Tabletop RPGs/story-building games - beyond D&D

I was sure there was a thread for stuff like this but search came up bare. There are a couple of board game threads I could have used but they seemed for slightly more traditional board-based games?

Anyway, me and a friend are trying to get a small group for gaming off the ground. As someone who has never actually participated in D&D but loves interactive fiction, I'm interested in getting some recommendations for new stuff that has strong story-building emphasis, less interested in magic mechanics and fighting (though not put off by it, in fact my friend loves magic mechanics, it's just me who doesn't care about it). A couple of games that we're both excited about:

Ten Candles - a game where you *will* die, you just have to map out the last hours of your band of survivors. Has the added cool factor of having to be played in a room with only ten candles lit, and you get to burn stuff.
http://cavalrygames.com/ten-candles

Misspent Youth - dystopian teen drama with what looks to be very strong world-building elements.
http://misspentyouth.robertbohl.com/

Any other suggestions? Or just discussing/reminiscing about this sort of game is also cool by me, tbh.

the only one of these ive ever managed to play a successful campaign with (as opposed to like one off things) was 'dogs in the vineyard' which id recommend whole-heartedly

Track down a used copy (or a pdf) of Castle Falkenstein from t. Setting is Victorian steampunk with faeries. Game system is card based not dice based and about storytelling not math.

Sorry, I was editing and fat finger posted on my phone. First sentence should end "from the early 90s"

I was also looking for threads like that and found several recommendations for "unknown armies" which sounds pretty good, haven't read or played it though

ten candles especially looks interesting & appealingly approachable. did quite a bit of this as a teenager, played a mix of games and especially enjoyed coming up with our own settings and games, often with no real rules just story telling, which I generally preferred, and which let us play in school, which we were v hungry to escape from at lunchtimes when we were 11/12

of the proper stuff we played a lot of my favourite was warhammer fantasy role-play, which I have recently revisited with far flung friends via webcam (on roll20.net). it's pretty straightforward rules-wise and you play normal, frail people with everyday jobs who are frequently nursing injuries in a sort of decaying version of 15th century germany (the two adjectives used to describe it so frequently that they're often run together being 'grim-dark') with constant whiffs of corruption and a looming sense of dread. the main thing it has to commend it is a v well written and enormous campaign ('the enemy within') which is often cited as the best. idk how long we will continue playing it but it's a good way of hanging out & crying with laughter with friends who are living round the world

the quiet year is one of these, i would love to play it if i had any friends who were into tabletop games!

Thanks for all the recommendations. Dogs in the Vineyard seems like quite an unusual version of this sort of thing (based on Mormonism??) but that's in its favour, though maybe as a later endeavour. The Quiet Year also looks great to me, I think I like things like that and Ten Candles where you carve out a period of time as unique even though you're marching toward an inevitable end. Works with my fatalistic tendency, I suppose.

WFRP looks pretty entertaining. Ogmor are you playing 3rd edition?

playing the original version, which is the only version I've ever played, and given my general lack of interest in rules beyond introducing a random element and some limitations, seems the best-suited to me. have a look on scribd. the way it shamelessly rips off real history and places is part of its appeal, and the sourcebook on the equivalent of amsterdam ('marienburg') was great too

my group is doing "dogs in the vineyard" right now, Vincent Baker is really reliably great. more to say on this thread when I get a minute

I was a beta-tester on this game and I recommend it highly

http://bullypulpitgames.com/games/night-witches/

Fiasco could be a good bet.

the interactive fiction element in Primetime Adventures is really high - really super fun game with this great feature where, at the end of a session, you preview what's going to happen in the next session. It's episodic by design, which I really liked - one thing that can frustrate in tabletop play is how a session can sort of peter out as the evening moves on instead of building to a climax

Vincent Baker is really reliably great. more to say on this thread when I get a minute

haha i was recently having an argument abt how awful a lot of pen&paper rpgs in the kickstater era are using baker's 'urban shadows' as an example. often these games are just much worse versions of more comprehensive/restrictive rule sets - id rather play world of darkness than urban shadows, for e.g. and i think a well-run d&d/pathfinder campaign is just better than any of these loose 'story-telling' systems

emily if you want something fatalistic and inevitable you cld try 'downfall' by carloine hobbs - i didnt love it but i really prefer more open-ended and rules-heavy systems

Thanks JCLC! Those look brilliant. Most of my gamer friends are women/NB so female-heavy scenarios like Night Witches could appeal. Though as I say, the others are more into classic style stuff than I am (though I am going to insist on playing some traditional fantasy RPGs if we manage to make this regular).

