When you first start a new TTRPG, what are some of the things that immediately turn you off of the game? Artwork? Character sheet design? Ease of access? Or something else?

I’ve been playing TTRPGs on and off for more than a decade and I have a few major things that just frustrate me and are not fun. I’m trying to learn how to enjoy them, or at least have them not make me angry.

I really don’t enjoy character creation from a crunch perspective, I just don’t enjoy reviewing the rules, feeling like I’m making the wrong choice/being criticized by others for not playing optimally, and compiling it into a character sheet.

In the same vein, leveling frustrates me to TEARS. I just spent 3 hours of time leveling a DC20 character from Novice to Level 1 for a session tonight and I’m ready to shred my character sheet.

Help me!! I want to at least feel neutral about this process because I LOVE playing games, but this stuff is making me not want to play.

Your party is hired by a loan-shark luchador to track down a debtor. This leads you all to an airship on its way to the Near. Can you escape in time?

When The Sky Comes Looking For You is a 40-page zine adventure for level 2 Weird Frontiers characters written by J. Yamil.

The zine features artists like Bradley K. McDevitt (Dungeon Crawl Classics), Christopher Torres (Weird Frontiers) and Yuri Perkowski Domingos (Shadowdark).

When The Sky Comes Looking For You will hit Kickstarter on February 7th as part of Zine Quest.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/whenthesky/when-the-sky-comes-looking-for-you

Thanks for supporting Indie RPG creators!

Hey everybody! Sharing my latest GM tips video hitting a few points I have about running the Shadow of the Demon Lord starting adventure Dark Deeds In Last Hope. But a good portion of the video's start is about how SotDL shook me out of my D&D haze and got me back into playing other fantasy games.

Link here: https://youtu.be/N32JMRVS3m8

So my question is: Were you ever previously stuck playing any game without playing anything else? If so, what was the game that got you out of your funk?

I've been playing DND 5e for 7 years now, and while i'm quite happy with it, I would like to try some other fantasy systems. I've been playing Old Dragon, a brazilian system that plays a bit like older DND versions (ADND / B/X) at least as far as i know, I've never played those.

While it's simplicity it's being quite fun. The combat is not what me and my players like and expect. I don't like huge dungeons, and my games tend to be about heroism and combat, so there isn't much treasure hunting.

Old Dragon has combat rules as simple as they can be, and expect the Player/DM to be creative, and come up with things to do in combat for themselves, and I'm sure it works greatly, but it isn't the type of combat that we like. We enjoy having "buttons" to press during combat, use this or that feature and etc.

So, I was wondering if maybe there is a middle ground? Something with simple rules, but a bit more focused on combat as current DND versions are.

I'm running EtR for my group pretty soon, and I'm unclear on the intentions behind one thing.

For anyone who has played, how many locations in each sector did you go through? Is it intended that you visit literally every one, or maybe a few in each sector depending on the length of the game? I'm not sure exactly what the intent is

I'm a beginner GM and would like some recommendations for a narrative focused steampunk game.

I recently ran a detective-themed TTRPG and incorporated props, including a printed note for the players to discover and a poster they’d see near the initial crime scene. The props worked brilliantly, setting the scene quickly and helping immerse the players in the world.

What’s your experience with props in your games?

Hi, there is an RPG that I remember loving but I can't seem to track down, and was hoping to get some assistance in finding it.

The core setting detail involved time travelling computers. Computers that were capable of sending information backwards in time to their past selves, and they were trying to help humanity as a whole rise up until they were peers. The setting was _very_ explicit that they were not evil robots trying to conquer everything or control everything.

There was a wide variety of cultures that you could choose to come from. Each culture had two main principles associated with it, such as 'Identity' or 'Silence'. These principles would be things that could be tagged by PC's in order to get bonuses or to overcome challenges.

The majority of what I remember now are the different culture items.

There was a Starfarers Union, a group of space travelers that took the fact they were in space all the time to completely transform themselves biologically, having bird or octopus or other strange features.

There was a planet of masked people whose principles were Identity and Privacy, who would constantly rotate their masks as they went throughout their day.

A group of monks at the edge of space who acted in perfect silence and had cool robes that muted them, going on pilgrimages out to the rest of the galaxy.

