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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.

​

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

I know I could've Googled this, but I'd like to know from people who are already using something new. With Discord's new Age Verification, I've decided to move on. The only other program I have experienced with is Zoom (Used in an Owlbear, played a pretty fun campaign), but aside from Zoom, I don't know what else is out there.

Appreciate any helpful responses. It sucks that companies are now asking for our real-life IDs. Discord is just another company I won't be using anymore.

After a decade of only WOTC D&D, over many different editions, I've spent the last year trying out a bunch of new systems with my play group. We've had a great time exploring some of the highlights this hobby has to offer like Blades in the Dark, Lancer, and 13th Age. However, a recurring "issue" we run into is it can be somewhat cost inhibitive to sample different systems, especially if you want to support the creators of the system.

Most recently I've been facing this issue with Draw Steel. I understand that creating and publishing a TTRPG is a behemoth undertaking. However, I don't want to spend $60 just to look at the rules before I even know if it'll be a good fit for me and my group.

This is not a specific issue to Draw Steel, rather they're just the most recent example. I know you can often find free copies of the pdf's online, but personally I try to support creators when possible and want to reward the effort that went into their projects.

I feel bad for making what's in my opinion the worst type of post, one where someone is just complaining without offering any new ideas or solutions, but it's just a sucky feeling, doubly so when one of the most common pieces of advice you'll see on these types of forums are "try out a different system".

I'd love to hear anyone else's thoughts on this. Thanks!

Pretty much that, any major lore changes in the canon of RPGS that made you go "...What?" or made you cringe and forced you to change the lore or adjust?.

I hate to say it, but as an old WoD head...yeah...Hunter the reckoning 5 and Werewolf the Apocalypse 5 as a whole made me go "..wait what" specially with the idea of the get of fenris "Falling" to the wyrm

So i was on the Cyberpunk RED discord talking to the gang about how Lethal Red is, and now im wondering.. in your opinions, which games are infamous for how lethal are they and for how survivable are they

I always considered L5R (the first 4 editions) to be stupidly lethal. Cthulhu/Delta Green are too but thats part of the enjoyment of knowing that death is always rushing towards you.

I always considered that D&D is a very survivable game, specially with resurection spells and what not.

I'm toying with my friends on making our on game system for a High Fantasy TTRPGs, mostly for in group use and not to commercialize, and I thought of the idea of using a Dice Pool main rolling mechanic to be intriguing as a D&D-baby & Play-by-WhatsApp type of player.

Unfortunately, we didn't yet played that many TTRPGs, specially one with a Dice Pool system. So I ask you all what are your recommendations and why is that.

One of my favourite narrative devices in a game is a well designed time loop or time travel story.

Many moons ago I ran Masks of Nyarlathotep and mapped a time travel loop into it that the players loved, it worked as a perfect bookend for the whole campaign.

Does anyone have stories of time loops in their games? What worked, what didn’t… let me hear your stories!

I have been thinking it would be fun to play with folks irl since my main game is online, so I want to start a monthly open table game, set a time each month and whoever shows up shows up.

Problem is that I am not sure what to run. Like what would suit that format, of not everyone being there every session.

One thing I have been thinking is it would probably be theater of the mind, mostly just because I don't have a dining table so prob we would be playing on my couches (8 seats surrounding a coffee table) which wouldn't super work for folks moving minis.

Do you have any suggestions for what to run? Interested in suggestions for both modules and systems.

So I'm going to start this post by telling my adventure. I am narrating an adventure in the Fabula Ultima system, a system that simulates classic JRPGs.

From the first planning session, together with the players, we defined the rules of the table and the theme of the campaign. Everyone there agreed on a heroic adventure based on the legends of King Arthur. In the end, the campaign is inspired by a fantastic Medieval Europe where players play good-natured characters in order to prevent hell from consuming the earth. It's a cliché, I know, lol.

Everything seemed to be on track, except for one player. He was a little too inspired by the freedom of character creation that the system gives, and had the idea of creating a temporal wizard inspired by Dio Brando, from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

At first, I thought it would be just an inspiration in the skills and the most arrogant way, but still maintaining the theme, since everyone there confirmed it and seemed very excited to play with good-natured characters. But I was totally wrong.

