+1 Thread of Tabletop Roleplaying

And are you hosting the server or using one of the services? I still haven’t done anything more than a cursory look, and as it looks like The One Ring won’t get official modules I may stick to Roll20

I self host on my own PC, but I'm considering setting up something else - maybe a Raspberry Pi? - to have something a bit more permanent.

I just self-host on my laptop.

Lots of Black Friday discounts today - Free League and Modiphius are both giving 50% off on a bunch of stuff, including Alien, Tales from the Loop, Star Trek Adventures, and Dishonored.

I've spent a while scrolling through the list of discounted stuff on DriveThruRPG, but there's just… too much.

I pretty much only interact with Drivethru sales through my wishlist.

I pretty much only interact with Drivethru sales through my wishlist.

I got some Jon Hodgson tiles for $9.99from DriveThru - digital file, but I’ve had my eye on them for a while

The first half of 2021 I was running games two or three times a week and loving it. Players were keen and attentive, I was well prepped and took good notes. It was great.

Since then though it feels like every session has been a fight to get going and when we actually sit down to play I can barely get my head in the game. Not last night though! We had a solid three hours of Traveller which was pretty much all daft roleplay on board a tiny spaceship.

I don't think it was anything I did different though, I'm running this for four teen-agers and last night they were all wide awake and in a good mood, so really they were doing all the heavy lifting.

One of them did complement me though, "Brian, you run the best arrogant arseholes!" So that was nice.

There has been an absolute flood of great looking Kickstarter projects over the last month. I expect you have all pledged for the ones which interest you but just in case, here's some that I think are worth attention.

Reach of the Roach God is a South East Asian megadungeon themed around cockroaches and decay. Everything this two-person SEA team has made had been incredible, I'm sure this will be no different.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/centaurgames/reach-of-the-roach-god-part-of-a-thousand-thousand-islands?ref=user_menu

Salvage Union is a game and setting about mech pilot scavengers in a post apocalypse wasteland. Star Wars deserts mixed with Simon Stalenhag ish art. Based on the Quest system, which is a little dull, but maybe a good base for another game.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leyline-press/salvage-union?ref=user_menu

Carved in Stone is a systemless setting guide for 7th century Pictish Scotland. It's intended to be useful for gaming, education and historians. Great art too.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dungeonsonadime/carved-in-stone?ref=section-homepage-view-more-recommendations-p1

I've backed Reach of the Roach God and have the other two on my watchlist, but I've just paid for the CY_BORG campaign that ended yesterday, and I've got money set aside for the Mothership 1e campaign that's ending in a couple of hours.

Continuing the Kickstarter recommendations…

Down in Yongardy is a solo gamebook using the Troika! system and setting, and sound out of the sword wilding lawyer background therein. Basically it's a surreal new FF gamebook.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loottheroom/down-in-yongardy-a-troika-solo-gamebook?ref=user_menu

I expect you have already heard of Mothership, it's only got a day to go, but it has managed to break £1,000,000. I'm not a huge fan of the rules, although it looks like they have fixed a lot of the issues for this release. The best bits though are the adventures, Dead Planet, A Pound of Flesh and Gradient Descent are all absolutely excellent twisted SF Horror.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gerdling/mothership-sci-fi-horror-rpg-1st-edition-boxed-set?ref=discovery&term=Mothership

I hadn't realised how close to finishing the Mothership one was.

I was going to recommend the Tribe 8 bundle over at Bundle of Holding too, but it turns out that finished yesterday.

If anyone is interested in a fantasy RPG about religion and community and existential horror set in the ruins of Montréal, give me a shot and I'll share some PDFs with you. It is absolutely my favourite RPG setting.

I've been reading and watching various King in Yellow mythos stories for the last year or so and I keep coming back to the idea of running something inspired by it. There is a Yellow King RPG, it takes the original short stories from the 1890s and builds from there, but it's a bit too literal. Impossible Landscapes for Delta Green is similar, it has its own story to tell. I want to do my own version of the unreliable reality of it all, and I want to make it personal to the PCs in the group. Basically I want to run something like True Detective. I'm wondering if the solution might be to run Monster of the Week.