Will look up Downfall in a bit.

Woah, Fiasco looks cool

I wouldn't ordinarily self-promote anything on ILX (I don't do much) but this game I wrote about being a teenager is my favorite thing I've ever written. And is totally playable, people have even played it without me in the room.

Fiasco is a blast and kind of the go-to crowdpleaser of one-shot storytelling RPGs

The best thing about Fiasco is that the creators have totally stayed on top of it and have released new free modules (or story packs, if you didn't grow up on 1st Edn TSR products) every month since release. There's a huge variety of settings there to use with a wide variety of broad types - Kennedy talks at a trade show in Dallas in 1963; Queen Elizabeth believes there is a traitor in court; a band of adventurers have lied about killing a dragon because there is no such thing; Hong Kong gangsters work out how to split up HK after the British leave; two local news channels vie for popularity.

Dread is also a pretty fun horror rpg you can convert to any appropriate setting but the looseness makes it more of a storytelling game. Diceless, attempts to do something important (or more appropriately out of character, like when a schoolgirl is suddenly able to tie a tourniquet) are resolved by pulling from a Jenga tower. It stays up, you do the thing. This also builds suspense into the game because you WILL fail at some point. It comes with an 80s VHS horror plot which is pretty great, and has a really solid character generation system where you answer a dozen questions (some of which are totally innocuous) and what you've written down should describe your character.

There are more than a handful of Japanese games that are at least superficially interesting and could work with the right group: Clover, which is kind of an unstructured game about being a 5 year old; Tokyo Brain Pop!, features psychic schoolgirls and demons; Maid RPG takes the core setting of being a maid at a house to set up anime adventures in the house; Motobushido is samurai bikers, like the Flower Travellin' Band cover gone violent; Golden Sky Stories has you playing magical foxes and raccoons and is twee as fuck.

There's a game of Monkey: Journey To The West that I haven't tried but I could see being fun.

Grace looks really good silby.

haha i was recently having an argument abt how awful a lot of pen&paper rpgs in the kickstater era are using baker's 'urban shadows' as an example. often these games are just much worse versions of more comprehensive/restrictive rule sets - id rather play world of darkness than urban shadows, for e.g. and i think a well-run d&d/pathfinder campaign is just better than any of these loose 'story-telling' systems

lol I mean this in a friendly way but this totally sounds like an argument you'd pick

http://www.marryingmrdarcy.com is good if you enjoy the novels/poking fun at the tropes of Jane Austen

Hm, not for me. I wouldn't mind a satirical society backstabbing game (like Sting of the Wasp in tabletop form) but romance is not my bag.

Oh help. We've managed to organise a group to play Ten Candles but even though everyone else has more experience than me (because despite knowing a reasonable amount about this sort of game I've never actually played one) I have been nominated to GM. Any tips?

I've decided I'm going to concentrate prep on getting the room into a good horror atmosphere and do the introduction as a recorded message, but as the point of the game is to build the story together, do pretty much no preparation in terms of 'things I will make happen'. Is this a terrible idea?

Using sound and/or mixtapes is a great thing. I remember doing a Cthulhu game in Pastoral England where I played the Mark Hollis album and Cycle of Days and Seasons for the opening sections and The Place Where Black Stars Hang when it started going wrong.

You could listen to some actual play podcasts to check that your assumptions mesh with the reality of the thing. I don't know if starting with ~~collaborative storytelling~~ for your first game to DM is more or less in the deep end than starting with the-party-is-in-a-tavern, though, I'm also in the 'I know too much about this stuff for someone with no actual experience' camp.

I am thinking about looking for a group myself.

So this went pretty well, I think. I probably could have forced more decision rolls as people still had most of their cards left to play by the time the candles started going out on their own, but the players were all getting into their characters so it seemed better to not interrupt. The darkness and the pre-recordings worked great for mood-building. I was completely and utterly drunk off my face by the end of the game, but so was everyone else and I think I managed to keep it together and running smoothly.

Also for some reason I kind of figured people would just choose 'standard' characters, but loved that we ended up with a very strange group trying to fight the darkness together.

is Delta Green to trad for this thread? I've been reading up on it/listening to some live plays

This sounds amazing, I realize it's a bit of a puff piece in support of a kickstarter thing that isn't finished yet, but wow:

https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/9/15589492/divinity-original-sin-2-game-master-mode-gameplay-video-dungeons-and-dragons

The lizard — confusingly, he went by the name Walrus — looked at the wares on offer in this shop and was not satisfied. He demanded that the shopkeeper procure his finest magic wand, something he kept hidden away from the regular rabble that come to the shop.

