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This is a great idea for a thread but it leaves out those of us who perma-GM 
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Jan 4, 2021 19:03
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 13:50 |
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I've got kind of a random GM'ing question that I'm not so sure how to tackle, given that it's kinda conflicting between wanting to be friendly and welcoming to newbies while also wanting to hew close to source material: Say I'm thinking of running an RPG set in the universe of a well-known licensed IP. One of the big ones that most people already know at least a bit about via cultural osmosis -- your Star Warses/Treks, your Marvels, your Lovecrafts, etc. As a GM, the kind of game I would like to run this time around would ideally involve players that had a certain level of existing familiarity and fondness for that setting, so that we can spend less time stumbling around with people getting familiar with the universe, and more time telling a cool story. I'm not talking "everyone in the group needs to be a lore sperg", but just making sure that my potential players are already sufficiently bought-in to the setting so that I can spend less time focusing on things like "are they all picking up what I'm laying down here" and more time focusing on things like "making sure everyone has lots of fun telling a neat story together". My questions: Is it a dickish move to explicitly state that I prefer players with a more-than-casual familiarity with the setting when posting a new game on an LFG forum (not necessarily SA)? Is this terrible gatekeeper-ism? Am I part of the problem? Edit: I mean I guess it also sorta goes along with similar questions like "is it bad if I outline the exact kind of player I'm looking for, instead of being welcoming for anyone to apply"? Like, if I were wanting to run a sandbox Traveller campaign set on a free trader, I would of course be wanting to prioritize players with a higher degree of fondness for trade campaigns and an innate love of Excel. Or if I were wanting to run Apocalypse World, I would prioritize players who constantly ooze narrative and want to be a bit more "serious" about their roleplaying, etc. I just don't know if laying stuff like that out there in the LFG post is dickish, snobby, and gatekeepey, because I can't shake the feeling that it kinda is? Drone fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 12:50
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My Lovely Horse posted:Say you run a Star Trek game, as a potential player I'd be wondering: which Star Trek? Is it explicitly TNG era, Voyager era, TOS era, and if yes to any of those, do we treat the others as canon also; do we get to influence "canon" events, like can we keep Captain Picard from ever becoming Borg or is that going to happen no matter what; is That One Guy going to be in the game who says we can't do a thing because it contradicts page 147 in some novelization... I mean I should have just come right out and said the obvious but yeah, it's a Star Trek game. I had previous experience as a player in an unfortunately short-lived Trek campaign set in the TOS movie era, and we had a few issues involving players who were, don't get me wrong, definitely big Trek fans. But who also had no fondness for that era and hadn't even seen the movies (which was also kind of a huge "god, I'm old" moment, realizing that there are legions of fans out there who love the franchise as much as I do without having ever once interacting with large chunks of it). It's a huge IP with room for fans of all different kinds, and I love and appreciate that, but each era kinda has its own different themes that pull people toward it, and being on board with stuff like that is kinda a requirement. I do want to caveat it by saying that it's not at all about making sure that the campaign I'd run is ~canon~. I've done long-lived games in licensed IP's before (mainly Star Wars) and my approach there has always been "established canon stops the moment the group begins their Session 1". My concerns are more about exploring the themes and tones that each era has unique to them. Nessus posted:"ha ha, yes. doctor who. i like the robot dog" -- had that person been up front in their session description that it was kind of a canon nerd thing, neither of us would have signed up, but that would have been a good thing. Yeah. Don't get me wrong, I really like running games for people who have the "i like robot dog"-levels of familiarity with a setting. But only when that's the kind of game that I as a GM am looking to run -- it's very fun to take the established cultural touchstones of an IP as the only common denominator and allowing people to explore a world without necessarily being deep in its fluff, and I like that that can sometimes inspire people to get into the things I enjoy. Trek is particularly great for that, since its hallmarks are: campy space adventure, lots of primary colors, occasional philosophizing with a moral to the story and a happy ending. Everyone knows that much about Star Trek, and it makes that level of buy-in easy. On the other hand, sometimes I just want to put an ad out there for a group that doesn't necessarily need to be sold on the setting already, and gets what I'm going for from the get-go. Drone fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 13:20
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Is it reportable now? Honestly didn't even realize I had put it in there, I'll refrain from using it in the future. Old habits die hard. Anyway, thanks to the others for giving me some food for thought on my question. I feel a bit less weird about potentially being a little picky about my players now.
