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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.

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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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This submission is generated automatically each Saturday at 00:00 UTC.

**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.

So, my friend group are all in our fifties, and somehow we adopted a twenty-something into it. She's just babby but somehow all of our interests align and we get along pretty well despite the age gap. Anyway, she's been expressing interest in getting into TTRPGs for a while now, and I've promised her that I'd run something for her if we can get all our schedules aligned.

So a couple of weeks ago, I nonchalantly asked her if she had any dice, which she did not. A couple of days ago, I managed to slip in asking what her favorite colors were to the conversation. You can see where this is going. 😉 So today (or yesterday since it's 3 in the morning for me) I showed up at our annual Easter-adjacent get together, and pulled a little bag out of my purse and handed it to her. Inside were three sets of dice that I pulled from my collection in the colors that she liked. My God, the squeal of glee that came from her is something that I will cherish for the rest of my life. Now I just need to, you know, actually sit down and run something for her.

Connections is an inherent part of many narrative systems, including Powered by the Apocalypse, and mandatory at my table. I can't count the amount of times I've had a player ask me "Ok, but can I be the new kid?" The answer is no, because if I say yes to that person, then I need to say yes to everybody else, and then suddenly we've skipped an integral part of Session Zero to me, and some of my motivation to run is gone.

I don't know what is wrong with people not wanting to make connections in games where they are a required mechanic, like Fabula Ultima, or Animon Story, but I'm not like this. I LOVE finding at least one other player who I can create a meaningful connection with, especially because games that start in medias res just go so much smoother than dealing with the rocky and uncomfortable start of campaigns where people figure out how to get their characters to work with each other but this is just one of many reasons I prefer the OOC metagame of narrative systems.

By "fanmade" i mean projects that are developed by fans of a film/tv series/game/book/etc, adapting those media into a TTRPG with their own rules (not 100% original is ok, sine you know, it's almost imposibble to do that). The only example that i know are Project Moon TTRPG and Paradigm's RWBY TTRPG (i think there's at least 1 TTRPG fanmade system of each fandom, but these 2 are the only one that i've read their rules, so i'm using them as an example)

I've noticed that I don't take a system seriously as a thing I might use unless it has a mass combat system; in fact, I tend to not buy something these days, even if I'm otherwise interested, if I know it doesn't have one. Especially if the background of the setting implies mass combats occur or are important to said background.

You see, I mostly run political games, and I often angle the games towards eventually having mass combats (and sometimes it's built into the premise).

So, I have played a whole lot of them and looked at a whole bunch of other ones. I consider a system good if I can do army and vehicle mass combat with it, and if it scales easily between small units and giant armies. Some highlights:

The Great

1. GURPS Mass Combat- I consider this the gold standard. Easy to use, quick once you've set up (setup being calculate the forces ahead of time, but that's also relatively easy). Plenty of choices for the commander, and space for PCs to affect the battle in different ways and help or hurt the commander's battle roll. I've used this in a few games now. I measure all other systems against this one. My players have always enjoyed this one.

The Good

1. Fate Core - suprisingly, it worked. I thought the way it handled units was odd but it was fine. I used it a lot in a Rome campaign and it was quick and easy, and again, things for individual PCs to do.

2. Savage Worlds - my players liked this one a lot. Fast and easy, plenty of impact from PCs. Fits well with the "Fast, Furious, Fun" moniker. Nothing but good experiences, though it's fuzzy on details for the actual forces and such (but it's SW, so that's fine).

3. Genesys - it seems good on paper; I haven't run this one yet (but will soon I think as I'm running a Genesys game now) but it seems to have enough narrative detail to be interesting, and all the other elements I'd expect. Only tiny issue is it does not natively scale to larger number, but if you ignore the examples (and they are listed as examples) you can change the scale of forces to whatever you want.

4. Burning Empires - a little complicated (but isn't everything from Burning HQ?), but it worked at the table and led to some gripping battles. Some of the rules are fuzzy at the edges, but works well enough, though can take some time to resolve.

