RPG

First-time DM and newbie players.
Is it a good idea to pick alternate-history based on Earth setting, for the ease of familiarity?

Are there any existing communities that focus on designing your own rpg?

If not, would you be interested in joining one?

How do people feel about posts regarding designing rpgs in this community? Is it relevant and interesting or a potential nusiance?

Would you play a game with no combat items? There would still be items to bolster social interactions, stealth, and other out-of-combat activities.

Would this impede your sense of advancement, or are character feats and non-combat items enough?

I am working on a game with a magic system for combat. It is already complex enough that I prefer not to have combat items. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

I don’t really know where to begin with moderation and I have limited access to the internet with my current living situation. If anyone has any suggestions on if this is a good idea or if any of you would be interested in joining such a group I’d love to hear from you, thanks! :)

Hey y'all! I've been thinking about starting a group of Legacy. For those who don't know, the system is a Powered by the Apocalypse game set in a Post-Apocalyptic setting of any kind (I was thinking a zombie apocalypse) where the players take control of factions. You shepherd your community through the ages and you also take control of significant characters from them to solve various threats to your community. You take decisions at both the faction and personal level, and you both cooperate and compete with the other players for resources.

My timezone is EEST. If you're interested, leave a comment or a DM and I'll be in touch!

this is one of the largest and most comprehensive updates to the game yet, and I think the game will finally be in a content complete state and a stable testing state.

Any games, module, intersting experiments?

Hello everyone. Im looking for a simple system that can be played by something like 3-5 people, which is simple enough to be played by an 11 year old. My sister is in her Harry Potter phase so magic and fantasy wizard setting is really helpful. I need it to be simple enough where I can teach it to my family in a night, and we can get right into whatever story I end up DMing (for the first time) for them. I really want to spend some time with my sister over the summer engaging her imagination.

Suggestions please :D

Edit: you people are wonderful, I'll check all your suggestions out for sure!

Hello there. I've started my MG 2e RPG read. I've fallen in love with the setting, but I really didn't like the GM's "The Mission" part of the game.

It reads like a rushed sequence of railroads: Mice run through a pre-determined and pre-calculated sequence of encounters with a very specific number of checks, then find a place to rest where they're allowed only a short respite before hitting the road again.

I've first thought that it was going to be an easy thing to just rip that part off, before I realised that the entire game seems balanced on the fact mice have arbitrarily few checks. Screw this, and I'll also screw with the "checks" economy and overflow opportunities to call Bonds/Instincts/Goals as well.

So: Can I and it actually won't break the game? Should I just find another game?

I really liked this module from back in the AD&D days, Tharizdun is a strange god

I have created osr and mausritter communities for our pleasure. I hope it is useful!

So the only game ive played was dnd and its hard finding a group for some reason and i dont really like that online stuff. so i like dnd but i have no-one to play with that i know and dnd can be complex at time.

is there by chance a free rpg tabletop game that is great for solo beginners who want to play more rpg's and such? i just feel like i need something besides computer games to play/do.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/116973

Hope this doesn't come across as too self promote-y. I'm not really looking for views or anything, but I thought I'd share what I made.

I'll admit I'm a bit anxious posting this, but I hope it helps someone or you just find it an interesting topic for discussion. It's just a small minimalist blog where I talk about TTRPG design and how I run my games and stuff. If I've misunderstood how this works and the link doesn't work, here's another one: Transient Thoughts on Roleplaying Games. I only have one article right now, about battlemaps and how they influence encounter design a lot more than one would think, and the impact of small choices in making them.

(I fixed preview formatting and opening articles, and also changed theme to be less aggressive to the eyes!) ~~For the best viewing experience I recommend clicking the title of a post to open it up properly (I'm still messing about with getting the layout of things prim and proper..)~~ and you can check the pinned 'About' post if you wanna know more.

If you do read it and have any feedback, or just wanna talk about it, I'd be more than glad to answer any questions in the comments here :D

Hope I'm ok putting this here, just wanted to share with some more people, start a conversation and all that ^^

I came across these published supplements recently as they one was listed as a winner of the 2023 LGBTQ Tabletop Game Award. They have a series of adventures, as well as pregen characters, and some additional subclasses, monsters, backgrounds, and items.

I'm sure this won't be everyone's jam, but I've been reviewing this content and I'm really intrigued with the settings and culture that it would bring to the right campaign and players. Thought it would be worth a share!

I wanted to share a TTRPG character creation (session 0) thing I did the website for. It's called Roll for your Life.

You can get either digital issue for free with coupon code "greyrolls" at https://rollforyourlifebook.com

(This is not an affiliate code, I'm just sharing a free thing that excited me)

I keep all of what happened in one journal, and everything else on the computer. All the maps, the schedules, and the character sheets using a gurps character sheet program (forgot what its called), because I run it through discord using a text format. I hardly plan anything besides what's in my head.

Ive been trying to use different ways to plan besides just pure vibes. like using joplin, or some wiki format or even trying to do use a mindmap? But alas most of what I do is simulating what I believe would happen and keeping character sheets of possible enemies on hand.