To determine how the shopkeeper would respond, Walrus had to complete a dice roll. With a click of a button, the game master created a pop-up on Walrus’ screen that had him roll a 20-sided die. The GM also noted that since that character had an intelligence higher than 12, he got a bonus of plus one to the roll. The roll was successful; the dwarven shopkeep begrudgingly trudged to the back of the store and returned with a powerful fire wand that was not originally part of his stock.
Larian Studios

It’s important to note that none of this was scripted. There was no dialogue option in the game to confront the shopkeep, and the wand that Walrus purchased was not actually hidden in back in the initial version of the map as it existed when we loaded in. Rather, as in classic pen-and-paper role-playing games, the GM went along with the flow of the storytelling as it happened, adapting the world of the game, taking control of NPCs and spawning in items to meet the needs of the party.

key quote of course

“The game master mode was a Kickstarter stretch goal,” Wincke explained. “It’s grown a little bit out of hand. It’s become its own thing. But we’re really happy with it.”

anyone play starfinder yet? gearing up to gm a campaign and it's a lot to get my head around having only played 5e but i'm pretty excited about parts of it, the ship combat rules in particular have me itching to build some cool encounters. not sure about the heavy magic presence and why it couldn't be handwaved away as telepathy/alien powers instead of explicitly integrating the fantasy and sci-fi settings but that's quite a minor nitpick.

welp, to each their own

when was the last rpg to successfully inhabit the space opera, uh, space

Has there been one that isn't Traveller?

Star Frontiers was the bomb.

Big co-sign on WFRP and The Enemy Within. Sadly we never got to finish the campaign.

Star Frontiers was the bomb.

i played my first game of Burning Wheel on saturday & have signed up for a campaign with the same DM, so we'll see how that goes

i'm looking to run a RP intensive game (or games) around themes of counterinsurgency, civilian urban survival during war, occupation, and small unit combat and i'm looking for a fairly light system that would be easy to run such a thing in -- any suggestions please? (it actually turns out there was a This War of Mine style RPG made but it seems basically impossible to find.)

Haven't played it but: would you dig Night Witches? http://bullypulpitgames.com/games/night-witches/

And from the same designer, Grey Ranks http://bullypulpitgames.com/games/grey-ranks/

it looks extremely interesting and i'd love to play it but i don't think it'll let me simulate what i have in mind from the description... altho maybe. i do like the idea of having separate cycles for interpersonal drama and then mission/conflict.

oh that looks good too. i'll have to watch the gameplay vids after work to see if there's enough of a framework there that i can alter it to take place today.

any ilxors interested in maybe trying a rotating RPG club online through maybe roll20 or fb chat or something? there are a bunch of systems and settings i'm interested in trying and my weekly group is pretty much committed to the current dnd campaign.

already doing one. we use roll20 for the map and character sheets and dice and we use google chat for talking to each other, works pretty good.

plz can i get in?

sure. i'm the GM, we're playing the 1982 edition of TSR's star frontiers, about halfway through the volturnus campaign.

how do u want to connect? i'm on facebook at facebook.com/mordy if u want to talk through there or you can just email me @ mms531 *A*T* nyu *D*O*T* e;d;u;

i&I wanna be playing some call of cthulhu tbh

started a delta green campaign with four friends yesterday. it went pretty well.

I've not tried any of the stuff suggested above yet - am meaning to when I get enough time to get my head around it - but I did a "scenario" the other weekend that went down very well. In it, she's a "Worst Witch" type kid at a witch school, and I had her "friend" cast a spell wrong that shrank them both, and had her friend get carried away by a rat, and then let her figure out how she would rescue her friend. I made a map of the witch school building, came up with some traps/adversaries, and had a very simple system for conflicts/challenges, where she had scores for magic, charisma and strength, and if she needed to do anything she had to roll under that number with two dice. And I let her invent her own spells to achieve any magic stuff, but on the proviso that she had to roll under her magic score to make the spell work, and she had to compose the spell and make it a rhyming couplet. It was lots of fun!

Now just looking for stories/campaigns I can loot for idea and keep this very simple system going. The focus was communal storytelling and problem-solving, which I think she really enjoyed. Also she loves making up her character sheets.