The Frustrating

1. Mythras - I REALLY like Mythras, but the mass combat rules for some reason only scale to having, say, at most, a few units of a bit more than 1000 soldiers in them (and each unit of each type is counted as a sepearte thing). Meaning even running a single Roman legion of 5000 men against a similar sized force would be a nightmare of 5-10 units on a side. The rules were written for Viking England, where armies weren't terribly large, but outisde of that narrow perview, it gets weird (as said, Late Roman Republic battles could easily reach 50000 on a side). Running it was actually pretty fast, and my players thought it was fun (they liked the Special Effects system in these rules a lot), so it works well, but not at the scale I'd like. Also, no rules for mass ship combat (which is, for me, horrible in a book called Ships and Shieldwalls). M-Space, on a side note, has a system for resolving extendd conflicts, and the author has informally suggested ways to use it for battles, but that was EXTREMELY abstract.

2. Burning Wheel/Torchbearer 2e - same problem; the guide for this only scales to units of 1000 men, which seems silly, as even in the "period" the BW book seems to emulate sorta (12th century France) battles were larger and could easily reach 10000 on a side. Rules are iddly, but you'd expect that here.

The Not Great

1. Reign - The mass combat rules for Companies at that level are fine; it's all very abstract anyway. The mass comabt rules for actually controlling an army in the field are actively not good. There's no way for individual players to affect anything, or get hurt, or anything else, really. Also, for some reason the author only supposed battles of around 1500 men will happen, tops, which again is ludicrous, especially for a "generic" fantasy game (I know bigger battles can happen, but you only get 15 dice in your roll, and obstensibly, each die is supposed to represent a unit - anything above 15 units on a side and you have to wait until other units are destroyed, making a big battle take forever). The top unit size is 100 men, which is the main problem here (but not the only problem). I like a lot of things in Reign, but not this.

2. Trinity Continuum - I don't know what to make of it. It's technically for mass vehicle combat for some reason, but you can bend it to handle mass infantry combat. But the rules are loosey-goosey, but not in the fun, Fate way, but in the "we threw this hear because we had some extra pages" way. I think. Like much in the book, it's very possible I can't parse the prose and they really work fine.

The "Why don't you have mass combat rules?"

1. Runequest (and by extension, Basic Roleplaying) - just...why not? Much of Runequest lore is based on big set-piece battles that changed the narrative of the world. It'd be great to play those out, or other things between clans and tribes and such not in Dragon Pass. The game even has a Battle skill, which lists some effects for rolling it, and not much more. It's kinda annoying that it doesn't have proper battles.

2. Traveller - also...why not? There are, I acknowledge, ground mass combat rules in the Mercenary boxed set (which I hear are terrible; the old ones in Classic Book 4 were servicable, but I only ever used them a handful of times but I didn't feel they were terrible). For a science fiction game set in space, neither Classic, nor the new Mongoose versions, have a mass space combat system, and that's a crime. There's some sort of something in the 2e High Guard book about rolling damage for multiple units, and I heard there's somethng a little more fleshed out in the new HG 2022 book, but I have a bet it isn't great, but no idea. It would otherwise be the perfect system for the Honor Harrington game in my head, but can't do it. Why do Admirals exist?

3. Wrath and Glory (and all the other WH40K or Warhammer Fatnasy rule sets) - like, I get there's the tabletop miniatures game, but I detest minis; I want a version connected to the RPG rules I'm using so I can fight the battles the rules imply are happening in the setting. It's really odd we NEVER got a RPG-based system for any of those games.

So, that's all the ones (I think) I've actually played, save for Genesys and Trinity, which I've only read. It's one of the reasons I tend to stick to generic games, because they tend to have mass combat systems that are fun and involve the players, and can scale. Some other generic-ish games have them but they don't really scale, even for the time periods they are about. And some systems which SHOULD have them don't.

