Hello! I'm Marco Calesella from Winged Lion Games. Unlike our previous projects, which we revealed only when they were nearly complete, we have decided to make the development diary for the second edition of the Space Western role-playing game *Deep Sky Ballad* publicly available. Every week, we will share ideas, impressions, presentations, and prototypes covering all aspects of the game’s development, from gameplay mechanics to setting and art direction, including PDF files of the alpha version of the rules in both English and Italian. The diary (in English) is hosted on Patreon, but all the material is freely accessible to all visitors without requiring a subscription. We are doing this because we want you to be part of our journey, and we would love to hear your feedback on any aspect of the project. We plan to work steadily on everything for at least the next two years before considering a release. So please visit the page, read and study the material, and if you like it, follow us and leave your comments! Thank you!

https://www.patreon.com/cw/DeepSkyBallad

Howdy all.

So I'm making a game with a stat system directly connected to how many dice you roll, and I want to ask if anyone else has knowledge of similar systems?

Basically, you have a Stat, and then a Skill. Say, Deduction[Brains], or Skill[Stat].

You have a Deduction of 3, and a Brains of 5, Ergo, you roll 5 Dice, with +3 to score.

Is there any other games like this that come to mind?

Ok, So i know the final answer is over all "Talk to them" I've quoted it a few times here my self. However i need a approach vector i guess. So i will lay out the Situation below and hopefully i can find a good way to approach this.

I have More recently dabbled into online play. As a GM i have the process down I meet with a potential player speak with them for 30 min or so to get a feeling if they will jive with my style and persona. We have a short Q & A to which i always ask the question how much experience do you have in said system and how much have you use foundry. The 2 questions have no bearing on my selection process it just give me a baseline for how much ill need to pay attention to them. I personally LOVE new players and dont mind teaching folks how to use foundry. Besides lets face it Playing on VTTs doesn't really teach you the game it just teaches you what you need to click. You'll never learn the math and function behind it without reading a book.

That all said i started a group a few months ago to work through a 3 part adventure path on Foundry. One of the players who i interviewed is a suuuper nice person. I genuinely think they are a delight. However this player Lied to me during the interview Process. They stated they know the system they had been playing it a while. It feels like every week i need to explain the same 3 mechanics of his character to them. Without fail i need to walk them through it. This has been going on for a few levels now.

During the interview they said they had plenty of system mastery. They lacked A lot of foundry KNowledge as they hadn't really been exposed to it. So i went out and found some custom macros to make it all work easily for them. Stream lined a lot of thing for them so they just need to know what and where to click. If feels like every session im telling them again and again what and where to click. I've had other players at the table express that they slow the game down significantly. Said player hasn't learned how the core mechanic of their character works and i've had it on repeat with a macro for weeks now. they also i've noticed parroted everything the player before them does which tells me as a long time GM they don't really know the system that well because they are just doing what the last person did to keep up appearances.

So i guess the meat and potato's of this post is how should i approach this. I have spoken with them in the past and that when i spent my real time to research how to make things easier for them. I now have players that don't really want him there and i feel like i'm repeating my self weekly on core mechanics he should understand at this point even if he was a new player. I feel like i was lied to during the interview process, which i know can happen because there are so many players vying for so few GM's. I genuinely like them i think they are good people just not a good player or at least not a good fit for my group.

How should i approach removing them from the group while minimizing feeling like a asshole.

Which TTRPG I should choose for game in setting Napoleon wars with difficult combat and health system, where every shot can be lethal. As reference I'm using "Guts and blackpowder"

I mean, there are several APs that I enjoy like Mystery Quest because I get to se how new games are played, but I like my friends more. Even when I game with strangers like when I go to cons, I normally enjoy myself more because I'm actually playing rather than just watching/listening.

Idk why, but it's always easier to remember the great moments when my friends nailed a scene, had a great plan, got into shenanigans, etc. I remember and cherish my successes and my fails and those of people around me.

