Paranoia and Mothership
I’m running a game for a steampunk airship crew in GURPS over Foundry.
Local game shop seems to be about half D&D and related, but I do see a fair number of others represented.
I just started a game of Thirsty Sword Lesbians for a bunch of 13-16 year olds.
… Wait, officer, just let me explain…
Just finished a long campaign using a system loosely based on 5e based on Animorphs that my friend made. Has entirely new classes, races, feats, and abilities.
Pathfinder, D&D 5e, Call of Cthulhu, and Vampire: the Masquerade.
The V:tM group is about to implode due to out-of-game drama, and the Call of Cthulhu group went on hiatus a few months ago. The 5e group is a therapy group but has a couple powergamers making everyone miserable. The Pathfinder group is the only sane one, and they’ve been doing the same campaign for going on three years now.
Spare a thought for those of us running a TTRPG via Foundry VTT. 90% of the cool mods are for DnD or Pathfinder, which is a problem if you’re running Dark Heresy or FATE or something.
They’ve been doing a lot of amazing work on Savage Worlds tbf
the fabula ultima mod for foundryvtt is tasty and excellent
Can’t find that in the Foundry mod store? Is that only for Fabula Ultima or system agnostic?
https://github.com/League-of-Fabulous-Developers/FoundryVTT-Fabula-Ultima
still in beta afaik!
Mörk Borg? Other Fria Liga? Other Borg-likes? Other Kickstarter games? Is that just me?
Don’t get me wrong, I love PF2 and I mostly actually play 5E with my friends on zoom (that bunch of Philistines), but I can’t be the only one obsessively finding niche games online like Into the Odd and Forbidden Lands and Frontier Scum and Inevitable and porting them into system-agnostic hex-flowers that could support Dark-Tower-esque realm crawling and West March-ish living worlds that I can never find anyone that wants to play and…
Do I have a problem? Am I out of touch? No, it’s the D&D players that are wrong
whow, RPG over Zoom. Didn’t know people did that. It was always Discord for us. (WELL, Skype in the way back when times when my back didn’t hurt but y’know)
We use Roll20 as a VTT, but we all run a zoom meeting at the same time because we live in different states and continents and it’s good to see their faces (and their kids and partners). Shrug It’s a pretty wide range of technology skills and preferences, so we went with the stuff people know best.
It makes sense, I’d just never seen it. My brain sees ‘zoom’ and thinks ‘business, work’.
Me and my role-playing mates are also on that VTT+VoIP-Call life because we live kilometers away from one another.
I’m being a little lazy - I made this about 18 months ago after a conversation in one shop. A couple of days ago in a different shop the “alternative” mentioned was Dungeon Crawl Classics. As far as I’m concerned, D&D with the serial numbers filed off is still D&D.
I mean DCC & 5e are very different.
D&D with the serial numbers filed off is still D&D.
I’m getting tired of eating Mac and Cheese all the time “have you tried Caccio e Pepe?”
It’s still pasta and cheese.
If someone asked me for something other than dnd to play, I’d imagine they’re looking to get out of the tolkein flavored medieval fantasy genre into something different and recommend something like World of Darkness, modern supernatural urban fantasy for political intrigue and melodramatics, or Blades in the Dark, victorian industrial fantasy heists. Not “grittier Tolkien flavored medieval fantasy.”
Okay and in Pathfinder you have Ustalav where you could play a horror campaign filled with vampires and werewolves, you’ve got Tian Xia for weeb shit, you’ve got pirate themed adventures like skull and shackles, and plenty more or hell you have Starfinder for space fantasy (soon to be interchangeable with 2e). I know DnD has settings that are different as well. Complaining about setting is very whatever, but also of course people go to Tolkien fantasy it’s what everyone for sure knows. But also pathfinder 2e and DnD 5e are both mechanically similar. DCC does at least offer a different type of gameplay, a lot less power crazy and honestly felt more like mausritter to me than DnD.
But yes, you could play plenty of other games. I’m not saying don’t play those. I’m just saying calling DCC the same thing as 5e is just rude, the same way calling caccio e Pepe the same thing as mac n cheese would probably get you stabbed by Italians. (edit: lol autocorrect cacciatore)
Idk, I run a game club for kids and most just wanna fight things and play what they see on stranger things and thus other systems don’t matter or interest them because they would have to learn how a d10 system or clocks or etc work. They also all know what fuckin generic Tolkien fantasy is, so you don’t have to explain what a geist is or etc. something like DCC at least plays similar enough and has a similar theme while still offering different enough gameplay to have some kids realize they like shit that isn’t just DND, or allowing the kids bored of 5e something a little different.
