**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.

Ok, I know I sound like a curmudgeon but hear me out on this one. I think putting the focus on “fun” when it comes to TTRPGs is putting the cart before the horse. Having fun is the result of actions, it doesn’t happen on its own so the focus should be on the game itself. When I show up to play a TTRPG, my primary purpose is not “to have fun”, I’m there to play the game because playing the game results in fun.

Let me provide an example to help you understand. For several years I was a club coordinator for a college TTRPG group and I ran a lot of DnD 5e. After a while it was easy for me to pick out who was there to play DnD and who was there to “have fun”. One guy showed up and insisted that he play a donkey because he thought it would be funny. He didn’t want to be able to talk or have a class or anything, he just wanted to play a donkey. Well I let him (my mistake) and he spent most of the session bored out of his mind because DnD is a game centered around combat not braying and eating grass.

The sad thing is there are plenty of TTRPGs centered around playing mundane animals where a donkey character would be appropriate but DnD is certainly not one of them. It's like he showed up to a basketball game and decided that it would be fun to see how high he could bounce the ball. That's all well and good but the rest of us are here to play a game.

Does what I’m saying make sense? Do you think there is a difference between focusing on playing the game and having fun? Am I just being pedantic?

i am looking for a good old west rpg. Only one i know is deadlands…

A few days ago, I made a post about how hard it can be to find committed players online, and I was honestly kind of “happy” to realize I’m not the only one struggling with this.

The reason people gave was basically what I already suspected: when you have a large number of people responding to a recruitment post, the chances of weird people showing up increase a lot.

And yeah, that happened almost immediately.

On the same day I made that post, I opened recruitment for a 5e one-shot. Out of the people I interviewed, there was one person I really liked, two I’d say were okay, and one absolute character.

This guy basically kept saying he was a GURPS specialist and spent the whole time talking about how amazing GURPS was. When I said I personally don’t like GURPS because I find it too simulationist, he replied with something like: “That’s because you haven’t had me as your GM.”

Also, his motivation for joining my one-shot was apparently that he wants to run D&D 5e himself in a Harry Potter homebrew setting, but he hates the system, barely knew how to make a character sheet, and was already working on homebrew because he intends to run paid games.

So yeah. That was something.

Anyway, the thing is: I schedule these interviews, but I don’t really know how to be inquisitive without coming across like an asshole.

In person, this is easy for me. It feels natural to approach someone and get a sense of them. But online it feels weird, because I’m not seeing a face. My PC doesn’t have a webcam, so I don’t require other people to use one either. Because of that, I get kind of awkward and usually end up cutting straight to something like: “So, what class are you thinking of playing?”

I know that probably sounds silly, especially since I’ve been GMing for 12 years, but it’s something that happens to me.

So, what questions do you usually ask during online recruitment? How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

I'm going to be playing SWADE (Savage Worlds) for the first time on Saturday. So, I'm trying to wrap my head around the system a bit in advance. I'm trying not to be a min-max jerk, but I am a numbers nerd. So, I'm looking at the distribution of the rolls with the wild die.

For those unfamiliar, you get the better of 1d6 or your skill die on any given roll. Skill dice can be D4-D20. If you roll the highest number on a die, you "ace" and can roll again and add. It's after this process that the best of the two is determined. Generally, there's a target number with 4 being normal difficulty to meet or exceed. Veterans of the system, please let me know if I have missed anything important.

This brings us to the weird corner of the probability chart. A difficulty 6 is more likely to be made with a D4 than a D6. With just a single die, it's about a 2% increase. This is a weird artifact of how the "ace" works. Adding in the "wild die" shrinks the gap, but by only a few tenths of a percent.

I know this is just in one place and the curve works as expected elsewhere, but this seems like a common spot to land. This is where slightly skilled people encounter moderate difficulty.

Am I missing something? I can't be the first person to notice.

For those of you who didn't catch the onyx path publishing virtual con they announced a bunch of new books and at least one new game. But more importantly they also announced a 3rd edition of scion!!!!

I am so goddamn hyped. Scion my beloved <3

I'm constructing a homebrew setting to run for my family — none of us are hardcore RPG people, so the world has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It needs to feel alive the second they step into it, without drowning them (or me) in lore. I won't say it's anything inspiring - It's an isekai-ish fantasy: modern people pulled into a magical world whose underlying "fabric" is slowly unraveling. Seems popular at the moment and an easy concept to start for role playing.

I ended up building it in two deliberate layers, and I'm not sure I got the ratio right.

Breadth - I gave the whole world a light pass: a few continents, a handful of nations and factions, the central cosmic problem, the big conflicts. Enough that whatever direction they wander, something is there - but I purposely didn't go deep. It's scaffolding. Key entities and their motivations, tied to organizations and their purpouse.