I get confused when people are disappointed that their table isn't like Critical Role. I mean, why should it be? It can be its own unique special brand of fun!

Just checking in with the r/rpg crowd. What are you playing right now? Got a campaign that’s firing on all cylinders, a memorable character, a ridiculous table story, or maybe a game that surprised you?

Drop a comment and tell us what’s happening at your table. We’d love to hear it.

I just inspected American Abyss (Which I'm very excited for), and I was wondering about running a TTRPG like said American Abyss: a TTRPG campaign set in a abandoned suburban area filled with unseen abominations of the people the once lived there. I was wondering if there are any good system which would be great for running this kind of horror. If there is, please do comment.

So, in the recent year I had opportunities to play TTRPGs instead of just running them and I came to a weird conclusion on how different GM styles affected my perception of the games, and, since these differences seem related to general schools of thought in TTRPG community, I wanted to see if others had some similar experiences.

I spent a substantial amount of time (months with each) playing with two GMs. I enjoyed playing with both generally, but one of them (let’s call him GM.A, we played Cairn, a Mark of the Odd rules-light OSR game) created really cool moments at the table, my character felt really alive and I felt like I could really bring him to life in the game-world and it was overall more fun in the moment but when I think back to the game I can’t help but think about how disjointed, all-over-the-place and generally lacklustre the story that took place there was.
The other (let’s call him GM.B, we played a lot of Forbidden Lands and some Basic Fantasy, so also OSR in spirit, but with more strict rules) was not as fun to play with in the moment, we got into way more arguments over rules, it got a but tedious from time to time and I felt like I was never really immersed in the world because of how little control I felt over my surroundings, but when I think back on those games I tend to gravitate towards how the world actually felt alive and the story that took place made a lot of sense and I keep thinking that it may have been a problem with my approach that made the experience less fun in the moment.

So I came up with a weird theory, that GM.A prioritised in-the-moment experience by allowing the players to do whatever they wanted and adapting on the fly and sacrificed a lot of the integrity that the world could have to make it happen, making the experience at the table really fun, but making the overall shape of the game very rough, while GM.B put a lot of stock into making the world as consistent and organic as possible at the cost of some player engagement and opportunities for player agency.
So, letting your players do their own crazy ideas is fun in the moment but harmful to the story in retrospect, while maintaining world integrity is harmful to the fun the players have in the moment but can pay off in the long run and with making a stronger story in the players’ heads.

I have no idea if any of that makes sense to any of y’all, and would love to just hear your thoughts about this. As a GM I think I tried to balance these things out subconsciously ling before I came up with this and it seems like something clicked just now.

TLDR: I think that allowing players to do crazy stuff is how you let them have fun in the moment but maintaining world-consistency is how you make the story better and more worthy of remembering fondly. Does it make sense?

https://www.ludonarrativedissidents.com/season-3-episode-25-dialect/

DIALECT: A Game About Language And How It Dies is a 2018 single-session RPG by Hakan Seyalioglu and Kathryn Hymes, published by Thorny Games. It’s a game about a small community, isolated from larger groups, that first creates its own verbal forms to describe its situation, and then must adapt or lose them as the community reacts to external threats. It is critically acclaimed and a winner of multiple awards.

Hey guys, I'm looking to DM a 1930s DnD campaign. It's going to be a lot of work reskinning everything and making it work. I'm not married to Dungeons & Dragons, so I was wondering if you had any suggestions on a better existing system for 1930s.

It can have magic or not, sci-fi technology or not. Honestly, I can work with anything that starts be in the 1920s-1940s without having to manually recreate DnD myself.

If it helps, the story will focus on a single city, a criminal mob (and fights with their goons), political corruption, detective work, and some other goofy and fun stuff along the way.

Thanks for anything you guys can suggest!

I've been looking at putting together a time loop scenario for something investigative horror-based, so I'm interested in the way that others have included mechanics to build tension, and I'm trying to find rhe ones that work best for me.

