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

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

yeah that's what I meant! thanks.

have you played it before?

Karl your group concept sounds excellent + like a lot of fun. are you acting as the group manager + booking gigs bc you're playing fixer? are you only going to play shows or are you doing illicit work on the side?

xp no, don't think so, although I am familiar with the old Iron Crown Cyberpunk game which was Rolemaster-based. is this the one that was originally Steve Jackson Games?

are you acting as the group manager + booking gigs bc you're playing fixer?

i'm not sure yet! we didn't get to spend much time working that out yet, but i'm sure i'll have a better idea after the next session.

are you only going to play shows or are you doing illicit work on the side?

i definitely want to get us into illicit work on the side, for sure. plus, due to Life Event rolls, i have a connection in the Mayor's office, and the Techie has two connections in the Seattle Police.

forgot one more detail for Ten Ton Heat - one of my drumsticks is actually a drumKNIFE. i worked this out with the GM already. The Fixer has Melee, Brawler, and Handgun as "Career abilities" (a set of 10 abilities that are recommended for your Role, and that you have to dump your starting allotment of 40 ability points into). i intend to use my drumknife way too much, and what i really want to do is get into a situation where i do a drum solo, and then at the climactic moment, throw the non-drumknife high into the air so everyone is looking at it, and then throw the drumknife at the enemy and run away

also, three out of the four of us are musicians, so i think at some point we're going to write a cyberpunk song for our band

I am green with envy! That sounds awesome.

Ooh :)

I never posted in this thread I guess? I actually played in a Cyberpunk Red (using the starter pack thing) for a couple of sessions before the lockdown, and it was great fun :) our characters were all so awesome, and we were immediately the most caring people in night city? (that's what it's called right?)

i acted out this awesome scene that i'm still proud of where half the party ended up in a mexican standoff with some angry incels on a roof, i got on the roof and sat cross-legged in the middle with a bottle of soju and two cups and basically commanded the lead incel to sit and drink with me while i gave him some kind of insane rambling circular tony robbins motivational speech and defused the entire situation. then he went downstairs to apologize to the bartender for being a creep and my party mugged his lackey.

oh man!

if i were there, i would definitely have recorded that with my smartgoggles

haha someone did! but they failed their, uh, something roll, and it didn't go viral yet :(

which is for the best i suppose bc my guy is trying to keep a low profile on account of trying to take down the corp that killed his anarchist art collective/polycule

i went really wild with my backstory

did you have any media in your group? I almost switched to Media at the last moment, but only 1 other person in our group has decent combat skills, so i figured i should be someone who can help out there as well

also notable, my character has an obscenely high cool stat, and i communicate entirely non-verbally 90% of the time to "maintain the illusion"

xp no media! they haven't added it yet to Cyberpunk Red as far as I know. I think it'll be in the full book, which comes out... some time.

i am so sad the game went on hiatus, it was seriously so goddamn fun. the DM ended up running a different game over the internet and i joined but i didn't know anyone i was playing with and everyone's voice sounded similar and it was the Alien RPG which has really cool mechanics but i felt like it moved too slow and was really stressful and i ended up dropping bc i couldn't make one of the games bc i was having a bad brain day :(