ttrpg

I've struggled with this before my self, where I would run a disastrous session and feel like shit about it for a while after. It happens to all of us, it's not a personal shortcoming- We all make mistakes, and your friends aren't mad at you, and they understand you.

Looks 'ight

Well, you know what they say:

The Crow always wins.

Ran The Witch is Dead for my wife and SILs recently.

They played an Owl with Create Fire (Othello), a Crow with Make Book Read Itself Aloud (Cawthorn) and a Cat with (Tidy Clean and Mend).

If I'm honest, Create Fire was definitely an MVP.

Spoilers, session report, includes arson, a murder and some eye stuff

Below are some pictures of character sheets, the village map and some notes I took during the session (most of them are the names the players came up with for the expelled wizard when they couldn't remember his actual name).

Overall we had a great time, good way to spend what would have been the time for our normal game when a few players were out of town.

Edit: also we used these little plastic ducks to track danger and also the location in the village our intrepid heroes were at.

please they talked about it on OSP I wanna play it so bad T_T
i know it was in some charity bundle on itch io previously

Pathfinder is like D&D - you create a character, explore dungeons and castles, battle monsters using weapons or magic, and level up. If you've played D&D, this will be very similar. But no experience is needed!

I will be running the Beginner's Box adventure, designed with new players in mind. If that's a success, then we can carry on playing. This adventure might take two sessions or up to four. It comes with pre-generated characters which make it easy to just start playing, but we can also create our own.

Just comment below if you're interested. Do mention some times that work for you. Think about your schedule for the next couple weeks and give a few different "sets" like 6-9 PM, Fridays, Pacific Time or 12-3 PM, Saturdays, Eastern.

If there's interest, I'll create a discord and we can work out all the details in there.

Since we've been talking about satire being dead a bunch. Author does a really great history of Warhammer 40k, and also goes over why Neo-Nazi's keep showing up at 40k events despite Games Workshop saying "it's satire bro".

Yep, this is going to be a post discussing racism.

One thing that confused me greatly about orcs and goblins is the severe difference in technological levels between them and regular human empires (also something else, but I'll get to that later). Regular humans are depicted as being from the (unrealistic view of the) medieval period, but orcs and goblins are portrayed as being extremely underdeveloped tech-wise. Their cultures don't feel like they belong together in the same geographical locations, and orcs don't seem capable of learning from the people they've warred with for hundreds of years.

Now you may argue that that's because orcs and goblins are intended to be genetically mentally inferior; their intelligence stat is certainly below the average human intelligence (average human intelligence = 10, orcs = 8 (5e orc = 7)). However there's a reason why this doesn't make sense: human barbarian tribes exist in the same regions as more technologically advanced humans and they're not advancing either, despite co-existing or warring with other humans of their region for hundreds of years. Their tribes, unlike their literal neighbors, have been entirely unable to advance and yet remain as a constant warring group against their medieval counterparts without ever getting wiped out. They don't live in neighboring nations, they live within the same nations as their medieval counterparts.

In the real world, you have situations like this arising because nations like Britannia (I've no idea what it was called before the Romans invaded) was literally invaded by a technologically advanced nation, putting them at odds and making neighbors of people who were technologically lesser. Situations like when the ~~native~~ actual American peoples were invaded by Europeans.

I've seen King Arthur portrayed as a knight fighting off 'barbarians' (one of the transformers movies, but also probably other depictions too), which would more accurately translate to a colonialist terrorizing the local population in this scenario, although apparently in the actual myths he was a Briton who fought off foreign invaders instead (not a depiction you see in media as far as I'm aware, especially as king Arthur is portrayed as being clad in plate armor of the medieval period).

Basically a more accurate representation of this situation in your usual TTRPG setting would depict the more technologically advanced nations as colonizers, at constant struggle with the neighboring populations that they're actively trying to suppress, and I say neighboring because had those populations existed within their nation they would have murdered them all. TTRPG settings never depict this relationship, instead asking that you accept this current situation as though it just sprung up into its current state all of a sudden (which it did).

Going back to the cultures of orcs and goblins, they're usually portrayed in a way that also makes them similar to human barbarians, neither of which match the cultures of the medieval peoples, but settler colonialism is never used as an explanation for why that is (settler colonialism being the only/most likely logical reason). No technologically medieval culture still has its barbarian beliefs or even traces of it, meaning they are indeed more akin to foreign invaders, which just makes the settings feel off given that those nations aren't settler colonialist.

