Which RPG(s) have you always wanted to play but could never find a group that was interested?
Some of mine are Space 1889 and GURPS Discworld
Wait, GURPS Discworld?‽!?
Yeah, I printed a copy a while back (lots of free prints on college), never played it but had some cool ideas like when something happens it should be in the way that makes the best story, if a mage turns someone into a pumpkin all of this clothes get turned as well, with the exception of the hat and the shoes, just because that’s what makes the best description of the aftermath.
Amazon has it, I’m pretty sure! I have it, but haven’t had a chance to play it
Ooh, I have several I’d like to play, but I don’t see a way to unless I DM them myself:
- Mage: the Ascension
- Vampire: the Masquerade
- Ars Magica
- Transit: the Spaceship RPG
- Call of Cthulhu
- Shadowrun
- Numenera
I guess I’ll get to it at some point and just start a group myself, but I’d love to be a player in any of those, especially Mage.
Mage and Vampire are my favorite systems, but I’ve never never got to play them (just GM), still I love them both. So IMO give them a go, for Vampire I like the new rules better (5th edition) but some people have very strong opinions against it, for mage M20 is the best, but it’s gigantic so it might be very intimidating.
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I loved the Bloodlines crpg, but somehow I feel that in ttrpg the vampires/PCs will inevitably end up as edgelords, much better than ordinary humans. How can GM mitigate that?
While I love the Bloodlines game it’s a very different beast. As all computer games it suffers a lot from “D&Dization” or in other words extreme focus on combat, not to mention that most computer games try to make you feel like you’re special, you’re THE dragonborn, THE ONLY person that can do X, you are powerful, you are unique, and if your character fails or even dies, you go back and try again, so on the cannon of the game you never fail.
TTRPGS can be very different, yes your vampire is very powerful and can take a bullet to the head and lift a car, you are superhuman… too bad you live in an inhuman world, in the vampire world PCs are at the bottom of the pile, being “much better than ordinary humans” is as much of a threat to an older vampire as being “much better than ordinary ants” is to humans. To give an example the prince of the city that can tell you “you are annoying me, go take a walk on the sun”, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to prevent your body from walking directly into sunlight.
Secondly Vampire is NOT focused on combat, as a GM you can give some combat against humans or lesser vampires to make them feel powerful once in a while, but if they try to face every conflict as if it were a physical conflict they will have a bad time. Older vampires don’t play fair, they might throw hunters, werewolves or just simply money to deal with a problematic vampire, think about it this way you probably could beat Jeff Bezos in a fair fight, but you would never have the opportunity because if you even become a small annoyance he has enough money to make you disappear and make your life miserable, he can hire someone(s) to follow you around and buy every building you rent and kick you out of it, buy every store where you shop and close it, buy every taxi app available in your locality and ban you from it, find every single thing that you like and take it away from you, money buys power, and older vampires have infinite amounts of both.
Last but not least, Vampire is a game of personal horror, yes you are strong but that doesn’t help you to deal with the monster within. Everyone you know is bound to get dragged to it, you don’t just leave everything behind, what does it matter if you can survive a bullet to the head if the person is pointing it at your sister because you accidentally killed his sister and he knows you will survive a bullet. Even if you managed to keep them away from others, you are a danger, you can snap and kill them because you’re hungry, you are a threat to every human that comes near you, but staying away from humans is not an option, since you will forget what it’s like to be a human and you will loose yourself to the inner beast that is trying to take control. And while this last point might seem that players can just RP their way out of, Vampire has rules for humanity and newer versions have mechanics for keeping humans nearby as tokens of humanity, this makes it so that the player feels the problem of losing a sister and can’t just say “oh well, I guess I don’t have a sister anymore” because that means he has lost humanity, he has become more of a monster, and when the beast within wins the player loses the character.
Sorry for the long reply, but Vampire is one of my favourite RPGs.