Fighting Fantasy books! They're kind of a halfway house between Choose Your Own Adventure and D&D (you roll two normal dice to see which page you should turn to, there are hit points, damage, etc)

I've been running Troika (an rpg based on Fighting Fantasy system) for a bit and now. Love the setting and feel, but the 2d6 system is punishing as each 1 pt difference in skill has a dramatically different chance of success.

I am probably going to switch to a Star Wars RPG because a couple of my players are super SW stans. I haven't seen a SW movie since Revenge of the Sith, lol. Gotta make your players happy.

I only ran Troika once, when a couple of our D&D group were missing. It was fun. I'd like to run it more. The skill system can be tough - I haven't looked into it, but I bet the fan-community has come up with some house-rules, and the combat & armor systems takes a minute to get used to imo. But I just love the vibe tbh. For skills I think the answer is maybe calling for fewer rolls if possible - if they've got the base skill in something and it's not a difficult task, I'd say let 'em do it w/o a roll and only roll for things that need to be dramatic.

I used to have (but never played) the Star Wars 2nd Edition RPG when I was young--it's also a D6 system but iirc more like a dice pool system?

I loved the Lone Wolf books; they were not super popular here in the US but I read and played a ton of them. I think they are all gone now, lost in a mother's cellar flood. I've managed to replace a couple over the years but they've gotten expensive for nice copies! But, and this could be a few years old, there's a website that has HTML versions of all the books with automatic combat rolling & such - played through a half-dozen or so. I fucking LOVED those books.

Lone Wolf books for your extreme nostalgia -
https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books

I just remembered that in 90s internet time, I was on a Lone Wolf listerv and that was the first time I ever met another I@n J0hn50n!! He was Irish IIRC.

But I just love the vibe tbh.

Yeah, I have a lot of different vibes I can get into if I want and Troika can hit a bunch of them: science fantasy/psychedelia/eldritch horror, etc, etc. I think my players weren't as into the whimsical British psychedelia elements as I was. Also, most of them hadn't played an rpg in 30 years, so they needed more prompting on the character sheet than Troika's system gives.

I don't know if you like the Powered by the Apocalypse games, but there is a 3-page hack of Troika using some of those concepts.

The SW RPG I am running (session 1 will be next week) is the newest one from Fantasy Flight Games that game out over the last 7 years or so. It's about the polar opposite of Troika rules-wise. It uses the narrative dice system, which I haven't used but I am very keen to try. Basically, you roll non-numerical dice - positive dice based on your stats and skills and negative dice based on difficulty, environmental factors, and opponents skills. Opposing symbols cancel and if you are left with positive dice after cancellation you were successful, but there is a wide spectrum of success and failure - successes with drawbacks, failures that give you advantages to your next roll, etc, etc.

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/2/27/that-star-wars-feeling/

So I ran the first session of the Star Wars RPG and it went incredibly well. My players generally haven't played rpgs since the late 80s and seemed to have some issues grasping the Troika system, which is very simplistic, so I had concerns whether the SWRPG system was going to be too much for them. Ironically, at least so far, the narrative dice system is very engaging for players and GM; there is a lot of back and forth discussion of how to interpret dice rolls which acts as prompts to further the narrative. In essence, it prompts the players to take more authority over the narrative so the GM doesn't have to do all the work. I like it.

The other thing is I've usually run games where I know the setting in more detail than my players, so I would do a lot of work feeling like I needed to convey setting. Running the Star Wars setting with players highly conversant in the setting (more than me even) again takes work from the GM. It's like a shared pool of knowledge you don't have to spend time spoon feeding to the players. I can focus on story.

One of the PCs returned to their home planet for the first time in five years to discover their mother and father had died and her younger brother had left the planet to go look for the PC. Now she has to leave the planet to find her brother. This is good, dramatic stuff.

A friend hipped me to Symbaroum (https://www.symbaroum.com/ a Scandinavian dark fantasy setting with some overt colonialism overtones. Human civilization surrounds a vast, lightless forest which takes up most of the world - the home of an ancient fallen empire and a prime destination for adventurers. Anyone have any experience with this?

Had a few gaps in recent months - 12 sessions out of a possible 16 - but we’re now 36 sessions deep in our WFRP campaign and have finished Shadows Over Bogenhafen! Very exciting. The party saved the town but at some cost. Death On The Reik starts on Wednesday. It’s about a year since I bought the new rule book, and though it’s cost me hundreds of pounds on sourcebooks and dice, I’m very glad I did it.

Only problem is I’d love to play it one day as a PC, but fear I’m stuck as GM forever now...

