well, the people coming to a convention and seeking out RPGs to play are probably looking for something engaging and described in a way that the GM sounds like they know what they’re doing. If you we’re trying to pitch these sessions as “learn to plays” I would focus more on describing the appeal of the system itself rather than the actual oneshot you’d be playing.
If you’re interested in what Luke Crane is up to:
There’s also this third-party Torchbearer zine:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/morditepress/the-grind-2
Matt Cohville’s first podcast was up. I kinda turned it on as background noise and didn’t pay all too much attention. There was some amount of drama about “whether or not that was good D&D” on Reddit somewhere.
For the people who have a game going right now, what are people playing? Both in the System/Pitch sense.
Right now I’m running a Genesys game set in Fantasy Greece starting a medusa-themed disney princess.
Going to run a Monster of the Week game with my wife and kids sometime soon. I think I’m go to set it in the Pacific NW, like Gravity Falls.
I’m close to kicking off the first session of a new Burning Wheel game.
Thieves’ Guild in a Dover-esque fantasy city. The “big guy” running the crime scene is arrested by the king, and all hell breaks loose in the underworld.
In a D&D 5th ed game. I’ve been in handful of D&D games in my time in my current rpg-club and this might be my favorite one. There is enough combat and other interacting with the mechanics that it feels sufficiently D&D, but isn’t just dungeon crawl so there is plenty of story and character moments to have fun with. And I get to be a bird that’s good at copying but really bad at talking.
And as that will be ending next week I’m planning to potentially run a noir Cyberpunk campaign soon. Instead of the Shadowrun style thing where players are basically special ops unit with highest end gear that corporations hire against each other, I want players to have small PI firm to deal with street level problems, finding people who have disappeared, dealing with local punks harassing corner-store owner, that kind of stuff.
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Last week I kicked off a roll20 5e D&D game set in Ravnica starting with the “adventure” in the back of the book. My intention, however, is to turn it into Mad Max meets sewer sharks with motorcycles and dunebuggy gangs at war in the city and fighting over the ruins of something akin to Padmanabhaswamy Temple. In some ways I’m stealing from an old Polyhedron issue about Mecha for ideas for equipment for the bikes so they can kinda act like the groups “big guns” that they can’t really take into crypts and such, but can be pulled out to deal with larger more threatening enemies on occasion.
- I’m playing an online game of Stars Without Number — imagine Traveller built with modern tech and D&D underpinnings.
- I’m playing Torchbearer, Burning Wheel’s nostalgic Basic D&D system.
- I’m running Dungeon Crawl Classics, which is a lightweight D&D with “classic” adventures and sometimes silly random tables.
- I’m reading Blades in the Dark, and if I ever finish it, I’ll pitch it to my DCC group.
I, sincerely, wish to one day be as lucky as you in finding so many non-shitty people to play with consistently.
I’m in a friend’s pathfinder campaign but we haven’t played it in some time for a variety of reasons, I think it may have fizzled.
I’m running a Dungeon World game with the same group. Dungeons World’s tidy campaign fronts and such make it much easier to prep for so this one has been faring much better.
I ran Lady Blackbird for the first time last night, we got to a good mid point. Depending on how the group feels next week we’ll either resume that to it’s conclusion or we’ll play the aforementioned Dungeon World game.
I wanna play burning wheel in ernest one day. I wanna play wolfspell when it comes out, I wanna get a solid torchbearer game going. I wanna play Luke’s french revolution game. My eyes are bigger than my time budget and friends’ patience when it comes to tabletop.
There’s some overlap in the in-person groups. We’re still trying to get up to speed after the holidays. There’s a good amount of GM and game rotation, with DCC being a solid default.
The online game is—surprising to me—remarkably consistent. We’ve been playing six months about every other week. Found them through a friend-of-a-friend.
I’ve been pretty lucky in that. Met some good people and pretty much been organizing a group since forever. Found some good people at a local Meetup, dragged them home.
Life and schedule is probably a bigger problem than quality of people. We probably have a queue of six different games people have ideas for, and that’s not considering the Star Wars or Planescape games we want to get back to.
I had been running a Blades in the Dark game last year, wanted to end it with a session of Dread, but it died because of scheduling.
playing in a Burning Wheel game right now as an Orcish Whaler with a weather witch in training and a captain with more dollars than sense
Also running my homebrew for an MtG-roleplaying hack, hoping to wind that one down since I’ve got another big project picking up steam
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What do you think of the Genesys system? They recently released the Android Source book for the setting and I was thinking of trying to get a game of that going
Was player in a short campaign that was run with Genesys. It worked, but wasn’t too into it. The wonky dice weren’t interesting enough to counter how long it took to learn to read them.
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We started with an Edge of the Empire game before starting up the current game in Genesys, and I’m liking it so far. If you’re fond of what the world-setting for the Android book is going to be, I’d say maybe grab a starter set if they’re doing one and go for it.
The fact that you need custom dice is something that’s a frustrating buy-in, will not argue that, but once you’ve got a few sessions under your belt it becomes pretty easy to navigate. It’s just another dice pool mechanic.
I feel like Genesys is occupying that strange place that exists in the middle ground between “full” story RPG’s and more mechanically focused games. The dice themselves can offer some interesting ways to let the story emerge during play in very unexpected ways.
Because no, I hadn’t intended for them to end up in Tartarus last session. Nor did I known who sexual harassment satyr was before a player rolled their… I think it was third despair of the day?
I definitely understand the frustration @Apsup has with the dice; Fantasy Flight is notorious for pushing custom bits & dice. I think it’s interesting way to represent two different axes of success, i.e. how well you did and how much that helped you, but I’m unsure if the complexity is worth the hassle vs. a traditional dice pool game.
@Nerick_Spellchaser Alright, I’ll give it a spin; I played the one shot for it at PAX Unplugged and I really liked the favors system, I think it was based off of the smuggler’s Debt system they made for edge of the empire. I’m not sure if they’re making a beginner box for this unfortunately, since usually that box comes out before they drop the source book, just based on the release cycle for their other titles
From what I’ve read of the genesys core system, it feels mechanically fleshed out in areas aside from combat, which is a pleasant change of pace. However, some of the mechanics felt a bit loosely defined when I was reading the initial release of the Genesys system.