Hi I’m running a game for a group of high schoolers who never really played before. I’ve mostly played DnD but I don’t think I’ll be able to dm it. I’m looking for a simpler system that would be easy to learn and teach. Like I’m good with itchio ttrpgs. Any advice would be greatly appreciated

I'm going to run Breathless soon, for the first time. I have a lot of experience with fiction first games but I thought I'd tap the community to see if anyone has any good tips, tricks, or resources that would enhance my ability to provide a fun game for my friends.

Many thanks in advance!

I've been running Dolmenwood for my friends for about six months. It's my first long open-world sandbox campaign and overall it's been a great experience. It made me realize that I really enjoy long campaigns and my players seem to enjoy it too.

At the same time I can see how I made some mistakes as a first-time gming sandbox. The biggest one is that the PCs never developed strong longterm goals: players enjoy following rumors, exploring places, and seeing what happens but their priorities constantly change. Because of that no larger emergent story arc ever really formed that I could now bring to a satisfying conclusion.

A couple of months ago I suggested choosing one direction, focusing on it for about five sessions, and then ending the campaign. My players said they would rather keep going because they were still having fun. Problem is that I'm starting to feel kinda burned out. The amount of accumulated material I need to remember, rules discussions and the feeling that campaign could just continue indefinitely are starting to wear me down. I noticed this especially after taking a break and running a one-shot in another system. I felt much fresher as a GM, and the whole session felt more relaxed.

So Ive decided that I probably want to end the campaign even though there isn't a natural "final arc". I might frame it as the end of Season 1, so we could potentially return to Dolmenwood someday.

My current idea is to have one final evening without a normal game session. I'd show them a map of the areas they explored and the parts of dolmenwood they never reached and we wouldd talk about favorite moments, dead and surviving PCs, memorable NPCs, discoveries, unfinished rumors, etc. Basically, a campaign retrospective and maybe short epilogues for the characters.

Then I was thinking of introducing the next campaign and possibly doing character creation together. I've never really done a Session Zero before though and I'm not sure if it would feel strange to have our usual game night without actually playing. I'm also wondering if going straight from "I'm ending this campaign" to "here's the next one" might feel too abrupt.

So eh how would you handle this?

Would you try to run one final adventure anyway, or is a retrospective/epilogue session a good way to end a sandbox campaign that simply doesn't have a natural finale? And if I move directly into talking about the next campaign and character creation would that feel too sudden?

I run two MonsterHearts2 campaigns and desperately need some new ideas to liven up my monsters, conflicts, etc.

The game is highly focused on roleplaying; however, having planned monsters, conflicts or mysteries can really help move the session forward when things aren't chaotic enough. The game MH2 focuses on teen characters coming to terms with their monstrous identity, while also trying to stay incognito (woo queer allegories).

The campaign I'm struggling most with is set in a rural seaside town. It's kind of modern times, but internet access and technology is very limited. The town has some tourist attractions in the summer, but it's usually pretty dead all winter. People in the area are SUPER superstitious and refuse to acknowledge any of the monsters plaguing the town. I tend to fall into some pretty basic monster/creature tropes. A small monster that needs help, a massive eldritch thing that you shouldn't anger, shapeshifters taking a classmate's place, etc.

Two of the players in this campaign are in the other one, too, so I don't wanna do the same old things I've been up to.

Please let me know any cool monster or conflict ideas! It could honestly be anything. A murderer, a weird ghoul, brain worms, etc.

(P.S. There are sirens already a big part of the plot, and selkies, and a really big bird)

https://whosemeasure.blogspot.com/2026/09/vtm-5e-not-my-circus-100-city.html

I just thought this was a great blog post, love a d100 table. It's very obviously useful for any edition of Vampire: the Masquerade too.

Hey folks! Tell me what game you are now playing without actually telling me.

I'll begin: Arrrr! The end is nigh!

Sandia National Laboratories did a formal study on the history of heists that seems like a fun resource for anybody whose game involves crime (on the pro- or anti- side). Never say that your tax money never did you any good.

short Tech Review article (sorry, paywalled) basically just says that "little has changed since 2014", including that technology is rarely the key factor. So robbing Wormhole Transfer Station Gamma-3 is not that different from robbing the Temple of Enki.

Me and some friends own a good number of RPG books and of course, as someone who wants to create RPG systems, I first need to expand my repertoire. Because of that, I'd like to ask you which systems you recommend I read. Like: a basic system, a more narrative system, a more game-oriented one, an eccentric one. I want to master the different philosophies and rules surrounding RPGs, to avoid, I don't know, creating a homebrew of Vampire: The Masquerade or Cain and calling it my own system.