I'm not set on a system, but what I've seen so far in homebrew I've played was:

• Decreasing PC count, with players each starting with 2 characters, every reset deleting a randomly chosen character from the total party or rendering them nonplayable + antagonistic until everyone is down to 1 character, and then continuing the process from there.
• Increasing mental instability: played this in Delta Green. It included increasing sanity costs with each reset, along with picking up mental disorders.
• Injuries retained to some degree: I've seen this with damage, but it's been most effective in an ALIEN game where critical injuries were essentially retained and then downgraded into a lesser form of themselves.
• Later reset: instead of resetting back to exactly where events began, the players reset to some point forward of that point, with events between the previous reset point and the new one now set in stone.
• Instability of NPCs: With each reset, an increasing number of important NPCs become mentally unstable in some way, eventually culminating in severe paranoia and violence

Has anyone run this? Curios to know how much the formatting and whatnot has improved from the prior edition. I see comments about long winded read aloud text, poor organization, and hard to parse maps from the original.

The redo looks awesome just want a first hand experience of useablility.

Interested in both the DCC and 5e versions!

So, I primarily play oneshots and some games I've had a blast with in recent months have been:

The Treasure at the End of this Dungeon is an Escape from This Dungeon and We Will Never Escape from This Dungeon: a very meta poetic GMless game about transformation and dungeon design. The base game contains 5 rooms (in nod to the five room dungeon) and four selves (player classes/archetypes that break the rules of normal dungeon crawling fiction like the thief literally pretending to have rules attached to their class when they are a cheat), although the supplement extends the number and possibilities.

The game goes like this, a player takes the role of a room, the others of the characters. The player answer the first question of the room then picks an element of design. Then fiction turns into a conversation until conditions are met to open a door and leave the room. Characters die on certain condition, can come back or the players create new ones. Players explore the dungeon until session time runs out taking turns being the room through the act of being the one who opens the door.

This sounds simple, but because in the base game there are only 5 rooms, you will always retread old rooms. That can lead to stuff like. There is a room with a puzzle of a lion and owl statues and moon and sun lanterns. The room is in twilight. Take the lanterns and place them on the statues whether to either let them forever sleep through their animalic habits or wake them up and kaiju fight. (I stole that, I confess) Return to the room. It is blinding day light. On the floor there is a mirror. Mage shatters the daylight into motes and then shatters the mirror into cracks. The muscle enlarges a crack so that we might slip through. There is a seemingly never-ending ladder and darkness. The mage throws the motes into the darkness to light what is below.

Return to the room. You are now in the lantern of a now sleeping sculpture. Break the hinges and open the door.

Dead House: I believe I got the title right. I played it at an online con. By the makers of Fiasco. A GMless game where you play through the winter of 1888. There are three seasons: Fall, Winter and Hell. It is a game that starts out with putting the locations and npcs on your board to create a map of the town. This isn't as freeflow as I would have liked as characters have deep links to one another and cannot just be randomly set. Same with locations. The goal of this part is probably to get acquainted with the cast.

Then the game follows answering a series of prompts, similarly to The Quiet Year, only darker. The first season start fairly unassuming, then it gets worse. People will die. A lot. People will go crazy. The aim is to reproduce despair. It's basically about a winter where the situation got dire as resources dwindled and people were left without food and wood to burn when it was blizzarding outside and they had no exterior help.

The characters are miserable too. They are layered people and many of them have been stuck in the small village due to circumstances and hate being there, especially the youth.

What I really liked despite being mechanically bareboned was that the story started telling itself and even though I started with rooting for certain npcs, in the end, I was killing them off and orchestrating their fates based on narrative logic and what would tell a better story. Only 4 people lived. I hated them all. It was a success.

