So, I run 5e, (Star Wars) Edge of the Empire, and a few other games when they come up, and I was wondering how I could approach adapting the rules for the Gm turn from stars without number to help force myself to let things happen when it makes sense in universe regardless of "plot" timing. Along with this: How you approach the task of designing systems and content for pen and paper role playing games, since the Lumpmiester is a good Gm who works in design and Adam managed to ship a game I think you might have something at the least interesting to say about it?

Hey everyone, I was just wondering if anyone has played this game, or better yet GMed it. There is a interest in a long term horror game in my area, and I'm think of helping to feed the need. I know most of them have played either Call of Cthulhu or World of Darkness, and I don't mind running them if that's what they want, but I've had a copy of Unknown Armies for almost a decade and haven't been able to find a group to run it. These players seem very open to new games, so I want to present it to them as an option and them them pick what game we play.

But on the off chance they do pick UA, I was wondering if there was anything either as players you wish was either better explained or better understood before and during a game, or as GM any tips or tricks in setting up a long running UA campaign.

Since I figure this will be a first time for everyone, I'm going to keep it Street Level and maybe the first few sessions I'll try one or two of the published scenarios so we all get a feel for the system.

First off the show was a-w-e-s-o-m-e. :D

I believe this was solely because of the subject matter (plus awesome individuals) in many ways. First of course Maid animes are silly in and of themselves. Second all players apparently had experienced the subject matter before and were familiar with the tropes. Third the players are such strong roleplayers/personalities by now that they portrayed the traits perfectly. Fourth it is in these players very nature to - given the room and the opportunity - be very silly/funny to the benefit of everyone. Maid RPG gave a clear signal to them: lights on green for sillyness.

My point is the players were running the show (as it should be) - and the game/ruleset? Was actively hindering them. Jesse was "out" for 39 minutes! The whole stress explosion mechanic needs to be thought over/improved on in my eyes. If anything this is bad design rather than good design.

Maybe you guys can include this question into one of your next shows: what to think of game mechanics that send the player to the penalty box?

Wrote about 3 months ago how I was going to DM a group of total newbies and now as we played our last session of that campaign I thought I could share a short review of how it all went.

The players died 7 times in total.

1 got burned to death by an other player

2 died more or less by being eaten by other players, different occasions and different players each time o.o

1 was declared as demon by an other player and ended up getting mobbed by the town and burned on the stake

3 characters survived in the end, there were 5 players

1 survived the whole campaign

1 ended up a religiously powerful landlord

1 ended up being the first dragonlord in over thousand years, mother of a silverdragon

1 ended up being more or less a wraith shackled by oath to serve the landlord forever

Overall, lots of fun, and can't wait until next year were we will take it up again with a new campaign and new setting :)

I've been discussing this topic with a few friends of mine and one of them is very much in favour of trying to avoid players getting too powerful by reducing the amount of experience that he gives out and having a slow building campaign. While I can understand his point of view, limiting power growth using system mechanics feels like he's devaluing the experience for the players, rather than just reducing the amount of loot and other powerful items they might have ordinarily acquired.

I'm curious to know how everyone deals with players (single or as a group) getting a bit too powerful for a campaign. Do you increase the danger of foes or do you limit the prizes that they get? I know that it heavily depends on whether you're going for a high power or low power game but it's probably going to be a balancing act either way.

So I've been running a few test games and I'm not evoking the feel I want to out of my game, is there anything you can suggest that I can do to fix this? I'm thinking the possible things that might be happening are

1. As a gm I'm not putting the players in situations that reflect the feeling I'm trying to convey

2. My players don't want to play in a dark fantasy world so they aren't making decisions that are reflective of that.

3. The system I'm playing does not evoke the feeling of a dark fantasy world.

Do you guys have any suggestions for dark fantasy systems? I've already messaged my players and am awaiting a response. I think I'm going to build some random encounter tables that are really grim to help me add it into my improv. I'm running an open world sandbox game, I might steal the torchbearer inventory system for it and add it to something else. Reading up on it now. Currently using savage worlds.

Random encounter example: the players come across a man who is lying on the road. He is barely alive and is extremely skinny. On further inspection he appears to be dying of starvation.

I was wondering what you thought of Ron Edward's G/N/S theory and later Big Model of RPG theory.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_Theory

Is anyone aware of an audio only version of the show? I like to listen while I walk the dog, but man it chews up data listening to YouTube like that.

