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

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

I just remembered that in 90s internet time, I was on a Lone Wolf listerv and that was the first time I ever met another I@n J0hn50n!! He was Irish IIRC.

But I just love the vibe tbh.

Yeah, I have a lot of different vibes I can get into if I want and Troika can hit a bunch of them: science fantasy/psychedelia/eldritch horror, etc, etc. I think my players weren't as into the whimsical British psychedelia elements as I was. Also, most of them hadn't played an rpg in 30 years, so they needed more prompting on the character sheet than Troika's system gives.

I don't know if you like the Powered by the Apocalypse games, but there is a 3-page hack of Troika using some of those concepts.

The SW RPG I am running (session 1 will be next week) is the newest one from Fantasy Flight Games that game out over the last 7 years or so. It's about the polar opposite of Troika rules-wise. It uses the narrative dice system, which I haven't used but I am very keen to try. Basically, you roll non-numerical dice - positive dice based on your stats and skills and negative dice based on difficulty, environmental factors, and opponents skills. Opposing symbols cancel and if you are left with positive dice after cancellation you were successful, but there is a wide spectrum of success and failure - successes with drawbacks, failures that give you advantages to your next roll, etc, etc.

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2013/2/27/that-star-wars-feeling/

So I ran the first session of the Star Wars RPG and it went incredibly well. My players generally haven't played rpgs since the late 80s and seemed to have some issues grasping the Troika system, which is very simplistic, so I had concerns whether the SWRPG system was going to be too much for them. Ironically, at least so far, the narrative dice system is very engaging for players and GM; there is a lot of back and forth discussion of how to interpret dice rolls which acts as prompts to further the narrative. In essence, it prompts the players to take more authority over the narrative so the GM doesn't have to do all the work. I like it.

The other thing is I've usually run games where I know the setting in more detail than my players, so I would do a lot of work feeling like I needed to convey setting. Running the Star Wars setting with players highly conversant in the setting (more than me even) again takes work from the GM. It's like a shared pool of knowledge you don't have to spend time spoon feeding to the players. I can focus on story.

One of the PCs returned to their home planet for the first time in five years to discover their mother and father had died and her younger brother had left the planet to go look for the PC. Now she has to leave the planet to find her brother. This is good, dramatic stuff.

A friend hipped me to Symbaroum (https://www.symbaroum.com/ a Scandinavian dark fantasy setting with some overt colonialism overtones. Human civilization surrounds a vast, lightless forest which takes up most of the world - the home of an ancient fallen empire and a prime destination for adventurers. Anyone have any experience with this?

Had a few gaps in recent months - 12 sessions out of a possible 16 - but we’re now 36 sessions deep in our WFRP campaign and have finished Shadows Over Bogenhafen! Very exciting. The party saved the town but at some cost. Death On The Reik starts on Wednesday. It’s about a year since I bought the new rule book, and though it’s cost me hundreds of pounds on sourcebooks and dice, I’m very glad I did it.

Only problem is I’d love to play it one day as a PC, but fear I’m stuck as GM forever now...

Didn't realise how mentally exhausting being a GM was until I tried it

Maybe I shouldn't have been nervously slamming cans of shipyard while running the games idk

Scik Mouthy, which edition of WFRP are you using?

We’re playing 4e.

Always was a Tzeentch man, myself.

4e's combat is such a weird mess, one of my group was so determined to aggressively optimise their build I kind of gave up on ever trying to balance the fights and just make it more that they had social consequences if you did it in public

The worst injury anyone got in our playthrough of Enemy Within was actually the halfling losing an ear to a cloud of explosive methane in the sewers

I'm playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay too! But just as a player - I read a lot of Games Workshop guff as a kid and now it's really difficult to remember what still applies and also what my character would be aware of.

13 months and 45 sessions in. Our group has one more child now than when we started, which feels epic.

wow!

irl child = +1 bonus to everyone's key stat imo

I've started playing a ttrpg that is more of a "new school" storytelling rpg. There is still a GM (me), but players have way more agency than in "old school" rpgs. Action resolution (rolls) does not determine player success or failure but who narrates the outcome. If the player makes a certain roll, the player narrates the outcome including adding facts that are true and which the GM cannot contradict. The better the roll, the more facts a player can add. If the player does not make their roll, the GM narrates the outcome.

The game is highly collaborative - the GM can't really determine a plot (meaning a beginning, middle, and end) because the players will likely just go in a different direction at any time. Instead, I just introduce a starting problem/hook, then keep in mind a few potential complications and NPCs that I might introduce. The rest is improvised at the table.

This is a big change for me coming from a long history of traditional rpgs and requires me to unlearn some habits. It also goes against my personal bias toward over-planning. But the nice thing is I don't feel the same responsibility for everyone's enjoyment. There is more of an equal share of the storytelling responsibility. It's early, but I like it.

What’s it called?

Bl00d & Hon0r - A Game of Samurai Tragedy. A name with terrible other uses. The .pdf is on drivethrurpg:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/85815/Blood--Honor

The players make up a samurai clan then their characters who are members of the clan.

There is also a related game called World of Dew which expands beyond samurai and their clans to a later period, such as the Meije Restoration, with noir investigators, merchants, westerners, etc.

It uses particular elements of the FATE game though it is a bit different.

Also, would really love to give Mörk Börg a spin - it's a rules-light death metal fantasy rpg about the end of the world. Imagine an art-punk WFRP with the alienation, darkness, and gore cranked so far up you have to laugh. The doom of Call of Cthulhu with the character survival rate of Paranoia (albeit without clones). Geared for one-shots I would think.

I'm imagining a Tinder for rpgs. It's hard.

what do you mean?

When you’re not in junior high, life makes it hard to find and maintain an rpg group for an extended period. I was just fantasizing (and joking) about an app that would make it easier to find a game.

that makes so much more sense than what i was imagining, which was swiping left and right on rulesets