The player in question brought all the traits of Dio to the character. The background he gave me was literally the story of the first part of JoJo, with subtle changes in the names. Obviously, I went after this player to confront this. After all, he agreed to deliver a heroic character and not the villain of the campaign.

I'm not the kind of master who likes to limit the creativity of my players, so during our conversation, I tried to find a middle ground, something that kept the idea of character that the player wanted to use, but at the same time made sense with the rest of the group.

In the end, we agreed that the character would no longer be so evil and that he would be on a journey of redemption, which would be a cool theme for the group.

I really thought the problem was solved, but I was wrong again.

In the first game session, even after all the meetings to leave everything on track, this player returns to do some bizarre things.

His character is a horror. He speaks cursing the group, disrespects the NPCs, attacked the healer because he was frustrated in a conversation and, to make matters worse, attacked all the dogs in a village for no reason. That frustrated me a lot.

Honestly, as a friend he's really cool, but as a player, he's been a real horror. He disrespected all the conversation we had to put everything on track and keep the table pleasant, and to make matters worse he still didn't read the system book, forcing the group to have to stop to explain the rules to him.

All this, and on top of that, keeps breaking the mood all the time with random jokes that nobody understands.

Would it be wrong to just take him off the table?

What is Break!! RPG

Yes, the exclamation marks are part of the title. Yes, that is great.

This is a British RPG, done by I think two guys down in England – one writer, one artist. That very tight crew shows in the tone of the book – everything feels unified and deliberate, and you definitely feel like it is the specific design of specific people. In terms of theme, this is a ‘JRPG’, ‘anime’ and ‘Nintendo’ themed RPG – there have been a lot of those hitting Kickstarter recently, all with very green grass fields in the art and anime-style characters jumping up at the viewer. The book devotes all its art to furthering that theme – with whole pages devoted to looking like stills from an anime - while the mechanics have nods to Zelda such as Hearts rather than Hit Points. We ran this as the ‘anime rpg’ - complete with fourth-wall breaks, exaggerated reactions, descriptions of ‘how the animators cut corners in this scene’, and timeskips that we cheerfully didn’t explain because neither would an anime bother to – and it frankly worked excellently for that and we really enjoyed that aspect especially.

In terms of the game-line for this RPG – there basically isn’t one. They have the core book, and they are planning on a Kickstarter for an expansion. Right now £45 will get you 100% of the content available.

Who Am I / My context

I’ve been playing TTRPGs for a couple decades, and have played most of the big name games in that time. I generally prefer mid-crunch trad RPGs, ideally with both light narrative mechanics and character tinkering elements. I’m a slut for good art in a book as I believe that the primary purpose of an RPG manual is to excite you enough to actually want to run it.

I change games a lot, so tend to prefer that a game do something interestingly different or have a strong theme rather than just be generic or universal. For Break!! RPG we had a campaign of thirty sessions – we only play for two hours per week though, so that’s maybe closer to 15-20 in-person games.

The Book Itself

Physically, this book is small and dense. I got the deluxe edition – since the creators are here in the UK, I was able to get it for a reasonable price, which is a nice change from general industry trends since the end of Empire Brexit. The physical production quality is superb, and it felt very premium to hold and use. One thing I did find annoying though is that the book doesn’t really lie open very well – the size is smaller (more like A5 than A4) and with the dense paper it meant that the book just didn’t want to stay open on a page. That’s definitely a petty complaint.

Words cannot describe how attractive the book itself is. I’d actually recommend that you go watch Dave Thaumavore’s flick-through video here, as he accurately shows just how delightful the book is to read. There are also preview images on the official webstore here. The delightfulness of the book comes through in two ways. Firstly, the art itself – it’s remarkable just how much there is, and as it was all done by one guy it’s very consistent in feel and quality. However, almost more importantly, the book is laid out in an excellent way – information is concisely and clearly presented in a way that feels like an educational handbook rather than just the huge blocks of text that we normally get. This actually felt a little redundant to me at times – the beautiful presentation was working harder than the actual rules complexity required.