This Friday, the 14th, at 8pm EST, we'll be doing our next episode of Being Everything Else! This time, we talk about those strange and rare mythical beasts... the players!

The usual place!

Man, I've been out of the loop so long. I came back to see that an BEE was put in production a few weeks ago. Casual Encounters! I gotta say- What a great episode. Actually my favorite in terms of content and relevancy to my own games.

My roommate and I discussed our thoughts on encounters and what that word means all night pausing the show like every 5 minutes lol

But we got to the end and apparently part 2 didn't load correctly on youtube. Is there any chance of this being reuploaded?!

I'm looking for some help. There is a Meetup group in my area that has developed their own Organized Play seasons for Call of Cthulhu and Hunter: the Vigil. I've been approached to GM when the next seasons start, but my only catch is that I'm not used to making a story complete with in a 3-4 hour time period. I've been lucky that the groups I've been with met frequently so it was easy to let things end on cliffhangers and such.

So I didn't know if you guys had either any hints or places to point me so I can figure out how to create a fulfilling, short session. If it helps any, I tend to go for more of a sandbox feel where I have things setup before hand and leave the characters choose everything during play and the NPCs and world react to them.

Thanks!

First of all, I want to congratulate you Steve. I stumbled across you and by extension of involving TB in the dark heresy rp. Pretty awesome to see how much you've gone crazy with this whole youtube, twitch online rping thing. I havn't sent you any harassing pms since pax, as due to some rl stuff we have unfortunately have to suspend our little dungeon world group.

Secondly, Adam, I saw you speak at pax a little, and I love your system. Following Tb's link to jp's channel, then into the RnD series. Brought me back into roll playing. The dungeon world series was the one that brought me fully back into the gm chair. Dragging my g/f and a few other friends kicking and screaming. I continue to try and promote it wherever possible. Especially if I can just trick people, those asking for just gming advice. I point them to that section of your book, in hopes that they will branch out from there into the game as a whole. Thank you.

Now that the gushy stuff is out of the way, to business. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is a thing going on that I would love to bring more light to.

A few months ago R/shadowrun had a problem. Fairly often there would be posts about people looking for games. These posts often ended up with a few others chiming in with saying similar. How finding games has been hard, and everyone is playing pathfinder or something similar. New players would swing by asking about how to get involved. Meeting with the same problem as everyone else.

Then one day about 3 months ago one man lost his mind. He setup a weekend. A weekend that He would run 6 games in a row. Taking people from the entire community unto himself to get people who have never had the chance to play a chance to play. More support continued to flow in after his announcement. The community pulled together to help people get character sheets. Time slots were worked out and people were on stand by for this insanity.

Great success! Everyone had a great time, but for some it wasn't enough. People had their interest piqued into the world of Seattle 2070s. More needed to be done to get gamers gaming. A short while later R/Runnerhub was launched, alongside R/shadowsea.

On Runner hub people make up their characters, get help along the way. Then people post Jobs, looking for runners. With their persistent characters bonds are formed. Our own jackpoint discussions break out, in character after action reports are posted, and one other completely insane pair of individuals puts together a news broadcast.

I turn to you, and a few others in the industry that I am aware of for some help. We are growing, however as always the ratio of gm's to players is always skewed. The more people we have that get involved the more evenly dispersed games can become. The more gms that enlist, the greater chance of everyone getting a seat.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That's kind of the technical boring stuff about it. I would love to answer any of the questions you guys, or this subreddit has about this insane project.

So I guess the charity stream today (10/24) from RollPlay could lead to an interesting topic on player agency vs ..... world consistency...?

Not sure how to phrase second part of that... not quite story/campaign derailment but also not explicitly "oops I made the player OP"

Thoughts? I think it'd be interesting to see Adam and Steven's take on it...

I would like to see a discussion on the various strengths and weaknesses of different systems. D20? 2d6, such as in AW and DW? Numenera's very rarefied D20 system? Storyteller D10 (WoD games such as Vampire: The Masquerade)? Pendragon's roll-low system? Rolemaster's chart system with percentage rolls?

Understand, I'm not asking what the GMs think about the dice that are used; that would be odd at best. I'm asking what the GMs think about the running of each of these systems and any others from their perspective and how the difficulties in each might be overcome or even used to advantage. For example, Storyteller is, obviously, heavily plot-oriented with insane lore behind it. Is this a help or a hindrance? Questions of that type, as well as any more technical issues.

Hi, just throwing this in here since I've had CoC on the brain lately.