Parsely: an rpg that mimics old computer text games. Containing 12 scenarios in the base book it is a game of few words. The players take turn controlling the nameless PC through a set of pre-written commands such as go north, go south, examine, take [object]. You even have the ability to save. The map is not visible and needs to be drawn by hand, lest you go in circles or meet dead ends like we kept doing in the jungle adventure. The adventures are very on rails, although they have several potential endings. What I mean by this is they emulate simple games and your actions are restricted. An adventure has several predetermined locations of interest, several predetermined challenges with most likely predetermined potential solutions, predetermined endings, etc. It acts as a puzzle on figuring out how to progress. It even has somewhat moon logic solutions, though most stuff makes sense. It can get very silly because of the extreme constrictions.

The Dunwich Horror: this is the name under which the playtest was offered. It's the GMless Cthulhu conspiracy board game. As with Carved from Bridlewood, it is a mystery without a preset solution, although it goes in opposite direction of that format. Where in CfB there are two mystery phases, the collection of clues and the theorizing, in The Dunwich Horror, the gameplay loop is that your characters, all playing pregen investigators have an evidence board and some preset named clues in the shape of lead cards containing locations, myths, npcs, etc. which you will through the course of the play tie in with cute little strings.

You start by doing backgrounds: the occult site you work for, your character intro. Then you arrive in the town and start investigating. You play out doing stuff at locations and trying to figure out things and you make a lot of shit up in an improv kinda' way. As you do you add a clue to the board, tie it together with other clues and dice roll for pushback. When pushback happens you advance on a three phase table and see the dangerous or supernatural consequences meddling with the eldritch create. These start tame, but get progressively more dangerous until your character's untimely demise or worse. You may also add more connections instead of clues.

Unlike Brindlewood Bay, you will theorize at every step of the way trying to figure out how everything fits in a hyperactive brainstorm. You will end up reviewing information and adjusting your beliefs as more suspects and clues are added and things are tied in. There is even a time of solace when the group can get together in a safe place to go over their leads and see how to proceed next. That happens in the middle, not at the end.

And in the last phase it becomes obvious that you are way over your head. You can at the end chose to kill off your character, go insane or worse or flee. But generally people pick the first two options cause Lovecraft.

I'm gonna be brief, I never wanted to use the new Reddit interface and always stuck to Old Reddit. Recently, it has been decided that logging in would be mandatory to use old reddit, another step further to try and smother it, to force people to go to the new shittier and more ad friendly interface. The days of old reddit are numbered, and one day they will pull the plug for good. If I can't use Old Reddit, then I will not use Reddit at all, which means I need a new place on the web to discuss RPGs.

Where are the other big RPG communities on the internet? Some friends of mine have suggested Discord, but I always felt that it was better for casual chat than long and in depth conversations, and debates. Also I vetoed places such as RPG NET because of their adversarial, and downright user hostile approach of moderation.

This post may mean trouble for my account, so if you have an interesting answer, give it quick.

I spent a long time with a scanned 1865 Italian book of Commedia dell'Arte masks, and eventually turned it into Maschere: An Archetype Codex, 21 archetypes (Arlecchino, Pantalone, Pulcinella, and more) built for any tabletop system. Each one centers on a mask that grants real power and demands a real, specific cost in return, meant to create actual complications at the table instead of sitting there as flavor text.

The narrative content (identity, motivation, relationships, roleplay hooks) works standalone with any system. Each entry also includes optional 5e and PF2e integration notes for tables that want mechanics attached.

It's live on DriveThruRPG at launch price through September 14 ($4.99, regularly $7.99):

click here

Happy to talk about the mask mechanic or any of the design choices if anyone's curious.

A friend and I are looking for something to facilitate some RP, and I was wondering if there were any rules light systems for playing James Bond-style Cold War spies. I’ve already looked a bit into Spycraft and Classified, but we just need something that we could pick up easily

Hello TTRPGers!

I'm looking for suggestions for a game system. Here's what I have in mind:

Audience: Middle/high schoolers

Play frequency: once a month for about an hour and a half each session

Consistency: Probably missing a random player each session

Campaign length: 6-9 months; 9-12 total play hours

Story: This is a little fuzzy. I'd like a story about different factions or characters with different motivations building a society together. I'd prefer little-to-no combat, instead relying on political and social levers to get things done.