Now as regards orcs and goblins and their alignment by birth, I reject the automatic evil alignment they get and I reject it because in principal I repudiate Gygax's views, which you can read here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/dtpgim/gygax_on_lawful_good/

He agrees with Chivington about the 'nits make lice' being an observable fact, a quote Chivington made in regards to actual human beings and not a race of beings who are objectively/genetically evil. Chivington was in the process of ethnically cleansing the region for settler colonialist reasons; Chivington's side is the evil one and yet in a bizarre twist his logic is the one being considered as the rationale for lawful good.

Any accurate depiction of medieval societies living in such close proximity to orcs and goblins would require that the medieval society is a foreign one, where they're the ones who are basically a pox on the orcs and goblins rather than the other way around as it's portrayed. Orcs and goblins are always shown to be a constant threat to human societies, when in reality the inverse would be more realistic. There's never any depictions of humans encroaching on and terrorizing orcs and goblins but the other way is always what's presented, and that never made any sense.

Given Gygax's son's (Ernie Gygax) comments about ~~native~~ actual Americans, I got the sense that maybe he was raised on an unhealthy diet of 'heroic' cowboys versus 'savage' natives, and if this was the case, then his father probably raised him that way and had similar views (especially given his quoting Chivington as rationale behind the lawful good alignment of paladins).

When you consider Gygax's opinions on the views of a genocidal murderer, suddenly it would make more sense to flip alignments between the medieval society and orcs and goblins (I'm not comparing orcs and goblins to ~~native~~ actual Americans), and suddenly paladins become basically the medieval Wehrmacht.

Unfortunately this line of reasoning brings me to.....the tired old racist view that 'technologically advanced' = objectively good.

(oof this post was long)

Sometimes you just get :d20-fuck-ya: and it all goes according to plan :trans-ferret:

By that I mean that the sheer number of coins that are expected to buy pretty much anything at mid-to-high levels is so absurd that it makes the old imagery of treasure chests full of the stuff feel not only underwhelming but burdensome.

If 50 coins equal one imperial pound, as the rulebooks typically state, you could just about melt down and hammer out a house or a boat approximating the prices in the book for such things. It gets even sillier when magic items are so obscenely priced yet at the same time a typical adventuring party picks up so many of them that they could, materialistically speaking, pull a Mansa Munsa on any quasi-medieval economy if such items are really priced that highly where a hand-me-down magic protection ring could set up a peasant in endless luxury for life.

I don't try to fix all of that mess, but I do tend to use a house rule where coins have as much written buying power as 100x the listed prices for most things, and the coins found in a listed lair are reduced by to 1/100th of the listed values, which also keeps coppers, silvers, and electrum relevant a lot longer. As long as all the players remember the conversion tables and don't forget them in a way that fucks up the bookkeeping, it works pretty well.

How about the rest of you? :d20:

howdy, it's me again

So I've been watching Star Trek lately, and I've read a lot of good things about Star Trek Adventures by Modiphius Entertainment, and so I want to check out the quick start scenario for that game.

This will be a one-shot with pregenned characters, run off my Foundry RPG server, next weekend (26th-28th). If you're interested please drop a post here and/or DM me on Discord (SSJMarx#1619) and I'll put a channel together to talk about it. Also download the quick start guide linked above and skim the rules and characters - but please DON'T read Chapter 2: Away Mission: Signals since that's the scenario we'll be playing lmao.

You don't need to know anything about Star Trek to play - in fact it would probably be better if you come in without much knowledge of that universe's canon, since I only have a modest familiarity with it myself. All you have to know is that the Federation are Big Space Communists even if the writers of the TV shows are too liberal to admit it.

The scenario starts in media res, with the players as an Away Team investigating a missing Starfleet ship. Here's the introduction:

CAPTAIN’S LOG

STARDATE 48311.3

We’ve received a message from Narendra Station that a runabout called the Susquehanna has gone missing in the Carina Nebula, deep within the Shackleton Expanse. The Susquehanna was investigating an unusual alien signal that originated from the nebula when all contact was lost. We have been ordered to enter the nebula, find the runabout, and determine the origin and cause of the alien signal. Starfleet has also advised that Romulan and Ferengi ships have been sighted in the region, so we should exercise caution since they may well have detected the alien signal as well.

Been thinking about bringing in an outside friend to role play or at least control the the boss for the up coming battle. Being able to stage a fight where the boss honestly has no idea of what the players will do or what their skills are but has absolutely no hesitation about trying to kill them seems like it would be pretty cool. And know matter how much you try as a DM you can't not know things and even in a grim dark game like we're playing it does really suck to kill your players so there's always the desire to pull your punches even if you don't do it. Having a boss that not only goes straight for the throat but is also played by someone who thinks differently than the rest of the encounters my players are used to seems like it would make it truly unique fight.