P.S. - someone reminded me of Dune 2d20. I ran it and mass combat was a big feature of that campaign (players were establishing a new house on the corpse of an old one, essentially). It was really fun; squishy in places between switching from the macro to the micro. It was three years ago so I don’t remember off hand how players could affect battles but something with actions and Assets but I can’t recall what. I remember people had fun.

Despite the strength of the IP, I rarely see this project mentioned here. Now that it's been out for a while, I'm curious what the consensus is.

I'd be interested to hear the perspective of anyone who has either run the game or decided to pass on it after looking at the rules. What do you think about the Arkham Horror RPG?

Hi everyone!

Yesterday my group and I played "Up in Smoke", the quickstart adventure for the new Discworld RPG (Adventures in Ankh-Morpork). We had an absolute blast, but we realized something really funny when we finished: we didn't roll a single die during the entire session.

We got so deep into the roleplay and conversations with the NPCs (trying to get info out of the tavern owners, interrogating suspects, piecing together clues on our own) that it never felt like there was a moment where an action mechanically "had" to fail. Everything was resolved through logic, dialogue, and pure roleplay.

Since the rulebook states that tests should only be made when an action "has a chance of failing," and the system relies so heavily on narrativium and justifying traits, our GM just let the story flow without asking for rolls.

Now we are second-guessing ourselves and I wanted to get some feedback from the community:

• Do you think playing like this defeats the purpose of the game's mechanical system (missing out on consequences, luck, and narrative twists)?
• Should the GM have pushed or introduced rolls to inject more chaos into the game, or is it perfectly fine to clear a module purely through talking if the group is very proactive?
• For those who have tried this or similar narrative-heavy games, how do you balance "rewarding good roleplay" with "actually engaging with the mechanics"?

Any feedback is welcome! We loved the experience, but we want to know if we missed out on the mechanical essence of the game by focusing too much on the talking.

I’m looking for a system where my players were badasses in the past, but now they’re older and time has moved on (like Kings of the Wyld book, if anyone’s read that). They get back together as older people to go do a quest.

Is there any system that can do that, feels like a lot of systems are zero to hero or you’re just another cog in the machine.

Theme doesn’t matter, could be fantasy, sci fi, western, etc.

Low crunch, OSR is preferred.

I've seen posts about each, but not for both. Me and two friends who have no real experience with this genre are looking for something accessible to start with. Do you have any recommendations?

background: I have a discord server (not RPG related) with about 10 people and the activity is quite low so I would like to boost that. secondly I’m quite interested in RPGs in general and am happy to be GM in a play by post game.

idea: to run a one GM to many players RPG where any of the members can contribute to advance the story and everyone posts asynchronously. the players would have to be comfortable just following the story and contributing whenever they feel like it and letting others advance the story at other times. i’d GM, tell the story, and occasionally do mechanical things like dice rolls.

question: do you think this idea is a feasible one? what are some possible pitfalls in such a game? Would you recommend a shared lead character that all the players roleplay? what systems would you recommend? are you aware of such one-to-many games being run on discord?

I have a friend who doesn't like the idea of RPGs, but has played a few RPG adjacent board games I think there may be a bit of a chance to convince them.

What we've played and liked:

• Last Night on Earth - Each player takes on the role of a hero or multiple heroes depending on the number of players or plays the zombies. each hero has hit points and special abilities and can hold items. the dice used are d6s.

What games I don't think work as well:

• Games Workshop Specialist games (ie Warhammer and 40k board games) - The aesthetic isn't for them, and a lot of the mechanics (for me) feel hit or miss depending on the game. for instance I got Lost Patrol and if you play it right the Genestealers will always win. and Warhammer Quest Darkwater has scenarios that are unwinnable if you don't have a specific character in your group.

Qualities I'm looking for:

• Has miniatures

• Uses normal 6 sided dice

• can be played 2 player.