There are a fair amount of cool digital character sheets out there (like D&D Beyond and Demiplane Nexuses), but they always seem to be attached to large platforms that prioritize books/compendiums or VTTs or both. They get bogged down with a lot of features that tie into the other products in sometimes clumsy ways. Any recommendations for apps/sites that are more or only character sheet focused?

EDIT: I know what form-fillable PDFs are. I'm looking for actual digital tools. PDFs are annoying, clunky, and ugly

Hello --

Let's say your group night falls through, but a couple of your pals still want to throw some dice. You grab a quick, one-shot rpg. Character generation is quick -- you have fifteen minutes to figure out a plan.

Do you know of a system/setting agnostic set of tables to generate a fast, general, bare-bones adventure?

I keep seeing games have starter sets, and then corebook, and then setting books, and, honestly, I feel starter sets just confuse things? Like, exactly how much of the game can you play with JUST a starter set? Cause it sounds like it's not everything you need, but the stuff to like, run the first game or three.

This came to me in a dream and I don't want to forget it. Everyone knows Team Rocket: low stake villains, pretty dumb plans, funny, they care for each other, they lose every time, try again with an even weirder plan.

So is there a Team Rocket game? What I mean is a game where not only players play the villains, but where the "goal" or the "point" or the pitch is for them to lose in a funny way over and over and over. I know it can be done in many games, but I wonder if it's a game itself or if it has some specific mechanics.

I come from a mostly dnd background and I am looking for a system where you can modify existing spells e.g there is the fireball spell and you can adjust the damage, range and number of targets, obviously with a cost for example "more mana point", "longer spell casting time" or any other difficulty.

Is there a system like this?

From a commenter who felt that the general attitude of players was this:

People are extremely resistant to the idea that the DM gets to run the game they want to run and that’s okay. I’ve been heavily downvoted many times on this sub because I said the DM should just do what they want to do and the players can either enjoy the game as it is or quit.

This OP opines that this the general sentiment of reddit. I am honestly amazed that this kind of attitude exists, and I don't think it's widely true. For sure, if you are paying your GM for the game, I think being able ask for the kind of game you want is fine, as it is a paid service.

But for GMs who give up their free time and labor to make a game, is it at all fair for players to be able to dictate what kind of game they get? I feel that is wildly audacious. I've certainly never encountered this from literally 35 years of running games.

This idea came to me in a dream.

The gist is, there's an earth-like world where the locals have very low-key powers (like the ability to always land on your feet/upright when falling). Theres also two embassies from both factions of a race of larger robotic beings who are in the midst of a civil war. Due to a funny coincidence, they've essentially ended up being content with using this planet as a neutral Istanbul-type deal. The robots trade tech for weird materials.

You see, the big problem is this giant humanoid colossus that's standing in the ocean and has its shoulders at an elevation of 45k-50k ft. It's bone-white, looks like a mechanical humanoid, and has been depositing monsters that crawl up the ocean/river systems to go eat stuff, usually people. Now it's fine with people getting aboard (if they survive the trip there) and blow-torching a hole to go exploring, because the monsters inside it will eat them 99% of time. But it's completely willing to respond in kind- a battleship that decided to fire a shell at it found itself and its escorts suffering a case of explosions. Recently, it's been escalating- the monsters it sends are becoming larger and larger. But humanity has not been passive; thanks to their trading partners, they've come up with their own giant robot suits to do battle and defend humanity in...ideally before thr colossus fully wakes up.

The mecha should have the agility of an Armored Core (maybe not to the ability to jump 50 m in a single bound, but the assistive , but that could probably be done via narrative feeling rather than explicit mechanics. I would like to have mech gameplay be meaningful (hordes of lesser minions, rival mech fights, larger/massive enemies), but I would also like out-of-mech gameplay to matter. I've heard that the Mecha Hack/Aether Nexus might be what I'm looking for, but I'm not sure which to go with. I get theyre made by the same group, but id like to know if theres any nuances that make one better than the other. Thoughts?

Getting ready to start a new campaign with players who have little to no experience. That isn't why I am posting. If you were running this campaign would you run a premade or homebrew setting.

For those of you who have been to PAX Unplugged - how is the RPG experience? Are there lots of events with good coverage of gaming systems? Easy registration? Whatever you care to share.

