**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.

**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.

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.

The title is usually the first thing people learn about a game. Reddit threads titled “[Name] Review” or the question in your play group of, “Hey has anyone here heard of [Name]?” There’s books that have been written and will continue to be written by the pressure placed on a title and the first impression it brings. This is not the place for those books. This is instead to ask for some examples of interesting cases of popular (and unpopular) games with particularly good and particularly bad titles.

Example 1: When a title is simply something that exists in the setting of the game, make sure that what it is referencing is something that is important to the players. Some good examples of this are Delta Green, Heart: The City Beneath, or Vampire: The Masquerade. What is Delta Green? That can be answered with the description of the game rules, but is also validly answered with a description of the government organization that makes up the core of the narrative. What is The Masquerade? Great question, it’s only the primary rule underpinning all of vampiric society. The main way this trope can fail is when the game’s content isn’t anchored to the concept in its title. I love Pathfinder 2e, but in my time of running it I’ve never had a single player interested in the Pathfinder Society within the setting. People make adventurers with personal stories and don’t feel particularly pressured to attach themselves to a larger adventuring company. Hell, a handful of APs for 2e aren’t even compatible with the Pathfinder Society. Similarly (although less so), Dungeons and Dragons. If you’re running prewritten campaigns, a bunch will feature either dungeons or dragons, occasionally even both. But neither of these things are truly required for the game, and several prewritten adventures get away with having neither. This is definitely the most common way to create a title, so there’s plenty of examples of doing it well and plenty of examples of doing it wrong. For every The One Ring there’s a Savage Worlds (fight me).

Example 2: If the title is a catch phrase / quip about the game, it shouldn’t conflict with the atmosphere presented in the text. MÖRK BORG is literally screaming at you, you don’t even need to translate it from Swedish to know that it’s bad news. Spire: The City Must Fall tells you exactly is going through your character’s minds. Warhammer Wrath and Glory tells you precisely what two things your characters will be feeling as they tear their way through enemies. Eat The Reich is a pun and mission statement for a pulpy blitz through terrible people. Games that fail at this are ones who confuse their messaging, or don’t really have a message at all. Games that have titles based on the system they use can also fall into this batch. If someone looks into Dungeon World without being aware of Apocalypse World, the title carries no real meaning. This may be controversial but… I think “From Another Time, Another Land” (F.A.T.A.L) is actually a kinda clever title that would be better served attached to anything that isn’t Fatal. Since Fatal isn’t really about the passage of time or the distance of lands the title is meaningless, but I can imagine a game focused on exploration and archeology with that title. An Indiana Jones adventure from a fantasy perspective, something of that sort.

I’m not intending to be exhaustive, just long winded enough to give some content to go off of, so if anyone else has other kinds of title trope please go on your own rant in the replies. Additionally, if you strongly disagree with me about anything, I will cry I am very interested in discussing the ways titles do or do not work.

Had a set of books arrive with significant damage. Emailed [support@exaltedfuneral.com](mailto:support@exaltedfuneral.com) over a week ago... crickets. Any suggestions for alternative routes to reach out? Keep emailing? Are they generally pretty good about this sort of thing or should I just expect to suck it up?

With the explosion of online tables, and the ease with which one can join and leave a table, I've encountered the unnerving experiencing of some players ghosting the table. It isn't rampant or anything but there have been several instances where a player has just 'vanished' entirely. No GM-player friction, no player-player friction, just an enthusiastic player disappearing overnight. It has happened once at a table where I was GM'ing and it has happened at a table where I'm a player, and the ghost was a longtime player from before I joined. I've experienced the normal 'wrong player for this table' situation, the 'real life gets in the way' situation, but these two are just a mystery to me. Both were on Discord based tables and their accounts just went 'dark'. All attempts at communications just go unanswered, and not just from me but from others at the table.

Anyone else experience this kind of thing? Anyone ever eventually figure out why or what happened? Anyone ever done this themselves? (no judgement) I'm just curious why it happens/happened.

I am working on quite an extensive article about the history of the Romanian TTRPG community and last weekend, we (as in me and Yuno) had the chance to make a small presentation on what we have uncovered thus far. This whole process however got me thinking about past campaigns. Even though I am continuously running something I always get somewhat melancholic thinking about those past groups and experiences and even while running, there is a part of me that dreads the finale of it all, the end of the journey.

Roughly a year ago I wrote an article arguing that TTRPGs are a form of folk art, it is one of my favorite pieces of writing I have done. But in this melancholic state and emboldened somewhat by reading more about oral literature, I decided to write a sort of companion piece for that article. This is the end result. It is, at least in my opinion, much more raw than other articles I usually write, despite the fact that it is also much more academic then what I have written in quite a while on the blog. It also proved to be somewhat of therapeutic exercise for me, as it helped me with processing the ephemeral quality of this hobby in a slightly better way.

I now share it with the hope that you will all find it interesting, that it might stir up something in you and perhaps above all, with the hope that, for those of you who are in the same predicament as me, it will prove to be therapeutic as well! Thank you!

It’s a Mage: The ascension chronicle i’ve run for about 7 months.