In my experience when I’ve been playing any system for a long time and my players say “hey do something different” they are almost always looking for something very different from what we are all playing. I’ve spent the most amount of time playing Mage the Ascension in my rpg career, eventually my current group was hey Mage is getting a bit stale, let’s do another game. So we did some Vampire the Masquerade, and it was too close in flavor to Mage. So we started playing some Pathfinder and that was the breath of fresh air we were looking for. Eventually we did switch back to mage, but one of my players decided to run their own campaign set in Star Wars which was a ton of fun.
So forgive me for using my own experience of when my players have asked to play something different my understanding is they are looking for something more drastic that going from one Tolkien inspired fantasy game to another Tolkien inspired fantasy game or from one modern Gothic punk game with magic to another modern Gothic punk game with fangs.
I understand, I’d say moving from world of darkness’s most powerful book to its 2nd most powerful book isn’t that large of a difference, maaaybe geist or idk I haven’t tried mummy or any of those they could play different but eh.
DCC felt very much like a rules lite, low power, riskier game, which still makes it very different from standard DND/Pathfinder so it just felt rude to completely dismiss it. Sure it’s the same setting but if it gets people to try something and they like it and want to branch out into other rules light stuff that’s cool? Again mostly coming from my experience of everyone is comfortable with generic fantasy Tolkien so they’re more willing to try it than say, Mork Borg. So I understand most public places more focused on that, and once people wanna break out and try weirder things with their groups they can.
Is the US situation that bad regarding game diversity ?
I am in a very active club, and less than half of the games are D&D and clones (including pathfinder and OSR in D&D and clones), before that I was part of an active online community, and again while D&D was big it wasn’t more than half of the game ran.
And if you look at new games starting, due to D&D tendency to be relatively long campaign, it’s even hard to find a seat at a D&D game because relatively few games starts compared to other games. (And then there is a couple of indie-game one-shots GM, meaning that there is always a slot open for a less known and often weirder game)
No, actually, but general cultural awareness is really only those two, and maybe iffy on Pathfinder, and given the popularity of Stranger Things, D&D had a lot of mainstream attention, and Pathfinder is arguably a better place to start for newbies interested due to Stranger Things. As far as I understand. I’ve never actually played either D&D or Pathfinder, but I have been in Vampire the Masquerade and Serenity tabletop groups.
Well, consider that D&D spent almost two decades being the only role playing game in America, and just over a decade being the only role playing game everywhere else it got translated to. It got a massive head start. The only reason Pathfinder got so big is because WotC shot themselves in the foot with 4e by trying to get rid of the OGL and pissing off all their customers
Roll20 stats one year showed primarily 5e, but that’s also what it works best with (in my opinion), and I think general sentiment has changed for d&d generally. My group started with 5e, but we haven’t really played it much recently. My first group we never did d&d, though started and never finished multiple. So I don’t think so, but it’s one of the more popularized options.
I finished up a Mutants and Masterminds campaign last month, now I run two DnD games weekly, one for my particular party and one open to all comers.
Thank you! You’re doing Lliira’s work!
Well, the rule at the shop is you need to DM a game open to everyone to get to reserve a spot for your own stuff.
A Blues Brothers meme template used with a D&D reference…
How do I upvote more than once?
A lot of the usual suspects, but when my group of grognards plays we reach back a bit. Tomorrow we’re playing Traveler. Last few times we played it was Champions.
I’d like to run an OpenD6 game of I can pull a group together. The last few times I ran it was D6 Star Wars, but I like the system for other genres as well.
Would love to see more Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) or World/Chronicles of Darkness (CoD) love around. I think CoD has one of the best systems out there to play modern and contemporary settings imo. Also, long live Mage (MtA)!
I am in the final countdown of our Brindlewood Bay game that I’ve been GM for a little over a year. Next up is a Dark Age Mage game for that group.
The other night we are playing a version of Battle Bots with house rules after a couple of years of Shadowrun, originally on 1st Ed modified, later of homebrew simplifications.
We’ve also played Ultraviolet Grasslands, The Between, Blades in the Dark, and Dungeon World in the last couple of years, along with several house experiments.
I’ve been doing some Delta Green and it’s been great. We’re about to close the campaign and I fear for my character’s life and or sanity.
