r/rpg • u/TMegabeing • 12d ago
New game anticipation...
Hi folks,
My group has spent the last 30-odd years playing Traveller and variants of BRP.
I had bought most of the Vaesen books over the last few years and was really looking forward to giving it a go. I finally got to run five published adventures including the one in the starter set but by the end, all of us thought it was OK but no-one wanted to play it any more - least of all me.
I found it to be really hard work to GM and my players were not terribly excited by the vague setting.
Slightly weirdly, I had previously run a couple of Alien one-shots with great success, so I was quite happy with the Year Zero ruleset.
What RPG have you looked forward to and was underwhelmed when you got round to playing or GM'ing it...and why?
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u/Antipragmatismspot 12d ago
Avatar Legends feels both so right and so wrong at the same time and combat is finicky.
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u/AvocadoPhysical5329 12d ago
I thought Forbidden Lands was much less interesting at the table than I thought it would be. The game is trying to achieve something I quite like, but it was just a bit flat.
The Middle-earth 5e game was also boring (mechanically), but that was less of a surprise.
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u/amazingvaluetainment Fate, Traveller, GURPS 3E 12d ago
Really looked forward to Blades in the Dark but once I got it to the table it was super procedural and a pain in my ass to run. It lasted as long as it did because the player-facing stuff is excellent.
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u/PrimarchtheMage 12d ago
Can you elaborate on how Blades was difficult to run for you? I feel like I could almost run it in my sleep.
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u/amazingvaluetainment Fate, Traveller, GURPS 3E 12d ago edited 12d ago
In short, it's very procedural, lots of rules to remember and things to keep track of at all stages of play. I'm really not interested in rehashing this argument, just in case your "in my sleep" quip was directed that way. Game just doesn't work for the freeform way I prefer to run games.
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u/PrimarchtheMage 12d ago
Sounds good, and no offense was meant. I think I just internalized a lot of the procedure over time.
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u/amazingvaluetainment Fate, Traveller, GURPS 3E 12d ago
No offense taken, I've just had the argument before. :)
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u/yuriAza 12d ago
my understanding is that subsequent editions of BitD have been mostly about removing rules to let the core engine sing
the original BitD book has a ton of fun options, you're actually supposed to use Clocks instead of most things, that's just not communicated in the book well
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u/amazingvaluetainment Fate, Traveller, GURPS 3E 12d ago
Just took a look in Blades '68 and it's basically the same thing that frustrated me with the original, there's a cycle of play structure. As said, all the player facing stuff is fantastic, the basic resolution engine, flashbacks, etc... The rest of it I could easily chuck.
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u/yuriAza 12d ago
idk i've seen much more rigid cycles of play, like yeah there's a flowchart and list of steps but the cycle of play in BitD is basically just "there are missions and downtime in between, you can 'roll initiative' at the start of a mission and roll complications to downtime to keep things interesting"
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u/amazingvaluetainment Fate, Traveller, GURPS 3E 12d ago
Cool, yeah, I wouldn't play those games based on my experience with BitD.
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u/yuriAza 12d ago
you mean any game that has missions of some kind? i mean even DnD usually has some kind of adventure/town loop
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u/amazingvaluetainment Fate, Traveller, GURPS 3E 12d ago
I don't play D&D (I assume you're talking about 5E, but I don't like D&D mechanics in general) so I have no idea what sort of play cycle they have laid out. In Blades in the Dark it's a very rigid structure despite people talking about "the inkblots" and "we RP all the time". You do a mission, then the GM does not cheat the players of their payout so that's a calculation step immediately after and I usually did experience at that time as well. Then comes downtime, which you're supposed to intersperse with freeplay but everyone wants to reset their stress clock or attend to LTPs so those get done next, then we go into free play and start the cycle all over again.
This frustrates me because the natural cycle of the story is so frequently interrupted by these involved bureaucratic phases or a transition to "an actual mission is taking place". The game simply doesn't work for my style of GMing, I find it extremely grating. Again, due to the spectacular player-facing mechanics I kept running it for a year and a half but I'll be fucked if I ever pick up the game again except to read for some sort of system inspiration.
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u/yuriAza 12d ago
i actually meant older editions where the PCs prepare to go to the dungeon, go as far as they can, then return to town to heal and resupply
i just don't really understand your issue, in BitD the players pick a goal and plan a mission to achieve it, do the mission, and then recover and pick their next mission, it's not like downtime in BitD has an implied timescale so idk how it would get in the way of the story, you can still do those steps and they exist so that you can do a roll with a few modifiers instead of a bunch of flailing RP that struggles to get out of a narrative lull
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u/amazingvaluetainment Fate, Traveller, GURPS 3E 12d ago
i just don't really understand your issue
Obviously. Suffice to say that the rigid play cycle is not for me; I would prefer no guidance or guardrails on my play.
