I’ve made an evolution of what I previously posted.
It’s a game about becoming a wizard while imprisoned in a sprawling library dungeon by the sorcerers of the surface. The sorcerers can only use one school of magic while your characters can learn all of them so they fear for their place in society.
It’s diceless as Player’s description and GM’s complication combine to resolve conflicts. It doesn’t use metacurrency either, instead it has a gameable advancement mechanic where you have to do a certain variety of things to advance in the way you envision.
Bundle of Holding brought back their Coriolis & Tales From the Loop Bundle from a few years ago and added an additional set of stuff to a second bundle. If you enjoyed the recent ALIEN game, Forbidden Lands, or Mutant: Year Zero then Tales From the Loop may interest you.
I think the best part of running games for the group I have right now is when they start chit-chatting among each other. The idea of some motley crew of adventurers actually discussing something for ten minutes makes me feel I’ve done a good job of helping them feel immersion.
I like the idea of the GM training course to make sure you come across as someone who is able to run a a game to avoid issues, however not sure who would be interested in signing up for the courses.
Doing the first playtest for my system tonight. It’s only a simple game but I’m really excited for it. I’m looking to see if it feels right in play and the characters progress in a sensible timeframe.
I’m running two weekly games – one D&D 5e that’s been running since last April, and one Savage Worlds that’s been about half as long. Both are set in my homebrew setting, both fairly generic fantasy. I also run a third group once in a great while, and I just converted that one over to Savage Worlds as well.
I much prefer Savage Worlds, and whenever I finish up the 5e campaign I pretty much hope to never run 5e again. I don’t hate it or anything, but the cognitive load of encounters and statblocks and all, especially as you get higher in levels, just isn’t something I want to deal with anymore. Savage Worlds is more tactical than (and arguably just as crunchy as) 5e, yet it makes it much easier to improvise and adapt on the fly. And the way the system works just kinda slots into my brain better.
A few sessions into Pathfinder 2E on Roll20. Roll20 is…functional, can’t really complain since our GM took the onus to learn it and finds it a useful tool.
P2E is kind of a crazy good improvement over both 1E and DnD. I haven’t played/read DnD 5E but changing the action system to “you get 3 actions per turn” and then assinging various actions different # of actions required is so much more intuitive than DnD’s "move + attack + sub actions. Making Attacks of Opportunity a feat the not everything gets also a welcome reduction in combat clunkiness. Haven’t gotten into double digit levels but so far the math is just all around better, lower HPs, monsters leave bruises and aren’t damage sponges. Still built into the problematic loop of rewarding graverobbing, murder, and colonialism but the game part is much better.
Finally started writing my next game again and looking forward to be able to playtedt in person.
I’m running 2 virtual games of 5e theater of the mind via Meet. One is like 80s but fantasy (surprisingly, adapting the plots of 80s films to fit a dnd campaign is quick and easy!) for 6 people, the other is a homebrew world for my wife, my brother, and his fiancée (who is new to tabletop).
I find that the sidekick rules in Tasha’s works really well with balance, since that second group is just a gnome bard (my wife), tiefling sorceress (brother), and a human Druid (his fiancée). They’ve bought a trained war hound, which my wife is running as a warrior; since it levels up with the party they’re better balanced than I initially had thought they’d be, in terms of combat and such!
Poking at Blades In The Dark to run at some point in the future, but not actively planning, if that makes sense!
I am running playtests of my own system. As a Burning Wheel GM I have tried to make a light game that runs similarly for a GM despite being a different game, it’s diceless and features no randomness (replaced by arbitrariness). It’s focussed on characters with magical potential coming into their power. Currently it’s 18 pages but my writing isn’t great so I might have to provide additional explanations.
The playtests have shown how it’s much more difficult to learn magic from scratch than intended for a short campaign so I’m smooshing together the standard resolution and magical resolution to make it easier to get and simpler to use but I’ll be losing some depth and a bit of lore.
We’re concluding the playtest in the game’s current form tonight. Hopefully with a decent finale, if it’s unresolved we might do one more session.
Random is having to roll a D6 and get a 5 or 6. Arbitrary is winning a game of Rock Paper Scissors. But both happen about 1/3 of the time.
I wanted a game in which the mere description of how you do a thing could resolve that action.
So I made the stats things like Force, Speed, Determination etc. The GM thinks of a complication such as Collateral Damage or Creating Hostility. If someone is acting with Determination they will always win against Hostilty but will always lose to Collateral damage. Any other complication we add up a few numbers but get a win/lose result similarly.
In a vacuum two test characters fighting each other is similar. Some stats might have the edge on others but really it’s solvable, like if we are playing rock paper scissors but you know I happen to be really good with scissors, like I win a tie - so do you counter me with rock or do I double bluff you with paper? It’s not massively meaningful.
The beauty of it being an RPG is that the arbitrariness is tempered by player priorities. The advancement system counts the times you use these qualities so you might be trying to choose the right thing for faster advancement. If you favour one manner massively over the others you lose whenever you encounter the same complication which is kind of like a tragic destiny for a character. And you have to describe your guy acting a certain way. These are really soft influence that matter to player tactics, this is to encourage you to try to get into the opponent’s head and try to read all these subtle priorities.
Link to the current version - this is pre playtest and I see all the problems now. (But the resolution table somehow isn’t one of them!) Mannerism RPG Ver 3..pdf - Google Drive
I’m a constant GM, so I’m currently running two campaigns. The first one is a Lancer campaign over Roll20 with some of the folks from the discord, the second is a Force and Destiny game about to kick off this Saturday with our first in-person session 0 since the Plague year.
I’ve run two campaigns using Roll20, one a Blades in the Dark game and this Lancer game. Roll20 can be really dependant on what tools somebody’s already built for you. For the Blades game, I was able to run entirely in R20 because the character sheets Evil Hat built were so robust. Lancer… not so much. I’ve ended up using the make a battle-map function and the lighting engine to make solid mecha combat maps, but Lancer comes with its own super-tool that Roll20 hasn’t bothered to integrate.
My local group has been on a Genesys kick for several years now as our system of choice. We started with a Star Wars game and fell in love with the resolution mechanics, the three different dimensions of results on a roll. We used it to reboot a game we’d attempted in 5e with too few players several years ago, and it was a solid campaign. Current F&D game stems from me recently watching the Star Wars D+ shows and thinking there’s a lot of story to tell in the same era the Mandalorian takes place in, blending in some of the wild Force stuff from Rebels and Clone Wars.
Sorry to break it to you. There is no difference here. Rock, paper, scissors is exactly the same as rolling a d3. The only advantage of RPS is that you don’t need any extra equipment.
Technically mathematically, sure. But for the actual practial purposes of the RPG, just replacing it with a d3 will not make any difference whatsoever that will matter, or that anyone will notice.
I do think RPS is a better choice than d3, because the lack of need for equipment, which is not a small difference at all.
