**Come here and talk about anything!**

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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.

I often struggle to find as much art as I would like for my games. For my most recent campaign, I've been leaning heavily on public-domain art. Those who came before us have provided! Plus, you can even use it in published work/actual plays if you do either of those.

The public domain is an especially strong resource if your game is strongly inspired by a certain historical period. My game is inspired by 1500's Japan, and it's awesome to have a bunch of historical artwork from Japan to use as the aesthetic base of my game.

It's also great inspiration. While digging through public-domain art for specific characters or locations, I run into a bunch of other art that I'll throw into a folder as inspiration for later. And then I use it as key art for hexes, magic items, whatever. If you're feeling really spicy, you can even do a bit of editing to make a picture just right, or bash two pieces together. It's easy enough to make transparent images, or transpose part of one image onto the background of another. Here's a couple of fun page layouts I did by editing and using public domain images.

So use more public domain in your work, and save yourself some time and money. Here are a few sources I like for finding public domain art. If you have others, I'd love to check them out if you share them!

The Met collection - Tons of art and a search feature that lets you sort by medium, region, and year. I liked looking at paintings and prints for character and location art, and other mediums for magic items, armor, and clothing. There's even an arms and armor department that is perfect for TTRPG inspiration. I particularly like the Met because many pieces come with a little background information on the artist or context on the piece.

Wikimedia Commons - A bunch of free-to-use assets, including videos and sounds as well as images. I've mostly used it for images, but the video section can be useful too, I used it to find an example of a Kagura to show my players! The only thing to note about these is that they include many sources published under Creative Commons Share-Alike licenses, so make sure your project is also share alike if you're going to use them!

Creative Commons search portal - This lets you search a bunch of different sites (Google Images, YouTube, etc.) for specifically free-to-use assets. Like Wikimedia Commons, if you use this one, make sure you check the asset's license before using it! Some can be used with no strings attached, some require credit, and some require that you also share your work under a Creative Commons license.

Ukiyo-e - This one is a lot more specific, but Ukiyo-e is a database of Japanese woodblock prints; it's awesome for character art!

As a P.S., if you aren't planning on selling your work, I highly recommend publishing your content under a Creative Commons license! Just as we can build on the work of those who came before us or share our work with the community, we can give back in the same way.

Here is my personal insight and perspective to the Indonesian Tabletop RPG scene.

Little cute story that happened to me yesterday, was also wondering if you ever heard of this kind of "system" ?

I work in a daycare/after-school center. We take care of children here waiting for their parents to finish work and come get them.

It was Wednesday so we had them the whole day, we were coming back from a trip, and on the bus one of the kids was making a lot of trouble, talking super loud and not staying still on her seat.

I wanted so bad to find a way to make her focus for a bit so I said :

-" hey, wanna play an...adventure...imagination game ? "

- " what is that ? "

- " so you're in a room and there's a door... "

I have almost no experience with TTRPGS and even less experience dming, (currently playing my first ever campaign, ~session 5), and DMed a single duet one-shot with my GF) but I saw in her eyes and demeanor that I caught her attention.

-"I open it !" she said.

-"Okay, when you open it you look up and there's a bucket of water falling towards you, what's 7+2 ?"

-"9!"

-"Cool, you get out of the way and the water splashes next to you but misses you"

I totally improvised the idea of using quick math to replace rolls, she ate it up and when we got out of the bus, she begged me to keep playing.

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We got inside the daycare, and I got four of the kids to come with me to a room where we have a chalkboard, asked them all their " adventurer's name ", if they were a human or something else, and what weapon they wanted.

We had " Jonseena " - The Human with huge boxing gloves " Gyme " - A girl with an axe, " Chelsie " - A girl with a sword and "Jaslie " - An elf girl with pointy ears and plant magic. I can draw, so I very quickly sketched a portrait for every-one of them and had them sit down in front of the chalkboard.

Had them go through a basic, normal dungeon, drawing the rooms and the ennemies on the chalkboard as they walked along. When we had "skillchecks" I made sure the maths problems I gave them were age-appropriate, Jaslie the elf is 4 irl, and Jonseena is 10, so for her it was something like "2+3" and for him it was like "9*3+14". At one point, Cheslie was frustrated cause the party fought rats and beat all of them before he could attack so I was like " use your eyes and tell me what 8+8 is " which led her to find a loose brick which started a fight with an ogre. Cool stuff.

Not gonna bore you with a detailed retelling of the rest of the game, two of them got picked up by their parents so I had their character fall into a trap ( the other two found that very funny ) the remaining two fought a king-skeleton-type-thing and got a big treasure chest and they were super happy.

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I just wanted to share this story cause it made me want to make this into a game we could play regurlarly with 4-6 kids, it was really fun :) Also wanted to know if some of you ever did something similar ? :)

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TLDR; Quick RPG for kids using " what's 2+2 ? " instead of dice rolls.

I've only ever played heroic TTRPGs like Pathfinder 2e, Lancer, Draw Steel, Masks and the like. I have no experience or reference point for OSR games, but this announcement has piqued my interest. How does Crows, at least on paper, sound/compare to existing systems? Trying to decide if I should support the eventual MCDM backerkit, or pick a different OSR game.