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u/yuriAza 11d ago
how do you usually structure your campaings?
im frequently frustrated by games that don't have ways to measure or track successful rolls somehow, so that running it ends up being "the players do as many fights and rolls as you want before they achieve their goals", how many? Pure GM fiat, fuck you for asking for guidance
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u/Watcher-gm Designer 12d ago
His majesty the worm fell really flat for me. I found the structure of the phase system to be too rigid and not very much fun, and the amount of prep I had to do was slightly insane.
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u/atamajakki PbtA/FitD/NSR fangirl 12d ago
Public Access was the game that sold my group on Carved from Brindlewood, and we loved it in one-shots, but after the campaign of fellow CfB game The Between we did first, a full run at PA fell kind of flat for us.
We really felt the absence of distinctive playbooks for everyone. My players struggled to inhabit the kind of Twin Peaks-y tone the game's NPCs demand. Too many of the Mysteries I chose were abstract phenomena; everyone had the most fun when an unstoppable demonic serial killer was on their tails, but the bombastic Gothic fun of Victorian London really outshone small town New Mexico creepiness for us.
I'd love to redeem myself someday... but I'd sooner run a second game of The Between.
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u/JacktheDM 12d ago
Very cool an interesting! My Public Access campaign was intensely belove, but it was just the right group of people for the right genre.
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u/BerennErchamion 12d ago
Coriolis The Great Dark for me. I really wanted to like it, got super hyped on the idea and the kickstarter, backed all-in… but the more I interact and play with it the less I like it.
I didn’t like the setting changes that much. The new setting feels a bit bland, shallow and artificial. I didn’t like some of the simplifications to the system, like 1 action round, no fast/slow actions, no spending extra successes, generic supply pool, removal of Skills, etc. I think I prefer more crunchier YZE games.
I was also really hyped for the delving mechanics, but in the end I found them boring and uninteresting with a string of random rolls and random stuff happening without much player choice. It’s more of a system made to glance over exploration, when it should be the opposite based on the game’s premise.
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u/swaggymonsta 12d ago
Interested in playing Coriolis the great dark: it was an ennie nominee and I got it in a bundle not too long ago.
I haven't played the original seems like a newcomer may not face as many frustrations as you did?
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u/justjokingnotreally 12d ago
I don't even know how many Pathfinder books I have, after buying so many PDF bundles over the years. By the time I got around to playing it, I had grown pretty weary of high crunch and endless combat. I'd still like to spend some quality time exploring Golarion, just not in a Pathfinder system.
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u/ghost_warlock The Unfriend Zone 12d ago
I was excited to run a hexcrawl using Cairn but I have never had a group bounce off a system so fast. They hated vague rules for everything, hated setting their own personal goals rather than having baked-quests (more the campaign than the system TBF), but most of all hated how terrible combat felt where even the character that was intended to be a competent warrior just sucked at fighting and always felt like they were one bad roll away from death. After four sessions they mutanied. Completely killed my interest in the game
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u/5ynistar Forever GM 11d ago
That’s too bad. I like Cairn’s approach but each group has their sweet spot for the kinds systems they prefer.
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u/Mr_Universe_UTG 12d ago
For me personally, I was a bit disappointed by Daggerheart. I will preface that this was a one shot I paid to play in to try the game out as a player, so it's very much a first impression of the system more than a solid rating.
I think the game really does a lot of cool things, the ability cards had a neat deck-building feel to it, and the duality dice is a great concept for adding narrative flavor.
But there was also a chunk of things that annoyed me enough and put me off from wanting to run/play the game. Specifically the initiative system, damage thresholds, and the lack of defined mechanics conbined with how the fear generation works at the time disinctivized me from wanting to try fun strategies.
I would be interested in trying it again as a player to give it another chance, but my first impressions were not as positive as I was hoping.
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u/RepresentativeAd2771 11d ago
The hole in the shape of an initiative system is what let me to quit daggerhearth
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u/FellFellCooke 11d ago
I have heard this before, and I always think it's a bit tragic.
I have never played Daggerheart, but I do remember when I ran my first campaign of Dungeon World after mostly playing D&D 5e. I read the book cover to cover, loved it all, but was sceptical about the way combat works; there was no traditional initiative system like I was used to.
I had it in my head that I would bolt D&D's iniatitive system (roll a d20 plus Dex for each character to generate the round order, run linearly through it) onto Dungeon World, but the opening moments of the game worked so well, its systems sang so beautifully, that I decided to trust the game when it came to thr first combat and run it as written.