Dunno if there's a rule or etiquette against self-promotion, but I've been streaming a campaign set 13 years after New Vegas and thought there might be people here curious about it. Starting the next scenario tonight at 8:30 pm CT on twitch.tv/professionalslacker7

Using a program like Tabletop Simulator or one of the alternatives.

I'm thinking 40k because the 10th edition is right around the corner and I'm interested in using that as a jumping on point, but I'm open to playing anything - Age of Sigmar, Battletech, Warmachine/Hordes all come to mind as alternatives, but I haven't been active in the hobby for a long time so I'm sure there are hundreds of newer games out there that are great too.

My big thing is I really want to play a narrative campaign of something, not just match up with randoms to play one-off battles where we barely talk. All of the games I mentioned have rules for that, with stuff like your units becoming veterans over time and your characters being consistent.

Since it's online there would be no expectations of buying anything (or participating in the irl hobby at all) to participate. We could coordinate over Discord and do things like have multiple games going at once, change games in between campaigns, spectate battles and chat, etc.

https://itch.io/b/1753/ttrpgs-for-trans-rights-in-florida

An indie RPG bundle with 500+ games and supplements on itch.io with proceeds going to Florida charities, so far it's raised 160k :trans-ferret:

Biggest standouts from looking at the first page:

Wanderhome - Pastoral fantasy game where you play as cute animal-folk wandering around and slowly dealing with their trauma rather than trying to solve every problem in every town they stop in. The art is whimsical as fuck, and it's made to be GM-agnostic so you can play it either without or with a GM depending on what floats your boat

FIST - A light and easy to learn system where you make rogue paranormal mercenaries and do some crazy shit in the Cold War era. Inspired by METAL GEAR, A-Team, and Doom Patrol. Also in the bundle is MANDELBROT SET, a campaign kit for FIST

Gubat Banwa - Filipino folklore RPG inspired by tactical combat-focused games like Lancer, ICON, and D&D 4e. Uses the separate narrative/combat system concept like Lancer and has rad art

Maharlika RPG - Filipino folklore RPG but this time with giant fucking robots. Also inspired by Lancer and D&D 4e and also has rad art

Thirsty Sword Lesbians - A PbtA She-Ra inspired game where you play as angsty disaster lesbians and get into sword fights but end up kissing in some intergalactic war. Looks adaptable to almost any setting, as the playbooks/classes are based on different emotional conflicts

For sale, corebook, never played.

I am running this “season” (in the TV sense not the video game sense) of my friend groups lasting TTRPG session. It’s sort of anthology in that we are wanna be creative types and we use the games to explore our storytelling abilities. None of them are particularly connected but there are some common themes throughout. We have been playing on and off since high-school.

We have done one session of just about everything from classic D&D to modern stuff like Lancer and Mothership. However, Many of our adventure turn into a DBZ were we all get stronger items and Level up and fight a guy. I want to mix things up.

I am Gamemaster this time around and I am running a campaign of vanilla “Spycraft” the D20 secret agent style game. I recently replayed “No One Lives for Ever” and I thought it did a great job satirizing but also indulging in the genre. I want to do something similar, I want to keep it tightly focused and without giving way to action movie just giving them bigger guns and stuff

I was thinking of doing the same thing but taking back to a faux Civil War era with super spies and mildly future tech or maybe a reverse Saturday morning cartoon G.I. Joe where they play agents of a Cobra-like organization.

Does anyone have any tips in general about how to think about breaking genre trends and making a more unique play experience for your friends?

We're a group of 3 people looking for a player and/or GM. Currently we're in between specific systems, but we're looking at Maid RPG right now for a one shot. No specific requirements or anything, but we've tended to keep a more comedic atmosphere in any game.

Subversion is a game about people and communities eking out a better existence in this rapidly changing world. The drama centers around the actions of envoys, representatives of your community, each from one of seven fantastic species, with their own unique combination of abilities, determined to protect and advance their communities while remaining true to their own ideals. Subversion is about community, direct action, revolution, and hope for the future, even against a world rife with runaway technology, unchecked power, and dangerous secrets.

Seems kind of interesting ngl...

I love this concept. Zee spends a lot of time apologizing for it not being balanced, but balance isn't the chief concern of TTRPGs it's just a consideration and sacrificing a bit of balance on the altar of fun worldbuilding and intricate tactics is totally worth it as long as you don't go completely off the deep end.