I will sound a note of caution about the PDF, however. This came free with the physical purchase for me, and has enormous amounts of links internally – so many that I actually looked up the keyboard shortcut for ‘back’ in Adobe, just to be able to navigate it better. It was, however, so tightly copy protected that I couldn’t even copy the text to the clipboard. I had to jailbreak it just to add my PC’s ability text to their character sheets – which then broke all the internal links and bookmarks so it was a nightmare to navigate. It’s another petty complaint, but I had to have two PDFs open just to copy NPC statblocks into the VTT from one book, and thus I thought about this issue for the whole campaign. If you are running in-person this won’t be an issue, of course.

Rules Complexity and Feel

As I mentioned above, the rigorous educational-style layout here is excellent and makes the rules very easy to absorb. This did feel a bit unnecessary given how light the actual rules are. What we are really dealing with here is an OSR game, in category ‘reimagining’. You have eight numbers on your character sheet, split into combat and non-combat. The three combat numbers are attack bonus, defence, hearts - so your BAB, AC, and HP for those who remember 3^rd edition days. Those progress up in line with your class and level, with the Champion getting the highest attack bonus and the Heretic having lowest hearts, etc. You roll high for combat – to use OSR terminology, this is an ascending armour class system – and I would say that despite the use of zone combat, the actual game-feel here is within two or three degrees of playing a (non-4) D&D edition, just very stripped back.

The five non-combat numbers are Might, Deft, Grit, Insight, and Aura. Continuing the D&D comparison, that’s the typical 6-stat array but combining Wisdom and Charisma, which is a common enough approach. Those numbers start around 7ish and rise to about 13ish across levels 1-10; you want to roll low for these, as this is a ‘roll under’ skill system. Speaking of skills there are none – but you get three ‘Purviews’ which actually work basically the same as the Experiences in Daggerheart, being words or phrases that you can call upon to claim a dice bonus. What works not as well here however is that the Purviews are dictated by the character’s Background (as you have the usual Race, Class, Background trio), and I found that the players all ended up with three Purviews that heavily overlapped and were hard to use in a wide range of circumstances. I repeatedly offered the players to modify their purviews but they were hesitant on that front, and so instead I just had to be generous and allow some very creative interpretations of ‘absorb a torrent of information’ or ‘moving through tight spaces’ to help players pass a reasonable number of rolls. It’s worth noting that the roll probability is pretty low here, with no in-game source of rerolls for the most part.

So what this adds up to is a game that feels basically like stripped back D&D with a light Zelda-theming in combat, and just a stripped back feel out-of-combat. I found that the players had very few ‘levers’ out of combat in general, even for the non-combat Factotum class, outside of the crafting mechanics which are pretty detailed. In a game like Vampire you have the skill chart and the disciplines that can be called on and let people show off their niches; in a heroic fantasy game I’d probably see players suggest spells or magic item usage to get past issues. Here I kind of just had to keep saying, “roll insight”, which for much of the party was a sub-50% chance roll and so not popular. I ended up doing a lot of skill challenge style stuff, and that was often very fun – an extended chase sequence as the party ran from a huge horde of angry communist goblins trying to “re-educate” them was a memorable one – but ultimately every single non-combat challenge in the game was resolved through the players rolling a D20 and trying to get under one of their stats.

I’ve gone into a lot of detail here because I’m very aware that this is not going to be an issue for a lot of people, so I wanted to explain clearly why I felt it was a negative for me specifically. I’ve been experimenting with the OSR space in the last couple years and it’s likely that this is showing my tastes do not align with that rules philosophy. Oh, I should also mention – the whole campaign people couldn’t remember whether they needed to roll high numbers or low numbers on a given roll – since you want to roll over defence but under stats. This sounds so petty, but genuinely it came up like three times a session, especially when you rolled a stat roll during combat, so it became a very memorable part of the system for me.

Specific GM Issues

I’ve put this under a separate heading since I think many games are specifically harder to run than to play – I always think of 3e D&D and it’s insane NPC statblock expectations here.

In Break!! RPG terms, it’s a fairly easy system to run, but an unsupported one. It also prompts a lot of design work from the GM. For example, you have lots of little subsystems – crafting, world exploration, map-making, relationship bonds – but there is almost no detail given to these things, because they’ve been covered in one page and then the book moves onto the next topic. That means that when you start trying to engage with those systems – in my case, one player got very excited for map making, for example – then basically all the work of creating the content to actually use that sub-system falls on the GM. What the book’s done is given a mechanical skeleton - but frankly I found most of the systems were variations on roll Insight or Deftness, so they were not really helping very much.

