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Been GMing for a party of 3 regulars and 2 newcomers for a few months now. I know all of them pretty well, but haven't played an actual RPG with 3 of them. It was fine at first, but a few weeks ago it started being a drag for me.

I generally try to act stuff out for the players, i.e. most anyone relevant in the story has a name, a few lines of background and whatever I can pass for a personality. I'm not trying to act like its absurdly high quality, but theres enough to immerse yourself if you want to, because the whole theatrical part of DMing is one of the aspects I like most. But the party just can't take anything seriously for more than 10-15 minutes.

I had a pretty dramatic sidestory going involving a serial killer, who was at large in a town the party frequents. He had killed 2 NPCs the party knew and liked. It was going fine at first, but a random joke towards the latter half of the session turned the murderer into a running gag, and neither him nor the actual murders themselves were taken seriously after that. This has happened half a dozen times for larger scenarios, and happens constantly for smaller ones. I can try as hard as I want to set up something dramatic, creepy or just a little serious, and 15 minutes later its a comedy.

I've gotten used to this to a point, no story you ever write survives first contact, and in a world where my primary goal is that everyone is having a good time this would be fine. But its gotten to a degree where I personally don't enjoy telling the story anymore, because it feels like building a sand castle as impressively as possible, and all your players care about is how forcefully they can kick it the fu*k over.

So I changed course, cut out the dramatic moments, stopped trying to write cool or tragic characters. I just about halved the amount of prep time per session. And since there isn't anything to smother to death anymore, I'm much more relaxed at the table and can more easily participate in just acting stupid. I still prep locations, encounters, quests and all that. But it now operates on a very "Sitcom with a limited budget" type of scale.

And then everyone got kind of mad. I had mentioned the whole comedy-fatigue before, and they had promised they'd try to adjust a bit, but I felt like none of it ever really showed. Now they feel like I'm not trying at all and the setting being boring. After a bit of back and forth I said something to the effect of "This is just me giving you the same amount of energy as the other way around." and that hasn't gone over very well.

I'm mostly asking whether others had similar issues, and if theres some middleground I'm missing. I would normally like to continue the party, but its looking kinda dire.

I am actually screaming into a pillow because the dm foreshadowed this fucking perfectly we just didn't realize until it was too fucking late.

The god, that we fight for, that some of us are even magically bound to follow the will of?

IS THE MAIN FUCKING VILLIAN, HELL BENT ON CONQUERING THE WORLD AND WE DIDN'T FUCKING NOTICE UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE TO DO ANYTHING OTHER THAN HELP THEM WITH IT BECAUSE OF OUR OWN FUCKING CHOICES

GOD

FUCKING

DAMNIT

Edit: using the opportunity that this has gained a lot of traction to say. Play legend, really fucking good system.

Edit 2: BOYS, HOPE HAS BEEN REGAINED. WE HAVE A FUCKING CHANCE, I REPEAT WE HAVE A CHANCE

Up from the depths...ギャオオオーン！

KaijuCon is back and bigger than ever! Join us on October 24th for Nagoya's first and most monstrous TRPG and board gaming mashup convention. This year we'll have over 25 game tables in 3 sessions (both in English and Japanese). The VP of Chaosium, Michael O'Brien, will be joining us again (and GMing!) along with various authors and artists of CoC and other Chaosium products. There will be signings, merch, and games run by authors, artists, designers and a multitude of GMs from tabletop communities across Japan and beyond. Please come and roll some dice with us at KaijuCon 2!

Purchase tickets and sign up to play in or host a game at the links below.

Tickets:
https://kaijucon.org/

Registration for games:
https://kaijucon.org/games

Time: October 24th, 10am 〜 9pm
Place: Nagoya Prime Central Tower, 13F
Cost: Advance tickets 2,500円 / 3,000円 at the door

A Pound of Flesh flipping Mothership from a game about dying alone in space to dying on a dystopian space station with a population of millions is what made me finally fall for the game that's now my current favorite. Vaults of Vaarn hosts its own faction-heavy urban sandbox, Gnomon, and one of the coolest things about the imminent new edition is that all that material has become core. I'm fiending for The Tiger Princess of Treacherous Tripura and Junk City, upcoming books that I hope will finally sell me on OSE and Mausritter, respectively.