What games have you played whose mechanics or narrative led to you becoming a better Game Master and why? I am looking to broaden my choice of games for both the one-shots that I run and the longer story arcs my group plays.

I have run D&D5e, Savage Worlds Adventure Edition, Mothership, Everyone is John, and Goblin with a Fat Ass for reference. Any and all recommendations are appreciated.

I've just finished watching the show **1883** which reminded me of the classic video game **Oregon Trail**.

This made me want to play in a dreary survival cowboy/western fiction where simply travelling is a hardcore endeavor.

I know about weird west games (this genre could potentially work, I'm not against it) but a fairly realistic western game would probably be better.

Does something akin to a western survival game exist?

I really want to hear what players and GMs love right now.

and everyone is right there are ways to many negivitive posts and rants about this or that game is bad.

so let's focus on what and most importantly why we love the games we do.

To preface, I've largely been running pathfider modules in addition to building a custom arc for the players- balancing it by building out the enemies and hazards in foundry, testing them against player copies, and having a running stat docket so I can see the players' odds of failing vs succeeding any given save. The goal is to be very fair of what is asked of the players, and try to always have at least a good chance of succeeding right off the bat. And, naturally, pulling punches when the players just keep failing something or other.

A lot of it stems from the fact that, no matter how many debriefs or whatever there are, it seems that the players are giving the answer they think I want to hear and not being honest or forthright. That and there seem to be a lot of communication issues besides. And yes, there was a session zero where I went over ground rules, what I'm trying to do, what do the players want to see...

They might be asked if they want to see more mysteries/whodunnit style modules... and say they do, they had a good time, despite having spent the whole time complaining. And maybe that's true, they may be interested in some platonic ideal of a mystery, but they certainly don't seem interested in the mysteries that are presented to them in game.

They are told that the adventure is going to be dangerous, are totally okay with it... up until they take damage. Which I could understand, if they didn't have multiple healer kits, a healer, and had only taken 1/10th of their health pool throughout all 7 turns of combat. And of our players, only two of them took any damage whatsoever. Which means the session grinds to a halt for 10+ minutes as the player argues why they shouldn't have taken that much damage, are you sure you know what you're doing DM? In my other game this was never a problem, shouldn't there be a homebrew rule... Tbh this happens whenever that player takes any damage. You can also imagine he complains about having to say what he wants to do exactly so the bonuses/effects/actions can be applied correctly ("Why would I need to say I'm making a lethal attack non-lethal? You should assume that's what I wanted") which, you betcha, drives me up a wall.

They rarely ask clarifying questions. I've tried to make the map and room descriptions as detailed as I can, but I can't account for everything they might want to interact with. This has been brought up too, but it leaves me feeling like they expect this to be a videogame, where everything is fully rendered and interactable right off the bat, because you can bet they get fussy when custom items take a bit to load in Foundry.

On a less important, more petty note, none of them have any life experience or media literacy outside of anime, comics, and fanfiction. Which means it is difficult to tell them "you got kicked in the head by a rampaging horse and get knocked over" because they flat out will not believe it. I could tell them "The man does not accept your bribe of 5 bucks to reveal incriminating information after you called him a thief in front of customers", because they do not believe a person would be offended at being called a thief. Nothing seems to hold their attention, and no amount of communication on my part seems to help. I'm actually starting to think the only way to hold their attention is to just plop in a bunch of batman references/optimus prime himself/tsundere highschool girls with guns/whatever in the game and hope they take the bait. But I don't want to do that, because I have zero interest replacing every person in a given village with big titty anime girls. Also my voice doesn't go that high.

Basically...my players love to complain, but actually be honest about what they want in game (aside from continuing to play). How do I stop being annoyed about it? It feels like I'm running a game where my player group consists of 3 Angry Videogame nerds and one Doug Walker. I'm over it lmao

With fanfare, RPG Geek was launched in 2009 by the same people behind Boardgame Geek. At the time, "BGG" was a hub of tabletop gaming culture and remains so to this day. RPGG, however, never became that. Compared to its older brother, activity on RPG Geek never really got heavy and is nearly moribund now.

Now, I confess I'm begging the question of the title because I already have an opinion on why this is. From the start RPG Geek approached its subject the same way BGG approached its own - primarily as a catalog of physical objects and user experiences of those things as physical objects. But for other than diehard collectors, TTRPGs don't really work that way. And TTRPGs aren't subject to the same limiting publication filters as boardgames. Tracking every adventure and expansion published for (at the time of RPGG's founding) 3E D&D is an endless task and ultimately not very useful for a broad audience. Same thing now with the fire-hose of material for 5E, and that's just one particular subset of the field. Watching the site fail to keep up with releases on itch.io is something else that calls its relevance into question. Its not really arguable that RPGG is actually prominent, just see how infrequently its mentioned in this sub. but are there other perspectives on why it doesn't have traction?

I believe that reading up many different games makes you a better game master; as every game has something to teach you. It could be a concept, a way of presenting fiction, a little trick to engage the table or a different way of handling initiative.

What's something you learned from an RPG that you bring to every game you play? I'll go first with Monster of the Week guiding principle "Be the characters biggest fans." Really changed of how I thought about running games.