Tabletop RPG Catch All

Has anyone here played or run the newest wotc "Witchlight" campaign?

It looks my jam - very Gaimanesque. But I'm not sure how my players would react to what looks like an extremely low amount of combat. Anyone have experiences?

Haven't run it but I've read through the first third. It is absolutely designed for low/zero combat. As far as I've read so far, almost every encounter is designed for RP and negotiation over combat. If something ends in a fight it's gone VERY wrong.

It's also a little over-doing the whimsy, imo. And you would need to make sure the players know that up front I think because it's saturated with the stuff. This is a more...Disney...version of what I personally would consider the feywild to be

So I'm putting together a homebrew 5e campaign to run with my wife and best friend. We're going to use the Essentials sidekick rules that Pyxistyx so kindly pointed me to. I'm focusing more on humor and problem-solving than combat, for the most part. The basic premise is that they will be entry-level employees at a company that fixes situations for clients. As entry level, they're being tasked with a job no one wants: rigging an election in a nearby small country. It actually doesn't matter to the company who wins the election. It's more important that they have a recognizable effect on the outcome, so the company can use it in their portfolio to get work in larger, more profitable elections later on.

The first session will be internship interviews. I'm putting together a list of sidekick candidates that they can review and choose from. These include a healer, a thief, a heavy, an offensive magic user, a magic user focused on buffs, and Doug (a former stay-at-home dad who just wants something to do now that the kids are out of the house and his husband is working longer hours).

The campaign will consist of them completing a job in each of the 14 townships in the country. Each township votes differently, so I'm trying to come up with a variety of ways for them to buy votes, discredit candidates, rig voting systems, get on the people's good side to sway their vote, etc. Some of the ideas I have are as follows:

- In one township, the vote of the local duke counts for 45% of the total vote. He's desperate for his daughter to agree to marry someone and move out of his house. However, she's obsessed with a pair of playwrights named Stan Hall and Chad Mark, who write cheesy cookie-cutter romances set around major holidays, and refuses to agree to marriage unless having a meet-cute as seen in Hall & Mark holiday plays. If the players can make it happen, the duke will vote for whoever they want.

- A major general store chain wants help clearing out a pixie infestation in a town in which they just opened a store. Upon investigating, the players will learn that a labor-friendly wizard placed a spell on this town. If one business grows to the point that they're driving all competition out of business, pixies are summoned which will eagerly work to produce and deliver goods for smaller businesses to even the playing field. Votes in this town are allocated based on wealth. The players can either end the spell (killing or trapping the pixies only results in more being summoned), in which case the large corporation will vote for them, or they can work to drive the corporate juggernaut out of town, which will evenly divide those votes between the remaining small businesses.

- One township holds a popular vote. However, the town council is refusing to count the votes of the newcomers to the town, only counting the 200 or so votes of people who've lived there for a while. The newcomers are all undead, raised by a necromancer who wasn't really evil, he was just bored. However, he left, and now the zombies and skeletons, all of which are perfectly reasonable individuals who've settled in the town, want the right to vote. The seven-person town council is voting at the end of the week, and the vote is currently 5 to 2 against granting undead suffrage.

- Two townships have made a wager based on the outcome of a friendly sporting match, with the losing team's community voting however the winning team's community does. The sport is unicorn polo. It's an extremely lopsided match. One town brings in ringers, employing illegal performance-enhancing buffs, and has actual unicorns under contract. The other team is a plucky collection of local kids who learned to play on their neighborhood court, and are currently riding donkeys and camels with bedazzled cardboard horns glued to their heads. The players have to find a way to be sure the underdogs win.

I'm looking for more sidekick and encounter ideas, if anyone has any suggestions.

pyxistyx wrote:

Haven't run it but I've read through the first third. It is absolutely designed for low/zero combat. As far as I've read so far, almost every encounter is designed for RP and negotiation over combat. If something ends in a fight it's gone VERY wrong.

It's also a little over-doing the whimsy, imo. And you would need to make sure the players know that up front I think because it's saturated with the stuff. This is a more...Disney...version of what I personally would consider the feywild to be

Yeah, that matches my first impression. But adding combat is easy enough, and I'm thinking a sprinkle of dark undercurrents would take the edge off the disney vibe. I'm not sure how easy that would be, but one of the things I took away from Strahd is that relatively whimsical content can become sinister with nothing more than a vague hand-waving implication that something is off.

But having run Tomb of Annihilation for most of this year, mostly I'm just hungry for a memorable story and motivated NPCs with personalities, which Witchlight seems to have tons of...

