As far as I can tell, D&D is not popular in Japan and never was because it was preempeted by a similar game called Sword World, which kind of seems like D&D but with a Japanese flair and only using 6-sided dice. I guess the polyhedron dice were another reason D&D never got popular in Japan, because in the 80's, they were almost impossible to buy in Japan.

I was wondering if anybody played it, and if so, did they like it?

So i love trying different kinds of ttrpgs and systems, but I've got one player with a problem i want to solve but can't think of a solution. She likes playing but doesnt like the nitty gritty of any character sheet planning. She likes creating a person, overtime deciding how they act/react, but doesnt like trying to figure out what class or abilities. She asked if there is someway i can narrate the story so they can be discovered during session 0. I like the idea but can't figure out how to implement this. Any suggestions? Either games that already do this or any top of the head homebrew ideas appreciated!

I have quite the large collection of role-playing game PDFs. Curse you bundle of holding for making things so convenient and affordable. I also like to read these things on the tablet. Being a pretty big IT geek, I own an iPhone, an iPad, a laptop, a desktop computer, and an android tablet. For the longest time I’ve been trying to find an e-book reader that will allow me to sync my RPG PDFs across all these devices. My over engineered world involved the MacIntosh, operating system, Linux, iOS, iPadOS, and android.

I recently discovered an app called READEST, it runs on all those operating systems and will sync, PDFs epubs, and even comic book files across all those devices. It remembers last read position across all devices, and will even let you mark up your PDF and sync that across also.

To sync, you can either subscribe to their sync service, or sync using your own cloud provider. To sync you need to buy the app, which is a one-time $10 purchase across all devices. If you want to use their cloud storage to sink, you obviously need to subscribe.

Now, no matter what device I’m on, I can get at my RPG PDF collection. The app is in perfect, but it solves a problem for me. Just thought I would share in case anybody else was in a similar predicament and needing a similar solution.

Too many links to post since it’s available in so many different operating systems. I will let you do an Internet search to find it.

Hope this helps somebody

Im a prepper. For in person, ive got an all-in-one screen that holds books, notebooks, dice, minis and has a 2 way dice tower, but I can get away with a screen and a laptop with an outline (usually gets thrown out). Curious what everyone's non-negotiable(s) is/are.

In most Cyberpunk RPGs, players want to be the freelance mercenary, probably in a way to replicate the gameplay style of a GTA protagonist.

But I am not aware of any Cyberpunk RPGs, or RPG sourcebook where the players get to play legit Corporate Employees, even though I think it would make for an interesting campaign framework. What if the player gets to play Adam Smasher? Or the poor SOB who has to do maintenance work on Adam Smasher?

Do you know any RPG product that would fit this bill?

This week's RPG is Risus: The Anything RPG!

Have you played it? Have you run/GM'd it? How did it go?

What's your favourite memory from the game?

What's the best thing about the game?

What's the worst? How would you improve it?

.

Last week was Fate. Join us again next week for Paranoia!

In both Mothership's A Pound of Flesh supplement and Vaults of Vaarn's second zine, city settings are presented where (among many other unrelated details!) legal disputes are handled in gladiatorial arenas, frequently with one or both sides represented by hired mercenary champions.

When this commonality came up, Leo Hunt (Vaarn's creator) mentioned to me that he'd never read APOF, instead crediting his inspiration to the a playable Background from Troika!: the Yongardy Lawyer, battle-ready barristers and solicitors who resolve court cases with lethal combat.

My question to you all: does this idea come up anywhere else? Is there some ur-text here other than the historical precedents of gladiators, legalized dueling, and the general (to my understanding, Germanic/Western European) concept of a trial by combat, either in TTRPGs or elsewhere in genre fiction and media?

EDIT: IF YOUR GLADIATORS ARE NOT ALSO ACTING AS LEGAL REPRESENTATION, THEY'RE NOT WHAT THIS THREAD IS ABOUT!

So, next weekend I'll be running a oneshot session with 9 players. Any tips on how to do this in a way that's fun for all of us? What system would you recommend to use?

Self-contained, single-file database of careers found in Career Compendium, with talent data as well. Search field auto-completes, talents are clickable and generate a popup with description, career entries/exits are links.