Didn't realise how mentally exhausting being a GM was until I tried it

Maybe I shouldn't have been nervously slamming cans of shipyard while running the games idk

Scik Mouthy, which edition of WFRP are you using?

We’re playing 4e.

Always was a Tzeentch man, myself.

4e's combat is such a weird mess, one of my group was so determined to aggressively optimise their build I kind of gave up on ever trying to balance the fights and just make it more that they had social consequences if you did it in public

The worst injury anyone got in our playthrough of Enemy Within was actually the halfling losing an ear to a cloud of explosive methane in the sewers

I'm playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay too! But just as a player - I read a lot of Games Workshop guff as a kid and now it's really difficult to remember what still applies and also what my character would be aware of.

13 months and 45 sessions in. Our group has one more child now than when we started, which feels epic.

wow!

irl child = +1 bonus to everyone's key stat imo

I've started playing a ttrpg that is more of a "new school" storytelling rpg. There is still a GM (me), but players have way more agency than in "old school" rpgs. Action resolution (rolls) does not determine player success or failure but who narrates the outcome. If the player makes a certain roll, the player narrates the outcome including adding facts that are true and which the GM cannot contradict. The better the roll, the more facts a player can add. If the player does not make their roll, the GM narrates the outcome.

The game is highly collaborative - the GM can't really determine a plot (meaning a beginning, middle, and end) because the players will likely just go in a different direction at any time. Instead, I just introduce a starting problem/hook, then keep in mind a few potential complications and NPCs that I might introduce. The rest is improvised at the table.

This is a big change for me coming from a long history of traditional rpgs and requires me to unlearn some habits. It also goes against my personal bias toward over-planning. But the nice thing is I don't feel the same responsibility for everyone's enjoyment. There is more of an equal share of the storytelling responsibility. It's early, but I like it.

What’s it called?

Bl00d & Hon0r - A Game of Samurai Tragedy. A name with terrible other uses. The .pdf is on drivethrurpg:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/85815/Blood--Honor

The players make up a samurai clan then their characters who are members of the clan.

There is also a related game called World of Dew which expands beyond samurai and their clans to a later period, such as the Meije Restoration, with noir investigators, merchants, westerners, etc.

It uses particular elements of the FATE game though it is a bit different.

Also, would really love to give Mörk Börg a spin - it's a rules-light death metal fantasy rpg about the end of the world. Imagine an art-punk WFRP with the alienation, darkness, and gore cranked so far up you have to laugh. The doom of Call of Cthulhu with the character survival rate of Paranoia (albeit without clones). Geared for one-shots I would think.

I'm imagining a Tinder for rpgs. It's hard.

what do you mean?

When you’re not in junior high, life makes it hard to find and maintain an rpg group for an extended period. I was just fantasizing (and joking) about an app that would make it easier to find a game.

that makes so much more sense than what i was imagining, which was swiping left and right on rulesets

For a couple of months, I've been playing a GM-less version of The Pool, an early story game. It's been fun and a really interesting demolition of some of my conceptions about rpgs. It's one of the oldest new school games - your character is just a 50 word short story from which you assign dice from your pool as traits (i.e "lost his family +1"). Every few sessions you add 15-30 words to your story and can introduce new traits or change existing ones. If one of your traits applies to an action, you get extra dice in the roll. If you make your roll, you get to narrate the results - if not, the other players narrate the result. Everyone can introduce NPCs and play them at various times.

The biggest change is trying to play this game GM-less, which has really pulled back the curtain and exposed what it is a GM actually needs to do or not do. The game is so rules-lite that the only structure, the only game part that isn't pure imagination, is when you roll dice. The hardest part is trying to introduce new plot points without a GM - once things get going the improvisation takes over and things flow pretty well, but it can be difficult to get the ball rolling when there is no leader (GM) to tell you when to roll. Still, it's been great.

Still want to give Mörk Börg a try sometime.

Still going with our WFRP campaign. About to hit our two year anniversary and session 65.

I've never been interested in PBP rpgs, but I've been playing in one (actually we finished one and are on the second) on Discord for the more than three months. It's maybe the most fun I've had playing an rpg in a long while.

Right now it feels like we have a long way to go in this one and it's going to be a perfect winter activity as it's set in a sort of 1930's alpine setting with some Balkan flourishes, fantasy elements (spells), and pseudo-dungeons with ancient technology. The vibe is alternating between cozy and brutal.

that should say, "fantasy elements (spells and undead)"

Still playing the alpine/Balkan PBP game. What a journey.

