on the player's side I found to be simple, such building the world collaboratively. That's kinda' just using your imagination and reading the room to see if your suggestion is appropriate.

Similarly, I heard that you need players to be taking a more active role and being prepared for their characters to have more agency, but I've never had a problem figuring out what to do next. I suppose, I do not like games where backgrounds are extremely important in guiding the plot (such as trying to enact revenge) and prefer to have a character that starts with simple goals and connections and build from there, basically playing to find out (which is what you're supposed to do in these games anyway). But that's not hard.

I feel that most narrative games there are mechanics that create drama and conflict and playing into the archetype of the playbook makes the story kinda' write itself. Even when there's no clear archetype, character creation generally guides you to making a cohesive character with goals and personality, not just a bag of stats and you go from there.

Most of the time the world is flavourful or emulating a genre and that helps. If you signed up to play Masks you should want to do things like being angsty and struggling with the responsibilities of being a superhero while your brain isn't fully developed, similarly to how in DnD you should want kill shit and probably explore dungeons while doing so.

what are some RPGs where character creation feels really meaningful, unique, customizable, or thematically important?

I'm growing tired of your typical pseudo medieval/Renaissance fantasy stuff and I want to run something set in an antiquity like setting. Ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt, that kind of thing. Easily my favorite historical period.

I'm still (after decades) terrible at inventing my own content and I'm busy so I like to run pre-made campaigns.

75% of the campaigns have something that annoy me and I have trouble getting past them, usually in terms of why the party is doing the things.

Some recent examples, all of which have great core ideas/plots

• Deadlands Horror on Headstone Hill. Players are members of the "Twilight Legion", an unofficial organization of people who hunt the supernatural. The setting has two funded, professional, resourced organizations, the Agency and the Rangers, who handle this sort of thing. Why are the players who are just rando unlicensed people, handling this. There are people who are paid, trained, and have the authority to handle this kind of thing
• (new system) Winter King. Your players participate in the campaign because they receive a vision from Merlin. This seems flimsy. Why the players? This kind of "you're chosen" thing seems really common in campaigns.
• (WFRP 4e) The Enemy Within. Completely unclear why the players are doing any of this stuff, and pursuing this great conspiracy to protect the Empire.
• (Gumshoe) Pillars Built on Sand. The only thing that would get the players involved in all of the scenarios is if they're a group of guys that do random stuff for money, and randomly somehow they're hired at all of the key points. Also, they have to do super heroic stuff beyond what their paid for, even though they're guys that just do stuff for money. If you want to make a group that would actually try to handle the core issue of the plot (some supernatural bad stuff), it's hard to see how you'd rework the campaign so they'd interact w/ all the scenarios.
• A shadow of the demon lord campaign i just bought, where the players are kind of directed to go to places that happen to be part of the overall plot.

I don't have this issue with:

• Vampire the Masquerade, since its usually a sandbox and the players are just interacting with stuff or they're ordered to do stuff by their clan
• Werewolf the Apocalypse. It's explicitly your job to handle a segment of supernatural problems.
• Delta Green. Again, it's your job. The organization knows about stuff and can tell you to do stuff.
• One Ring. You have a company and you're agents of a patron. patron tells you what to do, and you like the patron. Patron knows stuff and can send you to it.

Given that campaigns whose setup annoys me are popular, that means that either

• players and GMs don't care about the weird setup;
• I'm deranged and this shouldn't annoy me (possibility). If so how do I stop being annoyed.
• GMs rework the campaign somehow;

How do you all think about it?