I have run other games in the past but they’ve always fallen apart due to scheduling issues before they ended. this is my first time actually doing an ending to the plot, and i’m nervous as hell. they’ve been tracking down a serial killer, finally found out who they are last session, and now need to apprehend them.

does anyone have any advice for ending? how do I deal with nervousnes? what’s needed for a satisfying conclusion? how do i deal with this sense of sadness over it ending?

I'm trying to find a game that I saw on FB ads on 2025 that could be considered over the top America or satire. Its a supernatural setting. Set in modern day. Its like an action comedy. Its like weird America. It may have been on kickstarter and I think some of the promo material had a Harley Quinn knock off and it may have included modern internet lore like slender man.

I really can't remember it, but it sticks out cause I thought the concept of American satire stuff being magical artifacts was cool. kinda like the litRPG series Discount Dan's Backroom Emporium.

Resources like hero forge and in game character creators are great for humans or popular species, but what do y'all do when the species of the character is too niche? Things that are like a combination of too many things to really already have a lot of art available for? Like what if a character is the ghost of a porcupine sniper who was also a fairy? In some cases for side characters one could use placeholder art and just describe the character, like using a generic porcupine and then explaining the rest, but what about for major characters that need a consistent visual design for?

When you're writing for a campaign that takes place in the real world, were you ever sidetracked by all the interesting things you didn't know about that location?

I always had trouble as a GM whenever my players would start getting many ally NPCs or maybe a pack of pets like a pack of wolves following them around or worse when they would have allied NPCs in high quantities with classes like wizard or any class with special abilities.

I have a "solution", first make averages, if you have 12 allied NPCs and 4 of them do 1 damage, another 4 do 2 damage and the other 4 do 3 damage then just skip the mess of managing it and make 12 NPCs of 2 damage.

This is something that many people already do the issue is ok, now you have 12 uniform allied NPCs... now what? make mob squads a concept that dnd already have with making them 1 hp and be able to spill damage but I don't mean that you use that rule, that rule has an issue and it's that it makes the individual NPCs weaker. What can be done is create formations with the NPCs making squads in the case before for example you can make 3 squads of 4 NPCs or just 1 squad of 12 NPCs. To create the squad add the HP of everyone into a pool. Let's say these 12 NPCs half of them have 2 hp and the other half 4. Ideally you could just split the squad into two squads to preserve fidelity but otherwise just make a mob squad with the average HP and also any defensive stats like AC. Whenever something attacks any member of the squad the attack use the HP pool and new block stat. Then deduct the damage from the mob pool to see if there are casualties. Let's imagine the 12 NPCs with 3 HP, that's 36, they receive an attack of 7 damage. Remove HP from the pool and every time it hits the threeshold of doing enough damage to defeat one NPC remove it from the squad. In this case 36 HP 12 NPCs - 7 damage = 29 HP 10 NPCs.

With this the NPCs don't have to become super weak whenever they're reduced to a mob, you can rule this out as you please for example the NPCs with the lowest HP of the squad always die first in a mob squad of orcs and goblins the goblins go down first. Or you can just let the attacker choose out of the squad what are they aiming to kill like specifically the orcs not the goblins and so the threeshold would be bigger, in my opinion just use average threeshold for casualties and let the weakest NPCs die first or make it random or perfectly split ratios of casualties between the different NPCs.

Alright, we did HP and damage, now the attacks. Since you have all the npcs of the group made averages you can just roll all of them at once like it's a wargame and you're playing warhammer fantasy. If you have 12 NPCs and the enemy ac is 15, roll 12 attacks and then apply the damage by rolling 12 damage dices.

But this solution is not good enough when you want to speed up things maybe you don't care so much about rolling 36 times if your players have 36 NPCs, so instead group up the attacks so you do less attack rolls. Let's grab the 36 NPCs and only do 3 rolls, each roll will be for 12 NPCs, so that way you make 36 attacks with only 3 dice rolls. Why is this so good? Because it's extremely flexible, you can design the attacks like the mob squad is a boss and then organize it however you see fit, The squad has some poison damage? Add one poison attack, Do they have some range attacks? Ok a range attack with the number of the range damage dealers with their own average.

But this is not good enough there's an issue, usually the reason why the players let the followers come with them is because they like their character. The pack of wolves probably has a leader that is cute but also scary when angry. They have a bunch of pirate/mercenaries following them around and one of them always makes a pun when he hits a target and the pirate captain has the delusion they're the king of the pirates and needs to recover their throne!

What to do to not lose the special NPCs, what if all 40 NPCs that are following the players are special? Ok, the solution is simple, allow one or more random mobs of the squad to act as individual. For one turn they will do something on their own. For example we roll and randomly the captain pirate NPC is selected from the list and the next turn is the wolf leader.

This allows you to not make them all faceless troopers because every turn one named NPC will do something, this is specially good if the squad have ability users like mages. Let them have an individual action like a spelll and then they go back to just being part of the mob.

This is all I have on the skirmish mob squad rules. If anyone read this long text, thank you for your time and please comment what you think of this, specially if you have any way to improve it or show me flaws.