My struggle with the Yellow King is that I have a vague idea of what I want the campaign to be about, but no clue as yet what I want the session to session play to be. MotW lays out exactly what you do in a session, all I have to do is create "monsters", actually people from Carcosa or touched by the Yellow Sign which fit, and just keep on ramping up the weird and the dark.

Some of the playbooks are perfect for the tone I want. The Flake, Mundane, Professional, Spooky and Wronged in particular. The others would probably work and long as there were only one or two in the group, it just means that they are already a step closer to the truth from the start.

MotW has built in progression, which might keep me moving through the story at a descent rate rather than being over cautious and dragging the game out.

It feels like a crazy ambitious plan, but it is kind of lodged in my brain now. I'll see if it has legs by trying to come up with half a dozen monsters which fit.

Most of you have, I assume, heard of Kickstarter's plans to use the blockchain for their platform, somehow, which is all kinds of yuck, but this article has some other concerns about what this whole idea has revealed about the platform, or at least its ubiquity.

That all said, the end state of Kickstarter’s blockchain plans don’t particularly matter. Whether or not the new platform comes to fruition, whether or not it uses less energy-intensive proof-of-stake software, whether or not people leave the platform, these are in the long run irrelevant. What the announcement should have revealed to anyone who felt strongly enough to leave the platform over it is that the TTRPG hobby has let Kickstarter become infrastructure.

I've seen a lot of chat about this. There's been a few alternative funding options suggested since the Blockchain announcement, but many people have had problems with KS for a while, mostly around the fact that you can only really use it to find your project if you live in the West.

Is spent a while this afternoon getting prepped for tonight's session of Traveller. I’m very much playing the long game here, laying the groundwork for a couple of scenarios in this sub sector, another couple and a short campaign in the next sub sector, and then when that’s done we can start on the actual Pirates of Drinax campaign. This involved taking up on a couple dozen planetary systems, placing various ancient ruins of sites of interest, dismantling an intro to an adventure and scattering it's constituents places my group will actually see them. Stuff like that.

Then the stupid game gets stupid cancelled because one of the players had to go for a family dinner. Bah.

The official Dark Souls RPG using 5e seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity.

Played through the Quickstart mission for Salvage Union the other night, which went very well – it was a new system for me and both players (and the first use, in anger, of the FoundryVTT thing I've built to run it), so there were some teething problems all around, but we got there in the end.

I think there are maybe a few too many instances where the GM (or players) have to come up with ad-hoc, context-appropriate "hard choices" for the mixed successes; combat was generally pretty snappy (the duel between our Soldier and a Knight was over much faster than I expected), but a 6-10 roll really slowed things down as we tried to come up with not just one thing that went wrong, but two for the player to choose between.

I'd also have liked to see more emphasis on exploration and scavenging from what you find, given the tone of the setting, but from what's been said in the Discord that's coming later with the campaign rules; this demo mission is very much action-oriented, with a story emphasis on speed.

It surprised me, too, that the player characters actually survived the entire thing. Some core resources Energy and Ability points, used to fuel Mech and Pilot abilities respectively) are extremely limited in the field, but it's balanced enough that the players were debating what to spend them on without feeling like they couldn't ever spend them. With a two-member party, I had to rebalance some encounters on the fly, but they had a pretty balanced team – one combat mech and an engineer able to repair damage, with a reasonable amount of cargo space between 'em.

Overall I'm pretty impressed at how well the no-modifier d20 roll for everything worked out; it never felt easy despite the 75% chance of success on each roll, and everything basically being a rollable table meant the Foundry system did most of the heavy lifting with referencing the outcomes – which was a godsend for trying to get through the whole thing in just a couple of hours. (I'd have liked to give some encounters more room to breathe, and some NPCs more characterization, but it was a bit of a sprint to get to the finale as it is.)

