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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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Quick confession. I've got a shelf (and a hard drive, TBH) full of games I bought, read cover to cover, got genuinely hyped about, and will almost certainly never run. Mothership, Spire, like four different OSR things, a gift campaign about SEC football, one Kickstarter brick I still haven't finished reading. For a while I felt kind of guilty about it, like I was doing the hobby wrong or just setting money on fire.

But at some point I stopped seeing it as a backlog and started seeing it as its own thing. Reading a really well made RPG is just fun on its own, totally separate from ever getting it to a table. A good rulebook is part game design, part worldbuilding, part art book. I'll read a clever initiative system the way other people read a good nonfiction chapter, get inspired, steal one idea for the game I'm actually running, and put it back on the shelf perfectly happy.

What finally made it click is that my home table only really runs one, maybe two systems a year, and thats the real bottleneck. It's not money and it's not interest, it's the group's time and their willingness to learn something new. So the play side of my hobby crawls along while the reading side moves as fast as I want. They're just two different speeds.

I dont think it's a problem anymore. It's two hobbies wearing one trenchcoat and I genuinely like both of them. Am I the only one who does this, or is your shelf a graveyard too? And does anyone else still feel a little guilty about the pile, or have you made your peace with it?

Hi all, so I have a few PDFs I've bought I'd like to make a paper copy of some day, however, I'm not sure what the best bookbinding method would be. The 10 page stuff is easy enough to sew together, but I'm curious what methods people suggest for the middle of the road stuff and how well it's kept up for you.

Howdy folks.

I've recently played through both Armored Core VI and Armored Core IV, and I'm now in the mood to play a TTRPG that would scratch the ich. Mutilated and scarred Mech pilots being guided by their operators or handlers to do various mercenary jobs in a dying world led by corporations.

Or, alternatively, could go with the professional armed Mech group route, like the Vespers and Redguns. Freedom fighters, maybe.

I've taken a look at Lancer, but I'm still unsure about it. It's just a little crunchy from what I've seen and I don't know if it captures the vibe, although I haven't looked at all the lore yet so maybe.

Thanks in advance!

tldr: looking for games where combat has plenty of options, but no range/position/location based skills & abilities, that specifically isnt Fabula Ultima itself.

Clarification: it need not be a purely combat focused game, as long as the combat meets the criteria.

Good morning,

After experiencing Fabula Ultima, I realized that one of the biggest hangups in my game is map-based combat.

Are there any other combat-heavy games that are designed to have two teams lining up and duking it out?

Below are some parameters to consider (sorry for any redundancies)

What im looking for:

-Engaging character creation. Player's have plenty of options to choose from and cand craft a variety of builds

-Expressive Combat: player's arent just using the same ability over and over, they are able to utilize different strategies.

What i am not looking for:

-Games primarily designed for map play, even if it can be ignored. (No WFRP, Savage Worlds, 2d20 games like fallout rpg,)

-Nothing that relies on range bands, location-based attacks, positioning, etc.

-Nothing that requires referencing multiple tables for a single action (example: roll to hit, then roll to determine hit location, etc, etc.)

I received the Welcome To Night Vale rpg as a gift when it first came out. For anyone who doesn’t know, WTNV is a podcast set up like a community radio for a mysterious town in the desert. The whole podcast is stuff like, “a new dog park has opened in town! Don’t approach the dog park, the dog park won’t harm you”. Seemingly innocuous reports get weirder & your mind fills in the blanks.

The game uses essence 20 as a system (DnD 5e lite) & has no advice about setting up adventures or random tables to get things moving. The GM’s guide is one long combat session. It comes off as more a DnD setting with Night Vale paint on it than a dedicated game. The podcast is inherently built on ambiguity & darkness, leaving me no real roadmap to work with.

I’ve contemplated how to make a good game with it. The problem is, all of my ideas involve disregarding 90 percent of the game & completely making my own content. My friend seemed excited about the thought of playing it, but I don’t think I can make it work.

