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I live all the way down in England and interested and spending my money on Viral and Signal to Noise (Call of Cthulhu scenario books), but at looked at the website I was buying it off of, DriveThruRPG, and I looked at Trustpilot reviews and it was a 2.6. I couldn't find anywhere else and people who reviewed the those books had a physical copy they seemingly got from DriveThruRPG. I was wondering if anyone could tell me if it honestly is trustworthy or really shady, if being the latter, I'd be grateful if anyone could tell me where else I could find those books.

Hello! I am currently leading as the president of my high school D&D club (keeping the D&D club name for recognition). After leading the club for a year, I realized many of the club members didn't use the bulk into D&D's ruleset. It mostly boils down to: roll a d20, high numbers succeed, low numbers fail. Some of the players seemed to not be interested in learning D&D's complex rules: One group enjoys goofy and silly campaigns, another into narrative gaming.

They seem to lean toward medieval and heroic fantasy, sci-fi, or random campaign ideas that they have on the top of their head. A vast majority of them are beginners who only heard about D&D.

I'm thinking of presenting 3-5 ttrpgs to suit the tastes of everyone in the D&D club without overwhelming them with options. One for narrative and story games, one for beer and pretzels play, one for beginners who don't know where to start, and D&D for brand recognition.

My current thoughts are:

D&D

Maze Rats/Cairn

Freeform Universal

Feel free to recommend more if you want.

Which 3-5 ttrpgs would you recommend to present to the club, and why?

What should be my philosophy with picking TTRPGS?

Edit: If you had to only pick 5 TTRPGS to present to the club, what would it be? And why?

They should cover most of the player types and suit many genres of fiction.

What are a bunch of games where you play as actual animals? By which I mean non humanoid. Not like redwall where the animals are anthro designs wearing clothes. I mean like bunnies and burrows or the warren. Your just a normal animal?

The ones I know of are

The warren

Bunnies and burrows

Briars and brambles

But that's about it.

So I have been a long time Warhammer Fantasy tabletop player and I am getting to DMing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Warhammer The Old World Roleplaying Game. While I am not as experienced in TTRPGs as I am with tabletop wargames, I started with DnD and branched off a little to pathfinder and some other games. But where does WHFRP fit in with overall popularity? Just curious. I seems like it is not nearly as popular as DnD but it is for sure not a niche game, I mean it's been around for a long time. Just want to know your thoughts. Bottom line I am really enjoying it simply because I love the world and lore. Thanks.

Hi everyone,

I am a forever DM in a 3.5e setting. I have run a game from Lv1-20 and I never want to do it again. ^^ At least not in 3.5e. Not above Lv8 etc.

My problems: Stacking multiple spell effects, having to roll 3 times to hit the wizard etc.
The save or suck spells from Lv9 and higher, melee- caster balance and how much work loot and mass combat are.

What it does well and what my players enjoy is the tactical part. The maps, rolling high numbers, getting new items (basically like WoW) but they also like the chaos and instigation from role play in between. So while something completely different like Call of Ct. would be extremely easy for me as a DM to run (no items, no levels, no spells...) its hardy a good pick for my group outside of a one shot or mini adventure.

A system that allows crunch only for the players, but is super easy for me as a DM to run is what I am looking for. Something where I can allow my players to level up without being afraid that the next level will break the game. (which is why I currently run a 3.5e campaign with a Lv8 lock)

After looking through multiple TTRPG options, I am currently reading into Shadow if the Demon Lord/ Weird wizard. It sounds great so far. It doesn't even need magic items since all the power balancing comes from the paths of the character. - Not sure if that would take away something, since my players enjoy items/power progression and I still like giving out special items linked to quests and stories. Or maybe that would run just fine with them. ^^

Other options:
PF2e -Better designed 5e but with more crunch. Looks overwhelming.
5e - More elegant than 3.5 but comes with its own problems
OSR games: A lot easier, Not a lot of crunch, which CAN work, but it doesnt feel like its good for more than a short adventure rather than a campaign.

