rpg

(crossposted to [email protected])

I like all sorts of characters. I've yet to find a class I don't enjoy playing. That said, my absolute favorites tend to be high-charisma types and blow-stuff-up casters.

Mechanically, my favorite character was my first ever TTRPG character: A half-drow draconic sorcerer in DND 5E. I focused a lot on fire spells and damage. Like I said, I love blowing stuff up. Plus I just think the fantasy of being innately magical is cool.

Roleplay-wise, my favorites have been my tabaxi swashbuckler rogue and my aasimar celestial warlock (DND 5E and 5.5E, respectively). The former was a pretty selfish guy who gradually became a better person as he grew to care about the party, and the latter started off as a magical cop who slowly started to realize that all the authorities she'd trusted were corrupt. Sadly, both campaigns fizzled before they could complete their arcs, but they were still a blast to play.

Some of my characters are a lot like me, while others are nothing like me at all. My first character, the aforementioned sorcerer, was more or less a self-insert because I was new to roleplaying and thought I should test the waters with something easy. By contrast, the aforementioned rogue, who was my second ever character, was someone I created specifically to be extremely different from me because I wanted a challenge. Most of my other characters have been somewhere in the middle of the "nothing like me" to "me irl" spectrum. (Although I'm currently playing another self-insert, just because I hadn't done so in Pathfinder before and thought it might be fun. She's a kitsune grandeur champion with the draconic sorcerer archetype. Yes, I WILL make and play a fox-dragon self-insert OC and there is nothing you can do about it. I may be cringe, but I am free.) For example, my warlock had pretty similar morals to mine, but she was much more naive and less confrontational than me.

So yeah. Tell me about your characters!

Ok, so I've been hammering away at my homebrew ttrpg-wargame and I decided to give clerics the ability to conjure troops. Different alignments get different things. So far, I've given clay golems to the good alignment, flesh golems to the evil alignment, and awakening plants to the chaotic alignment. I am unsure what to give to the lawful alignment.

To clarify the vibe I am going for, here's a a paraphrased version of each one's fluff text:

• "This clay golem you have given life to is a person. It is, by its nature, inclined towards kindness, helpfulness, and generosity."
• "The flesh golem you have constructed is a person with a different alignment from yours. They respect you as their creator, but may rebel if you do not discipline them, or if they feel disrespected, or if they disagree with you strongly enough."
• "You grant sapience and mobility to a number of plants of your choice. They may or may not appreciate this."

Vibe-wise, whatever I give to the lawful alignment should be obedient, predictable, and honest. My first thought is to give the lawful alignment stone golems, as in animating statues. However, i think it needs to parallel the mass troop creation i have granted the chaotic alignment. I have a number of ideas, but everything I've come up with either doesnt seem to follow the Lawful vibe in at least one way (Animating armor seems very scary and somewhat evil) or doesnt seem sufficiently exceptional or awesome (You have a class feature that lets you rally a peasant mob? Watch me do that with a Persuasion roll.)

I am also very averse to giving them the ability to call down angels, as I think creatures that powerful or abstract should never be easy to call upon unless the DM wants them to be easy to call upon.

For a last bit of context, lawful-aligned clerics are basically paladins. So, a better version of the question would be how you think paladins would conjure or fabricate troops if they had a class ability to do so?

Official rules for sneaking, rather than fighting, through a net architecture are now available for Cyberpunk RED. They are straightforward: a contested Interface check between the netrunner and daemons/dwellers in the arch:

To establish stealth in a NET Architecture, you have to spend an additional NET Action when you Jack In. When you do, you roll a contested Interface Check (Interface + 1d10 vs Interface + 1d10) against all Watchers (Demons, enemy Netrunners … and other entities with an Interface Rank) currently in the Architecture. If you beat them all, you successfully establish stealth and enter the system undetected.

Once the netrunner is in, they need to make a similar check against any Black Ice they encounter:

When a Netrunner encounters a Black ICE while in stealth, they roll Interface + any bonus to Cloak Checks + 1d10 vs the Black ICE’s Perception + 1d10 instead of performing a Speed Check.

Once the netrunner fails the perception check, they are no longer sneaking and normal rules apply.