There were three 'evil' factions, which ultimately were just groups who were doing their own thing extremely. One was a hivemind culture, a second was a group that embraced cloning, and a third I believe was turning themselves mechanical.

I think that the title included the term gold somehow, or a synonym of gold, like 'aureate' or 'halcyon' or something.

I have a group of friends who I've played D&D with weekly for several years (the campaign totaled about 7 years). Our GM has gotten tired of running & writing the game, and wants to take a break from it, so I figured I could step up and run some shorter campaigns in the meantime. Here's the background:

• I (currently) play mostly text games, and exclusively non-D&D games.
  • Samples: Monsterhearts, Mouse Guard, Godbound.
• The group is very large (about 7-8 people), and is mostly D&D-only players.
  • This group was originally a group of coworkers, most of whom are not long-time RPG'ers, but are good at meeting consistently and open to play and have fun!
  • The previous GM & about 2 others have tried other games and enjoy/are open to them.
• The previous game was set in Tal'dorei and followed a fairly classic fantasy plot. The group enjoyed a more comedic one-shot I ran for a previous holiday. There's no current consensus on a genre or setting.

The primary barrier to the group picking up a new game, in my opinion, is the amount of time required to pick up a new system, and possibly managing expectations around a new game. I've chatted with a couple others and the sentiment is that another D&D game would likely be the easiest to pick up & least likely to lose people. Unfortunately, I've tried DM'ing D&D (on-and-off for some 3 years) and I'm not only not very good at it. I don't like the amount of prep work required to keep the game rolling, I don't like how rule zero is applied to D&D and I'm more accustomed to map-less (or theater of the mind) play. I don't mind the depth of rules or crunchiness, but it definitely took a while to learn it all.

Do there exist any game systems that are easily picked up by D&D players, but can be run by a very non-D&D GM with minimal prep & ideally few or no maps?

Additionally, has anyone had experience trying to convert a D&D group to non-D&D games in the past, and what tips or tricks helped?

I need help. I found a great indie game, genre-neutral, 3D6-resolution system a while back, but I forgot the name. It's about a 32-page PDF with accessible writing and gritty black-and-white art. It’s not GURPs Lite or the Action! System. Self-published i believe. I think it’s a one-word title. Does this ring a bell for anyone?

Would you rather have limited spell slots or a resource pool with points you can spend to cast spells? Why?

Disclaimer: I am very rarely in this sub and therefore do not know how AI is handled here. I couldn't find anything in the rules and pinned posts about the topic, so I'll be open about it for now.
I only use AI image generation for my private group of friends*. No commerce, no Youtube. Only for immersion and visualisation.*

My question is probably a bit specific, but I hope to find someone who has experience with this :)

I like to prepare very thoroughly for my adventures; I'm not someone who ‘just starts playing’, but rather a perfectionist. The preparation of my last adventure, in which I used AI image generation, was some time ago. The websites I used back then no longer exist or all have a rather expensive subscription model, which simply isn't worth it for me.

I play Call of Cthulhu. So I don't need fantasy NPC portraits so much as realistic ones. Sometimes in the 1920s, sometimes in the modern era - simply classic photos.

The crucial point is: I currently use Copilot from Microsoft with a 365 subscription (because of Office...) for text-based support. I've already tried to create suitable NPC portraits with Copilot, but I just can't find the right prompts to achieve a good result.

Finally to my question: Is there anyone here who uses Copilot to create NPC portraits for non fantasy RPGs? Could you give me some tips? I sometimes don't get very far with the usual inputs.

Thanks to all!

I've been reading through the Invisible Sun rpg books, and I love just how weird and surreal everything is. Like how new rooms can just suddenly show up in your house, or how you can find the personification of Monday taking a stroll downtown, or how people use emotions as food seasoning and money.

Any other games out there that are really surreal?

Hi guys. I got this idea from roll for shoes (You begin with one skill. While playing, If you roll all sixes, you get a new skill - specific to the action). I'd love to play a system that give you new skills or items every 10-20 minutes.

I like it because it's simple in the beginning. It creates a really organic character growth and excitement.

I tried 5e, but my players would spend almost an hour picking skills (mid session), that killed all the momentum. So that didn't work out.

Do you have any game that would work for this kind of gameplay? Maybe some system that focus on looting would work?