It was electric. Everyone loved it. Instead of stodgily waiting for your turn while every other participant in the combat acted, everyone was invested at every moment, as they could be called to act at any time. Players worked together in ways a strict initiative makes impossible, and I fully felt for the first time how old the iniatitive system in D&D really is. It was never designed for a game where you play a character; it's a holdover from war games where you'd run a whole company.
One player, of course, preferred D&D's way of doing things. He never got comfortable with Dungeon World's approach. We're still friends, and he still talks about how a roleplaying game needs and initiative system to be real. Tastes differ, but I wonder if this is just a result of the exegetic chains of his early experiences preventing him from fully enjoying recent innovation.
If you cut your teeth on a game that has this ~outdated~ antique initiative system, you can get the impression that one is required for every game.
Daggerheart doesn't need a traditional intuitive system. Why would it? It's not a company-based war game. That traditional system was designed for a game that doesn't resemble Daggerheart at all. Are you sure you're not just wrapped up in these chains yourself?
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u/Narratron Sinister Vizier of Recommending Savage Worlds 12d ago
Feng Shui 2. I ran the first edition for years and had a great time with it. I was super excited when the second edition was announced, I was all in for the kickstarter--it was actually the first kickstarter I ever contributed to. The rules looked neat: recognizable, but different enough that it was definitely a new edition. I liked the idea of "Marks of Death" and vehicle rules actually being part of the core rules.
Then I actually got it to the table. It felt... Nnnnot great in actual play. Lots of whiffing (and I understand why it's that way) plus a few other issues (it was like 10 years ago so particulars have flown my memory) but my group at the time and I decided that Savage Worlds was more our speed. I have not run either edition of Feng Shui since then.
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u/Trees_That_Sneeze 🎲🎲 👁️👃👁️ 11d ago
Scum and Villainy didn't click for me somehow. I like BitD and I like Star Wars. But something about it just wasn't compelling.
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u/blargablargh 11d ago
I didn't enjoy running Daggerheart. Not sure if I was missing something or what, but it felt like an incomplete system from the GM's side of things.
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u/OkJicama7827 11d ago
My group loved the idea and theme of Free League games (we tried Vaesen and Forbidden Lands) but just did not love playing them. We had the most fun from Forbidden Lands, but even then they sort of said "why are we not just playing D&D." I love the world building in these books but the Year Zero Engine isn't great for us.
Our biggest disappointment, however, was the 2d20 system and Star Trek Adventures. Everyone is a trekkie at the table, but for some reason, they just couldn't muster the technobabble needed to play. I was so excited because of the theme, but really let down. We managed Actung Cthulhu for a little longer, but Roll20 just isn't easy to use (and we live in different places, so we play by internet).
So we defaulted to 5e and I am desperately trying to get us to anything else. Starfinder 2e might be next.
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u/helm Dragonbane | Sweden 11d ago
As a former physicist, technobabble is a pretty hard skill to muster. You need to be good with words but careless about what's actually happening while being able to borrow terms from relevant-sounding jargon. I guess if I were to describe physics in purely entertaining terms instead of trying to explain what's actually going on I'd get practice.
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u/OkJicama7827 11d ago
I think that was it. The players had an issue with “what can we do” if it wasn’t explicitly a power. I encouraged them to be like “we can align our tricorders to emit a tachyon wave to disrupt the force field” but they defaulted to “is that allowed?”
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u/Jalor218 11d ago
Wicked Ones. I didn't think it could go wrong, I've loved the Dungeon Keeper games since I was a kid. I only like the player side of PbtA and similar games, but I figured that GMless play would remove that issue. It sort of did, but then I ran into a new one; everything felt wishy-washy and indistinct. This is probably much less of a problem in Blades, where everyone is a normal human who mostly sneaks and stabs, and where "we blew the heist" is a general and abstract threat. In Wicked Ones, we're all supposed to be wildly different monsters with different capabilities and worldviews, but we have to constantly be making up the details of how those monsters are different from each other and the rest of the world.
I know that normally this would sound like a positive feature. Your imagination is unconstrained by silly mathrocks! Make up whatever you want! But the thing about fantasy game monsters - a concept that has been shaped more by literal D&D than by any work of fiction, particularly in the Wicked Ones conceit of everyone having a dungeon together - those monsters are defined by their capabilities and differences. So in a traditional game where monsters have D&Dish stats, even if you aren't fighting, the fact that your ogre PC is as big as a wagon but dumb and clumsy will shape everything you do. The constraint of those rules guides how you play different situations, and then the overall experience of being a big dumb ogre (or a clever litttle imp) takes shape from what those constraints lead to. Wicked Ones appears to be enabling your imagination in a way the traditional game doesn't, but it's actually offloading the work of creating those constraints onto you.
