Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I found in my YouTube recommendations a short about a literal Slay Queen game

 

[Jhonny Jhon]

Any advices on running a Rogue Trader campaign? My players are like a herd of autistic, racist, megalomaniac cats, so I think they will find the setting and the freedom exhilarating, I just don't know if I will be able to DM it properly.

 

[Ghostse]

I found in my YouTube recommendations a short about a literal Slay Queen game

That's an actual interesting concept at least.

 

[Tactical Wizard]

Been having fun playing DND with my friends but I have a really difficult time acting as another person, and not having my normal personality slip in. Idk maybe I'm just bad, but then again it's my first playing DND.

If any of you had seen me as a kid, trying to play at first and then GM at first, you’d have cringed so hard that your spin would snap. But I kept at it and I got better with time, as with anything. Role players are made, not born.

 

[White Slaad]

Been having fun playing DND with my friends but I have a really difficult time acting as another person, and not having my normal personality slip in. Idk maybe I'm just bad, but then again it's my first playing DND.

To name my first D&D character, I looked up "Medieval names" and chose one with the same starting letter as my own. It comes with practice. The 5e character sheet has a section for Personality Traits/Bonds/Ideals/Flaws: filling that out really works as a thought exercise, even if you never reference it in-game.

 

[2LtMashengo]

Any advices on running a Rogue Trader campaign?

Paging Dr. @Alabama Gamer

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

Any advices on running a Rogue Trader campaign? My players are like a herd of autistic, racist, megalomaniac cats, so I think they will find the setting and the freedom exhilarating, I just don't know if I will be able to DM it properly.

Damn, wish I had a group like that when I played Rogue Trader for the first and only time, I was quite literally the only fucker who was xenophobic (in-game...and maybe real life), I was so in character that one of the fuckers (who was playing xeno) started legitimately crying and I just had to quit after that shitshow.

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

I don't know what it is with Gen. Z but they just don't show up to games I've had every single game for the past four weeks having everyone be no shows and get new players over and over and over again something wrong with this generation

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

I don't know what it is with Gen. Z but they just don't show up to games I've had every single game for the past four weeks having everyone be no shows and get new players over and over and over again something wrong with this generation

Where the fuck is your punctuation? Anyway, what games are you referring to specifically? If a game has a low player count despite getting more players occasionally, it won't matter much, especially if a game has (good) single player content.

 

[Ghostse]

I don't know what it is with Gen. Z but they just don't show up to games I've had every single game for the past four weeks having everyone be no shows and get new players over and over and over again something wrong with this generation

Its not just Gen Z, its just more pronounced in Gen Z (and Alfa).
Its become universally acceptable to just flake on things with no warning because that's "confrontational" so just ignore something and hope it goes away and the other people get a hint. Or because you have something better to do. Just basically becoming more self-centered dicks.

 

[Adamska]

Any advices on running a Rogue Trader campaign? My players are like a herd of autistic, racist, megalomaniac cats, so I think they will find the setting and the freedom exhilarating, I just don't know if I will be able to DM it properly.

You are going to want to generate a sector yourself or have a series of planets on hand instantly, since they have strong incentives to act on their own initiative. I've used 1d4chan's Generators for great inspiration for many a thing, and their planet one's solid for what you need without getting into minutiae like Battletech's planet generator can do. If that's too much to start with, I would suggest using any of the pregenerated Fantasy Flight Sectors for your planets instead; each splat has one to work with, though I'd suggest Kronus Expanse, the one the book gives you, to start with.

If you want your players to have some restraint or feel the choice might limit them, have them serve as the retinue specifically of the Rogue Trader; this gives you the mission guy that can also determine and guide where they go. You can have them advise the Trader on decisions, which still gives them the final choice, but this ultimately allows you time to generate the world you touch down on.

Do not get stuck in details if you create the setting; you honestly only need about 2-3 weeks worth of material on hand, and make sure you have convertable enemies. Orks are real easy to use as a "well shit I didn't have a lot planned tonight, so Grukmakh da Fist and his boyz are back for anuva scrap." option for example.

I also tend to find player decisions more than result in metaplot and big results happening, so basically just have the tour and if an idea strikes you, add it in when you have a spot.

Lastly? It's fine to suck shit at DMing at first. I know I sure as hell did given I struggled badly with handling strong personalities at tables dominating policy initially. Just give a one-off a go and if it works, neat. If not, you tried.