So, I'm curious, what do you do?

Our DM uses cards which add a special effect on critical success and critical failure. Some of them are benign, some of them are severe.

There are 4 of us in the group. We walk into the room, and the mind flayer immediately stunlocks 3 of us. My character is a Loxodon Cleric built like a tank, but he can't break the stun because I keep getting shit rolls.

On its next turn, the mind flayer runs over to me. It goes to reach out its tentacle attack which will flay my mind and make me its slave... and crit fails. Crit fails with advantage.

The card that got drawn for the crit fail made it injure its tentacles on my armor. That may not have been a problem, except that they got injured in such a way that they could not be used until the next long rest. Think, like, breaking an arm, or something. But that meant that ALL of the flayer's most dangerous attacks were now unusable.

So we fucking thrashed it in the next turn, because it was completely defenseless. In our world these monsters are extraordinarily rare and most people wouldn't even know they exist- when we brought its body back to the wizard in town he FREAKED OUT and we were just like "yeah this weird tentacle monster was there, it acted like it was a big deal or something but it died when we breathed at it with no problem at all."

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/82851

I thought I'd share this funny story as it's easier to write than the Cutting Black review (coming soon).

It was the first session for a bunch of new players. I did the run I normally do for chummers: kill a gang leader called Chumkicker, frame another gang by copying their signature style. So, they decide to frame the Leather Devils as they have a bike fancy enough to make it work.

Their plan isn't bad, but I spot a pretty obvious hole in it and keep it to myself. They have the decker set up on the street corner to mess with smartlink systems and stuff, they have the mage make a big enough distraction to pull them out of the building, and they have the street sam & rigger do the actual drive-by.

The mage does the distraction (trid phantasm) from inside his car, and drives off as soon as the gang members start coming outside to investigate.

The street sam & rigger come roaring down the street, and while the decker is data spiking all the smartgun systems, they get the mark and roar off.

The decker is now alone, on a street corner, with no exit plan and the entire gang looking around for anybody associated with the hit.

What follows is a looney tunes escape, where he gets shot twice while summoning his scooter (yes, scooter. He blew all his starting nuyen on the best cyberdeck money could buy), and hops on and tries to drive away. Unfortunately, he doesn't have pilot ground vehicle trained, so he's rolling like 2 dice each combat round trying to gain speed. He eventually critically glitches and abandons the broken scooter, and tries to run on foot. He also does not have Running trained, btw.

While all of this is going on, the rest of the party has met up, starts high-fiving (the players knew what was going on, kudos to them for staying in character and not metagaming), and one of them asks "Where's the decker?". They all turn pale as they realize what happened, and get back on their respective vehicles trying to rescue him.

By the time they get there, the decker's been shot a few more times, managed to lose them for a few combat rounds in a crowd but is bleeding profusely, and another shot finally knocks him out cold (burned edge permanently to not die). As he's laying there, with the gang members coming to finish him off, the rest of the party roars in, starts a short gunfight and rescues him.

Moral of the story: have an exit plan for everyone.

I hope this isn't seen as an advertisement, because I think it's just legitimately of interest to anyone who likes RPGs a lot (and I certainly don't work for Bundle of Holding). It's like Humble Bundle if it focused entirely on RPG content and there's a lot of genuinely good deals tossed around that would never show up on Humble.

I keep trying to follow @rpg but I just get a pending status and I don’t see any posts. Am I doing something wrong?

Yo! Played TTRPGs for over a decade, wondering if anyone is scouting out some players for a campaign. I'm free most weeknights.

Great article for everyone to read.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/631499

So, I've been running the PF2E beginner box, which is like a tutorial adventure, for a group of 5 people (we play as long as at least 3 show up). The players had the option of playing any of the pregen "iconic" characters for Pathfinder. So far, we've had a fighter, witch, monk, swashbuckler, and summoner. Of those, only the witch has any sort of healing, and the witch player couldn't make our session last night.

The players went into this room that is meant to be like an optional miniboss (but there isn't really a way for them to have known that). The miniboss is this fire elemental rat that is supposed to teach you how "persistent damage" works. It's a very tough fight, and the elemental has a lot of defensive options like a cloud of smoke around it. Eventually the rat killed two party members (the swashbuckler and the monk), and one more (the fighter) went unconscious but didn't die. The last player (summoner) got chipped down to like 3 HP but was able to drag the fighter out of the fight to safety.

I think it was a good learning opportunity for the players that you need to be tactical and work together in PF2e, since they basically just all tried to attack the rat in melee. It also shows the value of having support characters in the party.

Going forward we are going to complete the beginner box, the two players who lost their PCs are going to play new pregens (bard and investigator). I'm hoping the players don't get too disillusioned with PF2e because it is very difficult at times.

I'd love to hear other Pathfinder GMs' thoughts. I'm still new, so it's possible I was doing something wrong, but I think I ran that fight the way it's meant to be run.