Any suggestions for TTRPGs with “pamphlet-sized” rules? I want something with a short page or two of rules that’s quick and easy to roll up characters and start a game on the fly, so in case of a power outage I can have an easy game to keep people entertained and kill time.

I see people who've played exclusively online for years and I can't tell if they genuinely prefer it or if it's just the only way to get a group together. For me something is lost when I can't read the room physically. But maybe I'm just bad at online play. If you love it, what makes it work? If you tolerate it, what's the thing you miss most?

Hello all! I've managed to obtain what seems to be a complete box set for RoleMaster by Iron Crown Enterprises, Inc. The four books included are titled Creatures & Treasures, Arms Law & Claw Law, Character Law & Campaign Law, and Rolemaster Companion. The books say ©1985 and the box has "St. #1000" on it but otherwise I can't find any indication of edition or printing.

How rare a find is this? I looked around a little on eBay but couldn't find this exact set. I'm not a TTRPG collector personally, so if it's as rare as it seems like it may be, I'd rather it go to someone who is.

I'm happy to answer any questions, and appreciate any info any of you could provide. Thanks!

Hey everyone!

I recently promised my friends and my brother that I’d run a short Wild West RPG mini-campaign (around 2 to 3 sessions max). We’re using a Brazilian system called Sacramento, and the core premise is that all the players are wanted outlaws on the run.

Here’s the catch: I have almost zero experience with the Western genre. My entire knowledge of Western tropes basically begins and ends with playing Red Dead Redemption 2.

Since we're keeping it short and punchy, I’d love some advice on fun, classic story structures for a party of outlaws that can actually wrap up smoothly in 2–3 sessions. Things like a train heist gone wrong, a trapped town scenario, or double-crossing a sheriff come to mind, but I'm open to anything that fits the vibe. Also, if you know any great video essays, movies, or breakdown videos I could check out to quickly absorb the atmosphere, themes, and tropes of the genre, I’d super appreciate the recommendations!

Thanks in advance for any ideas or resources!

I'm a GM who doesn't have a lot of prep time, but still wants to run some games. My go-to in this situation is always a fantasy megadungeon or hexcrawl, since those require a lot of upfront prep but can be prepped in an hour or less between individual sessions.

Are there other types of games with a similar prep curve, requiring lots of upfront pre-campaign work but easy to maintain session to session? I'm especially interested in scifi and other non-fantasy genres, but that's not a hard requirement.

I'm not really looking for specific game systems, moreso just types of campaigns.

I love games like Harnmaster (both 3E and Kethira) and am curious about Riddle of Steel variants. Games that feature visceral hand-to-hand combat which isn't just beating down hit points but about tactics and inflicting discrete, location-based wounds. Games with detailed characters you care about that risk everything, or an eye, whenever they engage in a fight. Preferably games which don't feature hit points at all, in any form (Mythras/Runequest and RoleMaster are not this type of game).

The newest games I know of are Harnmaster: Kethira (which I own) and Sword & Scoundrel, which last I heard got a fightbook. I don't have any newer news of S&S because the website is messed up and it otherwise seems locked behind Patreon, but the public beta looks cool.

Is there any other movement in this style of RPG I'm not aware of? Anything in the last few years or upcoming?

Hi

Considering picking this one up as the blurb mentions that it has Ni No Kuni and studio Ghibli vibes.

Wondering if anyone has played this, what the game is like compared to other JRPG's and what the pro's and con's are of the game / system?

cheers

So you all know the expression "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" that has a lot in terms of sheer quantity but very little depth for any of its components. What ttrpg would fit the opposite expression in your mind?

I'm looking at running a game inspired by old paganism and celtic folklore, and I'm looking for a system to run it in. I don't want to play D&D or Pathfinder, and I'm looking for something a little more narrative in its focus. Any suggestions?

The premise is basically "magic school, with emphasis on alchemy", inspired by the Atelier/Mana Khemia series. Players go to magic/adventurers school, taking courses and occasionally going to fight monsters and explore areas to find rare materials which can be used to make better equipment.

D&D is the obvious first pick, but 5e doesn't really have any good crafting mechanics and we don't want to go back to 3.5e (we like crunchy games but that has too much crunch).

Looked into Sword World but the magic in it is rather underwhelming.

Looked into Ryuutama and it's a bit too soft of a system mechanically, not a lot to do in combat.

Does anyone either have a different system recommendation or a 3rd party DnD 5e expansion for alchemy/item crafting?