So with that in mind... what am I missing? What are the coolest cities around and the best procedures you've seen for urban adventures? If it's got a wealth of downtime-related stuff, all the better.

Hello. I am a fairly long-time GM with experience in TTRPGs like Daggerheart, 5E, Fabula ultima, and many others. I love GMing. I love playing with people and playing the systems. In the moment I really enjoy what I do.

But for some reason, nearly the last 7 or so games I have attempted to run have ended very prematurely. We will be 1 or 2 sessions in, and for some reason, I just lose the will to keep playing.

I've tried doing oneshots, but I just do not enjoy those nearly as much as a campaign.

I don't know if it's an issue with myself, not feeling into the playgroups, or if I get bored of the system, but it really sucks to keep having this happen. It's been making me question my worth as a GM and if it's even worth it to keep attempting to play.

Has anyone had similar issues? I'd love some advice from the community :)

I've been reading the Core Law for Rolemaster Unified partly for pleasure, partly to eventually play. Based on its reputation and from what I've heard over many years, I was expecting to feel like I was taking in a fire hose of information that would be dense, unfathomably "crunchy," and look incredibly slow to play.

Yes, there are many tables. I can see how cascading through them after applying modifiers to a percentile roll, or perhaps going several levels deep into them like a Russian nesting doll, may have felt overwhelming back before virtual tabletops. I can also see how it may feel downright archaic in 2026. All that said, at its core, the system seems relatively simple: roll a percentile die, add any modifiers, and then look up your result on a table based on the number you come up with. And some of the results are downright WILD.

To me, looking things up on these tables seems like it would add a lot of richness to combat and playing out skills on the table. There's the potential to roll a critical and do things that are downright outlandish, such as defeating opponents that seem nigh impossible on first blush. I am reading them with glee.

I can see how it would take a handful of sessions to get your bearings, but if you have your tables printed out or somehow ready at hand with computer software, I have my doubts that combat would really become a slog that much. Kind of like Dungeon Crawl Classics — look it up and let 'er rip!

Maybe older editions read differently, but reading Rolemaster Unified, the game doesn't seem... that bad? Not nearly as rough as I was expecting. It's too bad the artwork is poor compared to older editions of the game.

I'd like to hear others' thoughts who have played Rolemaster or enjoy playing it today. Or who don't enjoy it, and why!

I kind of see the appeal of playing an older edition of a game. It's 'done.' No new supplements will come out to mess with your world.

But sometimes a new edition comes out and it just doesn't click with you.

I'd like to hear people's stories of why they stuck with an older version of a game after trying a newer version.

So the long read is that me and my wife are going on a trip, and we wanted to maybe have some game time (either 1 player, 1 gm or 2 players, no gm).

We were thinking Cthulhu confidential (a gumshoe 1-on-1 system that's pretty cool), but it's pretty rules heavy and requires a bunch of character sheets, and a lot of dice and other accessories - not really something you can pull up on the beach.

I'm not looking for things like Microscope, since my wife still wants to play a single character and not something too abstract.

In any case, any game that's easy to pick up (literally and figuratively), and is suitable for short maybe hour long sessions for 2 people. Looking forward to hear it.

I keep using these like they mean the same thing. They don't.

Rules-lite is how much book is on the table. Low prep is how much work I have to do before Friday.

I've sat down with a rules-lite game and still spent two hours making a town because the game didn't actually tell me how to start. And I've run something crunchier that was ready in twenty minutes because the procedures were the prep.

I think I pick the wrong game when I want "easy" and I don't know which easy I mean.

Anyone else mix these up? What's a game that is actually low prep, not just thin?

I'm thinking like Mothership's TOMBS cycle or Night's Black Agents' Conspyramid/Vampyramid - GM-facing tools that help prep go smoother.

For example, while Blades in the Dark has a fascinating heist system (mostly its flashbacks), it doesn't necessarily have any tools to help GMs design the heist in the first place (unless I'm remembering incorrectly).

Any ideas? Thanks!

There's a new charity bundle on itch, hosted by jesthehuman. Funds raised by those who participate will go towards scholarships for youths participating in the Games for Change Student Challenge. There are more details on the page itself. Minimum buy-in price is $10.00.

https://itch.io/b/3847/games-for-scholarships

I'm not affiliated with these folks. Just figured I'd share since I try to snap up every one of these sorts of bundles I come across.