That was a very good read, thank you for such thorough post
as a forever GM I feel your plight
You should look at solo systems! Mythic can be used with pretty much any game system, and their new edition is supposed to be very good!
Why do I love making lists so much?
Starfinder for me is like… I love the idea of it, but I worry I’m going to chafe with it because it’s less cooked compared to Pathfinder 2. Really looking forward to if they ever do a Starfinder 2e though! Especially if they unify the mechanical language of the two systems so that Starfinder and Pathfinder can become two sides of the same coin.
I am very curious about Shadow of the Demon Lord. But my group is “hard done” with pure fantasy settings, so it will probably take a lot of time until I can propose it.
I hope we could one day play CBR+PNK one day when someone can’t make the date.
And Neon City Overdrive looks interesting.
What are you guys playing now?
Shadowrun using my (still not complete :/) Savage Worlds hack/supplement. In all supplements I found there was always something that I didn’t like. But I should have accepted it and moved on instead of dabbling in game design, it took me a lot of time that should have been spent on planning the campaign.
Yeah I’m stuck in that black hole currently. But it turned into designing an entire game from the ground up. It started in 2016 and I’m still not done.
Yeah, it’s a lot of work even before you can move into testing. Fortunately I did not have to think about probability curves that much, only grasp the core idea of an existing system :)
You’re wise, don’t be like me
😄 Well, before that I was part of a group that was trying to create “Shadowrun 5.5”. There I understood a lot about how big project creating a system is
you got that right.
I’m using ‘Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game’ ruleset: https://www.basicfantasy.org/. I use watabou’s tool for inspiration: https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon
I want to play Wanderhome, but one issue with it is I want someone who really understands how that style of play works to play it with me. I’m very intrigued by the game but can’t quite wrap my head around how it actually goes at the table.
Next on my to play list is Reach of the Roach God but the issue there is scheduling: I have an existing weekly campaign and struggle to find time for a second campaign-length module.
I also want to play Gubat Banwa, I might try the solo rules, but I also have a massive backlog of solo games I want to try.
Hey! I look after the Wanderhome fan server on Discord, Reddit and here on Lemmy. If you want a hand please get in touch!
@seedling Reach of the Roach God sounds interesting. What system would you use to run it?
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Yeah, it’s got a lot of options, but as a GM, you have to put a lot of work into campaigns.
as a newbie to the system myself I’m having a lot of fun with it! if you haven’t heard of it I’d try the gurps lite version first which is free and a good starting point to add or remove rules and mechanics as needed.
I started my RPG life in GURPs in the 90s. Great system.
Coming a bit late to the conversation, but https://1shotadventures.com/ has a bunch of free GURPS adventures for your group to dip your toes into!
Delta Green. I love the concept so much, and have wanted to run a monster-of-the-week campaign for years, but the tabletop group I’m in mostly have a fantasy bent.
I have a huge list but I think they fall in a few categories: Mecha (Lancer, Jovian Chronicles), NSR (GLOG, Black Hack, Into the Dungeon, Mausritter, World of Dungeons, 6e, etc), One pagers (Honey Heist, Orcball, The Beast, Lasers & Feelings, All Outta Bubblegum, Planted, etc), and IP (Borderlands, Mistborn, Marvel, Outlaw Star, Warcraft, Diablo, Halo, etc)
Alien! I’ve got it on my hands a few days ago at my local store. I’m probably going to buy it by Monday or shortly after.
I’ve only read good things about it so far.
I haven’t played it but I think horror can be quite tricky to pull off at the table. I managed to create a spooky atmosphere a few times but it was never controlled, it just came out so.
Do you have some pointers/thoughts about how to make horror work in ttrpg?
I think I’ve been lucky building an horror atmosphere, because the only one I played was for Call of Cthulhu and was with a combination of casual DnD players and new players to TTRPG in general. So, explaining to them the kind of game keep them on the mood since first minute, since CoC has pretty hard rules about sanity and the posibility of dying, and there is a lot of emphasis on not beign combat focused.