From everything I heard SotWW seems to be a good fit overall, but I would still like to hear your thoughts and ideas. SotDL seems to be similar, but I dont know how well my players would react to a less heroic approach and less of a power fantasy.

TLDR: it was a fun time, can't wait to play it again!

Every month or so, I run a one shot or very short campaign in a new system for some friends of mine. I heard of Triangle Agency several months ago on Quinn's Quest and although he and a few Reddit threads listed complaints, I couldn't stop thinking about how it sounded like a perfect game for me and my group to cut loose. I put together a lame corporate PowerPoint complete with royalty-free generic company background music to teach my players the rules and introduce the setting, and then we jumped into a one shot using the pre-written adventure, Dead Quiet.

As a GM, I found it pretty liberating to have all of the rolls be initiated by the players. Essentially, any time there's a risk of danger or something going wrong, it does go wrong unless the player decides to use one of their special powers and rolls a success. This made for some hilarious moments where, for example, one of the PCs hopped in a car and described driving super fast to their first destination - so of course I narrated how they immediately got into a car crash. Later, when they went into a police station, they thought about calling in a bomb threat on a nearby building to have lighter police presence in the station, only to realize they would almost assuredly fail. But what they could do instead was ask the agency to go back in time and cause the creation of a foreign extremist group, thereby creating someone in the present day that is actually threatening to blow up a building nearby. This game is hilarious.

The downside to them rolling is that each time they roll, they generate a bit of chaos for me as the GM to spend as a bit of metacurrency to throw wrenches in their plans. At one point, for example, they had one player sneak into a house and be about to let the other players in, only for me to spend a bit of chaos to have them forget how to unlock a door. Which of course led into another rube Goldberg series of wacky hijinks to walk them through the process while avoiding detection by a spooky monster they were stuck inside with. I thought the chaos system was great for reminding me that I can and should be regularly messing with my players at a good pace - there's a nice balance that comes from their rolls generating chaos which fuels more obstacles for them to roll against to solve to generate more chaos.

One of my favorite aspects of the system was actually having my players play each other's important NPCs, who would occasionally show up throughout the mission to cause more problems. All of my players definitely understood the assignment and took every opportunity to mess with their fellow players, honestly more than even I would've myself.

Overall, I'd recommend this game with a caveat: you really need to be able to trust your players. The game puts a lot of power over the narrative and the rules in their hands. It really makes the GM feel like a middle manager - guide them as best you can, but if you try to control everything yourself you'll probably go crazy.

Often it is new players who ask for advice when they're just starting out, but rarely (in my personal experience) do I find veteran / experienced players asking this question.

What's a tip or trick you'd pass along to an experienced player who already has a good grasp of TTRPGs? What wisdom would you share with someone whose been in the hobby for years or decades?

For example, for me personally at least. I think it's really important to be open to change. My advice to experienced players is to always try to discover a new system or explore a new aspect of a system you're familiar with, big or small. There are so many great systems out there to learn and experience with new mechanics, ideas, and narratives. For those who want to stay on familiar ground, try new classes or species you haven't gotten to explore yet. Adventure in new settings. Play around with character archetypes or choices. Explore how far you can take a tool set or dive into a new kind of background you've never played.

I think there is so much joy to be had in the discovery of something new.

Curious to hear everyone else's thoughts on this!

I've been mulling over the importance of physical consistency and managing scale in TTRPGs. A bit of a late-night ramble:

What I mean by physical consistency is having mechanics you can think in or visualize. Our own world is obviously physically consistent, and many simulationist systems attempt to mimic this, such as by having specific injuries per hit location, complex armor and weapon interactions, and detailed, granular statistics for materials. They have rules for realistic travel, hunger and fatigue, degrading equipment, and even rules for wiping your ass.