I'd definitely like to run something a bit longer-form when the campaign rules drop, but in the interim the Quick Start is excellent (and free!), and well worth giving a look.

The official Dark Souls RPG using 5e seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity.

Yeah, that's absolutely a boring decision.

Glad to hear Salvage Union held up. I might be giving it a try myself soon.

The official Dark Souls RPG using 5e seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity.

Yeah, that's absolutely a boring decision.

Weird, it's almost like they want it to sell…

I mean, like it or not, D&D is the biggest elephant in the room, and being able to bolt your setting into a system that has that kind of install base might be "boring", but it makes a whole ton of business sense.

There's going to be a bunch of people expecting Dark Souls who are very disappointed when they start playing.

Then again, there will be ten times that number who will be quite happy with a darker 5e.

The official Dark Souls RPG using 5e seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity.

Yeah, that's absolutely a boring decision.

Weird, it's almost like they want it to sell…

I mean, like it or not, D&D is the biggest elephant in the room, and being able to bolt your setting into a system that has that kind of install base might be "boring", but it makes a whole ton of business sense.

Yeah! It's not like it's already been proven that an RPG based on a property with a huge fanbase could sell really well if you didn't do the most bog fuckin' basic shit with it.

5E is a very bad system for Darksouls and it's a sign of lazy, incurious, disinterested design by lazy, incurious, disinterested designers that this is what's happening.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that Avatar has a bigger, broader fanbase than Dark Souls, though.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that Avatar has a bigger, broader fanbase than Dark Souls, though.

Maybe. Avatar got a film made of itself, I guess, but Dark Souls has a lot of the same nerd crossover appeal. It's one of those known quantities and it'd have sold even without bolting itself onto 5E.

It's lazy, disappointing and-

Remember back in the mid 2000s?

This fuckin' thing happened. Jedi could cast abilities a number of times per day based on their wisdom modifier before they got all tuckered out and needed to nap for eight hours to let the force okay them for more power expenditure. The rush of 'holy shit the OGL just lets us copy and paste their shit for our shit, go go go!' resulted in a lot of terrible games and a lot of terrible design trends that we're still working off to this day.

Yes, Star Wars D20 probably sold pretty solidly it was a shit game that was a shit representation of its subject matter. The system worked directly against the theme and it left a lot of people feeling cold.

It's not like there aren't other, highly-lethal, dark fantasy systems they could have looked to for inspiration either, but maybe they just didn't want to licence Mörk Borg.

Frankly, I'm kind of surprised they didn't go fo a Call of Cthulu reskin – it has a mechanic of improving skills as you use them, which fits with the Dark Souls "git gud" gameplay loop, and it's more popular (by all accounts) in Japan than D&D.

But hey, if they just want to do an officially-licenced Dark Souls Monster Manual for 5e, I guess that's their call.

Japan already has a Dark Souls RPG which is by all account excellent.

Although, now that I think about it, rolling to hit is kind of a thing in DND and in dark souls…

Call of Cthulhu/RuneQuest would have been a better option, and the Mongoose RQ ogl is sitting right there. What would have been even better would be some sort of system based on preparing for attack patterns and looking for weaknesses.

But like Luscan said, no-one is trying to make a good game here, it's just another avenue for turning up into cash.

The parallels to the d20 boom are pretty obvious. I've seen three different cyberpunk 5e games (nothing says future noir like a raging Barbarian), Stargate, Hellboy and now Dark Souls

What would have been even better would be some sort of system based on preparing for attack patterns and looking for weaknesses.

I found an RPG.net thread about the Japanese Dark Souls RPG that went into some detail about the rules, and this seems to be a big part of its combat design.

The Dark Souls TRPG simulates this by giving you 5 Stamina Dice at the start of each combat round. Players must then decide whether to spend them on attacks, abilities, and other actions as Action Dice, or to keep them in reserve as Reaction Dice to defend against attacks from opponents later in the round.

It sounds really interesting! But less marketable!

The biggest problem I have with most licensed RPGs is a slavish adherence to the mechanics of the setting, often to the detriment of the actual game.

