#TTRPG opinions

[agathielart]

Tonight I DM'd my first Call of Cthulhu one shot and for the first time in my short DM experience I don't feel dread nor anxiety!!!

Turns out that I only needed to find a system that works for me. DnD is too complex and its adventures have too many plot holes for me to manage peacefully, Blades in the Dark requires too much improv for my shy ass.

Please please please if you wish to DM but when you do you feel unsatisfied or unable to run the game, try another system before giving up!

I can't express how happy I feel to finally be the GM for my usual GM (and husband) <3

[sage-advisor-of-gms]

Oh boy! Banter! I’m so here for this!

Arguable. The Ranger, as released at the beginning of 5e borders on unplayable, and is definitely not very fun to play. It's the only class they had to patch (twice!), which they eventually achieved by bringing the Ranger closer to how it was designed in 4e.

That’s weird. When I played a ranger for a mini arc, I had a great time with my raptor sidekick without having to consolidate the revisions. Nevertheless, to criticize the ranger class for receiving patches still leaves 9 classes on the board with a subclass total of 38, and that’s if you lump all the circles of land together and solely consult the PHB. Also, are we allowed to start talking about the edition that was so bad that we collectively chose to treat it like fight club?

Not to mention, 5e flattened several choices and took away others. You cannot make a martial healer, or a knight distinguishable from both Paladin and Fighter, or a purely psionic caster. All of those options were available in previous editions.

True story: one of the players in a group that has became regular’s at my table ask if we could do an all-monk one shot. I wait for the two players to veto it only to hear them jump on board. One played the way of the elements, one played Tasha’s healing monk, and one played Xanathar’s sun soul. The issue arose when they had too much fun knocking my fools around that they turn my one shot into a two shot. Same group made a band of bards for another supposed one shot, all from different colleges. We all had too much fun and my one shot turn into a short campaign.

And please don't say "just flavor it differently" or "just homebrew it", I see an attitude like that as a major problem. It lets WotC off the hook for designing a shallow game experience.

Got it. We’re not going to glorify Bethesda’s current business model. You and me are on the same page. I will adhere to your taboo rule and will not utter those phrases. Instead I will refer to any instance of those concepts with the video game terminology of ‘Mods’.

The Mystic didn't work, in my opinion, because they tried to cram every single D&D idea of psionics into a single class. MCDM Productions has since approached the idea and created The Talent, which works pretty well for what it's supposed to do.

Wait, I thought we just agreed on no mods. Why does this hyperlink take me to a supplement store with a 14.99 price tag? Is this comic from Marvel or DC? Are you an affiliate marketer? What the return policy in the event that my DM won’t allow me to roll my mystical man and begs me to just go with one of Tasha’s Psionics classes?

I honestly don't see what the problem with that is. Aren't subclasses supposed to add unique mechanics and aesthetics? The aforementioned MCDM Productions was able to do that not once but three times (yes they made two more classes, which are also very well designed). I won't even mention how many well-balanced, interesting classes are available on Dungeon Master's Guild.

I’ll provide an example. So hypothetically, you have hired me on to create a new D&D 5e class to solve the issue of only one class edition. I’m going to save the Kineticist for the final point and say that I’m building this class so that I can finally my SpiderDrow. Now I need three subclasses.

…

Well this is quite the conundrum that I’ve written myself into. Technically I should have one subclass down because it the Spider-Man that I want to play. But do I then make two additional arachnids sub-classes so that players can choose a crab or scorpion route? Or do I base the subclasses off of the spider mens of the multiverse?

This all has to be addressed before I get to question like: What hit die do I use? How do I convey web slinging and web swinging? If they got bit by a magical spider, would that just make them sorcerers? If they built their gear, doesn’t that make them artificer?

May I interest you in the Kineticist in these trying times?

“You can certainly try.” -Matthew Mercer

Pathfinder 2E is in general a pretty decent counterpoint, too: they've been releasing new classes pretty often. Two more are in the playtest as we speak!

Seriously, I looked over the link provided. However, the sudden shift of language due to the presentation of different mechanics hinder me from really enjoying the possibility of playing a Kineticist. And since mods are not allowed in our scenario, the solution to playing a class not found in D&D 5e becomes switching over to Pathfinder 2e.

So, I logged in to my Roll 20 account and decided to search for a Pathfinder 2e game to play on the a free slot that I had on Saturday. That specific search brought up 0 games. I decided to just run the broadest search for Pathfinder 2e on Roll 20 just to ensure that the site wasn’t malfunctioning. I found 4 games that were playing Pathfinder 2e. For comparison, when I put in a basic search for D&D 5e, I received 8 full pages of open games plus a ninth page that contained the overflow of games.