Playing Dungeons & Dragons with an Actual Dragon

I'm in a weird between-space with RPGs. I have been for years. But maybe I'll see where I can get if I talk, or type, through it.

I think my funk really does come down to becoming an adult. Scheduling and planning and all that. When I was in college, we'd start up new campaigns at the drop of a hat; someone's running something, it's a system I've never heard of, the campaign lasts for 2 sessions or 3/4 of a session, that's fine.

Now, I've got this weird, unhelpful feeling that it has to mean something. My friends are more spread out now, and whatever we do, it's going to be really asking people to dip into their free time and make an ongoing commitment.

Ultimately I'm not feeling a drive to run an RPG. I want to do something easy. Which is exactly why I want to run an RPG. My entertainment has been slowly drifting toward the lowest-energy state; from RPGs to board games to watching TV and now sometimes just slouching and watching YouTube on my phone. I need something to kick me back into being creative.

And then, whenever I get close, I get all hung up on the system and the players. One system has an interesting campaign book I'd like to explore, but a pretty ordinary setting; one system has a fantastically evocative setting but awful rules; one has interesting mechanics, but doesn't feel like it suggests a conflict to push the game forward.

We had a local RPG group that may have been an easy place to start, but they kind of dissolved thanks to the pandemic. And...ugh. I hate it when a hobby starts to feel like work. But I used to be good at this! RPGs are something I enjoy...right?

BeriAlpha, maybe it's worth looking for games that work well as a one-shot? That way you can try them out while only needing to get people together once or twice.

I have a good list of things I could suggest if that sounds good. Let me know if it does, and what genres appeal.

(I've had a lot of time running convention games in this style, so have been collecting games that you can teach and play without any/much preparation and in a few hours).

Lady Blackbird!

A rules-light one-shot with 5 pre-made characters. One of them is Lady Blackbird, on the run from an escaped marriage in a steampunk/sci-fi setting, a bit like a Victorian Star Wars without the Force. The 5 characters are the Lady, her bodyguard, and the three crew of the ship she hires to take her away. They begin play in the brig of a large cruiser which has captured them and their ship. They must break out of jail, get back to their ship and escape before continuing their journey to meet the great pirate king that the Lady has been in correspondence with since childhood.

It's awesome, short, and free!

Okay, I've got time to go through my shelf.

Games that I can confirm work well for a short game or one-shot (in general: simple rules, very little preparation is required):
* Fiasco (heists that go badly because you are terrible people, e.g. Coen brothers comedies)
* Agon (heroes vs monsters, strong Odyssey vibes)
* Dialect (about an isolated community and it's language, and how it is lost. melancholy)
* Microscope (collaborative history-building)
* Fall of Magic (fantasy quest, with a lovely map on a scroll you unroll to move along)
* Damn the Man, Save the Music! (a bunch of losers have one day to save their 90s independent record store)
* The Quiet Year (make a map, try to guide a post-apocalyptic community through the year)
* Alien (get eaten in space, look for the cinematic scenarios for one-shot play)
* Electric Bastionland (weird fantasy urban dungeon crawler. easy to play in short adventures)
* Instruments of the Chrysanthemum Throne (in mythic medieval Japan, mandatory volunteers are given terrifying cursed items to fight evil)
* A Taste for Murder (collaborative murder mystery)

Anything that's a regular commitment can start to feel like a "have to" instead of a "get to" after a while. Good luck getting your groove back!

I appreciate the suggestions!

I've never really been one for one-shots. A part of my malaise is that RPGs compete against board games for my time; as self-contained events, games designed as one shots make that argument even less effectively.

Or...you know, a better way to phrase it; I already have experiences that are like movies; I miss having experiences that are like TV shows.

Besides, I think I'm looking at a more internal conflict than just needing to find the right product. It's not that I don't know about systems and settings and stories with interesting hooks; I'm not going to find my way out of a creative low-point by buying more things.

Now, that being said...a convention would be nice. That's where I'd usually go to try some single-session games and meet some new people, but, have you heard about this pandemic thing? Crazy. Even though my success rate for convention games is, honestly, abysmal, I'd be in the mood to sit down for something again.

Well, the other way to go is just set up a game where it's assumed that not all players need to be present every session. A lot of more mission based styles work for that.

And you don't need to remind me about conventions now: my main local one in January was just cancelled

It's not exactly scheduling in the literal "getting everyone in a room" sense. My friends are pretty reliable; if we negotiate it out and agree to a game once a month, they'll be there.

