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I run narrative-driven games — atmosphere, choices, light mechanics. My group said they wanted exploration and freedom. So I built large locations by hand, wrote out the lore, gave each player a private notebook so I could follow their thinking.

Result: notebooks empty. The one who wanted exploration the most was convinced we had to follow the plot. Another buried me in lore questions unrelated to anything happening. A third just couldn't be bothered to think.

Is this a common thing, or did I set it up wrong? And if you've run into it — what did you actually do about it?

UPDATE:

Thanks everyone — didn't expect this many responses. A few points keep coming up, so putting them here so people don't have to repeat them:

Too much lore up front draws invisible borders. The "restaurant menu" analogy nailed it: hand someone a menu and say "or anything you like," they'll order off the menu.

Open-ended questions cause paralysis. Concrete A/B choices with the GM breaking ties works better. Set session times yourself instead of trying to accommodate everyone.

A deadline means nothing until it actually bites. Mine hasn't yet, so the players had no reason to treat it as real. Running a timed obligation alongside "you're free to explore" pulls in two directions at once. That one's on me.

Some groups just can't do sandboxes, regardless of what they say in session zero. That's not a failure on either side.

Still reading everything, just not replying to all of it. Appreciate the time people put into this.

After decades of wanting to give D&D a shot, I finally got a group of 4 players and an experienced DM together. Session zero was fun and I really enjoyed building my character at level 1. However, the DM and the other players seemed to have zero interest in building an adventure group with a common goal.

By level 8, the campaign had kind of unraveled and none of us really had any idea of the plot of the module. All 3 other players had at least some experience, with one having a subscription to Beyond and many if not all of the extra books and modules. The whole time I was playing, it felt like I was in a glorified character builder where the other guys were plotting to build a specific archetype and have their characters do very specific things; one guy would even throw crazy “can I do/make XYZ with my abilities” at the DM, who would agree, then the player would rub his hands together in excitement. They‘d offer suggestions on what skills/spells to select and be disappointed if I didn’t go with their ideal build for my character. Ultimately, I decided to remove myself from the campaign because it just wasn’t a fun adventuring experience.

TLDR: I thought playing with experienced players would improve my experience because they could explain some rules, but it turned into them bringing long-plotted character builds and plotting to mess with the DM, who went along with it.

Hello, fellow RPG gamers, today i wanna show you one of my favorite brazillian RPGs, Assimilação (Assimilation, cover art), a post apocalyptic narrative game about surviving a world full of bizarre creatures and people that evolved beyond normal limits. Before we start, i’d like to apologize if there are any grammatical errors on the text, english is not my native language, cuz i live in Brazil of course. Also my autocorrect might change some words here and there so there might be some portuguese words here. I also hope this post doesnt get removed because of self promotion, cuz i just wanted to share about a game most people wouldn’t ever get to know outside brazil. So, without further ado, lets get into it!

the setting

The setting of assimilation turns around an event called “the colapse”. The exact nature of the collapse is left ambiguous on purpouse so the GM can full in the gaps with their own explanation, but one thing remains untouched: the colapse brought the Assimilation with it. The Assimilation is pretty much a zombie virus but instead of making people go crazy, it actually accelerates their natural evolution process to an extreme level, so you could go to sleep one day and wave up with fins or scales, and depending on how many mutations you have, the virus could take control of your character, and that’s how people become actual zombies. Despite that, the player actually has some control over how much their characters give in to mutations, but I’ll cover that later on. So the vírus caused monsters to appear and people to go berserk, so the world ended, and now groups of people reunite to try and survivor this hostile new world that was born from the destruction.

