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

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??

i think as you do it you'll get more comfortable with it. doing it with your kids should be forgiving i'd think and good practice for dming for adults?

just don't tell your kids you made any of it up, let them believe it all comes from the game and they'll think it's all cool. worked on the adults i made stuff up on the fly for!

both those posts sound wise.

i've gone way down a rabbit hole with this. these are fun: http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html

what do ppl think about forum roleplaying? probably too embarrassing to ever do on ilx...

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/317424/Dissident-Whispers

^ All proceeds going to the National Bail Fund Network

What are people's opinions on paid games on R20? Should I as a noob stay away or is it worth taking flyer on?

OK obvs not RPG but Codenames is playable online now! Any ILXORS fancy a game? https://codenames.game/

what is it?

Oh, it's board game about words. You have a deck of cards with a single word printed on each, and deal some ~25 of them out. Two teams have certain words that they need to guess to win, and one person on each team gives out very concise clues to get their teammates to pick the right cards.

I am accelerating down a massive WFRP 4e hole and it is gre8.

Been DMing the first stage of The Enemy Within, finishing in the next week or two, it's been a lot of fun.

The combat/advantage system is a bit of a mess but who cares about the combat really

Had a guy going all in on portraying a deluded Bretonnian Halfling Robin Hood wannabe, it's like getting some acting for free

we love to see it

That’s the way it should be.

Assembled a group for WFRP 4e and we generated characters last Sunday, and had our first play session on Wednesday. Outrageous fun. I’m having difficulty thinking about anything else.

TTRPG based on Come Dine With Me, anyone? https://kierongillen.itch.io/come-dice-with-me

Oh my.

Who you playing as Nick? I had a very enjoyable run last year as a young soldier who lost a hand to a bomb attack on my first full play session

I’m GMing. Party had a ratcatcher, a slayer, a physician and an outlaw. Done three sessions on an introductory adventure I wrote, and next Wednesday we do Night of Blood...

No horrific injuries yet - they’ve mostly been combat averse, and sensibly set a rat ogre on fire before letting the slayer at it - but the outlaw got beat up bad by skaven and has contracted ratte fever (but doesn’t know it yet).

Slayers’ first attack on the rat ogre was to hit it with his “bottle of cheap spirits”, and he was lucky enough to catch it right in the snout and give it a second ‘ablaze’ condition. He then basically dismembered it as it tried to flee.

waaaaagh

i bought troika and am excited to run it soon

Played through about half of the legendary Night of Blood in our fourth session. My Kanka journal entry:

A stormy night, in pursuit of a mutant family – but is it to capture or to warn? – the road turning to sludge beneath cartwheels, a strangled, braying sound from beyond the treeline: someone – or something – crosses the road behind the cart, following closely at the forest edge. Then a stag, suddenly, bloodied and terrified, lunges from the forest ahead. The cart upturns, and beastmen attack, giving up their hunt of the stag to hunt the party instead.

The Slayer dispatches them swiftly, and the journey resumes, thunder and lightning, something is in the forest and following: mutants attack! A slog of a battle this time, eyestalks and fur, eventually overcome. Too late to turn back, keep going, a flash of lightning illuminates a coaching inn up ahead. But the gate is locked. A side door gives entry to the courtyard, but the inn is locked, though lights illuminate inside behind drawn curtains.

Knock on the door, a disgusting landlord, surprised to see anybody and not keen on strangers tonight, a roadwarden and a lanky, goggly-eyed barman, suspicious of the party, something about a bandit attack. The ratcatcher takes his dog outside and notices horses in the stables are uneasy, lets them out carefully, and finds the half-devoured corpse of a stable boy in the hayloft.

What in Sigmar’s name? Summons his companions, something alive on the stable roof, the Slayer climbs up there and battles a hideous, mutant spider thing, perhaps once a man, slipping on the pitched roof, flaming arrows from the physician illuminating the scene. The outlaw sets the hayloft alight, and Slayer fells the spider-thing but slips and falls from the roof, two stories straight down onto hard, sodden earth. Is he dead? The doors of the inn are locked and bolted again, and this time they will not open.

this is a neat description of a solo dungeon world game, for anybody here who's never played the system and is interested it.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/one-on-one-dungeon-world.349103/

Can we get an update from Karl Malone??

