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

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

i've heard people swear by Root as a fun tabletop for kids/adults
https://ledergames.com/products/root-a-game-of-woodland-might-and-right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpxV-uNZef4

I've played Root and enjoyed it but I thought it was pretty complicated for adults!

Yeah about sixteen minutes into that video he says "that's where the real game begins!", lol.

Thanks again, guys - definitely going to get one of these started up for when she rises around dawn on Sunday!

I was going to recommend what this other ilxor was doing with their daughter, but in the end it's probably a little redundant.

Ha yes - i'm just running dry of ideas of my own at the moment, and could do with a system that might offer challenges/puzzles/stories beyond the ones I've stolen from half-remembered movies and The Adventure Game from the 70s

In other news our WFRP campaign has now reached session 24 (next Wednesday) and we’re into The Enemy Within. Aside from simply ignoring RAW quite often and just using whatever dramatic test we think is appropriate, it’s going pretty damn well. We’ve not even had any scheduling problems in six months, which is remarkable. Being fully remote now probably helps.

Stevie I’m interested to know how it’s going. N is starting to show interest in these things. We have some story dice which she was v interested in for a bit, but she prefers to use them with friends and obviously that’s not quite happening right now.

I've not tried any of the stuff suggested above yet - am meaning to when I get enough time to get my head around it - but I did a "scenario" the other weekend that went down very well. In it, she's a "Worst Witch" type kid at a witch school, and I had her "friend" cast a spell wrong that shrank them both, and had her friend get carried away by a rat, and then let her figure out how she would rescue her friend. I made a map of the witch school building, came up with some traps/adversaries, and had a very simple system for conflicts/challenges, where she had scores for magic, charisma and strength, and if she needed to do anything she had to roll under that number with two dice. And I let her invent her own spells to achieve any magic stuff, but on the proviso that she had to roll under her magic score to make the spell work, and she had to compose the spell and make it a rhyming couplet. It was lots of fun!

Now just looking for stories/campaigns I can loot for idea and keep this very simple system going. The focus was communal storytelling and problem-solving, which I think she really enjoyed. Also she loves making up her character sheets.

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)

I've been running Troika (an rpg based on Fighting Fantasy system) for a bit and now. Love the setting and feel, but the 2d6 system is punishing as each 1 pt difference in skill has a dramatically different chance of success.

I am probably going to switch to a Star Wars RPG because a couple of my players are super SW stans. I haven't seen a SW movie since Revenge of the Sith, lol. Gotta make your players happy.

I only ran Troika once, when a couple of our D&D group were missing. It was fun. I'd like to run it more. The skill system can be tough - I haven't looked into it, but I bet the fan-community has come up with some house-rules, and the combat & armor systems takes a minute to get used to imo. But I just love the vibe tbh. For skills I think the answer is maybe calling for fewer rolls if possible - if they've got the base skill in something and it's not a difficult task, I'd say let 'em do it w/o a roll and only roll for things that need to be dramatic.

I used to have (but never played) the Star Wars 2nd Edition RPG when I was young--it's also a D6 system but iirc more like a dice pool system?

I loved the Lone Wolf books; they were not super popular here in the US but I read and played a ton of them. I think they are all gone now, lost in a mother's cellar flood. I've managed to replace a couple over the years but they've gotten expensive for nice copies! But, and this could be a few years old, there's a website that has HTML versions of all the books with automatic combat rolling & such - played through a half-dozen or so. I fucking LOVED those books.

Lone Wolf books for your extreme nostalgia -
https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books