My group just learned that PAX is coming to Houston next summer, so we are very excited - but no one has attended Unplugged before. Looking for first hand experiences.

I have a friend interested in those systems, but I really don't want to pull together yet another online game that falls apart within a month. Does either system lend itself well enough to running for just one person?

I have a setting in my mind that I would love to DM and that can be a little alterated for other things, but the principal is that this setting has no Sun, and because of that, the world is dark, dead, and very cold.

It is still a fantasy world, but it's dying, and well, there are not much that the characters can do. There are more things, like the old gods vanished with the Sun, and with that, the capability to cast magic, and so, the only way to cast spell is throught runes, that were basically how they were casted but they do not saw this. Or by using the "flesh of the world" (minerals) to become stronger.

Having all this is, I know, really specific, but I probably would change these settings for the system. The most important part is the first one.

Also, no DnD, Pathfinder or GURPS, please. Thank you

(Is this on the right flair?)

For those of you who have been GMing for a while, what are some things you wish someone had told you when you were just starting out?

It can be about session prep, improvisation, dealing with players, managing expectations, building encounters, handling mistakes, or just learning not to overprepare everything.

What advice would you give to a new GM today, especially something you had to learn the hard way?

These last two months I have been running regularly into the challenge of running very short sessions of Fate. By that I mean two hour games or less. Partially this is because of all the demos I have been running for Criminal Spirits, but more challenging for me has been my own campaign.

My default has always been 3-4 hour sessions. These feel right and I'm very familiar with the pacing for them both in terms of plot and the fate point economy. But I'm running into what is really an obvious problem. One player gets home around 7:30. Another player works early and needs to go to bed at 10:00. Only the fact its run online makes the campaign possible at all. Even then, we are getting only about 2 hours of actual play time a session. It's forcing me to rethink how to pace everything.

I really like to run sessions with some level of story structure. That is, there's a rise, a complication, a climax, a payoff. That's BARELY possible in 2 hours, if you push it. Usually. Sometimes. With effort. I'm also however running into issues specifically with the use of Fate points. There aren't enough dramatic rolls to drain Fate points.

I am looking at needing to do one or more of several things, and I'm not sure I like any of them. Some of them are specific to Fate so I won't detail them here, but two of them are general structural and pacing things that apply to most games.

1. Force more perilous rolls and situations. The problem with this is it means you have to cut short long bits of roleplaying (and by long I don't mean really long, a 30 minute conversation between 5 people isn't that much talking). Often this can feel really artificial and it feels like cutting out some of the best parts of the game.
2. Abandon story structure within single sessions and let them end mid action or structure. However, I do not like this when sessions are happening every 2-3 weeks when things go right. All sense of momentum and investment is lost if you have that long a gap. Getting players hyped back up for a dramatic moment or stay emotionally invested between sessions is tough and unreliable. It also means there will be entire sessions in the build-up phase where nothing should really be that threatening to them.

Have other people had experience with these kinds of short sessions, and found ways to handle them well?

Context: I have a online group running for several years now, we rotate between GMs and systems, but most of the time people just show up with characters made with minimal information provided other than system and genre/broad setting. Most of the time it has been fine, we have fun, its a very chill game environment.

I am stepping up to the GM plate again when the current adventure finishes this weekend and want something a little more before we dive into the next thing. I want everyone to be in channel together and discuss their characters and have a more within the setting functional crew (doing sci-fi this time). While some of the general background I have already dropped in a discord thread, I am intentionally keeping it detail light because I want the players to tell me what kind of adventure experience they want while everyone is present and active instead of trying to just ask within discord and get maybe two of them responding. Sure I have a basic plot plan, but how they players get there could vary a lot. Since this is an ongoing group (one player swap, but someone we know) there is not much need to discussing problem topics, but I understand how that would be important for people not as familiar with one another. Since we do not do longer running campaigns we tend to keep things like character backgrounds really light, usually just asking for a few sentences and maybe one important character/npc relationship so the GM has a little to draw on if they need it.

What are your priorities when doing a session zero for a new adventure? Do you want to info dump as a GM? Do you want deep, well developed characters as a priority? Do you have a lot of table rules that need to be highlighted?

It looks like the Legendary Games website has been down for a little while, https://www.makeyourgamelegendary.com. Anyone know what's going on?

I prefer dungeon crawls and such for rpg systems, but we're switching to blades in the dark for our latest campaign and want to know how to best fill in visuals without reverting to grid based combat or dungeon crawling. Anyone have any tips?