rpg

I have been chugging away at making my own fantasy ttrpg for several months now, and a decision I made early on has been bugging me as possibly being misguided.

I really want a fast combat system. However, there are two ways the interpret "fast" here. The one I committed to early on was to make each round one second long, so on your turn you only have time to either move or act or do nothing. This does mean each turn feels really fast, since the amount of choices you need to make each round are extremely small, and this also make spellcasting seem way more risky and expensive than it actually is since you need to commit multiple rounds to the casting. It feels fast, but combat can take hours.

The other option I did not pursue is to compress each scene into one big roll, creating a system similar to the Narrative Dice system of Genesys where you spend several minutes gathering a pool of dice which represent the chaos and misfortune of the scene, roll them once, augur the bones, and then combat is done. Usually the entire combat scene will take less than 5 minutes, but it's a long 5 minutes filled with details, debate, and checking your work.

The reason I was attracted to the more granular first option was mainly because it's ironically the less crunchy option, since your options each round are to either Move, Fight, Defend, Aim, or do a quick Skill Check. However, as the system is growing it's becoming more clear to me that my game is fundamentally not about the fighting, its about the journey there and back to the community you call home. So, I'm starting to think I should have taken a more zoomed-out approach to combat, maybe starting with wargame rules and then working backwards to derive 1-person combat, maybe trying to make my own narrative dice system using the normal polyhedral dice.

In the end, my priority is to avoid what most DnD-likes end up doing, which is combat that feels slow and also takes hours, but I gotta go in one direction or other. I'm curious what y'all's preferences are. When you are playing a TTRPG, would you rather play combat that feels fast but actually takes hours, or combat that feels slow but actually takes minutes? What's more important to you?

My partner and I enjoy worldbuilding and we like bringing our world to different systems and seeing how our world looks and acts through the lens of that system.

For simplicity sake, imagine a typical fantasy setting. Elves, dwarves, orcs, magic, yadda. What would be your system of choice for playing in it?

If you don't like your standard fantasy, obviously this question is not directed at you.

Bonus points if you tell me what you like about your chosen setting in relation to a fantasy setting.

I liked his cyberpunk deck, so I thought I'd share

I know there’s a lot of Swade system for deadlands but I feel that don’t work for me so what’s your go to Weird West system ?

I run a table. One of the people at the table insisted that I checked out Daggerheart. So I did. And I was very pleasantly surprised.

Why? Well, I admit I had some prejudices against it. First, I sort of made up my mind when I saw the whole licensing issue, Daggerheart basically doing what Wizards of the Coast did with Dungeons and Dragons. But not only that, I also saw red flags in Daggerheart itself: minis.

I saw a video for Daggerheart where the thumbnail showed minis. I was out. I find minis so frustrating. They are in my list of things that I cannot care about. I care about dramatic stories, not combat simulation. I care about intrigue and character growth, not arithmetic. I saw that and assumed that Daggerheart was a combat simulator just like Dungeons and Dragons is. I didn't even pay attention.

But then my friend insisted that I read about Daggerheart. And so I did.

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that minis are optional. Even more importantly, I was shocked to find a game that effectively is Powered by the Apocalypse. I was especially relieved to not find rules for movement that require trigonometry or strange approximations (unlike Dungeons and Dragons, where there are grids and numbers everywhere).

I found a game that prioritized drama. Yes, it still simulates combat, but it does so in such a simple way that makes me happy to run it.

I’m excited! This would be the first game that I ever play when the game is just released. This would be the first game in which I don't even have to pitch to the table; the table already wants to play it.

Of course, these are my first impressions. Maybe they'll change. For now, I'm happy.

https://www.allplay.com/board-games/the-defenders-almanac/

An extensive illustrated guidebook to the besieged lands of the Commonwood and a rules-light tabletop roleplaying game for collaboratively telling short stories of animal resistance to the machine invasion ~ from T.L. Simons, creator of Defenders of the Wild and Bloc by Bloc with fantasy author Margaret Killjoy, game designer Henry Audubon, illustrator Meg Lemieur, and writer Patricia Noonan

Anyone played it? Got any tips? I realise it's pretty recent, so maybe not..

I'm about to start a session with a new gaming group (of old friends). I'm new to DMing and TTRPGs in general (have played one session of pathfinder), two of my 4 players have a fair bit of experience playing and DMing.

I realise this is way more rules-light than pathfinder, though that's probably not saying much - it also seems a fair bit lighter even than some PbtA based games I've looked at..

General advice for DMing rulse-light RPGs also welcome :)

In the Seattle shadows, fixer Brynne Taggart is known as one of the best, the kind of fixer you want on your side rather than against you. But something has gone sideways and now she’s disappeared. Her mentor, the legendary fixer Saint James, needs a team to turn over every stone in the sprawl and if necessary crack some skulls (or spill some blood) in order to find out what happened … and why.

What starts off as a simple investigation within the suburbs of Seattle quickly escalates into a royal cluster-frag as gangs, bikers, and other runners become major obstacles. So the question becomes: are you going to take this laying down or are you going to rise to the occasion?

The description sounds like this is not a Disian plot, more street like

Anyone checked this out?

Since I started observing CGL on DrivethruRPG, I must admit they do put out stuff for SR. Maybe not always the best but it's not complete silence. I wish they negotiated the rights to use Horrors' plot, though

Don't get me wrong - I love me some VtM, but I was just curious if there are any other good vampire/werewolf-centric ttrpg's out there?

Winners will be announced at Gen Con on August 1st.

When I write as a GM, I incorporate all of my players into the story and evolve the narrative around their characters' backgrounds, actions, etc. So, when a player doesn't show up regularly, it has a tendency to disrupt or even halt the game's progress. The smaller the group, the more serious this issue becomes. I've had gaming groups implode over this.

So what sorts of rules or understandings does your group have in place to offset the void left when a player doesn't show up to the game? Does the absent player become an NPC under the GM's control? Do you just ignore the fact that the PC carrying the magical Orb of Whatsit is off on holiday when the king demands the Orb to save the kingdom?

Obviously, we all have real-life stuff that crops up from time to time that can prevent us from playing, but if I can commit to writing and running the game each week (barring life's little emergencies), I don't feel I'm being unfair to expect the same from my players.

So, GMs...what are your thoughts?

Title says it. Roll for combat/battlezoo's distributor 'Diamond' has filed for bankruptcy and is keeping their (and other company's) stock to sell in a liquidation sale to keep the proceeds and pay off their debt.

Mentioned in the video, diamond is a distributor for other TTRPG companies as well, such as paizo, goodman games, and others.

I don't think they're the sole distributor for all of them, so i think the amount of damage it's doing is highly specific to each company, but it's still pretty shitty for companies in this industry in particular because of how hard it is to turn profits already in a niche industry.

Here are 20 free ship maps for your high-seas campaigns!

These maps represent many hours of work which I have been able to do full-time since the start of 2024. Consider this my way of giving back the positivity and support I’ve received in this community since the beginning of my mapmaking career!

Download all 20 maps for free here.

If you enjoy my work then please consider supporting me on Patreon. Supporters will get access to all of my watermark-free maps, gridded variants, and tokens in a VTT-friendly file format.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31885959

Somehow it didn't ping on any of my radars and I don't see a mention here

CBR+PNK hack with metahumans, magic and a bit more meat than the original