 

[Noxe]

I don't know what it is with Gen. Z but they just don't show up to games I've had every single game for the past four weeks having everyone be no shows and get new players over and over and over again something wrong with this generation

I mean half if not all my group is Zoomers or barely older, and everyone shows up to every game. Idk sounds like a you issue

 

[AnOminous]

Lastly? It's fine to suck shit at DMing at first. I know I sure as hell did given I struggled badly with handling strong personalities at tables dominating policy initially. Just give a one-off a go and if it works, neat. If not, you tried.

My general rule was if the players were having fun, anything goes, because it's really for their benefit. If someone is fucking it up for everyone else, though, it stops. I really didn't mind if the players basically "took over" or even completely went off-mission if it developed that way, and never really had to resort to the spiteful "rocks fall everyone dies" solution.

I'd occasionally have something more strict, like a linear dungeon that is basically just a series of puzzles the party is forced into, but mostly, especially as I got better at it, things would be more freeform (and I had my box of index cards of NPCS/places/situations so I could more or less wing it with an improvised mini-mission without much difficulty).

 

[Adamska]

My general rule was if the players were having fun, anything goes, because it's really for their benefit. If someone is fucking it up for everyone else, though, it stops. I really didn't mind if the players basically "took over" or even completely went off-mission if it developed that way, and never really had to resort to the spiteful "rocks fall everyone dies" solution.

It's why I considered my first campaign a failure; while my players usually had fun, I had one asshole essentially dominate screentime and then he left the table and took his assbuddy as soon as his arc was over and I wanted to focus on the other players. The best example of this was during a split set of encounters, where he would not fucking shut up and relent, which given that was the first time I ever had a party split, meant half the group got forgotten due to this chucklefuck and his buddy.

Like I said, you will fuck up, and you will get better. That campaign definitely made me a better DM since I don't brook that sort of shit anymore. I've since then made a point to try and give players something to do as best as I could. In fairness, that campaign had two That Guys, with the gimp buddy of this cunt being Switcheroo Steve as I call him, so in fairness I was thrown into the deep end for my first proper ttrpg campaign.

Another guy in our group grew really well at being a pretty good DM, and he struggled hard on his first time running a campaign. He only needed a few games to run to really hit his stride.

 

[AnOminous]

Another guy in our group grew really well at being a pretty good DM, and he struggled hard on his first time running a campaign. He only needed a few games to run to really hit his stride.

I was lucky enough all my early stuff was people I knew personally, often for years beforehand, and it was one on one or two, with even my larger groups being more like 3-4 than a big unwieldy group. By the time I started dealing with larger groups and people I didn't know and stuff like that, I more or less knew what I was doing.

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

Notepad Anon and his "Baby Game":

Thoughts? (TL;DR Baby Game means you're basically "babying" a game in that you're constantly on top of it, tweaking/fix/changing how it works constantly to make it better in some way).

 

[Imperial Citizen]

We will be doing a retrospective tonight on Dice Scum. From the rpgs we reviewed to what happened in the hobby and entertainment over the year. Come and join in on the Festivus celebration!

 

[Maverick Vile]

What's the proper way to run a hex crawl, especially over repeated areas, without it turning into a tedious, pointless slog?

One way is to simply stop rolling for encounters once you've exhausted content for that hex. If you don't mind coming up with your own material, though, make previous encounters adapt to the party to hard counter them. Maybe some of the hobgoblins that fled when the party decimated their group have returned and now they're back with tactics specifically adapted to the party dynamic. If they like mounted combat, consider giving them pikes to brace against a charge or lassoes to pull them from their horses. If they primarily fight from range, maybe the hobs have learned to fight as a phalanx and turtle up as they approach the party. If the party has a mage who lays some pretty oppressive AoE, maybe they spread out and skirmish with shortbows to focus the mage down as swiftly as possible (don't forget to give them thunderstones to fuck with his casting, too).

5E is a good system.

The SJW and woke culture around it sucks.

Coming from 3rd ed and Pathfinder, 5e is so utterly bereft of mechanics and build diversity that I can't get into it. I can see the appeal in simple mechanics, however, especially when trying to introduce new players to ttrpgs, but even that gets soured by Hasbro intentionally making it easy to get into in order to cast a wide net so they can get as many people as possible playing their "one virtual tabletop to rule them all." They so obviously want everyone on their gay fucking virtual tabletop so they can nickel-and-dime you to death when all the other virtual tabletops go under and they're the only game in town.