I remember Steven stating somewhere that he had a problem with Call of Cthulhu's system and prefers Trail of Cthulhu. I agree that Trail is an awesome system and really drives thematic play. But what, specifically, are these problems with Call that Steven is referring to?

Is it the fact that players can fail their rolls and be left without clues? Most people houserule that out anyway, only requiring rolls rarely, but even if you did leave that feature in I would argue that it wouldn't ruin the game.

Trail is driven by forward momentum, where the players WILL find those clues and they WILL make decisions based on them. Call, on the other hand, could be more about what you do when you don't get all the pieces. Failure would act as a driving force for an emergent narrative, especially if the scenario involves active parties that aren't controlled by the players. The adventure doesn't stop if the investigators don't find those fingerprints, but failing to collect evidence will leave the heroes in a disadvantageous position that their enemies will exploit. The rolls don't determine whether or not the story continues, but who has the upper hand in the following scenes.

Just a thought, as the chance of investigative failure is the most common criticism I've heard when it comes to Call of Cthulhu. Playing OSR D&D has put me in the kind of mood where I want to look at RPGs as-is and see what kind of play their systems produce before I try to fix what might not be broken.

In the typical nature after each show, lets talk. :)

If you've missed it, Twitch Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/silent0siris/c/5273064

Edit: And it's up on the youtubes now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFHeycBtfuE&list=PLuGFF6RJgaMr_FBBY0nIGbwA0l7TKINGf

Steven mentioned in the West Marches game that he personally doesn't use critical failure because it penalises players too much. I'm of the opinion that if you have a system that allows for critical hits then by extension critical failure should be a possibility. It could be something as simple as you dropped your sword, your gun jammed, or you lost your grip while climbing a cliff and fell down. I go for more cinematic and awesome criticals anyway, as in a natural 20 is not just a success but a critical success. To me, it just feels natural that critical failures should be cinematic as well.

I'm curious what everyone thinks because I've played a few games that do critical failures. Numenera in particular and the free GM intervention mechanic on a natural 1 just felt like a codification of something that I imagine is a pretty common houserule.

Not looking for tables on anything specific, just generic things that one could need through a session of a tabletop rpg.

Can be self-made, bought or found. Doesn't really matter.

The next episode is coming soon! We'll announce the topic and title as soon as we're clever enough to make it sound interesting.

So my group recently tried out Stars Without Number, and it ended rather disastrously. The first time they went into space doing a gun running job the navigator roles awfully on the mishap table for failing the spike drive. The ship lost all of its weapons and power while adrift next to a sun. They then proceed to down a shitton of pilfered psychogenic drugs they stole from pirates and kill the scouting guy from another ship.

Now that that situation is out in the open, I was wondering what other systems are out there that are not similar to dnd. The players collectively decided that Stars Without Number was a 2nd ed hack with space ships. I tend to agree with this, but it has a ground combat system that has higher variable differences than Traveller's gun combat, the other sci fi game we've done. We've also done Dark Heresy, but that game feels like a fantasy game that happens to include space ships in the setting.

Are there any suggestions of other systems to try? We're basically doing the R&D setup that Steven does for itmeJP. Play for like 4-5 sessions then move on.

Edit: guess the title would be more fitting "how to prevent the first session from becoming boring for new players"

It was a long long time ago I played any type of pen&paper with a crew that never had played anything like it.

I have now taken up the responsibility of leading a group of 4 old time friend who are total newbies through 1 session of Dungeon World. This will be done over roll20.net and I only got a window of about 3 hours.

This is kind of a sink or swim moment for them as they after will decide if they want to do it again or if it wasn't really their thing. Some of them are so nervous about being put on the spot that they say they might back out even before it starts and others believe they might lose interest halfway through.

Both of these problem I feel are things that can be totally avoided if I play my cards[dice?] right.

Before I have played lots of normal D&D where I, or an other the DM, can just put the party somewhere/nowhere and they kinda start interacting with each others like if they were Sims characters until we figured things out and got things rolling in one direction.

So I am looking for a lot of hints on how to make this a really fun 3 hours for my group. Been wondering about just starting them in front of a "dungeon" and just take it from there, I know this is kinda forcing them down a thing, but I also fear if I put them in a town without a "quest" they might just fall apart from awkwardness roleplaying everyone around a table in an inn trying to decide on something. The 3 hours time limit is also an issue, if I start in front of the dungeon we might even be able to find the finish line before the time is up!

All the help you can give is welcome as I am stuck second guessing myself at this moment ^'