Tabletop RPG Catch All

There's absolutely nothing silly about buying a copy of Blades in the Dark!

First, you should definitely make an effort to play it. Second, even if you don't manage, there's a lot of wisdom and cool ideas packed into that game.

MikeSands wrote:

There's absolutely nothing silly about buying a copy of Blades in the Dark!

First, you should definitely make an effort to play it. Second, even if you don't manage, there's a lot of wisdom and cool ideas packed into that game.

I agree, maybe when the kids are a little older I will be able to make bigger blocks of time to do a single activity (or play with them in 10 - 12 years). I do love reading the game and picturing myself playing at some point. The new concepts in this game in particular are pretty great. I also really want to play Scum and Villainy and enjoy watching videos of both games on YouTube.

Mixolyde wrote:

I agree, maybe when the kids are a little older I will be able to make bigger blocks of time to do a single activity (or play with them in 10 - 12 years).

My own experience playing RPGs with kids is that they need to be very simple, and broken into much sorter sessions (like 30-40 minutes maximum). I don't think Blades would be a good choice there, at least until they hit 12 or so.

You might want to check out Hero Kids, which seems to be a very simple dungeon fantasy style. It's gone down well at the family game event at my local convention (although it was a few years since I paid much attention, there may well be something newer and better around now).

I'm working on getting a game of BitD going with some friends. I really enjoyed the one game of it I've ever played.

For RPG's with kids I can't say enough nice things about No Thank You Evil! by Monte Cook Games. I've played it with my 3 oldest ages 8, 6, 5 multiple times. The mechanics are simple enough to grasp. They allow some extra features for the older kids as well. Even created a character for my 3yr old. Who could make some simple decisions based on the story.

I have a copy of Blades in the Dark that I desperately want to play. It's really really hard to convince my friends to try out a new ruleset, unfortunately, and I really don't want to play online. Maybe someday.

Dysplastic wrote:

It's really really hard to convince my friends to try out a new ruleset, unfortunately

This is without a doubt the worst legacy of D&D (and other games of that style).

So many people are scared to learn new games because they imagine they will be as complicated as what they are used to, and very few of them are.

FYI, I've taught people enough to play Blades in the Dark in fifteen minutes at the start of a convention game slot. The basic stuff you need to know to play is not very much at all.

Oh, for online play: the roll20 sets that Evil Hat have been building over the last year and a half are fantastic. My group had to finish our Band of Blades game online while in lockdown, and for that (admittedly very paperwork heavy take on the Blades rules*) it was in fact preferable to use the online character sheets!

The rolls are all heavily scripted too, so you don't need to remember all the reference stuff in most cases, you just hit "make this sort of roll" and it prompts you for everything relevant and pulls in your character's abilities automatically.

* That's because you're running a military unit, with lots of characters. I think we had about 40-50 members of the Legion played and written up by the end.

MikeSands wrote:
Dysplastic wrote:

It's really really hard to convince my friends to try out a new ruleset, unfortunately

This is without a doubt the worst legacy of D&D (and other games of that style).

So many people are scared to learn new games because they imagine they will be as complicated as what they are used to, and very few of them are.

FYI, I've taught people enough to play Blades in the Dark in fifteen minutes at the start of a convention game slot. The basic stuff you need to know to play is not very much at all.

I disagree that it's a D&D is complicated and no one wants to learn more systems because they may be similar issue (at least in general/ legacy terms). I want to play D&D because I have never gotten past level 5 in a campaign. I want the standard fantasy setting and like the rules in 5th ed and actually want to play through them. Give me a couple runs through full adventures, then maybe I'll look for other games to play. But heck first I want to actually play a full campaign (which is much more likely with the most common ruleset), then let me look at less common rulesets. Right now I still can't get a basic regular game to run through anything longer than Lost Mines of Phadelever (sp?)

Oh sure, that's not universal, but it's definitely something I have come across a fair number of times.

But D&D 5ed *is* complicated. Looking at my shelf, I'd say there are three games that have more complex rules, six that are about the same, and about fifty that are simpler. (Obviously this is affected by my general lack of interest in most complex RPGs. But plenty of games with simpler rules exist!)

I just had one of my weirdest Reddit conversations of late.

Them: I tried converting Traveller to PBtA and it didn't work.

Me: Uncharted Worlds is the best mapping of Traveller to PBtA I have found.

Them: I've already got Traveller, why do I need to change?