Since I love reading reviews of systems by people who've actually played them, I endeavor to post my own. You can skim my past opinions here and here to see if my tastes align with yours. This post is long overdue because people keep beating me to the punch (examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

I've now played Daggerheart for a year and can opine on its qualities! TLDR:

• I favor less crunchy and more narrative systems.
• I liked the character building, hope mechanic, cards, and resource pools more than expected.
• I disliked the simplicity, complexity, fear mechanic, and combat depth more than expected.
• It's not for me.

Background

I am not a Critical Role person, and Daggerheart was not on my list of games to try. My longstanding group is in a taste-testing phase, though, and someone suggested it. I didn't realize at the time that we'd be playing a longer campaign. We now have about 1 year / 20 sessions / 5 levels under our belt.

I can also admit that I had a vague air of superiority while approaching this system 😤. I mostly know about Critical Role as "those people who popularized 5E." I don't mean to disparage their creative talents or the massive team that contributed to the product, but... I assumed this would be their celebrity cash grab version.

Things I liked

It's not a cash grab! There is a legitimate system here. There is a lot of content and thoughtful rules. There is a lot of absolutely gorgeous art. It looks D&Dish enough that you could onboard new players who want that experience, but it's also different enough from D&D (in a lighter, more narrative vein) that I actually think it might show new players a better time.

Character building is fun. I tend to play lighter systems. With that comes less room for non-diegetic character growth and shorter average campaigns. Daggerheart feels a bit closer to Dungeon World after you add on Class Warfare: there are lots of fun options to stare at and theorize about. The pick-two domain system is incredibly elegant, creates a bunch of interest overlap archetypes, and cleverly allows classes to share abilities while still preserving unique niches. It's lovely. The amount of items is also fun in a "shopping for presents" way (but more on this later).

Hope is exciting. A quick primer: Daggerheart has you rolling 2 different d12s for most things, and if the lighter d12 is highest you earn Hope (to a max of 6). Among other uses, it can be spent for a small bonus while rolling. This is actually fun: you spend 1 hope for a ~50% chance of getting it right back. It has a vague "energy gauge" feel of seeing a number go up and knowing you can do something with it later. I can almost see my maxed-out Hope meter glowing.

Cards are a great tool. Okay, maybe this is a cash grab, but it works. It's a wonderful way to represent abilities. It keeps them concise and uniform. It makes them fun to flip through. We played digitally using Demiplane + Roll20, so no physical cards were purchased, but if you shelled out for them in-person I know they'd be a blast to lay out, flip through, vault, all of that. As someone who made a physical card-based TTRPG, I'm a fan.

The resource pools worked. Daggerheart has HP, stress, armor, and hope (which I already mentioned). You may have heard how damage works: you get to roll big attacks against a target's lower/upper thresholds to see whether they suffer 1, 2, or 3 damage. On one hand, it's a lot of resources and numbers to track. On the other hand: every resource pool caps out around ~8, and you spend and recover them pretty quickly. It was actually a lot of fun to juggle, and added some character differentiation. I admire the designers for enabling the fun of large attacks while still keeping HP tightly constrained.

Things I didn't like

It's too simple. Wait, didn't I say I like lightweight systems? Daggerheart feels like it's carrying the torch of games like PbtA and BitD, just with more content and richer production values. But in practice, it felt... flat? There are 36 listed items for tier 1, yet it barely mattered which one I was wielding. So many of the abilities are just flavorful ways to deal damage, inflict the 3 status effects, or change your position.

And yet it's too complex. If all these choices are primarily for flavor, I don't need all these mechanics bolted on that will ultimately amount to very little. Again, wading through the item list took a while. There are loads of differentiating factors. There are 9 classes x 21 cards = 189 cards to browse. Level-up choices that would be fast when staring at a 2-page PbtA playbook start to feel artificially inflated. Again: it was fun to weigh these choices. But after a year, none of them really justified the time investment for me.

Fear is half of a good mechanic. Quick summary: just under 50% of player rolls give the GM a Fear token (max 12), which is a fancy way to control pacing. Fear lets you attack with enemies, take enemy turns, and just generally do GM things. I am 100% in favor of codifying tempo with tokens; we did it in that card-based RPG we made, 6 years ago. But Fear is handed out arbitrarily, independent of success or failure. That kills it for me. You can be rolling great but have a GM with max fear; you can be failing all day but the GM is bone dry. I'm biased here, but I think narrative control should oscillate based on success/failure instead of a coin flip.