(sorry for my bad English, not a native speaker..)
so, basically I'm trying to master a Persona RPG campaign with this book and, for those who have played the Persona saga, there is the shop where you can buy weapons. At pg. 125, there is the section where you can create them, making it pretty homebrew, but I really don't understand "the Point Costs". In this book, it's written that you can use the point cost as a gauge of a weapon's strength, and I don't understand if this gauge has to be the same as the PC's level or something like that. Maybe if someone on reddit could explain this to me, that would make me happy, because I'm honestly losing my mind. I have linked the book in case..

Persona TTRPG v1.23

Seems interesting, at least to me. One of the first things I see when I look this game up on Google is someone on this very subreddit saying that the game is boring, so is that an opinion shared by everyone here, or what?

And if it is boring, what makes it so?

hi im looking for recommendations of gloomhaven alternatives

Talking around the table and then around the extended circles, I've yet to find anyone that actually enjoyed the idea that your character could die before you even got to play it. But yet no small number of games I played in my youth had that exact scenario in their Life Path generations. Hell, some had several and frequent ways of death before play.

And while talking about it we couldn't really find a satisfying way to even include the concept- Life Path or not. And this is ignoring potential options like D&D/adjacent undead or ghost races where having died is the point of that character.

The only reconciliation I've imagined is if you have a game like Songbirds, Dark Souls, or some Destiny games where dying and returning is already a central concept and the character generation just plays into this- giving you an early power/effect at the cost of being an inch closer to permanent death during the campaign. But even then, that still feels somewhat like a copout since it thus wouldn't be adding much to the character/backstory.

I’ve started messing around with designing one-pager/one-shot RPGs and recently my sister’s bf asked if he could incorporate one I made in their existing D&D campaign (which inspired me to finally start publishing them to itch).

How often do you use one-pagers to inspire sessions? I’m working on one now that could be played as either a super simplified D&D-like one-shot or as a fun side quest in a campaign (bar crawl adventure where # of beers temporarily modifies existing stats).

Should I focus solely on the one-shot format or is it worth also gearing this towards people who already play D&D and other systems?

I want to know about the times you played F.A.T.A.L. and you liked it.

Or do you like and recommend Warhammer 3rd edition?

Anything like that.

If the game has a large, ardent fan community, I will disqualify it from this thread (though I have no authority to enforce that, so do whatever you want xP). This is for games like DnD and Gurps that also have many people who don't like it on principal.

I started reading LitRPGs a few years ago and have fallen in love with them. They support such a unique storytelling niche and scratch and itch I didn't know existed.

There is an element to LitRPGs that I kind of increasingly desperately wish I could see emulated within a TTRPG. A lot of LitRPGs tend to have what I can only describe as "Reactive Skill Systems".

Instead of these fictional game environments having any sort of standardized set of skills, they are usually implied to be so diverse, variable, and enormous that literally any possible hyper-specific concept can manifest as a skill and be capable of being upgraded to oblivion through repeated use.

An example of the sort of thing I'm trying to get across:

• Player narrates picking up a broom as a makeshift weapon in a fight, acquiring the "Broom" skill after successfully knocking out an assailant with it, which could potentially be upgraded to become incrementally better at any task that involves a broom, be it intended acts of cleaning, or as a weapon. Potentially even exploited at high levels as a loophole to offer a skill bonus in cases where the player is "sweeping", even if it's not with a broom.

Now, I can certainly think of plenty of games that use narrative rules that could accomplish a lot of the other aspects of LitRPGs, but as far as longform TTRPGs that mechanically support the concept of impromptu skill acquisiton and upgrading completely on the fly, that I can't say I've yet seen.

I'm sincerely hoping there isn't some super obvious, quintessential game that is capable of this that I'm just bone-headedly forgetting about, but I'd certainly be grateful to have such a thing pointed out to me nonetheless.

I can appreciate that this is a fairly bizarre request, so any spitballing you guys can provide would be appreciated.

I did some sick shit.

I dragged my players through a 3 shot (was supposed to be anyway; ended up needing a 4th session) where I had split sessions for sessions 1 and 4, then a different system for 2 and 3. I did this under the guise of a flashback where a DMPC walked them through it under a high-stakes pretense, then had them do it again for more personal stakes.