If we’re holding TTRPGs systems in a similar standard as the console wars, I’ll admit that there are some things that Pathfinder 2e does better than Dungeons and Dragons 5e. In terms of mechanics, pathfinder has a much more complex system that allows for more diverse options. However, that same complexity could also be serving as its low audience engagement. The majority of people tend to believe that the D&D 5e system is easier to understand. Adding the influential factor that D&D recieves as a named brand (Stranger Things, Critical Roll, Gravity Falls, Community), D&D gains an audience base that outnumbers Pathfinder. In my opinion, Pathfinder 2e ‘longer official class list’ falls to the sunk fallacy cost when an individual has to invest more time learning an advanced system only to find out that hardly anyone else is playing the system.

Now that D&D 5.5 is drawing nearer... Could we perhaps admit that it's pretty weird there was only one base class released outside of the Player's Handbook throughout the entire lifespan of 5e?

[bongosinferno]

Interesting thing with the Bethesda fallouts (I've been playing a bit of Fallout 4 recently) is that they, at least in my opinion, misunderstand the fun parts of the first 2 games. I don't think think the setting is a very important part in those games, it's a part of it but it's just set-dressing for the gameplay and fun quest stories and how the players interact with them. I think there's some potential in say Fallout 4 for interesting quests or stories (I've done a couple of quests but a lot of my knowledge is from the Joseph Andersson video), but the solutions to any story just leads back into the shooting gameplay loop. This is, I think, antithetical to the format of the originals, which were based a lot more in having the format of a TTRPG. If your TTRPG sessions all boiled down to shooting people with basically no alternative solutions to quests I think your players would get bored. Since it's got shooter mechanics this kind of salvages it, it becomes it's very different own thing. But the wonderful gameplay loop of those first two games is lost, and I kind of miss it. Man, I need to replay Fallout 2.

[cannibalhalflinggaming]

"

For a lot of people I think talking about the negatives of AI is pretty exhausting and trite. In online bubbles that are primarily dominated by artists, you could be fooled into believing that only massive corporations are behind AI, and that basically anyone who isn’t a heartless CEO or an embarrassed millionaire of some kind is firmly against it.

But that’s not the reality. The big news from last month is that Wizards of the Coast wants to use AI more frequently moving forward. It’s an expected move from a giant evil corporation; nothing new to see here. What will definitely receive less attention is that a new rule banning all AI content in /r/OSR has received a not insignificant amount of backlash. This is much more significant to me, because the OSR community prides itself on having a DIY ethic. So it’s about time we had yet another intervention about AI." - @sabrinatvband

[theood]

What story do you guys wanna see for dndads s3?

All I want is a new setting and fully new characters not related to the dads/teens at all. Complete new world!! Starting fresh!

[pixelkind413]

The past year or so has been a steady descent into madness when it comes to my TTRPG stuff...

It started with "Tower of Heck Cubed: Get Off Of My Lawn" requiring an honest-to-god Database to keep all the Guardians and Abilities straight, now I'm doing prep for "Pantheon Coup" and the Development Paths system I devised needs a fucking flowchart to make sense.

I zoomed out so the text isnt visible because this isnt about the content, but fucken look at this. I've barely started, and now I have opinions about flowchart formatting.

As someone who started by running an entire party's worth of character sheets in a single google sheets page, I feel like I'm a long way from home.

[earlgraytay]

God. I genuinely love DND, like, on its own merits and in its own right, but as a polytheist some of the mechanics and worldbuilding around religion in the Realms make me want to tear my hair out

you can tell it's polytheism written by folks who by and large have never practiced polytheism nor spoken to any hard polytheists, and also who didn't stop to think through some of the implications of their setting

and in seeking to accommodate one of my players (we're playing DIA, he wanted to be a) from Elturel b) a cleric, meaning he'd be affiliated with the church of Torm normally, except c) he wanted to pick the Grave domain) I'm stumbling into some of those contradictions now

[damsels-n-dice]

For the tarot ask game: the Heirophant and the Sun!

