Tabletop RPGs/story-building games - beyond D&D

And from the same designer, Grey Ranks http://bullypulpitgames.com/games/grey-ranks/

it looks extremely interesting and i'd love to play it but i don't think it'll let me simulate what i have in mind from the description... altho maybe. i do like the idea of having separate cycles for interpersonal drama and then mission/conflict.

oh that looks good too. i'll have to watch the gameplay vids after work to see if there's enough of a framework there that i can alter it to take place today.

any ilxors interested in maybe trying a rotating RPG club online through maybe roll20 or fb chat or something? there are a bunch of systems and settings i'm interested in trying and my weekly group is pretty much committed to the current dnd campaign.

already doing one. we use roll20 for the map and character sheets and dice and we use google chat for talking to each other, works pretty good.

plz can i get in?

sure. i'm the GM, we're playing the 1982 edition of TSR's star frontiers, about halfway through the volturnus campaign.

how do u want to connect? i'm on facebook at facebook.com/mordy if u want to talk through there or you can just email me @ mms531 *A*T* nyu *D*O*T* e;d;u;

i&I wanna be playing some call of cthulhu tbh

started a delta green campaign with four friends yesterday. it went pretty well.

i think i'm about to be part of a cyberpunk 2020 group

pretty pumped

I've been having fun running the newer WFRP 4e version of The Enemy Within, just in a discord server with a dice-rolling bot added.

The WFRP 4e rules are a bit of a messy patchwork but the fluff, its so crunchy

only ever played first edition but it's def my fav, both arcane and endlessly strange and grotty, squalid and real

i think i'm about to be part of a cyberpunk 2020 group

pretty pumped

Jelly.

yeah me too. cyberpunk 2020 is one of my favorite tabletop systems i'd love to play it again

lol

Leee i'm going to need you to expand on that, but i like where this is going

the system mechanics are only so-so iirc but the lore material is so good

one of the best card games ever (netrunner) is set in its world

the GM has never really ran a tabletop game of any sort before - are we doomed?

he is also incredibly bad at basic math. i guess part of the "are we doomed?" equation depends on how much i can chill out

no -- what's more important is the storytelling than the mechanics. as long as the GM feels comfortable learning as they go / fudging murky mechanics when they're too confusing and are slowing down the game i think you'll be fine. i suspect you're playing it more as a roleplaying game than a rollplaying game.

iirc and you should google for more current + specific ideas, some of the rulesets are not super fun/functional particularly netrunning but maybe rigging too? ppl have workarounds including just using skill checks/storytelling as opposed to fully implementing all the details.

Karl, one of my favorite gaming YT channels did a (hilarious) mini Cyberpunk 2020 campaign and basically hooked me into TT RPGs, at least as a viewer, I've been looking for my own game to join since then but have only managed to find some D&D/Pathfinder groups, which have been fun but I really rilly want to dive into the a sci-fi world at the moment.

anyone got recommendations for good channels/streams/whatever for non dnd content?

I just realized that maybe you were asking what "Jelly" means? It's jealous in kool kid talk, I'm surprised you don't know it!

Leee, was that Playstation Access?

Yes it was!

Awesome! I went in search of the videos you were describing and that was the one I found - they're really entertaining!

i've been thinking about starting up a DnD type game with my kids.. i've never really been a DM before though. any tips?

my strategy, if i were to start it right now, would be to find a game, read the..... manual (??), get them to make characters, and roll percentile dice for everything

Dungeon World would work, though the guy wrote it turned out to be a creep, so avoid buying it with money

idk how old are your kids? are they the type to get into ~~system mastery~~ or ~~character-driven storytelling~~ or both? are you looking for swords and sorcery in particular or other genres? do you want to make up the world and have them be characters in the world, or do you want it to be more directly collaborative?

i'm... not sure!

they're 11 and 8 - they want to be silly and have fun

i've been thinking about starting up a DnD type game with my kids

I've been running a VERRRRY simple d'n'd type game I came up with for my 5yo daughter, where she's a witch at witch school, and I come up with stories and adventures she helps tell, with dice rolls, and puzzles and riddles to solve, and if she wants to use a spell, she has to come up with a rhyme to make it work. She loves it, and it's ever-so-vaguely educational, and I've found myself putting huge amounts of time and effort into coming up with scenarios and puzzles.

the main focus is communal story-telling, which was an angle I missed when I was a kid playing RPGs who thought it was all about rolling the dice and winning.

that sounds amazing!

yeah that sounds excellent, communal story telling beats game mechanics every time imo

I would go to this witch school

me too - that's awesome stevie, she must love it so much

Thirding for your wholesome witch school!

that's such a great idea. i've wanted to start a dnd game with my kids and my 8yo is about to finish the first harry potter book so it might be perfect timing

Do it guys, it's a lot of fun and also it keeps em busy when they wake up too early on a sunday morning and you can't think of anything to keep their spirits up.

She calls it "cave game".