The setup was like this: For session 1 I had them pick how the group knew each other, and basically made them role-play out a session zero. They elected to be a hockey team, and so I asked them how they felt about the tragedy that took their team mate 1 year ago, and made them start building up some lore on this kid: he's smart, team captain, always down to goof off, etc. I also had them role play out some memories with each other to kick start the interpersonal dynamics. I pulled them into this sketchy little diner with a guy who started talking to them about where they were going camping, and basically queued up session 2, which was a flashback in the town that I used Call of Cthulhu for.

Session 2 and 3 ended up being these characters dealing with some weird stuff around town, a posession, then trying to find the magician who brought all this (a woodsman interested in felling Ygdrassil because his lover died), including bringing the characters to Ygdrassil.

Session 4 we got back to the hockey bros (the entire time between sessions I was texting them "remember when [passed friend] did this?" and we were just sort of passively role playing and popcorning around to keep the memories going. For this session I put them in kids on bikes, and had them go take out the Woodsman again, now with the help of purga-friend as the powered up character.

It was great. I had some awesome encounters (a woman who turned into a tree in the town, black insects taking some NPC's out a'la x-files, etc) and really was happy with the relationships my players built with each other and with their dead boi friend.

Crushed it.

I’m looking at starting up a new game and DungeonWorld is an option. The group has been having fun with Scum and Villainy and I think (not certain yet) that I’d like to stay in the narrative end of things. My players are drawn to fantasy and so I’m thinking about going back that way.

Which leaves me with DungeonWorld and maybe Chasing Adventure. I’m curious if anyone’s played/run both and can give any feedback on the experience. Or on any other narrative and/or lightweight fantasy adventure games I should consider?

Hi, as I wrote in the title, I'm trying to create an RPG system. It started as a silly idea with my friends, but I wanted to make it real. The problem was that I started the wrong way and spent two years writing everything down in a document, but I never took proper notes or organized my ideas, so it was a mess. Additionally, I was not consistent with my writing; I would work on it for a while, then stop and come back two months later.

Well, at the beginning of this year, I threw away everything I had done and started from scratch. I now have a large folder in Obsidian with everything organized, detailing how each part of the system should work. Basically I just need to make it more technical and actually write it because the foundation is already there. However, I have no idea how to start. I would really appreciate some help.

First edition Thank you to everyone who commented I now feel like I have a direction to follow from here on out

I have an obnoxious question. Are there any games or supplements or anything that have rules for building collections of things?

So like, collecting coins, MTG cards, plushies, etc. Where there’s mostly common items but also increasingly rare variants?

It’s a difficult thing to google for since 90% of the results are just about people’s game collections.

From the moment I started playing D&D, I wanted to play as stuff outside the classic Human, Elf, Dwarf and Hobbit Halfling. This first started with species like Goblins, then Aasimars, Changelings, Orcs, and so on... but it wasn't enough.

Then came stuff like Shifter, Warforged, Centaurs and Dhampyr, which gave me a pseudo way to play as creatures like Vampires and Werewolves... but it still wasn't enough.

After I changed systems, I started playing one very similar to D&D, with the grand prize to me being player species like Large Centaur, true Giants, Build-a-Bear style Golems, Harpies with no arms and balanced flight, Tiny Faries, and many more! For a full year, I was satiated... until I wasn't.

While looking through my phone's files, I found a purchase I made that I never got to use: a PDF on new classes + species combos for D&D 5e that let you play as full-on monster, be it angels, demons, dragons, familiars, ogres, etc.

It was then that it clicked, THIS is the way for me.

I don't want to simply be a human in a different skin, I want to fully BE and FEEL like the monster in question. I'm okay if humans are still just the classic Fighter, Mage, Cleric and Rogue, since I love them still; but when I choose to play as a non-human, I want to fully embrace the idea 150%

Hey All,

I wanted to advertise our podcast. We are a Delta Green AP podcast of 4 best friends playing an original campaign I wrote. Delta Green is a game based off Call of Cthulhu that's a mash up of X-Files, Lovecraft, and modern conspiracy theories. I also do all the sound and write/perform the music, so hopefully it's not shitty! The story follows three agents in New Mexico in 1998 investigating an uncanny biologic breakthrough at a small christian college in the desert with sinister underpinnings. Inspired by the surrealism of David Lynch, folk cosmic horror of Laird Barron, and one too many whiskeys. Appreciate feedback!

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