The Hierophant — Who is a fellow game designer you’ve learned a lot from? OR What is a piece of popular wisdom about games you think is nonsense?

i have a horrible memory, particularly for names, so i'm not confident in my ability to point at anyone in particular as a source of knowledge or inspiration. (that being said, i am going to shout out J.N. Butler purely for giving me the confidence to put price tags on my games). so i suppose i have to talk about popular wisdom... and pretend i know what that actually is, as someone who's still new to game design

i suppose i'd like to see more people and games blurring the line between game master and player? i very much view a game master as just a player with a slightly different role, and i see quite a few games that forget that game masters are playing the game too! or games that do away with them entirely, which is fine, but i do love running games. give me more games with multiple game masters, or where people swap in and out of the role, or where the "standard" responsibilities of that role are challenged somehow.

(if i'm just looking at the wrong kind of games, i'd love to see ones with the sort of thing i'm talking about! recs are so welcome)

The Sun — Talk about a game you’ve made that you’re proud of.

i was so hoping for this question!!! most of my game design in the past has been lyric games, solo games, or very short multi-player games. i'm a full-time student and have an irl job too, so those formats (200 word, one page, solo games) are easier with my limited time. but i've been wanting for ages to write myself a "proper", lengthier game.

i finally did that last month, in the form of 'til it kills us, my entry for the queer wrath jam! it's inspired by some of my favourite stories (both ones i wrote and ones other people did) and it's about 15x longer than anything else i've written. it was a massive labour of love, and it's still a work in progress! i'll be starting playtesting for it soon.

not only am i proud of it because of the amount of effort and the size of it, though -- it's also my favourite concept for a game i've worked on! the playbooks, each based on an emotion and the kind of magic i imagine that emotion would create, are so much fun to write. many of them are based on a combination of characters i love, real people i know who fit the archetypes, and just a very vivid imagination.

it's the best thing i've made so far, and i'm hoping the next thing i release will live up to the standards that this one set for me!

(and that i can get some equally cool art for it)

(honorable mention also to my lyric game defensive programming! i'll be the first to admit that it's barely a lyric game, let alone an actual playable game, but it was so much fun to write. i love lyric games as writing exercises, working in interesting metaphors and historical/literary references. and this one has by far the most frequent and most interesting stuff going on in terms of references and wordplay!)

[honeyboyfelix]

when you suddenly realize that you have no idea what your dnd characters personality traits are 🧍

[honourablejester]

Heart: The City Beneath Character Concept: Gnoll Vermissian Knight

Trying out actual character creation over here. And I really want my train knight, my armoured paladin of a warped subway network that got hooked into a vast, reality-breaking eldritch thing.

Character creation in Heart is pretty easy. Pick your ancestry, which has no direct mechanical impact. Pick your calling and record the core ability from it. Pick your class and record the core ability from it. Pick 1 major and 3 minor abilities from your class. Pick your equipment. Pick two starting story beats from your calling. Fill out the details around the mechanical core, including answering the questions from your ancestry and calling. Voila! So:

Character Sheet: Ahkoura Roselight, Vermissian Knight

Name: Ahkoura Roselight

Ancestry: Gnoll

Class: Vermissian Knight

Calling: Enlightenment

Skills: Discern (Enlightenment), Delve (Vermissian), Endure (Steelbones), Hunt (Phantom Lens)

Domains: Technology (Vermissian), Warren (Tunnel Rat)

Active Story Beats: Gain favour with a faction that can help you learn more about your goal. Find a helpful text.

Equipment: Scrapsword (kill, d6), Magelight Rig (delve, d6).

Resources: Spare Wires & Capacitors (technology, d6).

Trinkets: Small sphere with a southern star map on it (Gnoll). Brass-inlaid tin half-filled with brown, gritty stimulant (Gnoll). Book of handwritten theories and observations (Enlightenment).

Abilities:

Core Ability (Enlightenment): “UNORTHODOX METHODS. You blend together method and madness in pursuit of your goals. Gain the Discern skill. Once per session, before you roll dice to resolve an action, instead state that your result is a 6. You succeed but take stress.”

Core Ability (Vermissian Knight): VERMISSIAN PLATE. Your armour is made up of scavenged, barely-understood technology from the alternate realities inside the Vermissian network. Once per session, when you consume a resource with the Technology or Occult domains by augmenting or repairing your armour, roll the resource’s dice and choose one of the following:

• Remove stress marked against Blood, Mind or Echo equal to the amount rolled.

• Inflict stress on a delve or adversary equal to the amount rolled.

• (D8 resource or higher) Gain access to a skill or domain for the rest of the session.

• (D8 resource or higher) Increase your Blood protection by 1 for the rest of the situation.

Major Abilities (Vermissian Knight):

AETHERIC FIELD. Your armour buzzes with static that makes your hair stand on end; this discharge can keep you safe from the body-warping effects of the Vermissian. Once per session, activate this power. You gain +3 Echo protection until the end of the current situation.