I have really enjoyed running Trophy Gold, which is sort of an OSR-ish story game. It feels like an early D&D game where death is around every corner, but it is zero prep and no stress. It turns out I am much better as a high-improv GM than I ever was as a high-prep GM.

We had a lot of rolls last night - maybe 8 in three hours - but I have also had sessions with a single roll. Every roll is high stakes and can change the story dramatically.

The highest complement I can give is that it's the closest I've felt to what gaming was like as a young kid since that time.

Free RPG Day happening this Saturday, June 24th

https://freerpgday.com

Happening a lot of places on the globe, check your FLGS

Anyone played any of the ttrpgs in this bundle?

https://itch.io/b/2295/ttrpgs-for-palestine

Wanderhome is supposed to be good.

Still playing the alpine/Balkan PBP game. What a journey.

I have really enjoyed running Trophy Gold, which is sort of an OSR-ish story game. It feels like an early D&D game where death is around every corner, but it is zero prep and no stress. It turns out I am much better as a high-improv GM than I ever was as a high-prep GM.

We had a lot of rolls last night - maybe 8 in three hours - but I have also had sessions with a single roll. Every roll is high stakes and can change the story dramatically.

The highest complement I can give is that it's the closest I've felt to what gaming was like as a young kid since that time.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Wednesday, March 27, 2024 7:17 PM (ten months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I played that alpine setting pbp rpg for at least nine months. The game climaxed with us visiting Winterwhite, the goddess of winter and death, who a century or two ago had made a pact with the rulers of the valley that required each generation of rulers to sacrifice one of their children. The latest generation had broken the pact by failing to make the sacrifice, so Winterwhite brought a devastating supernatural winter to the valley that was on its way to killing everyone there, including the PCs. We ended up kidnapping the baron and his daughter and sacrificing them to the goddess to save everyone else. I voted against it and even offered up my character as a sacrifice instead. The game was very satisfying and also troubling. I kept thinking of the Star Trek line, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", which is all well and good until you are holding the knife in your hand. One of my favorite gaming experiences ever.

We are 2-3 sessions away from finishing a campaign of Public Access, a game where you play adults who grew up in the late-80s/early 90s and return to their hometown in New Mexico in 2004 to investigate a Public Access TV station that disappeared and nearly no one else remembers. It's a premise with a very hard framing, but within that frame the players really shape the narrative. It's probably been the best ttrpg experience of my life.

whoa that sounds great. definitely gonna check this game out!! can you elaborate on why it is one of the best experiences? is it tension, or character moments, or the in-book plot or what?

guess i haven't posted in here for a while which is wild bc ttrpgs have become a pretty big part of my life again in the past 2ish years. joined a steady table where we've been able to play 2-3 times a month (we aim for every tuesday, but... life). i think i actually took a seat from someone who just couldn't commit to it anymore, and since my weekly thing had ended (ran a pub quiz for 9 years before the pub finally axed it), i had time in my schedule! it was with the same GM as the cyberpunk game i spoke of above, but with mostly different players. 5 years is a long time!

initially she was running another cyberpunk-inspired game, CY_BORG (cyberpunk offshoot of mork borg) which we didn't run for tooooo long because i don't think the borg ruleset really worked for the crew we had. didn't really end up making characters we particularly cared about. so we ran i think one pre-gen module of some sort, started some homebrew, and GM said you know what, let's try something else. and that's when we tried...

MOTHERSHIP

good lord what a game. will avoid getting too "let me tell you about my game" about it (what next, i tell you my fantasy football team? what i dreamed about yesterday?) but GOOD LORD. we ran this for about a year with 4 players + GM (up from 3 players cyborg) (and eventually added a 5th for the back half). We ran through Another Bug Hunt, lost our first couple of PCs and really took it hard. Another Bug Hunt is a WONDERFUL module, excellent for learning the Mothership system. That was about six sessions to get through, then we did a short little pamphlet module, Haunting of Ypsilon-14, which we all survived (and credit to this crew, all people who really want to develop their characters as people. by now the surviving members are so COOL.) then we moved on to Prospero's Dream and ran A Pound of Flesh which... wow. Another Bug Hunt is very linear, but APOF gives you a sandbox and a few threads to pull... we spent a lot of time there. Then it was on to VR Dead, which was B R U T A L -- of the five characters we had, one was sent home early to warn the universe of this cursed place, one died mid-mission, and two more died on the VERY LAST ROLL in the escape. there were tears.