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Feb 11, 2021 16:51
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ZearothK posted:Has anyone here tried out Microscope specifically to create the setting for a game? Thinking of using it to do some collaborative world-building for our about to begin Strike! game. Yep, I did this with a game group of mine a couple years ago when we were trying out the Lancer beta. Microscope is super fun and we all came away from it going "drat this was neat".
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Feb 15, 2021 15:26
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I've been doing online-only for years (more out of necessity than much else) but I would bend over backwards to have an RL group that met regularly, had cool people in it who were fun to hang out with, and had interesting adventures together. I've never had an RL group that satisfied even two of those three things at once.
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Feb 18, 2021 17:58
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Did anyone do any of the beta playtest or quickstart for the new Dune RPG from Modiphius? Looking to read some thoughts on it but I'm not finding a ton out there in ~*the blogosphere*~
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Mar 1, 2021 13:34
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So Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number (and its free version here) was released the other day. As usual for Crawford its main pull is the GM tools it provides for making sandbox games easier to run, but I want to give it a shot as a system for new-ish people to TTRPG's. I was thinking of running Keep on the Borderlands for some newbies using WWN, since it's fully-compatible out of the box and, apparently, all I really need to do is invert Armor Class values. I've never played or ran KotB, I really only know it as this hallowed module from the annals of TTRPG history that consistently gets rated really highly. How much of that is just nostalgia, and does the module have any value as a "welcome to tabletop RPG's" introductory adventure in TYOOL 2021? If not, any suggestions for a better intro module that's OSR-compatible and pretty setting-neutral as befits a sandbox game? Drone fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Mar 18, 2021 |
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Mar 18, 2021 07:49
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:Oh cool, the SCP RPG is finally out Isnt this thematically just Delta Green
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Aug 10, 2021 11:47
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Bird_App_Refugee posted:Did anyone else back Mothership RPG? I can’t wait for 1e to be out. I backed it at the $99 tier, and updates on that KS have been really few and far between. I think the last one was in September, and it was only the fourth one overall or something like that? It's my only RPG kickstarter (for now) that isn't currently in the process of being shipped. Ironsworn: Starforged is gonna be here on Monday, and Old School Essentials should be within the next couple weeks. 
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Nov 4, 2022 18:14
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FirstAidKite posted:Can you tell me more about the gay realms? "Dare you enter my fabulous realm?" :whizzard: As a gay dude who is really into solo games though I'm really tempted to pick one of these up on a lark.
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Dec 3, 2022 21:34
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Countblanc posted:i've been stuck in GM Hell for a few years now and want to try finding people online to play with, how do folks generally go about that? i can pretty firmly rule out "get the people who have been my players to run something" as an option either because they're all booked with other games or have no interest in it. i saw there was a stickied thread but it seems to get like one post every month or two and it's just people posting their contact info and I have no clue if it actually leads to finding games. Hang out in subreddits for specific systems that you'd like to play in. In my experience pretty much anything non-D&D has its own subreddit where people are always eager for a game as soon as someone starts attempting to organize one. A lot of the time the game itself and/or its subreddit will have an active Discord (like Delta Green's "A Night at the Opera" server) that is pretty active and makes it easier to find a game, even if it's just a pickup. /r/lfg is hit and miss imo. As a GM posting for an open game you'll usually get at least a couple bites, but rarely as just a player trying to join a running game. roll20 LFG is probably a bit better about that as most GM's will post their games up weeks in advance of the first session for applications, but those tend to have a poo poo ton of applicants. Unfortunately both of those have the issue of players often dropping quickly. I've joined a few games from LFG and so far only one of them has been good and memorable -- unfortunately a That Guy who joined later kinda sucked all the fun out of that one. Also occasionally you'll find a group in a non-TG space, but again usually this is easier if you remain in GM hell. Last year I ran a short campaign in a gaming discord, and I'm preparing to do another one for a different offsite SA server in the coming weeks. Usually you'll find people who are interested in at least trying something out.