It's scheduling more in the "justifying the game's existence" sense. Accepting the weight of asking people to put something on their schedule. Acknowledging that most of them get two days off a week, and asking to commit part of that time to an RPG means that it's competing against housework, hobbies, going on a picnic, watching TV, catching up with family, board games, video games, etc.

Ah, understood.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm in a weird headspace about it.

Well, maybe not the same thing, but about four years ago a friend of mine suggested we start up a West Marches-style group, basically meaning lots of players, shared world, DMs run one-shots in that world. It's been the best gaming experience of my long gaming life by far, and we've now got probably a half-dozen pretty regular DMs and a couple dozen relatively consistent participants overall. Somebody posts they want to run a game for X number of players on the board we use, when it's full, it's full. In the first year of COVID, we played 93 or 94 games collectively, and it's typically around once a week at this point, sometimes more. Since it's a shared world, you wind up playing with the same characters over and over, and DMs generally turn their one-shots into linked adventures, all of which gives the feel of a "real campaign" in lots of ways. Some of us wound up playing much more and we started having level gap issues, so we agreed to having one character per tier (1-4, 5-10, 11-16, 17+) so you could wind up keeping playing with the same characters.

It's been just fantastic. I've got a perky Forest Gnome who frequently runs around with a sneaky Rock Gnome and surly Deep Gnome, and they bicker, just like a "real" party. We've had characters play brothers, children of other characters, and loads of other things, and it's managed to feel like a bigger living world in that way, and doing a campaign in this style not only defeats the Mighty Scheduling Monster, but it also means there's less "weight" to the DMing because you don't have to burden yourself with massive world-building details because you're all sharing it. I've got characters at 20 (we implemented a "Hall of Fame" for 20s), 18, 12, 5, and am getting ready to start a level 1 based on Theseus in Hades as an annoying, self-important blowhard. Since I play different characters at different times, it always feels fresh, and I get to try lots of things.

Anyways, that may or may not help, but if the concern is you might not make it worth everyone's time, well, this kind of campaign makes that way easier. All you need is enough mental energy to get one night going, and then, if you find plot threads in that you like, you build another night off that one. If not, throw it away and move on. It's just been a great way to game.

I love hearing stories like that, people discovering something that just clicks with them and turns out to be the best thing ever.

I haven't had a lot of success with West Marches-style games (or at least those that claim that they're trying to be), but that's in no way casting any aspersions on your experience. More likely than not, I just ended up in a couple groups without great GMs; they gave the feeling less of building a shared world where anything can happen, and more of "I'm running module 3.2B at 3:30, I have three slots open."

I'm still getting the sense that I'm having sort of the reverse problem from a lot of gamemasters...that the advice is around "I'm motivated to run a game, but have trouble finding the players or the time," while my issue is "I have players and time, but I can't remember why I used to be motivated to run games."

And I have to admit, the sweeping success of D&D 5E has been a stumbling block for me. My local RPG group is more of a Critical Role fangroup, and it's 5E or nothing over there. I think 5E's success is great for all RPGs, it's just kind of taking up all the air in the room, and my efforts to offer some other settings have been non-starters.

Long post incoming! Apologies if this breaks any protocols I'm unaware of. I say this as I don't often post in these forums, but I do like to lurk for a lot of discussion had is cordial, informative, and entertaining.

Anyway I thought I'd share my experiences of playing TTRPGs over the past year, which were capped off last weekend when I attended Dragonmeet in Hammersmith, London UK. It's a very long running TTRPG con that plays host to a full day of games, talks, and a large reseller hall. Before I delve into what game I ran there (for yes I did run a TTRPG), I thought I'd share some of the TTRPGs I played, typically online via Roll20 due to the pox we are all at the mercy of.

Traveller

One of the oldest TTRPGs created, it dates back to a similar time when D&D first appeared in the 1970s. This was an updated version that had enhanced some of the rules to make it less impenetrable. It's a Sci-Fi TTRPG set 1,000s of years in the future where humanity and many offshoot species are trying to re-build after a cataclysmic event that wiped out all of the computers due to a virus. Remember, this was written in the 1980s when people really didn't know that much about how such code worked. Anyway I did play a 4' tall flying lizard creature that was ostensibly a scientist but also an explorer as he wanted to find out the origins of his species. While he never really came close to that, other discoveries were made that led him and the crew he was with across the universe. Not a bad game, but despite the update still very clunky and has a lot of bloat in the level of detail it has.