Me: Because you said you were trying to convert it? WTF?

Has anyone played Chronicle of Drunagor? It has a 9 on BBG and its running a big gamefound.com expansion/reprint.
https://gamefound.com/projects/weare...

MikeSands wrote:

So many people are scared to learn new games because they imagine they will be as complicated as what they are used to, and very few of them are.

From what I've seen, most people who don't want to try new RPGs don't see the point in switching systems. Unless you have a particular interest in mechanics, the playing of D&D and the playing of any other RPG is the same to a LOT of players.

Valmorian wrote:
MikeSands wrote:

So many people are scared to learn new games because they imagine they will be as complicated as what they are used to, and very few of them are.

From what I've seen, most people who don't want to try new RPGs don't see the point in switching systems. Unless you have a particular interest in mechanics, the playing of D&D and the playing of any other RPG is the same to a LOT of players.

Yep, I personally feel that way. The mechanics for 5th ed work and are straight forward to me while allowing fun stuff. The simpler systems I know anything about (Fate and Monster of the Week) seem to not have enough structure for how I like to play so I'm not really in need of something else. I have yet to see a mechanic itself that is interesting enough for me to try to rally a group to play it.

manta173 wrote:

The simpler systems I know anything about (Fate and Monster of the Week) seem to not have enough structure for how I like to play so I'm not really in need of something else. I have yet to see a mechanic itself that is interesting enough for me to try to rally a group to play it.

Interesting you would mention FATE and PbtA. I'm actually of the opinion that both of those games require a higher level of engagement with the game systems (by the players) than D&D does.

One thing I've noticed is that the desire to try different RPGs always seems to come from the GM side. I'm not particularly surprised by this, since the GM is the player that has to engage with the system the most, so they're likely to have a higher stake in picking one they like.

Players, on the other hand, are often more interested in the roleplaying aspects and seeing the numbers on their character sheet get bigger.

I'm keen on running / playing in some of Free League's games when i get the chance. I've got Tales from the Loop / Things from the Flood, Coriolis and Vaesen just waiting to find a group willing to run through them.

That said, certainly not out of things to run in 5e yet!

Maybe it's also about novelty versus familiarity.

I love playing different games and seeing the different situations, characters, and stories that arise. Playing the same thing all the time would do my head in. Indeed, my group have had to take many months-long breaks in our epic The One Ring game, just to do something different a while.

5e just hits the perfect level of complexity and freedom for me, and it's my favorite TTRPG system by a fair margin, and that's about 40 years and who knows how many dozens of systems in. Granted, a lot of the appeal right now is we've obviously been playing remotely for going on a year and a half, and the digital support for that in 5e makes it really easy, since we were all a D&D Beyond group ahead of time, and the integration with Roll20 certainly works well enough. Part of me really wants to play some OSR game where you have to make multiple characters because there's that old-school "death is everywhere" feel, but just not motivated. Have zero energy to learn a new system at this point, largely because I know I'm not going to play it for a while.

The novelty and creativity axes of this discussion are really interesting, and something I’ve never thought deeply on. Whether or not you find either concept energising or exhausting is indeed probably quite a strong indication of a person’s preference for one or many systems. It’d be really interesting to see if/where DMs cluster on that graph…. I’m pretty strongly on the novelty energises me side but I’d say I’m pretty firmly in the middle as far as creativity goes these days. I was always the DM for various groups for about 15 years, but after I had kids my capacity for creative output plummeted so now I’m mainly a player. I love trying new systems now but the investment required for rules-heavy systems means I just don’t have the time and energy for exploration nowadays… Interestingly, I used to be completely the opposite - I poured months and months of time and most of my disposable income into D&D 3.5 and refused to play anything else. So the older I get the more novelty appeals to me but the less energy I have to expend on any given venture I guess?

5e is a lot like the Microsoft Office of TTRPG systems. It does enough things well enough and has a large enough user community that it is hard to get a group together to take on another system unless there is a compelling reason to do so. And even then, it requires finding folks really bought into your campaign concept to even get folks to give it a try.

In my experience, if you want a group of folks to play Blades in the Dark or Call of Cthulhu, you can't lead with the system, but rather with the campaign concept. Those two systems and several others simply work better for the particular campaign dynamic you might be going for. DnD's fear system, for instance, sucks ass. Like really, really sucks ass to the point that there is simply no way you can create the atmospherics of a true horror campaign with them without breaking immersion. CoC, otoh, is perfect for that.