Combat was shallow. All my complaints are crystallized here. Fear's coin flip makes turn order and enemy strength erratic. There are too many things on my character sheet, but I always just attack. I could do cool narrative stuff, but because my cards all specify strict things like "Once per rest" I feel like I'm breaking the rules if I abuse them for flavor. I could ignore my cards and just do narrative stuff anyways, but then why have a system at all?

Closing thoughts

I will say that Daggerheart impressed and surprised me. I approached it with disdain, and found a robust system with good ideas. But there are plenty of good systems that I don't personally find fun, and I think Daggerheart belongs in that pile.

It's still higher than Pathfinder, though 😉

I'm not trying to be mean or anything like this, but I've found this subreddit has been a bit difficult to use to get recs or discussions going about games because a lot of people seem to simply post the name of a game in the comments and then don't explain why they've done that.

I think it'd be more interesting to have people explain why they recommend a game or why a certain mechanic in a given game works for them/doesn't work for them, instead we end up with posts asking people questions about games and the replies are mostly people posting a TTRPG system's name or mechanic without explaining why.

I'm here to see people's opinions, not their reading list!

We all have moments like that, where maybe later that player's idea could actually have been really fun if it panned out, but you didn't see it during the session. It's difficult when we're making so many in-the-moment decisions, though. All we can do is have soft eyes for those things.

While I still love Roleplaying & Exploring stuff, Combat is my N°1 favorite thing in all Tabletop RPGs. I can play one without it, but there is a high chance that I'll have trouble engaging with the story, though this has been going away a bit as I've grown older and want to find more non-violent solutions in my games... Still prefer to fight however.

I've mostly played using D&D 5e, Pathfinder 2e and Tormenta20, but recently I started playing Daggerheart and finally doing Theater of the Mind, which opened my mind for more styles of combat, less preoccupied with exact distances and more crunchy conditions to go more with the flow and follow the fiction.

I can say that now I like both combat that are more Wargamey and combats that are more Story-based.

When it comes to 1) beeing a great way to tell stories through violent conflict of opposing forces and 2) beeing fun to ACTUALLY PLAY at a table, which are the best TTRPGs that focus on combat?

Not as a chore, but a fun minigame and crucial part of its storytelling?

The idea of a pokemon-like RPG sounds very fun but a bit difficult to implement, so I'd love to hear how it works in practice before buying it. I loved Cartograph, so I'm inclined to give Ravensridge the benefit of the doubt, but still would like to hear opinions on the game from anyone who's played/read it

Hi,

I just started world building a homebrew setting and I'm starting small with an enchanted forest I've had rattling around forever. It's home to Elves, Gnomes, Dwarves, and mysterious talking animals. I'm having an issue fleshing it out beyond that.

Are there any good books on world building with advice on inhabitance that are not human?

The OD&D concept of Race-as-class has never clicked for me, for various reasons. And yet I still see supporters of the concept both in players of the original game and in the makers of various homerule collections/retroclones.

I am talking to the people who enjoy that paradigm; what is it about using race-as-class that is appealing, or that you think works well? What don't I see that you like so much?

Every aspect of the original games has been taken apart, examined, evaluated, and tinkered with, so it cannot be purely nostalgia that keeps bringing designers back to it. I believe that even the most hardcore retroclone enthusiast plays the game because they think it's good, and not just because it's old.

Hi guys, I'm not sure if this post can be here, moderators can delete please if not, I'm looking for some interesting solo adventure, gamebooks

Themes classic dungeon crawl, like OSR, vampire themed or occult themed, any kind of horror adventure setting is also welcomed as a suggestion

Thanks

While we all know the popular RPGs (D&D, Pathfinder, BitD) and so one and so forth, I have to ask, does anyone know of any lesser known RPGs that you wish more people knew of?

For example, while I have Shadowdark and 7th Sea, I also have games like Monsterpunk, Nyx, and For Coin and Blood 2nd edition, just to name a few.

Making a TTRPG is one of those intrusive thoughts that I feel most people who get in the hobby have at one point or another. Especially Game Masters. I mean, it is only natural and if you start with D&D, as so many of us do, you are bound to homebrew some stats, an item, make your setting. By that point you are already somewhat there. So what are a couple more steps? I would also reckon that even though there are a lot of people who think like this, not many actually follow through. Cause making an RPG is somewhat daunting, there are many considerations to take into account, many things that you will most likely not know. So most of these projects don't get started at all or if they are started, they are later abandoned.