Then, the adventure I played had a lot of elements that create a build up for the sessions. Things I can identify that helped where:
- That the players where given a clear objective as a premise, but then an aircraft accident happened and they were completely lost. The whole adventure is escaping from the town were they are after the accident, the premise was a lie, and this gave them a sense of constant danger and a direct problem that they can not just forget about.
- In the adventure, language was a barrier. They were on a town where everyone spoke an old romanian dialect. Their only way of communication they had were trying to use their hands or talk to only one person in town which could translate their requests. This augmented the isolation factor.
- With the first two points, everything else flowed, because if they found, like, signs of blood somewhere, or strange paintings, talking about them ment using this one character that could translate their requests, but they didn’t trust them, because everyone on that town felt like an enemy, so everything else exponientialy grew in possible theories because trying to just grab information felt dangerous in itself.
This may be too much specific, but could be translated in other contexts by using those kind of barriers and immediate unavoidable problems that felt real, that augment a normal spooky scene you can imagine, supported by a game system that danger is a real threat in the rules.
Ah, you have some horror under your belt.
everyone on that town felt like an enemy,
How did you achieve that?
The adventure presented almost every character in a situation where players could almost no interact, but they were spectators of a weird situation that something felt off. Then later in the second day the adventure gave them freedom to try whatever they wanted.
For example, first interaction with the person who give them shelter, was requiring them payment after a heated discussion with some familiy members. With this, goes along a description where “players can feel that they are not welcome”. It’s in this moment when the discussion stops and this character began asking for something to stay the night, and it’s not money, and just aims at items they carry, like watches, or bracelets they could have.
Another example, there was an orphanage in this town, when they go to just investigate, they are presented with a person that controls the orphanage, and while they are talking, they hear screams from a child who is permanently locked in a room without windows.
The first example builds distrust in the family who gave shelter, and the other does the same for the person who controls the orphanage. Every person in this town has something wrong with them.
Even the less dangerous was a drunk person, which also build distrust, not because of danger or horror, but because trusting a drunk person could unveil their plans of escape to other people.
Also, there were minor factors that engrained on the players. One of the characters lies to them, and from then, they think that anyone could also be lying.
Wolves of God
Mine is more an issue of time than of finding a group; we just want to play too many things. I would concur on the Space 1889 (Savage Worlds version in my case), and add Goblonia (I’ve played it once but really want to try again), Numenera, The Elephant and Macaw Banner and Scherezade, just to mention a few I have and not yet tried.
Numanera looks cool, but I can’t get into the Cypher System. Have you tried any other games that use the system?
I haven’t, no. What don’t you like about it?
To me it’s too quick and dirty, also the math is kind of weird to get used to. I understand that it’s supposed to be more “cinematic”, but that ain’t my bag.
Ah, I liked the idea enough that I bought the rulebook. Trying to spin up a game for my kids right now. I feel like it should work pretty well for low-prep, fairly improvisational sessions, but I can understand why it’s not everyone’s bag.
I also like that it can work well for different genres, so not having to learn new systems for different games we might run over time should make it easier to get into and play.
Always wanted to try Lancer but haven’t pulled the trigger on the rules yet.
For me it’s Changeling: The Lost 2e. I tried running it once but I was struggling to write an engaging story for my players. Vampire is much easier in this regard just have the prince be a dick to the players and tell them to run. Another game I would really like to try is the Dresden Files RPG. I know next to nothing about it but the novels where a fun read; maybe something to look into when I find the time.
I’ve conquered my wish list recently, only to add ACKS to it this month. I sort of like AD&D, but I think this will work out better for me.
Honestly all of them. All of the in person groups near me have dried up, and my ADHD is too bad to try and use roll20 or any of that.
But cyberpunk red is one I’ve wanted to try. I love cyberpunk settings, and the shadowrun ruleset…oof.
