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

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 :(

ooo Alien RPG sounds fun too

Not sure if you've said this elsewhere, Karl, but are you playing with friends or did you hook up with a group through roll20 itself? I've been feeling the urge again lately, and never really got that much off the ground with pals.

playing with old high school pals. but yeah, i guess you can find a game with other people through roll20 as well? i haven't really messed around with it too much yet.

If there were a way to wrangle all the timezones, I'd love to play with ilxors.

i was going to say, i'm surprised there's not an ILX game going on right now! i would join the party but i'm cyberpunkin for a while

I'd maybe be up for an ilx game but yeah, timezones might be an issue.

i'd love to play this w/ ilxors when it comes out
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redcarnations/red-carnations-on-a-black-grave

That looks fun, never played anything like that

i was joking around a while ago about making an RPG set in the reign of terror, tocsins and tumbrils

Would be well-received

About a year ago I started work on an RPG about posting on a message board. The classes are done, progression and basic game mechanics are done... I gave up because it all just felt too meta. Might dig it out.

i would love to hear more about that

i am putting all my skill points into image posting and typing speed

It's in a work notebook somewhere (might actually been be in work somewhere) but the general premise was that you had to keep posting without losing interest, getting banned or lapsing into self-parody.

You basically controlled your own narratives and the GM would occasionally bring in unifying threads like clusterfucks, real world event, C/D, Defend The Indefensible, POX etc

Stats were in semi-contradictory pairs - perceived knowledge vs actual knowledge, readability vs repetition, snark vs nice guy, motivation was a standalone stat I think.

Classes were journo and wannabe as separate things, faux naïf, nostalgiac (maybe this was going to be either someone who would go on about how good the board used to be and/or someone who had grudges from previous board beef), fact bringer (possibly with minority interest as a sub class), board lawyer, social media substitute and something I called Light/Heat which was basically a Noize Dude.

Progression was about a combination of believability and citations/memorability in the hope you could become a board regular without having to become an admin.

Some say... we've been playing this all along.

i did order a pdf of red carnations so when it comes out i'll bump to see if ppl want to get a game. is there interest in putting some kind of rotating indie ilx tabletop online RPI together just in general? so many of these games i haven't played but have heard amazing things about (like dogs in the vineyard). but it's unclear to me how you go about finding a group for this -- my irl now roll20 group is great but i wouldn't really describe them as RPI (but trying!) & we only play dnd 5e.

What's RPI?

roleplay intensive as opposed to more mechanically interested or combat oriented games normally. it's a term of art i know from the MOO/MUD days when some servers distinguished themselves along those grounds and normally didn't allow any OOC (out of character) interaction. my dnd group is more about cracking jokes and ppl have varying levels of immersion. one thing i like about a lot of these indie games is they seem to be designed exclusively for RP - some hardly have any mechanics at all!

That sounds like it might be up my alley!

Definitely keep me updated, I'm interested but might not be able to fit in with you US players. Ideally I'd go for RPI *and* cracking jokes, nothing too strict but everyone giving it their best.

RPI & jokes is the holy combo. I'm also interested but GMTing it

reposted from idiot thread repository:

i have been devouring information about dungeon world and it feels like just the right kind of loosey-goosey for me. run and gun. the fiction is paramount. HOWEVER.

i am getting extremely ANXIOUS to GM (DM?) this game with my kids. i have no idea wtf i'm doing. i'm supposed make up villages on the spot and give them tags? if i make up a monster to battle my kids i need to create special moves for them on the fly??

how do i dispense with this anxiety??