So yeah. Trying to get a group of folks together to play Blades in the Dark is leading with "let's learn rules together". Trying to get a group together to do collective storytelling in a fantasy world of dark intrigue otoh is a lot more compelling.

DC Malleus wrote:

So the older I get the more novelty appeals to me but the less energy I have to expend on any given venture I guess?

Just be aware: there's lots of games out there that do interesting things with very small investments of "learning rules," "buying stuff," and even "time needed to play."

E.g.: Honey Heist. That's an extreme example, but when I played it we had two hours of ludicrous jokes and plans gone wrong. The rules took about two minutes to explain at the start (I guess I had to prep by doing that two minutes of reading beforehand too).

Oh totally, I’ve found heaps of low-investment systems that are great for a one-shot or two I’m a big fan of PbtA conceptually (I love advancement-through-failure mechanics!), but I’ve yet to experience a cohesive campaign using any of the various flavours. I’m in a 5e game at the moment which is fine from a system perspective, but I have no real interest in the mechanics and it’s only the increasingly fantastic D&D Beyond implementation that’s saving me from complete apathy towards my character sheet.

I'm also a big fan of short-series games: between five and ten sessions is a nice length for me.

I seem to have ended up playing a number that are longer recently (Darkening of Mirkwood with The One Ring, Night Witches, Curse of Strahd, and Band of Blades over the past few years), and I do find that I burn out playing the same thing. Our group tends to use short "palate cleanser" style games when we reach that point, and then return to the longer one.

We’re doing Scum and Villainy, but sometimes I think another system would be a better fit for us. However, I’m not the GM, so it doesn’t seem reasonable for me to impose upon the person who is running to go learn another system (and I’m already running something, so I’m not interested in running two things).

It’s not like things are bad, but most of the players don’t drive their characters very hard, and the GM sometimes does things that undermine the system’s principles. In particular, I seem to end up with ‘success with complications’ feeling more like just failure.

It’s kind of moot right now though. One of the players needed to take a break, and the remaining players don’t want to play with just two.

The hidden secret behind virtually every RPG system is that all those fancy mechanics boil down to ways to answer a single question: "Did I succeed?"

Once I realized that, my love for complex RPG systems died a little, and continues to die a little more every day.

Yeah but the granularity of what you succeeded at can be interesting.

Nevin73 wrote:

Yeah but the granularity of what you succeeded at can be interesting.

It can be, but I've found that the vast majority of the time tasks are Pass/Fail.

Valmorian wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

Yeah but the granularity of what you succeeded at can be interesting.

It can be, but I've found that the vast majority of the time tasks are Pass/Fail.

I don't need things to be complex, but I do need the mechanics to reflect what is at risk. Like I said above, the fear mechanism in 5e is really terrible at handling a horror campaign and homebrewing a mechanism that does handle it quickly becomes far more cumbersome that simply taking on the task to learn the rules to a system that optimizes for it. Firearms, as well, are just plain broken in 5e.

It does well at abstracting things enough that a pretty wide array of fantasy genres work well enough, but stray too far from the centerline of the ecosystem they have created and it starts breaking down in a hurry.

Fwiw, my 2p is that if I were to ever run call of cthulhu again, it would be without the "sanity" mechanics as written. They are pretty terrible from a 'representing mental health' point of view and using 'madness' and asylums in any horror genre these days is just... A boring crutch, and well past its prime. Doubly so in cosmic horror.

Also the new Fear & Stress rules in Van Richten's Guide are VASTLY better than the base game's rules.

Dead simple too. It's just a score that advances each time your PC encounters a situation that would be stressful or fearful to them (you determine up to 2 'seeds of fear' during character creation - e.g. fear of deep water, etc) and gain a point whenever you are confronted by that fear and fail a saving throw (along with becoming 'frightened' as normal).

Then you apply your current stress level as a penalty to all attack, skill and saving throw checks until you have had time to reduce stress (with a long rest or calm emotions / restoration spells)

I've always kind of felt that tropey stuff in some genres is a part of what makes that genre, even if it doesn't really reflect reality or modern sensibilities. Sure asylums and madness in cosmic horror isn't really very reflective of what mental stress is really like, but then again the combat in D&D isn't really reflective of what actual fighting is like either. It's there to evoke a feeling, not to simulate reality.