After delaying Masks 2nd Edition, Magpie has a landing page up for their next Kickstarter up. This one for an Avatar supplement

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magpiegames/spirit-world-avatar-legends-ttrpg-setting-toolkit?ref=creator_tab

Honestly...if Cartel wasn't the final straw for me with Magpie I think this would be. Canceling an entire kickstarter when it was already being run with two previous Kickstarters unfulfilled is a bad look. To cancel it and turn around and launch another so soon isn't just a bad look. I don't know what to call this other than egregious and a total level of disrespect for their base.

Currently running Mythic Bastionland on a 12x12 hexmap. I want to have a shared resource that I has inspirational pics of the local biomes/landmarks and notes what players have discovered in each hex. Currently the best tool for this I have at hand is google docs - one page for each hex and a numbered index that jumps to them. This is fiddly as hell though and has all the joys of editing a word document.

Is there a better tool for this? Surely this problem has been encountered before. Ideally it remains editable by everyone so the players can fill in their own notes and discoveries.

Thanks!

edit: actually this'll save me making a new thread: I also need physical tokens to place on that hexgrid at the table (so players know where they are, etc). Ideally made of metal so they don't fall over/move around, but also at least slightly evocative. I'm surprised that within my boardgame collection I don't really have anything great to substitute for tokens on the map, playing with light plastic cubes, or in one instance, a small rubber darth vader has not been ideal. Anyone aware of a product that solves this problem? Like fantasy themed monopoly-style tokens (without buying monopoly) would be a good hit.

Hi.

I am looking around for different mechanics from many different systems and I came across Honor + Intrigue's Advantage system. Basically you have three Advantage and can yield one to move out of the way. If you don't get attacked, you can recover one.

It occured to me that I had once played a different system and the combat was very static move-wise, so I had imagined the idea of spending reactions to move a few tiles to gain dodge chance, possibly even more so if you use the reaction to not just move a tile back but move behind a pillar or wall.

Can anyone recall other games using this? Does it work well in your games? Good/bad?

I know I would need something that's customizable for character creation. Less classes, more archetypal type things where people can point to buy and build their characters from the ground up.

My idea is inspired video games like Slaughterhouse, BloodRayne, and nightmare creatures.

Movies such as Conan the barbarian, heavy metal, heavy metal 2000, and mad Max.

Sword and sorcery such as corn in the barbarian, red Sonja, and Thundarr the Barbarian.

I have full world taught up in my head and I started writing it. I really set up there write an album but two of my friends are very much like to explore this world as characters but I can't seem to figure out a good system for it.

Fate core doesn't work for what I want to do. As far as gurps is concerned, as one of my friends described it that it's not off the table it's just off to the side of the table.

Basically looking for a game where the PCs are just normal people, living in a small town where weird supernatural shit keeps happening and they have to deal with it.

I play DnD, and I'm finding it... Somewhat frustrating. Roleplay seems to have very little impact on the story, and characters don't seem to matter beyond that they're characters made to inhabit the story, and through which the players can experience the story. A town mayor will just as happily hire a barbarian who can barely speak as he will a nobleman to handle anything from goblins harassing some trade routes, to diplomatic escorts and protection details of visiting royals.

I don't have that many issues with that particular example, but I think it highlights the point: Backgrounds don't seem to matter. I'm currently playing a nobleman in Icewind Dale, and while I understand a remote area like that with lots of hardships probably won't care too much about maintaining etiquette, your background should have an impact on how the world treats you. I don't expect my character to be treated with reverence everywhere, but if he were a soldier, I'd expect him to be treated differently by a guard than if he were a sage, for example.

Roleplay often feel inconsequential, like I said. I don't get experience for dealing with a Speaker well, or defusing a situation involving a local. I'd like those things to matter.

The world is another thing: It seems static. This is a complaint of DnD in general, not Icewind Dale. Things happen, the PCs show up, and then you're allowed to handle things in whatever order you prefer. I don't have a massive issue with that specifically, but it seems as though the entire world just stops to watch what happens. Things generally need to continue rolling even if a farmer had a child go missing. Seeing the effects of "things rolling" beyond some farmers tilling a field would be nice.

I should mention, I'm a fairly undramatic person. I don't enjoy tacking on twenty different traumas to my character, so any systems that require those won't gel with me, but I'm always happy to hear suggestions.