Scum and Villainy

Made by the same people who brought us Blades in the Dark, this has players being a member of a crew of smugglers and misfits trying to throw off the yoke of an impressive inter-stellar regime while attempting to make a profit along the way. A very interesting system that relies on players planning a heist and then executing it as best they can without causing too much of a ripple when they do. A fun game that I would certainly play again.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition

I have been playing Warhammer Fantasy Role Play (WFRP) 4th ed since it appeared in 2018. I even ran a one shot at PAX West of the same year that went down very well. Based on the Old World setting of Warhammer Fantasy (now known as The Age of Myth), it places ordinary people into extraordinary situations. A d100 based system, it relies on gaining certain numbers of success in skill checks to overcome obstacles. I am running the Enemy Within campaign through the Role Play Haven club that I am a member of. It's a fun game, once you get it into your head that the players are really, really fragile.

Shadow of the Demon Lord

Imagine a world in which the 'bad guys' have won. That's the setting of Shadow of the Demon Lord and the players are just trying to make the best out of a very bad situation. I played a 12' tall clockwork golem called S1m0n. Not the brightest of folk and could pack a punch, so was useful in a fight. Lock picking involved hitting the door until it caved in for example. A very simple game to play with a unique progress system based on a character's architype.

Dune - Adventures in the Imperium

I have both run 1 shots of this and am playing in a campaign at the moment. Set in the Dune universe, the system is very closely tied to player narrative to the point where actions cannot be committed to if they are deemed to be out of context. A really great game marred massively by the fact that the players must have an intimate knowledge of the lore of the Dune universe.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar Roleplay - Soulbound

This is the game I ran at Dragonmeet and I had never played it before. I just wanted to test it out at the event so I could find out if it was fun, turns out it is! The setting is in the Age of Sigmar universe, which is the current age of Warhammer Fantasy. It's a time when gods walk the realms and heroes are two-a-penny. The players take on the role of the Soulbound, champions of the gods who are destined to smite the agents of Chaos. Think of the Avengers only in a high magic fantasy realm. The combat is fast and furious with hits and damage rolled at the same time to keep the pacing up.

Knowing that the Christmas break is rapidly approaching, I'd be more than happy to run a 1 shot of all of the above games via Roll20 with the exception of Traveller as it's just too much bloat to it I'm afraid. I am based in the UK, but can accommodate different time zones during the upcoming break.

Let me know by replying to this post, we can use the GWJ Discord server for comms.

Thanks for the report! One year (a non-pandemic year, if we ever have those again) I need to get down to Dragonmeet, mostly just to meet up with some of the cool designers i've been working with this past year and a bit, more than to play any games!

Personally i'm taking a bit of a break from most of my games over December, starting up again in the new year. Running 4 D&D campaigns and playing in another couple of games has got me dangerously close to burnout and I *really* need some videogame time

Still going to be running my Odyssey of the Dragonlords game though, that one is just too fun to skip for a month!

On the topic of good one-shot systems. Check out SLAYERS. Dead simple, wafer thin D6 based game based around monster hunting in an endlessly expanding city.

The setting is a bit light but it's dead easy to pick up, the rules can be covered in one page and the asymmetrical character design is neat (e.g. the gunslinger class places six D6 in front of them as if they were barrels in a pistol, and you spend X number of dice in an attack to fire X shots at a target). Each class has different mechanics and play super differently.

Great little game to drop in if you need to fill a session where half your players are unavailable or something, or you just want to have a one-off change of scenery, as I found out!

Just one note, Aeoringas: Scum and Villainy is *published* by Evil Hat Productions, like Blades in the Dark, but the designers are different. And obviously it's also a Forged in the Dark game. I believe it was mostly designed and written before EHP came in to help with printing/distribution.

This might not matter so much to other people, but it's an important distinction to those of us working in this area, such as me. It's also not to run EHP down! They're great people and wonderful to work with.

Otherwise, sounds like a pretty good year of games for you.

I've got a similar length list, but it's mostly games I played at Kapcon in January while NZ was lucky enough to be COVID-free.
I managed to play:
* Unknown Armies
* Agon
* Electric Bastionland
* Heavy Metal Aeons
* Fall of Magic
* Storm Furies
* The One Ring (this was 95% of my rpg sessions)
* some Monster of the Week playtests
* Alien

There's still a possibility to get another one shot game in (maybe The Wizard's Grimoire or Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades) but not sure if the scheduling will work out.

Excellent point MikeSands and I'm sorry if I mislead anyone. The publisher is the same, but the design team is different. I should have made that clear. Thanks for the correction.

As for The One Ring, I played the first edition last year and really enjoyed it, especially the combat system, which is very tactical in terms of positioning.