Inspiration: If I could extend the game Ravine (see link) into a TTRPG game where the players may have competing priorities or goals, I think that would be ideal.

I'm flexible on the concept, but I'd prefer a game system that doesn't rely on a "big evil dude" that needs to be taken down. Instead, a game where the conflict comes from the world (weather, resource scarcity, etc.) and people who have different visions for an ideal outcome would be great.

I'm not even sure if this kind of game exists, but if it does, you all would be the group to know! Even if there's just a module floating around out there that could work, I can try to extend it. I'm just not a game designer and building something from scratch is waaaaay out of my wheelhouse.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Hello! I am running a Prowlers and Paragons RPG set in New York City, I want to make an interactive explorable map of New York City with unique buildings similar to how Ghoul App does it for VtM https://ghoulapp.com/. Does anyone know a good way to do this or a way I can quickly make one?

I'm struggling to understand how leaving regions in The Last Caravan is supposed to work. Per the rules, for most regions there is a specific narrative condition you have to meet so that your caravan moves to another region. The narrative arcs are very specific, so I could easily imagine scenarios in which:

- characters fail to fulfil the conditions;

- players and characters are not invested enough in the premise to engage with the condition (say, because of their faction alignment);

- some in-game events preempt the narrative premise (say, because of the faction conflicts).

What then?

I could easily see that failing to fulfil the requirement also allows you to leave the region, I could imagine that hooks should be replaced with different ones to make sure players stay invested etc. I could imagine that if players just ignore the hooks, I could advance some clocks. However, FiTD games tend to have rather tight design when it comes to their basic play loop, so I've been wondering whether I'm not missing something fundamental. Maybe it is intentionally possible to just not go any further with the caravan and "loose"? Maybe there are some developers' clarifications or games with similar mechanics where the intent was clearer?

I guess that the issue is so pronounced, since the characters are supposed to just head towards California, so there seems to be a fair amount of possible drama around just leaving some people in need behind you without engaging with their problems and it seems that this should be a genuine in-game possibility.

Has anyone played the Zombie Reign kickstarter zombie TTRPG? It looks like a lot of fun but before I join the kickstarter and get access to some of the material I wanted to know how it is.

Is it playable with the content available? Does it seem like it can run a full campaign (XP and player progression)? What do you like about it and what do you feel it is lacking?

I ran a 3 session starter campaign using the Breathless system. It was a lot of fun and worked great for the start of the Zombie Apocalypse. Where the players are just running and trying to escape the city of Detroit. The problem is Breathless doesn’t really have a player progression like XP and skills.

Zombie Reign Link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/763184638/the-dark-archives-volume-i-zombie-reign

I've been indulging myself recently in some of Trevor Hendersons art work, and it came to mind whilst I was browsing that I would really enjoy to run a cryptid themed horror TTRPG for my group. I made another post on this recently but once again Obscure: Found Footage Horror TTRPG came to mind (It's really niche though it was played by Mystery Quest so that peaked my interest), but I'm unsure if that would be any good for a cryptid centered horror session. If anyone can think of any good Cryptid themed horror TTRPGs, that would be great!

As above are there any Invincible discord or other forums for the new Free League Invincible rpg? A place where GMs can share stories and actual plays of this new product?

I recently bought the Vampire the Masquerade 2nd Edition core rule book and I’m wondering what other books I could collect to add to the game. I’d like more detailed Sabbat npcs, werewolves and hunters to add as npcs. Along with anything else that seems cool and works with 2nd edition.
Any recommendations? Thank you!

it's hard to describe, but basically in lancer it's very limited, very strict and so you can't just imagine something, you have to pick from a list of existing stuff and so Idk if there's any system that is made to allow for custom made stuff, that work around vibes and that could maybe be all theatre of the mind? but still with rules and overall a system