I'm glad there are more options for netrunners now. I hope RTal adds more options in future.

[Spoilers for the Sinister Secret Of Saltmarsh]

Gather around for a retelling of what happened to a group of adventurers who went to uncover the sinister secret of saltmarsh.

The game was run with the original 1981 module and AD&D rules. It was run as a one-shot with only the first half of the adventure treated as the whole thing.

There were five players, myself included. The other four were all brand new to TTRPGs. The GM provided premade lvl1 character sheets which everyone could pick from. I chose, as is my habit, a human fighter. Around the table there was a human ranger, another human fighter, a human bard, and a dwarf fighter.

Our characters were strangers at the Saltmarsh inn, taking refuge from a pounding storm that was coming down onto the seaside town. My fighter paced impatiently, as an escaped arena slave he was anxious to make money in any way possible and buy a ride as far away from this place as possible. The inn was mostly full of drunken fishermen and I talked up to the out of place burly dwarf to see if they'd heard of any work. A bard caught glimpse of an obviously more wealthy old lady and tried his hand sweet talking her for coin or work. She complained that all the fishermen did lately was sit around drinking and telling tall tales. She wanted their minds back on work rather than par-ab-normal happenings. She wasn't willing to pay, but said there was some old house that was the subject of ghostly tales. If the bard put an end to the speculation he was free to take whatever he found there.

The bard being a man of words rather than deeds talked around finding members of the party and convincing us it was all the only thing close to a paying job. After listening to a drunkard tell a tall tale about chasing an eight-point racked rabbit into the cursed house and hearing ghostly mutterings we settled down for the night in a shared room arranged by the woman.

In the morning we stopped briefly at the general store for what few supplied we could afford and went off into the house.

Exploring the first floor wasn't terribly eventful. A few bugs to fight, and a few pieces of scattered loot. The dwarf found some fancy looking magic books that looked worth some money but none of us could read the contents. We found some suspicious floorboards that appeared to be a hidden door on the floor of one room but left it until we'd looked around more. The stairs up to the second story were a wreck, but we noticed in one room of the first floor there was obvious water damage and sagging of the ceiling.

The other human fighter heaved the dwarf right into the damaged spot on the ceiling busting a hole in it and sending the dwarf, only a little worse for the wear, into a room on the second floor. After tying a rope to a ten foot pole and passing it to the dwarf to secure to the house, the rest of us climbed into the second story.

There we heard the gagged noises of a man one room over from where we had ascended. Slipping out the window and onto an overhang connecting the two rooms my fighter spied a bound and gagged man inside. The whole room had sagging and dangerous looking floorboards. Deciding not to risk going into the room, our bard who had followed me out got the man's attention from the overhang and I reached in with my spear tearing at the gag and pulling until it finally came loose. We interrogated the man who said he was a theft who'd taken shelter from the previous night's storm here and while in the house had been hit on the back of the head by some unseen assailant. He said he knew no more. The bard very much wanted to kill the man right away as he was of no use, but everyone else talked him down and decided to leave the man where he was until we knew more.

We poked around a bit more upstairs and into the attic, but aside from fighting some giant mosquitos there wasn't much of note so we made our way back down to the first floor and the hidden door. We pried it open and made our way into what was clearly an ancient basement. However the basement had been repurposed by equally obviously new additions like fresh cots and chests with recently used clothing. Poking around more we opened a sealed door on one side of the room and came face to face with six animated, magical and angry skeletons. We quickly closed and barred that door.

Looking around, the dwarf detected an irregularity in the stonework, and found yet another hidden door leading even lower into caves. In the caves we heard the faint noise of the ocean and could small the salt of the sea. We crept around finding the caves leading to a small deadend section of cave stacked with crates and barrels, with the path leading there branching off to a cove.

The other human fighter and ranger crept over to the cove while the dwarf, bard, and I slunk into the collection of cargo. We saw two men opening one crate to inspect various hand weapons, and one of the barrels smelled of strong alcohol. As we moved further in, a well dressed man flanked by two passive gnolls gave some orders to the men.