I've been running Call of Cthulhu games since the summer - regular group, we've run through four scenarios now, starting up on our fifth now. Still getting a bit of a grip on how best to use the mechanics to advance the game but everyone is having fun so that's cool. Only one character death, another close call. This week we continue our investigation in Foxfield, MA, where the town supervisor has been acting strangely. (SPOILER: the Mi-Go have kidnapped his children and put their brains in canisters and their bodies in suspended animation).

unfortunately, our cyberpunk 2020 game suddenly ended mid-summer due to real life social conflict. the DM (who i have been friends with since HS and who I have made up with, since) kept getting testy with people when they couldn't align with his schedule, and then things reached a head when he guilt-tripped another play who had covid-like symptoms and then guilt-tripped someone else who was taking a vacation and didn't want to play for a couple weeks. i was feeling confrontational and i called him out on it in the group text, thinking for some reason that it would be a good idea to publicly confront someone with long term anger control issues. things went downhill.

it was a cyberdowner 2020

sounds like it still went better than the 2077 launch

for sure!

haha, yeah....also it the DM's first time running a game, and it was pretty rough. the first time we faced combat, he said that he hadn't yet read "that section" of the manual so we all kind of walked him through it for an hour or so

oh dear

woof. Sorry to hear that Zack.
i feel like i am cancelling or unavailable as much as any of the players - tbh it's not that hard to be chill???

it is definitely not that hard to be chill when it comes to accommodating people's schedules during a pandemic, it's the most relatable thing

ZacH** sorry.

no big deal!

names are dumb anyway

This might be the wrong thread but does anyone have an idea of a RPg that would be good for a single 7 year old to play, with her very tired dad as DM? My daughter is full of imagination and loves such things, and I started a very simple self-made RPG for her last summer, but I am running low on inspiration for scenarios and stories and would like to come up with some kind of good experience for her, especially as she is a single child in lockdown and is going (not so) quietly insane

all i really know is dungeon world but it’s very flexible and values story over tables of stats etc - you can easily noodge things the way you want them to go. it works best with very minimal prep - a few monsters, maybe an NPC or two particularly for a 1-player game - and maybe an idea of a setting - but most of the world/history gets fleshed out in the questions you ask during character creation. if your daughter is imaginative you’ll find that she does most of the prep for you!

for more of a fleshed-out adventure scenario you could search for slave pits of drazhu

Ah, great stuff - thanks Tracer x

can i suggest choose your own adventure books or any of their gazillion variants? i bet you could find whole collections on ebay.

Fighting Fantasy books! They're kind of a halfway house between Choose Your Own Adventure and D&D (you roll two normal dice to see which page you should turn to, there are hit points, damage, etc)

speaking of:
http://ffproject.com/

also - offered unexplored and without a sense of quality -

https://chooseyourstory.com/Stories/
https://infinite-story.com/

And a site that lets you craft your own:
https://www.inklewriter.com/

Thanks Forks! She loved a kids CYA-style book when she was 3, been waiting till she was ready to try some more - and there are a few Star Wars ones out there too (she saw a New Hope for the first time a fortnight ago and is now OBSESSED)

I would recommend Basic Fantasy RPG if you want something light and D&D-derived. It's a re-organization/slight modification of the 1980s Basic Set rules, but modified to include ascending armor class and a few other minor things. Best of all, the pdf is free, there are a lot of free adventures, and you can get everything at cost if you want print copies -- the rulebook is abut $5 through Lulu or Amazon.

https://www.basicfantasy.org
https://basicfantasy.org/downloads/Basic-Fantasy-RPG-Rules-r107-bookmarked.pdf

The author suggests it's appropriate for kids 6+.

Another very stripped back D&D-clone is White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game -- another free .pdf
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/190631/White-Box--Fantastic-Medieval-Adventure-Game?filters=100_0_0_0_0