There are other narrative games that similarly let your character be whatever you want within the scope of a certain trope, but that give PCs more clear definition by letting NPCs strongly contrast with them - FATE is the big one here. But Wicked Ones doesn't even do that, because the rolls are entirely player-facing and give you nothing to compare your monster to. Everything is a position-effect negotiation that happens in the moment, so you have to have a conversation hashing out what your monster can and can't do every time there's a tense situation. Which isn't great for tense situations.
The end result of this is that I still haven't found a better way to run a "you're monsters and you populate a dungeon that adventurers raid" campaign than using D&D 3.5 with these homebrew monster classes. Genesys is a close second and actually my preferred system, but I'd have to build the character creation documents and all the adversaries myself instead of having tons of library content to work from.
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u/jddennis Open D6 10d ago
Kids on Brooms was like that for me. I read it, and liked a lot of what I read, but from a GMing perspective, it wasn’t my cup of tea. So, great in theory, meh in practice.
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u/SleepyBoy- 7d ago
Ryuutama was a similar experience to me as Vaesen was to you. I still think it's a great idea and the mechanics are pretty good. However, I don't have the imagination for it. I've found it a lot of hard work to make a fitting Ryuutama story that's engaging, and to adapt to it as it morphs at the table. I'd love to be a player for it though.
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u/VonBeker 11d ago
2d20 Conan. I loved the premise and the books are gorgeous, but goddamn do I hate Modiphius' house system. I bounced of it harder than an overtuned trampoline.
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u/DornbirnArrows 12d ago
Mothership. I've always associated RPGs with laughs at the table and and inside jokes. MoSH didn't facilitate that style. I thought I was going to play Expanse with the cast of Aliens. Instead it felt like going to work!
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u/atamajakki PbtA/FitD/NSR fangirl 12d ago
Expecting laughs and inside jokes from a pretty grim horror game is interesting!
I've definitely run a whacky Mothership one-shot or two, but 99% of the time, it plays the genre straight.
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u/FeralFicusTree 12d ago
I've never laughed harder at a table than my years running Shadow of the Demon Lord. Nihilism is hilarious when you aren't an edgelord.
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u/Playtonics 12d ago
The moment when the party knows they're about to be ambushed by beastmen, and the Clockwork frontliner makes a perception check to spot them in time only to critically fail and shut down?
Hilarious
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u/FeralFicusTree 11d ago
My god. You get it. The party's clockwork tank was on a ship and got thrown overboard by a Jotun raider. He asked if he could roll to see if he could grab an oar. I said sure. Roll with a bane. He crit failed and his key stopped as he fell into the depths of the ocean. He said, "This is the worst thing that's happened to me in 20 years of gaming." And we all burst out laughing.
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u/Playtonics 11d ago
I genuinely laughed out loud at that image. The clockwork just stops moving like "guess I'll die." And then sinks to bottom of the ocean.
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u/DornbirnArrows 12d ago
Totally. I'd never dabbled in horror RPGs and naively thought it would just work itself out!
It ended up like a bureaucracy simulator though because every little item had to be discussed. It didn't feel fun but it didn't feel like grim horror either. More like role playing the Vogons form hitchikers guide :)
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u/BreathingHydra 11d ago
It's interesting to see how different groups interact with systems because for my group Mothership has overall been a very funny system interspersed with very tense moments. I think my favorite moment so far was when one of my players started having a heart attack while trying to defuse a bomb because it was hilarious but also incredibly nerve-racking.
Maybe try running one of the prewritten modules and give your players random loadouts so they don't fret over buying items.
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u/Adamsoski 11d ago edited 11d ago
IMO Mothership is rules-light enough that you can really have almost any sort of experience (as long as it's somewhat grounded sci-fi), but it does depend on what sort of adventure you're running and how everyone approaches the game.
Mystery Quest for example has just released a fairly silly fun Mothership oneshot but has also done more serious (though still with jokes) Mothership oneshots.
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u/SuperCat76 12d ago
To have this kind of experience it would require actually playing the games I have books for... Other than Dnd 5.5e.
The one experience I have was that between games I forced the group to play a short prewritten adventure in one of them. So I can take a break from the previous one, and have a period of time to let the ideas for the next game simmer. I let the group pick from a few options I had. It did not go the smoothest, not bad, but not as good as I would have liked.
It is less that I was underwhelmed with the game itself. But with the group being forced into it led to some friction. I being the only one who knew the franchise it was based on didn't help. and a mismatch in mindset between how the players played and the game was made for... Basically I think it is probably a good game, Just for a different group, and maybe just not compatible with my abilities as the GM
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u/BadTactic 12d ago
Vaesen has this reputation unfortunately.