The mechanics

Assimilation actually uses custom Dice with symbols, and they work kinda similar to genesys. The actual Dice rolling mechanics are a mix between a bunch of systems, like storyteller and l5r. Basically, the game uses d6s, d10s and d12s exclusively. These Dice all have custom symbols called success, adaptation and pressure. The success symbol, represented by a ladybug, is pretty straightforward: you get it on a roll, you succeed at whatever you were trying to do. The adaptation symbol, represented by a deer, is a little bit more nuanced, you can spend it to change your action after rolling the Dice, transfer one of your successes to an ally or cancel out a pressure. The pressure symbol, represented by an owl, indicantes consequences, if you roll a pressure the GM can introduce a drawback to your action, like making your ammo run out or making you take a bit of damage. Just like the storyteller system, the amount of Dice you roll is a mix of an attribute and a skill: your attribute determines how many d6s you roll and your skill determines the ammount of d10s. After all dice are rolled, you may pick 1 one of your dice to determine the outcome of your action, tough there are several ways to keep more dice. You can also choose to act by instinct and spend an assimilation point (which will be explained soon) to roll with Double attributes (like strenght+Strength for example) and swap all your d6s with d12s. Due to the d12 having more sucesses but also more pressures, this is a high risk, high reward option and may have extreme consequences. This all might seem a bit convoluted, but there’s actually an oficial dice roller which helps out a ton.

assimilating

Now this is the core of the system, as the name suggests. Every character has something called a “tug of war”, composed of an assimilation level and a determination level. Both of these values depend on one another: the sum of both of them is always 10, só if one Goes up, the other one Goes down and vice versa. Most characters start at 1 assimilation and 9 determination, but depending on the Campaign and the character’s abilities, they might start with more or less determination. These levels also determine the amount of points the character can spend on each score (so, for example, a character with 9 Determination also has 9 DPs to spend). APs are restored after every scene and are used to activate mutation powers or acting on instinct. DPs are restored after every rest and are used to keep an addicional dice on a test or activating specific mundane abilities. If a character Goes to 0 AP, nothing happens except that they can’t use anymore mutations until the next scene, but if a character’s DPs get to 0, they mutate. When this happens, the determination value of the character is Reduced by 1 the next time they rest, and therefore their assimilation value is increased by one. The character then just roll a d10+one d12 for each Assimilation level they just attained and keep all of the dice rolled. This is going to determine the amount of mutation cards drawn for each mutation type. For every success rolled, the character draws from the evolutive adaptations deck (hearts suit), which grant benefits like increasing attributes. For every adaptation rolled, the character draws from the adaptative mutations deck (diamonds suit), which grant power at a cost (like breathing fire, but your voice is now super deep). For each pressure rolled,n the character draws a Card from the inoportune mutations deck (swords suit), which are strait downgrades. Each Card value has a specific mutation related to it, and the character can spend up to 6 symbols rolled to increase the mutation’s level. For example, a character rolls two sucesses on the Assimilation roll. They then draw 2 cards from the hearts suit, getting the regenerative mutation (8 of hearts) and the senstive mutation (ace of hearts). The player can now choose to spend one point in each of these mutations or spend all of their 2 points in only one of them to get a stronger effect. Additionally, if a character accumulates 10 pressures on Spaces cards, the Assimilation takes control of the character permanently, but these assimilations can be removed of the character fullfills one of their purpouses (for example, if my purpouse is to find a Beach and in one of my expeditions involves a beach, i can delete 1 pressure off of mutations from my character). Overall, this jeans that the character can choose to give up on their determination to get more power, but the more they do so, the easier it is to lose control, so it’s pretty much a blackjack game of mutations.

conflicts

Conflicts are pretty straightforward here. Theres no initiative, all players characters act at the same time, and then the conflict actions are resolved. Conflict actions are also kinda randomly determined, each specific conflict has an amount of dice they roll every turn (like 1d6+1d10+1d12, or 3d10, or 2d10+2d12. The amount of dice and their size ia determined by the conflict difficulty and conflict type. Assimilated creatures, for example, roll more d12s than other threats). Differently from the players, the conflicts keep all of their dice at all times. Each conflict has specific activations which cost specific amounts of each symbol. An attack, for example, costs 2 pressures to Activate (could be less, could be more, depending on the amount of damage). Activations that harm the PCs cost pressures, activations that help the threat or change the situation cost adaptations, and activations that benefit the PCs cost sucesses. All conflicts also have a special activation called “supression” that is activated using the sucesses that PCs roll against the conflict, usually by fighting but depending on the nature of the conflict it could be something else, like running. I think this system is pretty cool and incentivises the creation of threats beyond combat.

conclusion

Overall, i really love this system and love it even more because it was made in my homeland brazil. I think it’s really unique and really well made and wanted to share it with the whole rpg community. If this post Goes well, i might even cover some other brazillian RPGs, like paranormal order. Anyway, this is it, hope you enjoyed!