On his own initiative, the bard called out to the well dressed man. The man was startled and as he turned, my fighter quickly made himself scarce in the darkness of the crates. The dwarf as well tried to hide from the man's gaze but was too slow, and was beckoned by the man to stand near the bard.

The bard and man had a confused conversation asking each other who they were and what they were doing. The man was Sanbalet, a smuggler who had cloaked his operation under the guise of a haunted house to keep the locals away. As he asked the bard what he was doing and what he wanted, I crept through the darkness taking advantage of Sanbalet's distracted conversation and managed to get right behind him.

Then, I emerged just over his shoulder, and told him he had a good looking operation and asked if he was hiring. Sanbalet said maybe but only if he could get the bard to make sense. I told him that was understandable and stepped back into the dark.

Finally the bard and Sanbalet came to an agreement. Sanbalet would hire us and would also pay if the bard returned to town and told everyone the ghost had been dealt with. He wanted to keep the dwarf as a token of goodwill, and in practical terms a hostage, until the bard returned but the plan seemed set.

Meanwhile, the fighter and ranger had snuck onto the small boat and found it was still half full of valuable cargo as well as a chest bristling with coin. The two of them decided that they'd found their payday. From aboard they cut the line securing the boat and began rowing it away. When the smugglers noticed the boat escaping a huge commotion erupted. Sanbalet was furious, now thinking the whole negotiation had just been a trick. The bard was out of ideas and just started booking it back upstairs, being chased by all the smugglers.

Seeing the disaster unfolding, I leap out of the darkness with a dagger to take Sanbalet hostage and hopefully keep his gnolls off of me but he slipped out of my grasp. With no other way out, I started running to the cove. The dwarf followed me down the passage. The gnolls were in hot pursuit and jumped onto the dwarf, ripping them to shreds. I keep running towards the sea while Sanbalet fired color spray at me. I ditched my armor and my loot to be able to swim in the choppy water and made it out before the gnolls were done with what was left of the dwarf. I escaped and eventually wound up sputtering on a coastline somewhere.

The smugglers chased down the bard, who tried completely ineffectively to talk them down. He was dragged back before Sanbalet to negotiate but had no leverage, instead ending up on the receiving end of the dwarf's sword in Sanbalet's hand.

And thus ends the tale of a oneshot adventure in Saltmarsh.

[Yes I know about all the hidden stuff the party missed, sssssh.]

Low-fantasy D&D aliens?

@rpg

I want to stick aliens 👽🛸 into my next D&D campaign. My idea is to have little grey men show up in a flying saucer and abduct the party. However, I'm worried that this is too comprehensible for the average #DnD character. I want the PCs to be confused, but not the players! What's the weirdest alien you've ever thrown at your D&D party?

Side note, I also want to give the baddies #mechs. How do I mechanically handle this?

#DM #dming #ttrpg #scifi #fantasy #mech

I have been chugging away at making my own fantasy ttrpg for several months now, and a decision I made early on has been bugging me as possibly being misguided.

I really want a fast combat system. However, there are two ways the interpret "fast" here. The one I committed to early on was to make each round one second long, so on your turn you only have time to either move or act or do nothing. This does mean each turn feels really fast, since the amount of choices you need to make each round are extremely small, and this also make spellcasting seem way more risky and expensive than it actually is since you need to commit multiple rounds to the casting. It feels fast, but combat can take hours.

The other option I did not pursue is to compress each scene into one big roll, creating a system similar to the Narrative Dice system of Genesys where you spend several minutes gathering a pool of dice which represent the chaos and misfortune of the scene, roll them once, augur the bones, and then combat is done. Usually the entire combat scene will take less than 5 minutes, but it's a long 5 minutes filled with details, debate, and checking your work.

The reason I was attracted to the more granular first option was mainly because it's ironically the less crunchy option, since your options each round are to either Move, Fight, Defend, Aim, or do a quick Skill Check. However, as the system is growing it's becoming more clear to me that my game is fundamentally not about the fighting, its about the journey there and back to the community you call home. So, I'm starting to think I should have taken a more zoomed-out approach to combat, maybe starting with wargame rules and then working backwards to derive 1-person combat, maybe trying to make my own narrative dice system using the normal polyhedral dice.