it was around then that i started getting really interested in writing my own material for the game. found out about a trifold pamphlet game jam thing, figured fuck it, why not?, and wrote my first-ever own TTRPG thing. Which was approved by the company so it has their logo on it and everything! and then i won an award for "most favoured" pamphlet??? and now i am developing other stuff for this game! first one was strictly free, next thing i make i might try and sell!

after the near TPK of VR Dead, where 3/5 died, 1/5 left early in an escape pod and 1/5 "survived the campaign" (me!), i took over as warden and ran the game i wrote. it was hilarious how much i had to make up to keep it moving, because the stuff on a pamphlet is... not a lot! gave me a lot of ideas to expand a 2-pager into maybe a 20-pager. players all re-rolled except for escape pod lady, who after a time jump had gone from young and naïve to jaded and hardened. i think everyone got out of that game alive, but the emotional exhaustion of VR Dead had dulled the table's taste for the game a little bit, and two players ended up taking an indefinite break and we switched systems.

So now we are playing a Warhammer 40K RPG called Imperium Maledictum. I have avoided learning 40k lore my entire life because WHO HAS THE TIME but now that i am getting into it like this, in a way that's bottom-up, i love it. really realizing the thing that makes me phase out when learning this kinda stuff is when it's all structured top-down like a history textbook or something. do it like CRPGs! start me in the equivalent of a village and let me learn my way out! it's only been a few sessions of the 40K RPG (imperium maledictum if that matters to u, dear reader) but... damn. our GM really is amazing. she knows how to walk the line between making it all about the players and making it all about the world/rules/lore/simulation/etc. helps that our table is all primed on making characters that grow and learn and feel and all that kinda stuff. my silver-tongued, pragmatic, cynical preacher character had a divine intervention scene in last night's game that completely changed the trajectory of how i intended to play her, in a way that feels earned and appropriate and exciting to continue with.

i love ttrpgs!!!

also wildly late lol, but

Anyone played any of the ttrpgs in this bundle?

https://itch.io/b/2295/ttrpgs-for-palestine

i haven't yet played, but i have been reading FIST Ultra Edition lately with the intention of maybe running it in the future. it'll probably take some tweaking to make it what i want -- a sort of "metal gear solid 2 but you're playing the badguys" kinda thing (the game seems to want to veer a bit harder into the silly, mechanically, than i think MGS does, which... yeah i know how that sounds. MGS is silly. but it's different silly! it takes ITSELF seriously). but the general idea is government black ops super soldiers with weird powers.

while im typing about games i'm reading and not yet playing, here's some stuff i have been reading/thinking about/preparing to play:

- TRIANGLE AGENCY: i bought the box set the second it was available, and read much of the core book with great interest. as a book it is fascinating. wonderful world, easy to imagine a lot of the beats... but the reality of running it is kind of impossible to imagine? it is described as a kind of supernatural workplace horror -- think X-files meets the video game Control with more than a sprinkle of that excellent but short-lived sitcom Corporate -- and a lot of it nails this vibe (the character sheet is TEN PAGES lol, because paperwork?????) -- but then it also has this huge section that is "playwalled" -- not even the GM is supposed to read it til players unlock it via XP paths. there are SO MANY MOVING PARTS. i imagine it collapsing under its own weight. i still wanna try it.
- WALKING DEAD RPG: don't really care for the tv or the comics. it's fine. but what really cracked something in my brain is the economy of building a colony, saving npcs, dying, and rolling one of those npcs -- a game where player characters can be disposable without "ending the story." the gears are turning and i am now developing my own (in space, no zombies) take on the idea with generation ships.
- MOTHERSHIP: yeah yeah i'm mentioning it again because there is so much material out there for it, the game is lightweight and easy to learn, it's pretty much all percentiles so you actually know your odds when you roll, great kind of stress/sanity mechanics that don't feel as fatal as e.g. cthulhu, (dont get me wrong the game is still lethal!), and two big books coming out sometime between "soon" and "a really long time from now" in Wages of Sin and a sequel/expansion (?) to A Pound of Flesh... good time to get into this game!!
- HIS MAJESTY THE WORM is an OSR inspired megadungeon game which isn't usually my cup of tea, but it's bursting with awesome ideas -- like every PC has an explicit relationship with each other PC, and you "earn" the ability to rest/heal/grow at camp by developing those relationships during stressful moments! tarot deck instead of dice! gotta get back into reading this one.

Mothership!