Looking for something with actually engaging combat (not just chucking opposed dice pools or things like that), but that isn't just an index of abilities, powers, or builds to choose from. Something with at least some kind of tactical depth and player expression.

I love stories where monsters are the heroes, but are forced to live "underground" because society sees them as monsters and reacts with fear or violence, no matter how much good the monsters do. Stuff like Hellboy. Stories where the "monsters" are just humans at heart, trying to fit in, and their mutations or paranormal abilities are just a metaphor for traits that are "othered" by society.

Ergo, I love the "secret society" aspect of Vampire: the Masquerade. But, the worldbuilding of that game takes a very different direction than "misunderstood monsters". The average Vampire in VtM is very much evil (even if they don't see if that way). You treat people like herd animals and kill them and drink their blood.

To be clear, this is not a moral qualm. It can be FUN to be evil! But, I AM curious: are there any good RPGs out there where the PCs are monsters, but it's a little less "Sopranos" and a little more "Nimona"??

I'm developing an RPG in this vein myself, but it hasn't occurred to me to ask and see what (if anything) in this vein might already exist.

Recently saw a post on another subreddit warning about a company not delivering kickstarter projects so thought I'd do the same for a TTRPG company.

I backed Call of the Sea from Shadowland Games and Delivery was supposed to be in April. They have gone completely silent, with one update 6 months ago and the last one 30 days ago. But the last update just talks about more PDF releases and then they announce "They will soon update on print and delivery progress", while not actually giving any real updates.
While all this is going on they are releasing more new kickstarter projects, and from the looks of their old ones they have yet to actually fully deliver a kickstarter to all backers.
So beware when backing any of their kickstarters.

So I'm a 52 yr old long time gamer. I have a ton of dice like most do, and I love collecting sets just for their own sake. Generally I pass on overly novelty style dice (extra small, extra big, overly decorated, etc), I like just standard dice that are both pleasant to look at and easy to read. I player in my group earlier this year brought a set of dice he bought that he labeled "his old man dice". Great contrast, slightly bigger than standard dice, and easy AF to read! I checked em out and instantly liked them.

I went online that night and bought a set for myself to give a shot. I've been playing with them for a few months now and have to say my old eyes LOVE THEM. I've picked up about 4 different sets since then to use on a regular basis. They don't feel like novelty dice at all, even though they are bigger than standard dice (16mm vs around 20-22mm I think). They look and feel great though without being obnoxious, and more importantly - EASY TO READ lol...

I honestly wish this would become a standard size alongside the normal 16mm dice, especially by indie dice makers. Anyway, that's all. Just wanted to tell anyone squinting at dice to check them out and give them a shot. I've made them my primaries.

Anyone else finding love for these?

Hello!

I'm wanting to print an rpg that is only available digitally and there are so many options on Mixam that I am a little overwhelmed.

People who have printed out their rpg pdfs, what options did you pick on Mixam (or other printing platforms) and did you like what you got?

Preferences: I like the 6x9 soft cover set up, but beyond that im clueless

What is your favourite rpg system?

List two or three things you love and one thing you hate.

I’ll offer Pendragon. The stuff I love about it are the deeply thematic rules, traits and passions, and the GPC.

What I don’t like about it is the (imo) overly complex battle rules.

What say you?

I remember running a handful of games of Triangle Agency and having a lot of fun being the DM, as I had my own mechanics with which to trigger abilities and events during the game. It felt different to running many other games, where as a DM you're functionally omnipotent.

I have started writing a game recently and I'm looking for recommendations, similar games where the DM has some sort of gameplay or progression alongside the players.

I am looking to build a campaign based on shonen anime type of storytelling. Some of our favorites are Naruto, JJK, Hunter Hunter, Demonslayer, Attack on Titan. I plan to have unique abilities, overarching big bad villains, arc structures, bosses changing forms mid combat, long dramatic monologues especially right before death, and out of left field plot twist. You get the vibe hopefully. I don’t necessarily need a system that advertises itself as an anime because surprisingly most anime kind of play out like a TTRPG. But I am having a hard time finding a system. Any recommendations?