In the end, my priority is to avoid what most DnD-likes end up doing, which is combat that feels slow and also takes hours, but I gotta go in one direction or other. I'm curious what y'all's preferences are. When you are playing a TTRPG, would you rather play combat that feels fast but actually takes hours, or combat that feels slow but actually takes minutes? What's more important to you?

I liked his cyberpunk deck, so I thought I'd share

My partner and I enjoy worldbuilding and we like bringing our world to different systems and seeing how our world looks and acts through the lens of that system.

For simplicity sake, imagine a typical fantasy setting. Elves, dwarves, orcs, magic, yadda. What would be your system of choice for playing in it?

If you don't like your standard fantasy, obviously this question is not directed at you.

Bonus points if you tell me what you like about your chosen setting in relation to a fantasy setting.

I know there’s a lot of Swade system for deadlands but I feel that don’t work for me so what’s your go to Weird West system ?

I run a table. One of the people at the table insisted that I checked out Daggerheart. So I did. And I was very pleasantly surprised.

Why? Well, I admit I had some prejudices against it. First, I sort of made up my mind when I saw the whole licensing issue, Daggerheart basically doing what Wizards of the Coast did with Dungeons and Dragons. But not only that, I also saw red flags in Daggerheart itself: minis.

I saw a video for Daggerheart where the thumbnail showed minis. I was out. I find minis so frustrating. They are in my list of things that I cannot care about. I care about dramatic stories, not combat simulation. I care about intrigue and character growth, not arithmetic. I saw that and assumed that Daggerheart was a combat simulator just like Dungeons and Dragons is. I didn't even pay attention.

But then my friend insisted that I read about Daggerheart. And so I did.

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that minis are optional. Even more importantly, I was shocked to find a game that effectively is Powered by the Apocalypse. I was especially relieved to not find rules for movement that require trigonometry or strange approximations (unlike Dungeons and Dragons, where there are grids and numbers everywhere).

I found a game that prioritized drama. Yes, it still simulates combat, but it does so in such a simple way that makes me happy to run it.

I’m excited! This would be the first game that I ever play when the game is just released. This would be the first game in which I don't even have to pitch to the table; the table already wants to play it.

Of course, these are my first impressions. Maybe they'll change. For now, I'm happy.

https://www.allplay.com/board-games/the-defenders-almanac/

An extensive illustrated guidebook to the besieged lands of the Commonwood and a rules-light tabletop roleplaying game for collaboratively telling short stories of animal resistance to the machine invasion ~ from T.L. Simons, creator of Defenders of the Wild and Bloc by Bloc with fantasy author Margaret Killjoy, game designer Henry Audubon, illustrator Meg Lemieur, and writer Patricia Noonan

Anyone played it? Got any tips? I realise it's pretty recent, so maybe not..

I'm about to start a session with a new gaming group (of old friends). I'm new to DMing and TTRPGs in general (have played one session of pathfinder), two of my 4 players have a fair bit of experience playing and DMing.

I realise this is way more rules-light than pathfinder, though that's probably not saying much - it also seems a fair bit lighter even than some PbtA based games I've looked at..

General advice for DMing rulse-light RPGs also welcome :)

In the Seattle shadows, fixer Brynne Taggart is known as one of the best, the kind of fixer you want on your side rather than against you. But something has gone sideways and now she’s disappeared. Her mentor, the legendary fixer Saint James, needs a team to turn over every stone in the sprawl and if necessary crack some skulls (or spill some blood) in order to find out what happened … and why.

What starts off as a simple investigation within the suburbs of Seattle quickly escalates into a royal cluster-frag as gangs, bikers, and other runners become major obstacles. So the question becomes: are you going to take this laying down or are you going to rise to the occasion?

The description sounds like this is not a Disian plot, more street like

Anyone checked this out?

Since I started observing CGL on DrivethruRPG, I must admit they do put out stuff for SR. Maybe not always the best but it's not complete silence. I wish they negotiated the rights to use Horrors' plot, though

Don't get me wrong - I love me some VtM, but I was just curious if there are any other good vampire/werewolf-centric ttrpg's out there?

Winners will be announced at Gen Con on August 1st.