I've not played but hear some great things about it. The Warden Guide is supposed to have some of the best GM guidance around. I think it also has the most third party material for any rpg except Mork Borg. Some people in my extended group have talked about playing.

I don't have His Majesty the Worm but have heard high praise for its combat system, which supposedly has no turns/initiative and is totally open anyone can do anything at any time. I think someone in our group ran a one-shot of it.

can you elaborate on why it is one of the best experiences? is it tension, or character moments, or the in-book plot or what?

Since getting back into rpgs during the pandemic, my tastes have shifted toward more collaborative storygame rpgs.

In Public Access, the players gather Clues as they investigate Mysteries, like a haunted house or an abandoned amusement park. The Mysteries pose Questions like, "Where is the Monster's Lair", but there are no canonical answers and the Clues are just little phrases like, "strange patterns in the sand" or "a tromp l'oeil door painted on a wall". The GM just picks one that makes sense when the player gets one because of a roll. When the players have assembled enough Clues, they have to brainstorm and agree upon a story that answers the Question posed by the Mystery. Then they roll. If they succeed, their Answer is correct and it unlocks an Opportunity to resolve the Mystery. If they fail, their Answer is wrong, something bad happens, and they have to search for more Clues. There is a bunch of other stuff going on that teases out the back story of the characters via flashbacks. You end up with an experience not unlike a prestige TV show.

All of this is just to say the game is highly improvisational and collaborative. The feeling of working with the other players to come up with the Answers is just amazing, like when someone poses an idea and you just know that has to be the answer. It's exciting!

Also, this sounds amazing:

Then it was on to VR Dead, which was B R U T A L -- of the five characters we had, one was sent home early to warn the universe of this cursed place, one died mid-mission, and two more died on the VERY LAST ROLL in the escape. there were tears.

wrote my first-ever own TTRPG thing. Which was approved by the company so it has their logo on it and everything! and then i won an award for "most favoured" pamphlet??? and now i am developing other stuff for this game! first one was strictly free, next thing i make i might try and sell!

This is so cool, happy for you, Will.

there are no canonical answers and the Clues are just little phrases like, "strange patterns in the sand" or "a tromp l'oeil door painted on a wall". The GM just picks one that makes sense when the player gets one because of a roll. When the players have assembled enough Clues, they have to brainstorm and agree upon a story that answers the Question posed by the Mystery.

Oh, this sounds like the mechanic for Brindlewood Bay, my bf bought me the gamebook for it but I haven't had a chance to play it - it's elderly women detectives a la Jessica Fletcher investigating Lovecraftian horrors.

Honestly not managed to play very many ttrpgs since I started this thread nine years ago. Am thinking about forcing some friends to join me for a one-shot session for my birthday next month, but I fear it might end up with yet another round of me GMing Ten Candles (which I love, but I wanna play some other stuff too!)

Yes, Public Access is the same designer and publisher as Brindlewood Bay, which I also have, and The Between (which is basically Penny Dreadful, the RPG). The mechanics are all very similar with some important differences. I am bugging my GM to run The Between after we finish the current campaign.

i feel like i should clarify that the ttrpg thing i wrote was for a game jam so the award i won, while i am thrilled to have won, was among other a handful of ppl who made a thing within a month and not hundreds over the course of a year or something haha. still cool! but kinda forgot to write that important detail.

do ppl on this thread fw quinn's quest? started watching it only recently and i guess he's like the main guy ppl listen to for ttrpg stuff. i like his stuff! he covers things i am interested in! wish there were more ppl doing this!

One of the Discord's I am on are kind of strongly divided by Quinn's Quest.

I haven't really watched.

Also, Will, missed your game jam thing earlier. That's very cool. I had an Incursion for Trophy Gold I wrote and was going to submit it to a fanzine publication but life stuff got in the way. Doing that would scratch an itch I've had since I made up my own games at age 10.

I want to also big up the rpg Trophy Dark. It's a horror-fantasy rpg based on Cthulhu Dark about doomed treasure hunters exploring forgotten places and encountering terrible things. It's really for one-shots (1-2 sessions) as your characters are not expected or even intended to survive and there is a PvP element. It is a high improv game with a structure a bit like The Blair Witch Project: sort of typical fantasy party enters the woods, encounters strange, unsettling things, gets lost, starts blaming and betraying each other, until there is some kind of final confrontation. Against this structure, you also get brief deep dives into the backstories and drives of each character via flashbacks. The two times I've run it have been some of the most fun I've had on the GM side and you end up with a little story that would make a great 2 hour movie. A very satisfying game.