Lots of folks like to shit on 5e for the things it doesn't do well - and it's far from perfect. But it's more flexible and adaptable as a system than I think people give it credit for, it just depends a lot more on the people at the table than it does on the rulebook.

A Good GM Can Fix It is not an acceptable answer for a book that's gonna cost $40. I paid my money, I want your product to fuckin' work. DND's real good at capturing the feeling of playing DND and dungeon crawlers; it's real bad at mystery plotlines without major cludging, real bad at social things and it's not especially good at Combat.

Fun fact I learned the other day, the big climactic battle of Critical Role which lasted 2 four hour episodes was less than 8 turns of combat.

Did you play the FFG star wars game? That game's real good.

Yeah, if we are going down the path of "this system is good enough" then we don't even need rules. Just say what you want to do, the GM makes a call for success. I like rules which make the game better, or the GM's job easier. FFG Star Wars is a great example of this.

I have played the FFG Star Wars system, and yes, it's good - but I've had just as dramatic narrative-led sessions in 5e as I ever did with that, or anything else I've ever played, and while Genesys has a strong narrative focus, it also requires at least as much legwork and effort on the part of everyone to adjudicate the outcome or effect of Advantage, Triumph, Threat, and Despair as D&D does for success or failure.

I dunno, I feel like I've backed myself into a corner where I'm the lone apologist for Everyone's Least Favourite RPG. I'm not going to tell anyone they have to like it, and I do want to play more of other systems - but I have a lot of fun with 5e, and I don't think introducing people to a new setting using a version of those rules is necessarily The Worst Decision Of All Time.

I have played the FFG Star Wars system, and yes, it's good - but I've had just as dramatic narrative-led sessions in 5e as I ever did with that, or anything else I've ever played, and while Genesys has a strong narrative focus, it also requires at least as much legwork and effort on the part of everyone to adjudicate the outcome or effect of Advantage, Triumph, Threat, and Despair as D&D does for success or failure.

I dunno, I feel like I've backed myself into a corner where I'm the lone apologist for Everyone's Least Favourite RPG. I'm not going to tell anyone they have to like it, and I do want to play more of other systems - but I have a lot of fun with 5e, and I don't think introducing people to a new setting using a version of those rules is necessarily The Worst Decision Of All Time.

The systems in DND don't do a huge amount to support narrative, in the same way they don't do a huge amount of work to help support the gamefeel of Dark Souls.

And it likely won't be the worst decision from a purely capitalist point of view but from a creative point of view it's incredibly disappointing.

A lot of the systems that people champion as "supporting narrative" seem - to me - to boil down to putting a lot of the weight of expectation on players to find creative ways to explain the mechanical result that just happened. Which, yes, encourages narrative input, but also has been kind of overwhelming/offputting to some of the people I've tried to introduce to TTRPGs through systems like FFGSW.

I agree with you here. Some people love games which constantly require creative interpretation, others find them exhausting. Mostly I don't enjoy games which prioritise "narrative" but I find the FFG system to hit a real sweat spot where success and failure is clear cut but there's a bunch of other stuff flying around which encourages groups to throw in whatever comes to mind.

My problems with Dark Souls 5e aren't really about 5e. 5e has it's issues but there is fun to be had there. The problem is just that they went for the laziest and coincidentally most profitable game system they could have. There is no way that a game which plays like Dark Souls can come out of this so you are going to end up with a bunch of disappointed gamers and a forgotten game on 10,000 shelves. Instead we could have had a game like the Japanese release which is a genuine different option when choosing a game to play.

The thing is, I don't see how you make any TTRPG play like Dark Souls; it's a game about being very, very good at interpreting patterns and exploiting gaps to strike; basing it on the luck of the dice at all seems counter-intuitive.

I'd use a complicated rock-paper-scissors sort of thing where you have to predict your opponent's moves. To an extent the monsters would have to be pre-programmed so that they get easier to kill as your players know them better, this would also keep the thinking down for the GM. So it's player smarts vs monster numbers.