Depth - Almost all the real detail and effort so far I've put into a single entry point: a lawless frontier town called Crossings (I know, inspiring) where they'll arrive and probably spend the first few sessions. I tried to make it genuinely lived-in - the marchwarden who runs the place on common sense, half a dozen shopkeepers (baker, smith, ford-keeper, tanner, tailor, apothecary), a tavern owner who's quietly the local information broker, who feeds intel to whom, who's at odds with whom, what each of them did before they landed here, plus a few dated local events (a flood three winters back, a recent magical "tear," the arrival itself).

To get there I wrote a few short stories first - little 2–4k-word scenes from different NPCs' points of view (a market morning, a night at the tavern, the agent who meets new arrivals). Partly to find their voices, partly because it's just easier to know a town after you've watched a few ordinary days happen in it. Then I pulled the people, places, and relationships out of those scenes into an actual map of the town.

https://imgur.com/H6pOYJE
https://imgur.com/3NtUZlD

Here's the result and my actual question:
is this a sensible amount of depth for an entry point, or have I over-cooked one town while the rest of the world is a painted backdrop?

For those who've actually run beginner campaigns:

• How dense do you make the starting location compared to everything else?
• Where do you personally stop adding NPCs and relationships before it's prep you'll never use at the table? I don't have unlimited time
• Does "deep entry point, shallow everywhere else" work in practice, or do they immediately sprint off the edge of your detailed zone?

I’ve been seeing news of the expansions being crowdfunded on Backerkit, and it seems super unique. I’ve seen some older posts with the OG expansions, but they’re a few years old at this point. Any newer opinions on the game before one dives head first into the backerkit?

So in my infinite quest to find the mecha rpg that works best for me to run, I tried Beam Saber with a group for the first time last night. Our intention is more to just play with the system rather than go into a real big, serious campaign, so a short test campaign if you would. We had a group of 4, and I'd like to go over some stuff to see if it feels right or what have you-

Firstly from the way I understood it, clocks are king - I essentially used clocks as "HP" for enemies as well as obstacles. Is that right? for an objective on a timer (an APC bringing a VIP to a shuttle to be launched) I ticked it forward as seemed appropriate or as a Consequence

one thing that constantly trips me up in PBTA and FITD is turn order. I'm an initiative gamer at heart and freeforming it takes some time to get used to. I tried to go between players in order but the book mentioned that it might be important to let players also followup on their actions. When a good time to throw an "out of turn" Consequence and have the enemies do stuff is still something I'm trying to get a sense for, so advice on that would help

the main thing right now is I was probably too harsh with damage, which is ironic given that I tend to be way too easy on my players as a GM. I handed out damage as consequence way too much, that's clear. And to top it all off - they rolled Lowest Bidder on Entanglement, meaning they took additional damage. Maybe I shoulda veto'd that. (hilariously two different players had Common Parts as vehicle Quirks so they just popped new ones in as the narrative for that Resistance)

but as of right now the party stands at -

Envoy - Damage level 3, Damage level 2 x2, 3/4 quirks spent
Scout - Harm Level 2, Damage Level 1, 2/4 quirks
Technician - Damage Level 2, one junked slot, 2/4 quirks
Ace - Damage Level 1, 2/4 quirks, one junked slot

(Also, their Rover cohort got hit with Impaired, but in my defense a Consequence was rolled and their plan was to have him drive a hovertruck in front of an APC to cut them off. it WORKED too.)

I definitely could have junked more stuff - and in addition, I probably didn't remind them enough they can Resist consequences. we're all very new to the book, and the Terminology Amount is a bit much to gulp down. Same goes for things like Armor and Spark. I hope to do better next time.

in my case, I handed out Damage as Consequences because at that point, the circumstances were that they were withdrawing and I figured anything that impeded that would make the session run overlong. Maybe I shoulda just let them flee, but they also got to roll under Desperate position and get a tasty XP.

so that's my uh, pseudo-AAR. Any advice you have for me would be greatly appreciated, I care a lot about running good games even if we're just doing a test

I'm trying to find a sci-fi system for my crunch-averse players. Cepheus FTL looks promising, but it still has >25 skills and a detailed career-path character creation system. Cepheus Quantum shortens the skill list to 6 and uses point-buy character creation, which would be improvements for my players. However, I'm wondering if there's something in-between - maybe 10 skills with point-buy or skill package character creation?

I know this is a ridiculously specific question, but I'd love to figure this out. Thanks!

I really like spire rpg and I want to run it for my group of two players. do you guys have any advice or warnings?