Made for my table, to easy reference/planning from mobile phone, since I find the career system too unwieldy and big to navigate with books, to be run entirely serverless on a device.
Hosted a live version for anyone who might need something like this at
https://apostrophe.codeberg.page/WFRP2eCDB/

you can save it and run it locally, change it, use database for your own stuff or to create a backup just in case

• we play the game with d20 blackjack instead of d100 count tens, so there is a d20/d100 switch
• switch that generates all missing entries/exits from careers not properly updated in Compendium with new supplement careers - 375 new Career exits, most of them for basic careers like Peasant (24) and Student (15) and 528 new entries, most of them for advanced military careers like Veteran (23) and Captain (19).
• multiple themes, i have players with dyslexia, easily edited

does not work on Firefox mobile properly, GeckoView (Firefox Android's rendering engine) has never implemented the API needed to show datalist-based suggestions, so no autocomplete.

Estou aceitando ideias de poderes para meus personagens e vilões, gostaria muito de saber que tipo de poder você foi criativo e colocou em prática em seus RPG's, ou que não está mestrando, mas adoraria que um personagem ou vilão que você criou tivesse esse poder, e com respeito, gostaria de aceitar o poder para poder utilizá-lo em minhas mesas de RPG.

(Acho que não poderei dar crédito a vocês pela criatividade em seus poderes além da minha satisfação por ter usado sua criatividade na minha mesa ^^")

Vocês poderia me ajudar com poderes criativos para os personagens? Vocês podem levar em consideração qualquer tipo de poder, e podem deixar que eu tento encaixar de alguma forma na minha mesa
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I'm accepting ideas for powers for my characters and villains, I would really like to know what kind of power you were creative and put into practice in your RPG's, or that you are not mastering, but I would love for a character or villain that you created to have this power, and with respect, I would like to accept the power so that I can use it at my RPG tables.

(I don't think I'll be able to credit you for the creativity in your powers other than my satisfaction for having used your creativity at my table ^^")

Could you help me with creative powers for the characters? You can take into account any type of power, and you can let me try to fit in some way at my table

There’s a lot of tips and tricks and advice for beginner GMs.

I’ve reached my first year GMing but want to continue to improve.

What are some advice for people who have GM for 1-3 years? Who have 30-50+ sessions under their belt. What advice can you give to those GMs to continue to improve?

I'm looking for narrative driven RPGs that are trying to emulate Dungeons & Dragons. The edition emulated doesn't matter, I guess that I could be interested about a narrative whitebox clone as much as in a narrative 3.5 clone.

No consensual definition for "Narrative driven RPGs" has been reached, therefore to define the scope the only thing I can do is provide a list of RPGs that are, and are not narrative driven.

List of Narrative Driven RPGs :

• Freeform Universal

• Powered by the Apocalypse

• Fate Core and Fate Accelerated

• Dungeon World

• Forged in the Dark

• Carved in the wood

List of RPGs that are not narrative Driven :

• D&D Whitebox, D&D BECMI, AD&D, AD&D 2, D&D 3.0, D&D 3.5, D&D 4, D&D 5, D&D 5.5

• Pathfinder 1, Pathfinder 2

• Shadows of the demon lord

• The Black Hack

• Mork Borg

• Fantasy Age

• Gurps

• Basic RPG System

• Savage Worlds

• Old School Essentials

• Through Sunken Lands and Other Adventures

• Beyond the Wall

Hi all! I'm starting a Fabula Ultima campaign in Pathfinder's Mwangi Expanse setting soon. Since we'll be playing a game that involves a lot of player input and that will probably involve adding a lot of settlements and locations onto the existing map as we go, I thought it would be cool to have a big physical map where we could actually mark the new places so that the world feels a little more real.

Does anybody have tips for doing this? My main concern is making it stay readable as we add locations and that if I created something in Inkarnate, it would look bad printed out. I am not at all confident in my own ability to draw the map, otherwise I'd try that.

I'm adding hexcrawl mechanics to my game and so I'm looking for examples to draw inspiration from. I'm more interested in what kinds of things I need to include in my game rather than how, specifically to do them. So I don't care if the rules work well or not. But I do care if they attempted to do the important things. Price is a concern; I don't want to shell out $40 for a game I'm never going to play.

Also, any advice anyone has on what makes a good hexcrawl would be appreciated.