Minor Abilities (Vermissian Knight):

TUNNEL RAT. You have performed the Rite of Suffocation, and know ways of slowing your breathing to survive longer. Gain the Warren domain. You can hold your breath for a very long time, allowing you to stay underwater or in toxic areas for extended periods.

STEELBONES. Your armour bolts onto special implants that absorb harmful energy and distribute it through your body. Gain the Endure skill. You can fall distances of up to 3 storeys without taking damage.

PHANTOM LENS. Various blood, ichors and spittles have been used to treat these lenses, allowing you to see into dimensions other than the material. Gain the Hunt skill. While you wear these lenses, you can track anything – even if it doesn’t leave a tangible trail.

Character Concept:

I wanted the Vermissian Knight:

“The Vermissian is a cursed, centuries-old mass transport network that the people from the City Above built to get from place to place quicker. To power it, they tapped into the wellspring of potential that is the Heart, and damned every single tunnel and station to eternal weirdness. The Vermissian never officially opened. Now, desperate people, fringe historians and heretic cults hide in the infrastructure, using the strange unreality within to further their own ends. Using barely-understood technology and living in the space between worlds, the Vermissian Knights do their level best to understand the parasite reality and protect others they find there. They are in high demand as companions on delves: they have an understanding of the Heart, a good sword arm and a suit of powered armour built from scavenged train materials that helps keep them (and their allies) alive. Knights will inscribe the names of landmarks that they have discovered, or found stable routes to, on their armour – it is as much a research project and an advertisement of their prowess as it is a means of protection. Each knight’s suit is utterly unique, using technology taken from a dozen different places: different gauges of steels, different weights and levels of protection and flexibility and controls that are often inscrutable to anyone but the creator themselves.”

I love them instantly and completely. I’m gonna be a train knight and explore a cursed mass transit system.

And because most of what I want to do with this character is explore a cursed mass transit network, I had two main callings to choose from: Adventure and Enlightenment. Adventure because exploration is half the goal of that calling, and Enlightment because I don’t just want to see things, I want to know how and why they happen. I did go for Enlightenment in the end. I don’t just want to explore the Vermissian as it is now, I want to seek forbidden, dangerous knowledge on how a fuck up this titanic and massive happened. And, possibly … could it be fixed? Or used?

And. With that in mind. Ancestry has no direct mechanical benefit in Heart. But. The gnolls. See, humans are the tinkerers of the setting, they’d have reasons to want to unravel the Vermissian. The aelfir, high elves, the ones who built it, might want to know how they’d botched it. But the gnolls. The gnolls are currently at war with the aelfir and the City Above, Spire. They’re the enemy. And the gnolls come from a techno-occult culture:

“The gnollish empire (and its capital city Al’Marah) is founded on their advanced demonological and mechanical abilities; there are tales of djinn being bound into brass spheres to power uncanny devices. In the confines of the Heart, where the gaps between realities are thin, they can achieve unthought-of results in mechanoccultism – and great machines from ages past thrum and whirr in the hidden depths, just waiting to be found.”

“Al’Marah, the capital city of the southern gnollish desert kingdom, has no state religion. The government there dictates that the souls of all people who die within sight of the central ziggurat of Al’Marah are absorbed into the Source: a coruscating realm of energy from which djinns and ifrits are drawn to power gnollish machinery. They know this to be a scientific fact because specially-shielded teams have braved the depths of the ziggurat, found heaven and reported back on it with first-hand eyewitness accounts.”

The Vermissian was an attempt to run a mass-transit system off occult energy bored from the core of an eldritch extra-planar nascent god/reality seed/parasitic reality/thing. And the gnolls. The gnollish capital city is powered by their heaven. They hooked up their machinery to their afterlife.

Can you imagine a gnoll coming to the Spire, looking at the massive fuck up that was the Vermissian, and just going … How did you all fuck up this badly? This is basic occult power transmission! What did you do, or what did you plug into, that managed to do this?

One of the options for how you, as a gnoll (who are, again, currently at war with the City Above), even wound up in the Heart in the first place is that you are an escaped prisoner of war. And I was thinking. She escaped through the Vermissian. She ran into the weirdness of the tunnels, and no one followed her, and it turns out there are good reasons no one followed her, and she nearly died (or worse than died), and the only reason she’s alive now is that the Vermissian Knights pulled her out of the mess and got her to Derelictus. So she’s washed up in the undercity, very battered, very confused, and maybe she should be thinking about how to continue escaping and get home, but …

What was that? What she saw in there. How do you get that? What has to happen?