There are still a couple of issues though. Players are unlikely to fight the same monsters too many times because they are only playing 3 hours a week and a fight will take maybe 30 minutes? Also balancing this for multiple PCs would be hard, especially if you don't know how many players there will be. AoE and scaling health pools will help but it would still be a nightmare to get just right.

If I was running a swords-and-sorcery adventure game, I'd go with 13th Age over 5e any day of the week. It looks a lot like 5e while you're playing (roll to hit, roll damage) so it's not a completely new paradigm for 5e players to learn, but doesn't feel like it relies on DM interpretation as a core design decision the way 5e does.

It also has a much quicker power progression; where 5e often feels, to me, like it takes a couple of level-ups for characters to start to come together with subclasses and options, 13th Age starts you off with a reasonably spread of Stuff You Can Do. Its social mechanics aren't great, designed as it is around combat encounters, but it's certainly no worse in that regard than 5e.

I'd use a complicated rock-paper-scissors sort of thing

I don't know that a Dark Souls RPG works with complicated mechanics. It needs a push-your-luck system that rewards tactical play, but the basics should be as quick to grok as the videogame's light/heavy attacks and dodging.

The bigger question, for me, is how you keep the lethality of the videogame intact.

The bigger question, for me, is how you keep the lethality of the videogame intact.

Fast character generation?

In the videogame, though, you don't die permanently – you lose some of the collected XP metacurrency, but if you make it back to the same location you can re-collect it, which could be interesting but may get tedious as the DM describes your journey through the same six rooms again.

Sounds like that's exactly what they are planning: https://steamforged.com/blogs/brands/first-look-at-new-mechanics-in-dark-souls%E2%84%A2-the-roleplaying-game?utm_campaign=Dark%20Souls%20Roleplaying%20Game&utm_content=196500662&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-491447816

I'll be honest, it sounds like a pretty good upgrade to 5e. New classes, no death saves, burn HP/position for effects. I'd still be more interested if it was the Japanese version.

In the videogame, though, you don't die permanently – you lose some of the collected XP metacurrency, but if you make it back to the same location you can re-collect it, which could be interesting but may get tedious as the DM describes your journey through the same six rooms again.

There was an RPG a few years ago called Fragged Aeturnum which tried to do a tabletop Dark Souls thing. It wasn't great but it had some interesting ideas. If ran out of HP you could fight on in a more powerful spirit form for a few turns and as long as you killed the monster before your spirit faded your character would survive. More interesting than Death Saves anyway.

A free Dark Souls RPG: https://playfulvoid.game.blog/2022/02/02/oath-souls/

After telling everyone in the last Kickstarter update (almost two weeks ago) that the backer PDFs would be sent out starting on the 21st, Magpie Games have quietly let it slip on their Discord server that Avatar Legends RPG files won't begin to be sent out until tomorrow – because the staff at DriveThruRPG all have the day off for Presidents' Day, so there's nobody around to kick off the deliveries.

I'm not begrudging anyone time off, but it seems like this situation could have been anticipated before announcing a planned release date.

Avatar Legends PDFs have started coming out – and against the odds, I got mine in the first wave.

On one hand, it feels a bit over-written in places, particularly around the whole "what is an RPG/GM?" sections, but the odds of this being someone's entry into tabletop RPGs is admittedly higher than your average PbtA hack, purely by virtue of the licence.

It's also got a ton more lore than I really expected – pages and pages of stuff about each of the eras, the sociopolitical situation in each of the four nations, and a list of NPCs and groups that might be relevant. It's frankly a little overwhelming, and makes me feel like my campaign's one-city focus is positively myopic.

Mechanical changes from the quickstart are minimal; there are a few terminology tweaks and individual moves that have been refined, but the basic structure is untouched. Both of my players' playbooks have some changes that could have sizeable impacts on how we proceed with them. There'll be some decisions to make about potentially swapping out moves (and the Successor's backstory is going to need a kick in the pants), but I'm hoping it'll push things in the right direction – they're both a bit more passive than I'd like, right now.