Similarly, the book’s bestiary is very short, but the monsters themselves are weirdly overwritten – some are four pages long, with huge swathes of text on habitat and mentality, and ability text that spreads in a way that’s not actually very useful to run. There are only twenty adversary statblocks in the whole book; the designers have clearly chosen quality over quantity, but many of these monsters are weirdly specific (e.g. Zelda Link, Battle Maids, God) so were not easy to use. This meant that in my campaign easily half or more of the monsters are ones that I had to make myself and then try to fit into the unnecessarily detailed template. The numbers side of this is easy enough – pick monster level, use numbers given by a table in the book – but coming up with 2-4 abilities per monster was a significant mental overhead. As mentioned above I ran this game on a VTT, and that honestly did make the workload much worse – in-person I’d likely have just scribbled the numbers and made the abilities up as I went, but that’s not practical on a VTT where that kind of approach breaks down really easily.

Overall, I’d say that in theory this game would be very easy to GM, but in practice you should expect to be spending a lot of time making content for your campaign. I did the same for D&D 5e back in the day (cause all its monsters sucked ass) and I’d say this felt pretty on-par for that, despite the book looking like a much lighter game.

World and Vibes

The world is very lightly drawn. The world map is funny – it’s a d20 rolled flat, so in theory you can randomise location by rolling one. It’s also divided into four sections, determined by the fact that the Sun Machine is broken and doesn’t move any more. That means you have endless sun area (desert, jungle), endless night area (wastelands, fungus forests), twilight land (somewhat more generic fantasy island archipelago), and the mandatory underground land (amusingly locked in a 1930s-style Fascist vs Communist war between Dwarves and Goblins). Each of these areas gets two (2) pages of explanation, plus another four (4) pages of backgrounds that hints at more details for them. I found the world to be fun, but basically a blank canvas. I ran a campaign that was all about restoring the Sun Machine and that was a lot of fun, and I equally have other ideas I could have done in this setting. However, as you might be guessing, I did basically all the world design work for my campaign myself – this is definitely the kind of game where you read a thirty-word paragraph and need to expand it into a full town setting for your session. I had fun with that, and generally do prefer games that give punchy brief setting descriptions as I frankly can’t absorb and use very lengthy ones, but equally not everyone will like that as much. So basically this is the same as I mentioned under the GM section – lots of design work necessary, it just so happens I was happy to do that here.

Overview / TL;DR

I think this game works well as a OSR-style D&D clone which moves into a specifically anime/JRPG aesthetic. It is going to work best for a group where the players are happy with a low complexity level, where character tinkering is lower than D&D but higher than most OSR games – it’s maybe about the same as Shadowdark in that respect. The GM that it will work best for is someone who is happy to take the bones of a world and a game and do their own thing with it, again dealing with a complexity level significantly lower than D&D. The world flavour is good and fun, the art and book quality is immaculate and will make it a very easy sell for most tables, and overall I’d recommend it. We got to the end of our thirty sessions and the table consensus was, roughly, “That was fun, we enjoyed it, but we’re glad to be moving onto more complex games next.”

For my part, I guess the question is would I revisit this? Yes, but specifically only for one of my groups. They are not dedicated charop types and often struggle with the rules complexity in D&D, doing no out-of-session research and preferring to play in a tea-and-cupcakes vibe. This game would probably suit them a lot, and I like it well enough to propose it again.

I really enjoy reading TTRPG theory and by far the most useful to me has been the Lazy DM Method by Sly Flourish. I really like the concept of preparing for improvisation, and I love how the method has a lot of flexibility while maintaining cohesion, in a way that lets the GM respond meaningfully to PCs actions and intentions without losing the "spirit" of the game or session.

I've also enjoyed James D'Amato's Ultimate Guide series quite a lot, and it actually made me approach even everyday conversations in a more fruitful way. Supposing meaning, making choices matter, and so on, are really great principles for both roleplaying and everyday interactions.

So I was wondering if you've read some books that follow similar principles but that aren't too redundant with those books.