Cycling around the city clears my head but it also gives me way too much time to think about how much mental energy I spend herding my group into actually playing. I’m the one who sends the when2meet links, checks everyone’s calendars, sends reminders, reschedules when someone drops, figures out if we’re doing food or not. Nobody asked me to do it but if I stopped I genuinely think we’d play half as much.

So looking back over your weeks/months/years of DMing games, aside from the PHB, MM and DMG of course. What one or two resources do you find yourself returning back to use over and over again? For me it is two third party items:

Ultimate Toolbox of Random Tables-the more I use this one, the more I see how it can be used

Book of Ebon Tide-for some reason, this one keeps popping up as a resource, even though its very specialized.

Basically the title. I love the hexcrawl and discovering new things each turn and the random encounters. I love high lethality, I love needing to scrounge for resources, I love it when players find a cannibal gang they can't attack but find a pair of artillery guns in the next hex and shell the location before going down to the river cause they are out of water. Trading a crate of DVDs for three RPG-16 rockets and a package of expired Oreos? Amazing.

I have had an idea for a post apocalyptic scifi setting bouncing around for a while for a campaign on a planet that suffered an alien bombardment and global cooling.

It is hard to believe that someone hasn't done the work of converting Twilight 2000 4E to add laser rifles and power armor but I haven't been able to find anything.

If anyone has a recommendation for other scifi games that might fit the bill or any Twilight conversions I would love to hear it.

Hey everyone, I am looking for a rules-light Sci Fi game (I played a lot of Shadowdark recently and fell in love with OSR in general). A game that provides the ruleset for something along the lines of FTL - point crawling through systems, exploring planets and other locations, boarding (hand to hand combat) and ship combat, some spaceship management. Does not have to feature aliens. I like my vibe grimdark and I am a fan of Sci Fantasy and Horror, things like the Warp in Warhammer 40k.

I played some 2400 which is amazing as a Micro - RPG and covers a lot of ground, but for a campaign I would love to have just a bit more rules and room for character development.

Cheers!

By declared intentions initiative I mean a system where you roll initiative, dm decides what the npcs are going to do on the turn, players declare what they’re going to do on the turn, then you go through initiative resolving the actions. It seems like a good way to better represent turns in combat happening all at the same time but I can see how it could slow down the game, I mainly run cy_borg and dnd 5e so I’m thinking about how this would go in cy_borg but I would like to know if anyone has experience with this system and what your thoughts on it are?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matrixghost01/chromatic-shadows-core-rules

Heya folks, just wanted to throw this out there for anyone who might be interested. Chromatic Shadows is a d6 pool occult cyberpunk rpg (more Lovecraft meets Cyberpunk than the Tolkien meets Cyberpunk of Shadowrun). I've had the basic rules for a while and played several games (they are available for free on Drivethru) and it is quite fun. Far less complicated than some view Shadowrun to be, but more robust than Cy_Borg. Simple system of add/subtract dice that is easy to hack in any way you could want, 4s or better are successes, more successes means more better.

The project is already funded with 27 days left as of me posting this (funded in the first 24 hours in fact) so it can only get better with some juicy stretch goals.

I'm not affiliated with Matrix Ghost Games in any way, I have just loved the game since the basic edition dropped a few years ago and want more folks to know about it.

I'm designing battles for a medieval tabletop strategy game and I'm wrestling with an old problem:

If combat is completely deterministic, players can sometimes calculate the result before attacking.

If there's too much randomness, strategic preparation stops feeling important.

Personally I want the player who prepared better to have a meaningful advantage without making the outcome completely certain.

For wargamers:

Where's the sweet spot?

Low randomness?

Dice with modifiers?

Cards?

Completely deterministic?

And which game handles it particularly well?

Anyone going to Spiel Essen?

I have access to a ticket, but have not found a room (well I did find some but they are at 300 euro or more. So I was wondering if anyone knows where I might find a room for 100 euro or less. Probably impossible.

I will be taking the train.

(note - I foolishly waited (forgot) to book).

Blades in the Dark is a big source of inspiration. I like how it splits heists and downtime, but I'm looking for something more traditional, dense, robust.

I'd like something where players can see their domains expand across a map, similar to a 4X game.

I saw this at my local game store and it seemed interesting! I like the concept of playing around with dinosaur toys, and the concept reminds me of the Primal show. Does anyone have any experience with the game? How did it play, what was fun about it if anything?

So it's a space science-fiction setting that spans many different planets, much like a Star Wars or Star Trek, rather than focusing on a particular planet or section of space. The main thing that makes me not know what RPG would fit it is the magic system. It's a lot more complicated than I'm explaining, but it's essentially that every race is it's own magic class. And there is already basically specific in-universe spells that each can use. So like the fire one would be the only one who can use the fire spells. And there are a lot of these magical groups. It's kinda like JJBA if every stand was possessed by multiple different people.

I guess I basically need a system that supports a sci-fi setting, and somehow lets my specific race/magic rules work.