Aeoringas wrote:

Excellent point MikeSands and I'm sorry if I mislead anyone. The publisher is the same, but the design team is different. I should have made that clear. Thanks for the correction.

Yep, different roles is the key thing.

As for The One Ring, I played the first edition last year and really enjoyed it, especially the combat system, which is very tactical in terms of positioning.

Yeah, it's a good one. We're in the final stages of the epic Darkening of Mirkwood campaign, which we've been playing on and off for about 5 years now.
The new edition is nice too, generally streamlined and improved (although losing a few neat features in the process).

The description and reviews for Electric Bastionland sound amazing. I am a big fan of the writing and atmosphere of Troika and Into the Odd.

Mixolyde wrote:

The description and reviews for Electric Bastionland sound amazing. I am a big fan of the writing and atmosphere of Troika and Into the Odd.

Yeah, it's great. Essentially the same game as Into the Odd, but based in the city of Bastion with urban adventures. The big selling point is that your class is instead the career you just failed at, and there are over a hundred options that are all hilarious and strange.

MikeSands wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

The description and reviews for Electric Bastionland sound amazing. I am a big fan of the writing and atmosphere of Troika and Into the Odd.

Yeah, it's great. Essentially the same game as Into the Odd, but based in the city of Bastion with urban adventures. The big selling point is that your class is instead the career you just failed at, and there are over a hundred options that are all hilarious and strange.

"Hilarious and strange" is my favorite kind of anything. Which reminds that I need to see if Meatpunks is finished.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

Well, maybe not the same thing, but about four years ago a friend of mine suggested we start up a West Marches-style group, basically meaning lots of players, shared world, DMs run one-shots in that world. It's been the best gaming experience of my long gaming life by far, and we've now got probably a half-dozen pretty regular DMs and a couple dozen relatively consistent participants overall. Somebody posts they want to run a game for X number of players on the board we use, when it's full, it's full. In the first year of COVID, we played 93 or 94 games collectively, and it's typically around once a week at this point, sometimes more. Since it's a shared world, you wind up playing with the same characters over and over, and DMs generally turn their one-shots into linked adventures, all of which gives the feel of a "real campaign" in lots of ways. Some of us wound up playing much more and we started having level gap issues, so we agreed to having one character per tier (1-4, 5-10, 11-16, 17+) so you could wind up keeping playing with the same characters.

It's been just fantastic. I've got a perky Forest Gnome who frequently runs around with a sneaky Rock Gnome and surly Deep Gnome, and they bicker, just like a "real" party. We've had characters play brothers, children of other characters, and loads of other things, and it's managed to feel like a bigger living world in that way, and doing a campaign in this style not only defeats the Mighty Scheduling Monster, but it also means there's less "weight" to the DMing because you don't have to burden yourself with massive world-building details because you're all sharing it. I've got characters at 20 (we implemented a "Hall of Fame" for 20s), 18, 12, 5, and am getting ready to start a level 1 based on Theseus in Hades as an annoying, self-important blowhard. Since I play different characters at different times, it always feels fresh, and I get to try lots of things.

Anyways, that may or may not help, but if the concern is you might not make it worth everyone's time, well, this kind of campaign makes that way easier. All you need is enough mental energy to get one night going, and then, if you find plot threads in that you like, you build another night off that one. If not, throw it away and move on. It's just been a great way to game.

I miss the one GWJ had going for a bit. I can't get time to run games these days and haven't played since before COVID. I love the town we collectively built more recently too.

D&D Beyond has an "Advent-ture" calendar thingie running right now. Yesterday was a downloadable beholder Christmas card (with the option to download a version to colour in because kids love a cute beholder). Today is a contest to win a Players Bundle: https://wn.nr/cMhHW9

Not sure if anyone is interested but I thought I'd share. Like every online contest, you get bonus entries if someone uses your custom link and I totally pasted that link in here

manta173 wrote:

I miss the one GWJ had going for a bit. I can't get time to run games these days and haven't played since before COVID. I love the town we collectively built more recently too.

and eventually (hopefully by the end of the year because i've been stringing poor Amoebic along FAR TOO LONG already), i'll actually find the spell slots to finish the RELATED SECRET MAP PROJECT I am still slowly working my way through...

So Malaysian game designers have banded together to make a games bundle in support of flood relief. They seem to be pretty in to tabletop roleplaying so there is some stuff in here that may interest you peeps.

Update: The bundle ended with a tally of $18k raised. So happy for them.

https://itch.io/b/1194/malaysia-floo...

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FHClTuAVgAQbuvx?format=jpg&name=large)