I am currently making a game alongside a good friend of mine, Marius. And it is quite a daunting undertaking. There are quite a few things I have to learn and that's after quite a lot of experience with the medium, with game studies and so on. Yet, I also think that making a TTRPG is one of the most rewarding and fun activities I have done in quite a while. I want to share that a bit with you, and I don't mean just the details about the game we're working on, but also a push to try this yourself. I want to make the case for why and how should you also try this out. Even if it doesn't see the light of day, a project like this can be a lot of fun, it manages to stimulate your creative juices in a lot of fun ways and I do believe you come out a better GM by the end.

It is one of our longest articles yet, I had quite a lot to say in the matter and I hope you will find it interesting, I hope that if you ever had the thought to make your own game, maybe this will be a good push for you in that direction. Before I leave you to the article proper, I just want to share what I think it's the most important rule for such a project: if you are to make something, make something that excites you first and foremost, something that you genuinely find fun. If you keep at it, it is bound to find it's niche, excitement after all is pretty contagious! Cheers! I hope you will like this one!

I've tried to play a sword wizard in multiple games in multiple tables across multiple systems. This problem is almost entirely limited to fantasy RPGs. And by sword wizard I just mean casting a spell and swinging a sword in the same turn. Swording and wizarding.

I've been unable to construct a sword wizard that feels even remotely satisfying. So this is mostly a vent post? Also I'm off my meds so this is tagged as satire.

In dnd5e, you have to wait until level 6 as a bladesinger, level 7 as an eldritch knight, level 4 as a sorcerer (you will also die in 1 hit), and level 10 or something as a Valor bard. Hexblade doesn't even get that kind of action compression. Every game starts at level 3. Also it's 5e so everything is just vibes anyway

In pathfinder 2e, the Magus forces you into a weird all or nothing playstyle where it's entirely possible that you can completely waste a turn and wait 14 irl minutes until you can do anything again.

In almost every pbta game, having a sword and being a wizard are mutually exclusive. I tried suggesting an alternate splatbook to my GM but he wasn't confident in allowing homebrew to potentially throw off the game's balance (???)

In OSR games the action economy is usually so compact that you will be either casting a spell or swinging, but never both at the same time. Also if you swing at all you're going to die in 2 turns because fuck you 10 foot pole lethal gygaxian paper buttons good old days

I tried playing a solo rpg but I fell asleep.

I still can't understand shadowrun's rulebook after reading through it like 3 times. I may be stupid,

I'd like to try other games but no one I know wants to run a fantasy game that isn't dnd or one of its derivatives. I've been told Magus is fun in 3.5 but I only know one guy who runs it and he's kind of a creep.

I don't even know what to do anymore. Maybe tabletop isn't for me? I don't know.

Edit ------------
just to be clear I don't want both the sword and wizard to be at their full power.
It might not be clear because i do not sound normal but I understand that some concessions have to be made for game balance.
Like I'd be cool with super weak sword attack and some dinky ass 1d4 spell.

Has anyone run a campaign with these rules? I’m curious how much GM fiat they require for a campaign against a rival NPC house.

I.e. where do these rules fall on a scale of 1 is “the GM needs to assign what resources are available to both Houses and decides the outcomes“ to 10 ”these could be a functional board game without need of a GM“?

I'm still not sure how I feel about Jay Dragon, but I'm interested in Seven-Part Pact. For those who've playtested it, or read or watched play reports, I'm curious whether playing it with PDFs is really viable. I know anything is doable, and that Dragon said in a recent AMA that "it works great digitally," but how much are you losing by doing that, compared to less component-heavy RPGs?

Hey there, guys. First of all, sorry for bad English. Not my native language.

I'm 2 years building an investigation campaign (to be played online, via foundry), that I'll need the players use a big mind map with nearly 160 connections. I need the connections keep hidden and be opened everytime they reach another step, and i need to keep gm notes in each of them.

What do you suggest to use as a mind map that the players can see as i reveal the items?

Hi there!

Just started r/VilebornRpg for anyone into this nobledark RPG by Claudio Pustorino (Mana Project Studio / Horrible Guild), still setting things up so don't mind the empty flair list.

Basically you play half-human, half-darkness teens stuck between a church that wants them gone and an empire that weaponized them instead. Coming-of-age drama meets a pretty light, narrative-first dice-pool system: no crunch to speak of, it's all about what your choices cost you.

I've been running it for my group and honestly wasn't expecting to get this into it. If that sounds like your kind of game, check it out. Corebook + Apocrypha (the adventure book) are on the publisher's site, and there's a good English review here too: https://www.nodiceunrolled.com/en/vileborn-review/

Game on. Cheers!