And the Knights. The Knights helped her. They pulled her out of there. They looked after her.

And just. The Vermissian. How do you manage to get … What has to happen? What did you plug into? How did you do it so badly?

So she decided to stay. Nascent loyalty. Raw fascination. She decided to become a Vermissian knight, and work her way up the order, and somehow get to a point where she can find the original plans for the system, and figure out what the blue bloody hells went wrong.

She can justify it a bit. If this went so badly wrong here, will the ziggurat back home eventually go wrong too? Her people need to know. Maybe the enemy, the aelfir, just fucked up on a titanic scale, maybe the gnolls won’t ever have to worry about this happening because they’re not incompetent, but … just in case. What if it was something else? Is it just the nature of the Heart? What is the Heart, and how does it compare, technologically, with the Source? Was it a fuck up of method? Did the aelfir do something very silly with their couplings? What happened, and how replicable a mistake was it?

So. Her calling questions: What impossible thing is she hoping to achieve in the City Beneath? What’s the first step on her journey?

She wants to find the original blueprints for the Vermissian network. She wants to find the original insertion point, where the aelfir ‘dug deep into the City Beneath and pierced the Heart Itself, seeking to use its unimaginable energy to bind each station with one another on a mystical level’. She wants to find out what went wrong.

And her first steps there are to ingratiate herself with the Vermissian Knights, to join them, work for them, build up trust within the order. And to search for documentation that could give her hints towards what she seeks. Hence our starting Enlightenment story beats: “Gain favour with a faction that can help you learn more about your goal. Find a helpful text.”

For her Vermissian elective abilities, I kitted her out for exploration and tracking, mostly. I was tempted to give her ‘Black Knight’ to get the Occult domain, which would make sense from her backstory, and if I was actually running her I’d talk with a GM about that.

I also took no abilities that would actually give her any protection, aside from Aetheric Field. I probably should have. I was tempted by the Arcane Rebreather for permanent echo protection, or the obvious Armour Plating or Stalwart. But. I just want her to poke around? No fall damage. Ability to hang around underwater or in toxic locations. Tracking ability. I want her to look for things, not necessarily survive them. And, I mean, Vermissian Knights are fairly tough from a standing start.

So yeah. There’s Ahkoura Roselight. A gnoll Vermissian knight who just really, really wants to know, in exacting detail, how the hell you manage to fuck up this badly. Heh.

[zoneofsmites]

healing spells in dnd should be necromancy instead of evocation and I will die on this hill.

[bellshazes]

really unfortunate that i hate board games given my summer job for bsically a decade was teaching board games. mostly just the one but the summer the catan people invited me back was so fomrative in an ironic way well. anyway im going to bed.

[impossible-rat-babies]

if i don't end up enjoying stuff in the end, i do still like eshka a lot and might put her in other stuff

[the-princeps]

Metacurrency

So I know this is a fairly controversial statement, but I kinda like (some) player facing metacurrencies. To be more specific I like famously deadly games to have some fate point or such that allows you to escape death once or twice.

Now, why do I like this? I like it because it gives the GM two new things

a buffer zone

a dial

Now to explain them a little further, what I mean with a buffer zone is that if the GM where to ever do a slight miscalculation and accidently kill a character the metacurrency gives them a rebound that is satisfying and doesn't need to retcon anything.

The dial part is moreso geared into player psychology, but what I mean with it is that if the GM tells you "Within this strange room, you notice that your destiny is gone, your fate points do not function in here." this will bring the tension up by an extreme amount, though doing so repeatedly would lessen the effect and it is a bit of a cheap trick. This is the main part of why I like a save from death once or twice metacurrency, there are a few smaller bits I won't go into here as to keep the message somewhat contained.

[cannibalhalflinggaming]

Zine Month 2024 Round-Up

Lock your credit cards, hide your wallet, tell your banks to close early, because it’s February and that means a veritable deluge of new tabletop roleplaying game zines taking their shot at getting created with some crowdfunded help. Down the hall Aaron can be heard trying to keep his head above water with the first wave of ZineQuest projects on Kickstarter (there’s an alarming number of gargling…

[b-a-r-c-l-a-y]

i lost my big wide-brimmed hat the other day and want to get a new one. does anyone know where to find a legit wizard or witch hat that isn't just flimsy plastic costume material?

i like to have some style in daily life and wizardmaxxing might just itch that scratch and i need a hat that is built to last