One of them I essentially just stole the main maze element of the old UK kids TV show. Another I gave her a bunch of word-search type things to solve, and another was a series of "my first is in fire but not in dire" type riddles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYvoWFBoEeM

they're 11 and 8 - they want to be silly and have fun

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 22 April 2020 10:08 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

look at dungeon world! it works really well for silly fun. most of the world is improvised in play, but it has kind of useful mental metrics for running a game in non-frustrating ways and not stymying players. everything is 2d6 rolls with some simple modifiers.

that sounds perfect. i will check it out!

stayed up later than I planned last night, wistfully reading the Amber Diceless Roleplaying rulebook.

just sharing my cyberpunk 2020 progress! we met for the first time, via Roll20. we ended up just creating characters, setting up abilities, figuring out how to use Roll20, and buying some equipment. Our first actual session is two weeks from now, and after that we should be playing every Thursday night for as long as Coronavirus lasts, I guess.

i posted this on another thread, but i'll leave it here too:

I'm playing Ten Ton Heat, a Fixer that also plays drums for an up-and-coming band that has a gig on a pirate radio station barge near Seattle in a couple weeks. I'm not quite sure what i look like, other than my Attractiveness level is 6 (making me the third hottest member of the band; we have a pair of identical twins from Chechnya that are incredibly hot and charismatic, with very low intelligence), and I've purchased a set of SmartGoggles with 3 CyberOptic modules: Teleoptics (20x zoom), MicroVideo Optic (I can record up to 20 minutes of video), and Infrared.

what system are you using?

we rolled most of our character's backstories and "Life Events", although we did manually adjust a few things for more fun. here's what the other crew ended up like:

Rockerboy (one of the twins, and the one that is pretty much the band's "leader", even though we're agreed that we're a group of equals, and i've demanded that we share any band income equally. he put everything into Cool and Attractiveness, and the Rockerboy Special Ability: Charismatic Leadership, which allows him to sway an audience up to his level (10) squared, x 200. which is 20,000 people! in a strange twist of random rolling luck, he has the most starting money out of all of us - $24,000 Eurodollars, compared to my $3000 and the Nomad's $1000), but he also just lost his job, so he has no more monthly income coming in. since he's the rich guy in the group, i made him buy me top of the line electronic drums ($800).)

Techie (the other hot twin, more of a multi-instrumentalist. He and the identical twin Rockerboy grew up with a family that "vanished", which is funny because my family also "vanished", separately, in Vietnam. normally the Techie will be visually distinguishable from the Rockerboy because he'll always have lots of hologram related gear on. but we've also established that if the situation demands it, the twins can truly seem identical to other people, so there will definitely be fun shenanigans.)

Nomad (the bass player. also an orphan or abandoned earlier in life. all four of us are like that, and generally we have no money (except for the Rockerboy's previous windfall of cash from his previous gig).

i'm going to work on my character portrait later this week. can't wait to get started for real!

sleeve, what do you mean by "system"? if you mean the overall game setup, we're playing version 2.0 (Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0). however, a new version JUST came out - Cyberpunk Red - so after this first campaign we may migrate over to that if we're still interested. we're all planning on playing the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 videogame too, this fall

Yes, Public Access is the same designer and publisher as Brindlewood Bay, which I also have, and The Between (which is basically Penny Dreadful, the RPG). The mechanics are all very similar with some important differences. I am bugging my GM to run The Between after we finish the current campaign.

i feel like i should clarify that the ttrpg thing i wrote was for a game jam so the award i won, while i am thrilled to have won, was among other a handful of ppl who made a thing within a month and not hundreds over the course of a year or something haha. still cool! but kinda forgot to write that important detail.

do ppl on this thread fw quinn's quest? started watching it only recently and i guess he's like the main guy ppl listen to for ttrpg stuff. i like his stuff! he covers things i am interested in! wish there were more ppl doing this!

One of the Discord's I am on are kind of strongly divided by Quinn's Quest.

I haven't really watched.

Also, Will, missed your game jam thing earlier. That's very cool. I had an Incursion for Trophy Gold I wrote and was going to submit it to a fanzine publication but life stuff got in the way. Doing that would scratch an itch I've had since I made up my own games at age 10.

I want to also big up the rpg Trophy Dark. It's a horror-fantasy rpg based on Cthulhu Dark about doomed treasure hunters exploring forgotten places and encountering terrible things. It's really for one-shots (1-2 sessions) as your characters are not expected or even intended to survive and there is a PvP element. It is a high improv game with a structure a bit like The Blair Witch Project: sort of typical fantasy party enters the woods, encounters strange, unsettling things, gets lost, starts blaming and betraying each other, until there is some kind of final confrontation. Against this structure, you also get brief deep dives into the backstories and drives of each character via flashbacks. The two times I've run it have been some of the most fun I've had on the GM side and you end up with a little story that would make a great 2 hour movie. A very satisfying game.

well that strong divide is only going to get more relevant to your crew, because guess what he just dropped a review for yesterday? that's right it's public access

he being quinns quest

Ha, there was some PvP violence on our Discord yesterday about that review! This one guy hates Quinns apparently.

I watched most of the review because of my prior experience with the game. Quinns was very enthusiastic and touched on some really subtle reasons why the game really works. I really had no idea Quinns was such a big deal, but I am happy his review is giving the game a big boost for the upcoming kickstarter. They reported one of the actual play videos got about a months worth of views overnight!

really really really = my god