Really no game has done that.

D&D 0e/Chainmail 2e Supplement got closest by offloading the hexcrawl to a dedicated game. The issue is Outdoor Survival isn't very fun without a TON of tweaking.

Pathfinder has an entire book dedicated to roughing it in the wilderness, complete with mechanics for foraging and scavenging material components in the field. You can crack open Ultimate Wilderness or just check out the Archives of Nethys entry here. 3rd ed and Pathfinder are very mechanics-heavy-especially Pathfinder-but when it comes to giving you sandbox rules to base your game around, you almost always at have at least a handful of mechanics to work with. Hell, there are rules for managing properties and the commodities they produce, so you can make an entire campaign centered around real estate development if you want.

That said, short of a game being unplayably arcane, I generally prefer a game to hit as many of the possible mechanics as possible rather than be "streamlined." That's probably some grognard shit but it's a lot easier to ditch a mechanic I don't need than craft my own out of thin air.

My sentiments exactly. We generally don't make our mages keep track of material components unless they cost 50+ gold because it's already a lot of literal book-keeping being a wizard without making them lug around a purse with a hilariously-eclectic mishmash of seemingly useless bullshit just to cast their spells, but most of the players in our group love pouring over tomes of mechanics and finding something neat to base an enounter or even entire characters around.

If a game feels like a chore, it's miserable for the person who thinks that way and it's miserable for the rest of the table. I'm willing to try a lot of different games with almost anyone, but if it doesn't work for me, I'll try to leave with as little fuss as possible and with the least amount of disruption for the rest of the group.

Man, that reminds me of the time I joined a group where the DM was encouraging players to 'power-game,' because it was going to be an intentionally-tough campaign. Session 1 was cool and very fraught with peril right up until the last 20 minutes where a CHALLENGE RATING TWENTY DEMON showed up and killed all but I think 2, maybe 3, of our 8-player party. Motherfucker sat there and rolled for a fucking Balor.
"Does a 40 hit you?"
Well, I'm level three, so, yeah, dude.
"Ok, well, he hits you for 60 damage."
Ok, so once again, level 3, so my whopping 20 hp is nothing against the minimum damage of a fucking BALOR. He even went so far as going into intricate detail as to how the demon reduced my character to a red smear on the dungeon wall. Look, I went in expecting to maybe have to roll up another character sheet by the end of the session if we made tactical errors or the dice rolls went fucky, but you dropped a campaign final boss monster on our heads in session 1. I don't really consider that hard mode, I just view that as hazing your players. I know the DM can kill me at any time, he's the one who runs the world I'm playing in! Sufficed to say, I did not show up to the next session. I wished everyone else luck, but apparently things just went downhill from there, so I guess I dodged a bullet by bowing out.

Its not just Gen Z, its just more pronounced in Gen Z (and Alfa).
Its become universally acceptable to just flake on things with no warning because that's "confrontational" so just ignore something and hope it goes away and the other people get a hint. Or because you have something better to do. Just basically becoming more self-centered dicks.

This became super prolific after covid lockdowns. Texting the group chat a day before or like 6-8 hours prior on the day you meet up can mitigate it somewhat, but some people are just inconsiderate faggots who have no respect for your time. It's almost a kindness, though, because those same flakey people are just the kind of people to get on their phone while the game isn't focused on them or horse around and bring the game to a halt because they're bored.

 

[PuffMacMuffin]

I want to play more DnD/ttrpgs but most groups I run into have the most insufferable, min-maxing, meme spouting retards this side of modern gaming.

Every group i have run with just want to dungeon crawl, no time for fleshing out the story or interaction with the world.

I feel like the problem is me, and fully accept that but there has to be people who actually enjoy role playing in TT right? Maybe i should just stick with CRPGs

 

[Maverick Vile]

I want to play more DnD/ttrpgs but most groups I run into have the most insufferable, min-maxing, meme spouting retards this side of modern gaming.

Every group i have run with just want to dungeon crawl, no time for fleshing out the story or interaction with the world.

I feel like the problem is me, and fully accept that but there has to be people who actually enjoy role playing in TT right? Maybe i should just stick with CRPGs

What game are you playing? Honestly, 5th ed dnd might be advisable, since it's so light on mechanics that you almost have to roleplay to make up for it if you want any complexity.