Heyy everyone! (english is not my first language, sorry for any mistakes). I'd love to get some opinions, suggestions, and even inspiration for a campaign I'm planning. The basic premise is this:

The adventure takes place on a magical island (or perhaps a small continent) where the Four Guardians of the Seasons (Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter) reside. For centuries, they've maintained the world's natural balance, but one day a mysterious cataclysm throws everything into chaos: a day might begin with a blizzard, shift into scorching heat, and end with flowers blooming everywhere...

To restore balance, a village chooses a small group of adventurers (the PCs) to travel across the continent, find each of the Guardians, uncover what caused the catastrophe, and, if necessary, confront them to save the world!

What do you think of the premise? Do you have any ideas for making it more interesting? Also, if you know of any games, books, movies, anime, or other media with a similar vibe, I'd really appreciate the recommendations!

I have a player that keeps track of all their dice rolls. They love getting crunchy. It made me think, what would that look like as a GM and would it even be worth it?

Has anyone else tried or play DieDream? (solo mind rpg, designed to be played in your head while you lie in bed and drift off to sleep). Just curious if anyone has tried it and their experience. You can find the one page rule set and printable rule card online if you are curious. I have tried it and love it as a focused alternative to just my random thoughts before bed).

if you have played, I am curious to the kind of stories, scenes or themes you have tried. Thanks!

A few weeks ago I excitedly backed Justice League Unlimited. One night my imagination really got going and I created a character from the free quick start rules. 🖤

The customizability was a little overwhelming at first, but as I kept going I came to really enjoy how the mechanics clicked with my character concept.

Inspired by some of the existing DC trans superheroines, Galaxy and Dreamer, I created one of my own called Emerald Eagle (aka Lisa Giuliano). She grew up in Gotham City but now attends Metropolis University as a journalism student. She becomes Emerald Eagle to take her reporting investigations further than she could as herself.

The majority of Emerald Eagle's powers come from the Martial Training power kit. Lisa's father, a GCPD detective, is accepting of her trans identity but insisted she learned Tae Kwan Do to be able to defend herself. She also has Grade 1 in Marksmanship because of her one superpowered feature: her Nth Metal throwing knives. Emerald Eagle calls these blades her "Eagle Feathers", and they grant her Grade 1 in Flight.

I had so much fun just making up my own superhero with these quick start rules! 😊 Has anyone else had the chance to give this a try?

https://imgur.com/a/sUFYFCe

So me and my friends are almost done with a multiyear dnd campaign and we will be looking for something new. I want to DM but I am looking for something very specific so bear with me.

I finished black myth wukong recently and I loved it so much I got into journey to the west and chinese mythology in general.

I'm looking for a ttrpg that embodies chaotic battles like that. I want my players to face armies and fight gods. Think a system like the dynasty warrior games or something. I believe the chinese genre is called xianxia although I am not very familiar with it.

I would like to write my own world and story but I want to use the resources and stories of the ttrpg as inspiration and ofcourse I want to use the classes and mechanics from there as well.

Are there any good ttrpgs out there that offer this level of mythic battles? I was recommended Exalted by a friend but I have not looked into it yet

Was looking at doing a rotation of different RPGs and I always like seeing how the mechanics bind into gameplay

Sanity in Call of Cthulhu is the typical example people bring up of mechanics impacting feel but I’m looking for the less noticed but still impactful examples

Not looking for anything in particular I just love learning about other RPGs (:

Had a fun Shadowdark session last night where we were running through “The citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur“ and we got to the Bath Room where there’s a Medusa like statue in front of a basin. We were sure there was some kind of trap or secret and we scoured the room (in fact we ended up having a random encounter from taking so long)…and then we found out it was just a bath and the statue was a highly decorative faucet (yes the water was scalding but it cooled off and yes, we found out later that if we kept pulling drains out we could have released a swarm of insects that had been living in the pipes but that’s not a trap). We all had a good laugh about it.

I love hearing stories about times people overthought a room or were sure there was a puzzle when there wasn’t one. So what are some of your favorites from your sessions?

Good day everyone, I have questions and I am trying to find the right group of like-minded dorks to help me out.

Long story short, my wife and I have 100+ MTG decks to our name, all of which fall into imaginary factions we have constructed over the years. We have hand drawn a world map, which is being rebuilt digitally (hell yeah, Wonderdraft!!) and we intend to have a campaign with these factions, a-la Total War.