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Jan 4, 2023 07:55
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He goes into slightly more detail in the comments about why there are 6, but it still feels... vague. But there isn't even a system there yet, so benefit of the doubt. The tl;dr is that character classes will be defined by two of the six attributes. So like a Mighty Intellect might be a musclewizard or something, or an Intuition Agility might be a thief idk. It's weird and I feel like it reminds me of something, but I can't quite pinpoint exactly what.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:31
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Just did a bit of cursory googling for some anecdotal evidence and lol it seems like the physical Pathfinder 2e core book is nigh un-gettable in Europe (unless you happen to find a copy in a store that doesn't have a webshop or something). Granted, RPG supply chains to Europe are usually really bad... is it mostly sold out in the US too?
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Jan 22, 2023 09:46
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Toshimo posted:That's ok. Physical books are extremely last-century and the digital copies get errata integrated. I wasn't posting about it to bemoan the lack of physical books vs. always-available PDFs, I was posting about it to point out that Paizo is clearly making a fuckton of money over the last few weeks, so much so that it drained the stock of physical books. (the best is when you buy a physical book and they give you a code for a PDF though.  to publishers who do this)
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Jan 22, 2023 13:47
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Random thought: when you've got your slipcase RPG sets sitting on a shelf, do y'all put the spine of the books inside the slipcase facing out, or the spine of the slipcase itself? I've got the CoC 7e slipcase set and I kinda like just having a big gently caress-all Call of Cthulhu logo sitting in the middle of my bookshelf.
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Jan 31, 2023 09:25
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Anyone been to the Essen Spiel convention in Germany before and have any experiences they can share? I know Gen Con is sort of the main event in TG just because the forums are mostly American, but I'm on the other side of the pond and am considering attending next year once they announce the dates (not this year, it's too late to organize that). According to wiki it's got twice the attendance of Gen Con, which sorta blows my mind. I'm not entirely sure what to expect, but I assume the two events are broadly similar?
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Sep 13, 2023 14:26
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Magnetic North posted:I've never been to Spiel or Gen Con so I can't comment. However, you might get a little more traction crossposting this into the Board Game Thread since my understanding is that Spiel is much more strictly a 'board game convention' rather than 'gaming convention' like GenCon or 'nerd convention' like ComicCon or what have you. Just took a look at the convention center plan on the Spiel website and while it does seem to be majority board games, there seems to be a healthy enough mix:  Yellow is RPG/minis/collectible card games, blue is "family games" which I assume are Most Board Games, orange are hobbyist games (so I guess "intermediate"), purple is expert games, and white is for manufacturers and crowdfunding. So yeah definitely not huge on the non-board side of things, but it's probably also the biggest thing Europe has for those kind of games as well. Or are there other more miniature/RPG/card game focused shows elsewhere in Europe that I don't know about?
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Sep 14, 2023 07:46
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My longest-running campaign as a GM was over about 2 and a half years and I would ballpark guess we got in around 50-60 sessions (each at 3 hours long). For as much fun as it was, it was really straining to GM after awhile and I'd probably aim for <30 in any given future campaign.
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Nov 14, 2023 07:26
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So when commissioning male gaze booby art, do you have to specifically say exactly how much boob you want your OC to have, or do you just say "make her booby" and the artist sort of picks that up and runs with it?
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Dec 8, 2023 19:10
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 13:50 |
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What personality traits should I give to the artist who I'm commissioning to draw the male BBEG bandit/cult leader in this game of mine that for the purposes of this bad joke exists? Note that I'm also telling the artist that the leader is a shirtless muscletwink with a gigantic bulge. I think this will really accent those personality traits and it won't make any of my players feel weird. Edit: I'm maybe coming across harsher on this than I actually am. If my GM whipped out booby character art they'd had commissioned I would praise them for paying an actual human artist, but then also mock them incessantly but well-meaningly for their out-of-place horniness in the hope that they get the message, and that's the general vibe I'm going for here. Drone fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Dec 9, 2023 |
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Dec 9, 2023 09:44
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