Scale, on the other hand, is the difference between regular steel weaponry and a stone castle wall. Increasing scale might look like some enchanted hellfire sword that can melt through stone like butter, or swapping out your basic gear for power armor. Scale is defined by everything from the mundane to the divine in fantasy, and ordinary human-scale forces versus god-like tech or incomprehensible forces, like the raw power of a supernova, in sci-fi.

I think what people really want from realism or simulationist games is that physical consistency: the feeling that there are always levers to pull and push, that the entire world or ruleset is an understandable machine, and that it doesn't ever feel like it has gaps or inconsistencies.

Similarly, I think what people really want in progression fantasy is a way to truly feel like they interact with the world differently, rather than the typical affair of "numbers go up" that plagues most games. Sure, the scope of your adventure increases, but there isn't typically a way to easily understand how powerful you are through a bunch of numbers. Is your magic the equivalent of modern heavy artillery? Is your armor invulnerable to an endless tide of normal weapons, but you can still be crushed by a giant's club? I don't think dealing a bunch of numerical damage conveys this well at all, as there will always be some scale where you need higher and higher numbers to make it work out where the math becomes a serious burden.

I don't think you need to emulate realism to have physical consistency, anyway. You can achieve it even with broad abstract rules so long as everything interacts cleanly and the mechanics connect to the fiction and vice versa. If you do that, you have achieved complete physical consistency: a fully interactable world, which will feel real. Getting scale working properly at all levels without an endless number of rules for specific classes, like infantry versus vehicle versus starship rules, is just another part of that.

Ideally, if there were such a system that used logic from the real world, it would allow you to shoot a dragon in its eye, or strip its armor to create a weak point, blow off its tail or a wing with a powerful explosive, and crawl inside of its mouth and stab it in its fleshy bits where your sword would normally do nothing to its scales. That if you do ANYTHING, there is a distinct and meaningful mechanical element to it. You can always rely on stripping away the rules to achieve physical consistency by relying on the table's logic about what would happen in a fictional situation, but now you'll certainly introduce mechanical inconsistency.

An abstract system that doesn't try to emulate our physical world in some way is a bit harder to visualize, of course; I can't imagine anything outside of perhaps a game with truly abstract elemental forces, rather than flesh and blood characters.

I don't believe there is a single system that has yet achieved this perfect balance of physical consistency (abstract or not) and seamless scale. Though, I'd love to see one.

This question has come up for me in multiple games: how do we resolve double duty dice attack mechanics when the PC uses a ranged attack and the antagonist has no ranged attack?

Right now, I am playing Monster of the Week (MotW), but it's come up in Blades in the Dark, and Band of Blades. I'm sure it comes up in other games.

Unlike some turn-based games where the PC makes a move and then the antagonist characters run by the GM then make moves, these games have the PC's roll a die or dice and the outcome determines not only if the PC succeeds but also if the antagonist characters succeed on their attacks. Here is a simple example from MotW:

The hunter (PC) takes their bat and swings it at the werewolf. The player rolls 2d6 and adds their tough modifier resulting in a value of 7. In this scenario, the hunter successfully bats the werewolf, but the werewolf also successfully claws the hunter. If the result were 13 instead, the werewolf may not have harmed the hunter at all. The mechanics in MotW are ever so slightly more nuanced, but this is accurate.

So far so good. However, how do we resolve these mechanics when the PC uses a ranged attack and the antagonist has no ranged attack? I roll my eyes at the player who takes a gun and announces that they suffer no harm because they are out of range despite the dice dictating otherwise. There is plausibility, but they should still suffer some consequences. I'm not sure how to square this, however.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

With the Ennies fresh on everyone's mind, I figured this behind the scenes peak at how major book prizes (e.g. Pulitzer) are awarded might be interesting, despite the post itself being tangential to RPGs.

https://rebeccamakkai.substack.com/p/book-prizes-dont-work-how-you-think

From discussion on the Ludonarrative Dissidents stream a couple months back, it sounds like the Ennies work the same way as Rebecca describes for other book awards.

TL;DR- you effectively pick the nominees (at least) when you pick the judges thanks to the insane workload and timeline.