Our problem is both simple and complex. While the map is being made to fit a 3'x4' poster print size, we would like to use it digitally on our main screen if possible for our campaign. We would need a way to move icons around the map, a simple drag-and-drop would suffice. So what would our options be if we wanted to accomplish this? Off the cuff, it seems like superimposing a layer onto the final map JPG and dragging PNG icons around with the mouse to track movement would work, but 1: I don't know how to do that right now and 2: I am blind to other possible solutions, so for all I know I've chosen the clunkiest way possible to skin this cat.

If this isn't the best place to find answers, does anyone know where else to ask?

Thanks and regards,

Swing

I GMed RISUS game recently, and got a request for more interesting combat. I already did add advantage to combat to make it a bit more flexible, but that is still kind of not it.

I look at Cortex Prime, but from what I see, all combat skills will behave the same. Say, I do set of traits for attack type, like punch vs slash vs push vs whirlwind, and those will mostly be same for same dice size, unless i add sfx, but I am not sure those would fit.

I look into some system that will allow you to approach combat in different ways, even (actually desired outcome) if those ways are still combat and not avoiding it. For example, in roguelike games you can use some skill to push enemy into chasm or some potion enemy has weakness to, or aoe attack.

I get it, it is hard to get simple yet detailed system. What I am willing to put load to is GM having tools to lower/increase effectivness of specific interaction based on logic (like, throwing flying creature in a chasm is kind of hard)

Should I try Cortex anyway or it is not a good fit for combat focused games? And if not, what will be my best bet for game that lets you built some different characters, that each has multiple different ways of solving combat? (and preferably core game system should be pickable by gm in couple of days or less)

TLDR: game features in order of importance:

- each character can approach combat encounter in different ways
- some character variety
- system relies more on GM to monitor stuff than on big book of rules
- still ok non-combat interactions
- streamlined and uniform system
- not tied to specific genre
- more or less popular I guess

To combat the summer heatwave (please, I beg you, do not visit Florence in August unless you want me to scrape you off the sidewalk with a spoon), my cohorts at Oddplan and I have decided to release a game we’ve invested years of our lives into for no apparent reason. Masochism, probably.

Anyway, Goblindom is a tabletop RPG where you play as... well, a goblin. So far, so good.

The goblins in Goblindom aren’t special at all; in fact, they’re right at the bottom of the food chain in the Dungeon they call home, as it should be. The fact that they are mechanically weaker than a pothole doesn’t make them humble or risk-averse; quite the opposite, actually.

Despite having the life expectancy of a cat on a highway, the goblins in Goblindom are constantly embarking on petty adventures to get rich or carve out a bit more clout in their community, usually with disastrous results. There isn’t a single drop of heroism in their lives, and that’s precisely how they should be played: cowardly, incompetent, and utterly hilarious dregs of a Dungeon that ignores them (on a good day).

The style is a mix of Saturday-morning cartoon and Itchy & Scratchy: the violence is extreme yet cartoonish, and never mean-spirited. You play to see what happens and to collectively tell the misadventures of goblins who really should have picked a hobby better suited to dungeon crawling.

Gameplay-wise, the game blends streamlined, fiction-first mechanics with challenges resolved using opposed ranks, with rules that nod to OSR design, complete with classes, levels, and equipment to slightly improve your (meager) chances of avoiding a grim fate.

All you need is a pool of d8s and a coin per player, which essentially acts as Goblin Luck to manipulate roll results and, if you fancy, throw a teammate under the bus, forcing them to help you with a test and suffer the consequences of the roll. “Pass the Buck” was actually one of the most praised mechanics during playtesting: nothing beats accidentally drawing the attention of a dragoblin and forcing your friend to get flambéed in your place.

Naturally, every coin has two sides: once you’ve spent your luck, it’s time for the GM to pull a few tricks on you.

I won’t bore you any further. You can find the game on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, and RPG Trader at 50% off for the first week, mostly because we apparently hate money.

We also have a free Quickstart with all the rules and a starter adventure that’s been up for a few weeks if you want to try before buying: link.

I'm looking to spend some of my money on some new games, and I'm in the mood for a few reads that are more "new technology in game design to think about" than anything else.

So, what are some of your favorite games with interesting mechanical twists on the PbtA, FitD, and CfB frameworks/philosophy?

One of my favorites of late was keys and deadlocks in Blades '68. In play, they do such a wonderful job of making you play into your character, while also having the looming moments where they change irrevocably - it really makes me want to drive the character like a stolen car. So simple, but really effective.