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I feel this. I was for forever DM for my group for ages. Nearly weekly running a homebrewed PF1e game for just shy of two years and since we've stopped I just can't do it anymore.

And sadly no one's keen on running shorter "Mini campaigns" when I have an idea for somethings that's more than a one shot but less than a 6 month guarantee of play. I just have ideas I want to try with them, but if it's not exactly the same or adjacent system and ambiguously "in perpetuity" no one's on board.

I could talk about TTRPGs I have never played or games I would love to produce and invent for hours. I will spend forever looking at games I will never be able to convince my friends to play but I love it so much I will never stop looking.

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inspired by boop day, reblog this post if its ok for people to send you random asks and interact on your posts with no judgement. i want to talk to people.

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The only saving grace 5e has in my book is as a gateway game to the hobby, and even then I'd rather that game be something else. It's the MCU of ttrpg's; Well past it's prime, too widely known, and what is stuck being played.

the thing that gets me about 5e is how fucking stifling character creation is. no wonder people have a million homebrew classes, you make like three whole choices in the course of an entire character! when i first played it it felt like playing PF1 with one hand tied behind my back, and i have never been convinced it's anything else.

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I may be misremembering how it works, but I believe ICON does it's hp and healing like this. When you heal, you are healed or are shielded for 1 wounds worth of hp. So it ends up reinforcing letting your tanks, well, tank as all healing becomes more effective on them on account of them having larger wounds.

Need to type this up before I go to sleep lest I forget it:

Somewhat inspired by the concept of segmented hit points by @timepool and healing surges/the bloodied status from 4e: HP thresholds as measurements of how wounded a character is to pace healing without having to go into separate pools for "normal" hit points and "meat" hit points

Divide a character's hit points by four. That is a single "segment." If a character has taken at most one segment of damage in combat it recovers immediately: the character must simply catch their breath. If the character takes more than one segment of damage the character must take a short rest to recover their hit points, and until then they effectively lose that "segment" of HP from their HP maximum.

Do this for further segments: losing two segments of HP requires a full night's rest to recover, and once you're at your final segment you will need an extended rest (a week of downtime perhaps?) to get back to normal.

This could also be extrapolated for magic/spell/power points. Using just a tiny bit of magic means you can recover it quickly. Burning it all means you actually need time to recover it.

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"Read Banned Books" a new full page cartoon essay published in The New York Times Arts & Leisure section today.

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I am definitely on the train of Stormblood being the weakest expansion, I don't think it's awful, just one expansion kinda has to be the bottom of the list. But I really think it should have been broken up into two expansions with how the story ended up being split between both Ala Mhigo and the far east. To me it really feels like they tried to tell two major stories in one expansion and both suffer for it.

the biggest lesson you can ever learn about ffxiv is that stormblood is actually kinda fire when you don't have a bitch in your ear telling you it's bad. the second biggest lesson you can learn about ffxiv is what a prime number is

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Looking for an alternate flavor for your dwarves to go along with Texan orcs and Bostonian goblins?

May I suggest AGGRESSIVELY CANADIAN?

Living in the hardy frost-kissed highlands scorned by less hardy folk, they supplement the usual mountain-dwarf love of stone (great Canadian shield ) mining with a fixation on forestry, with a utilitarian and resource extraction focused eye towards natural conservation. Focus the dwarven love of craft onto wood and it's encyclopedia of uses, from the hafts of tools to watermill construction to the stout beams that will keep an ancestral hall sturdy for generations. Tell me that dwarves wouldn't love hockey and curling, or drown their towering stacks of pancakes in a barrel of maple syrup.

This is the vibe:

Tell me I'm wrong

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Oh cool! The guy who insisted on deadnaming Jennell Jaquays in his very famous article about her wildly influential dungeon design techniques, for years after both her public coming out and his having been informed, has decided, while she was on her deathbed, to rename the technique discussed in the article after himself, replacing the text of the original article and any of his own references to it online. He presumably discusses the technique in the book of dungeonmaster advice he's just published because his article on her technique was a foundational work in the blog that got him the book deal though who knows if there's any reference to Jaquays there given his apparent need to claim all credit.

Jennell was one of the most influential and foundational designers in the ttrpg hobby and her visibility as a trans woman has been incredibly important to so many of us in the space. Losing her has been a tragic loss for our community and now to have her name spat on like this just as we've lost her is horrific. Grief and Rage.

Nonlinear dungeon design is Jaquaysian or Jaquaysed or at most distant, Thracian. Making a dungeon more non-linear is Jaquaysing it. Let's agree that Xandering is just being an unbearably spineless white man, given the Buffy context and this one.

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I adored these back in middle school. Was too awkward and obsessed to realize how absurd the Monster Manual looked just sitting on my desk in English class. Continuing to be so obsessed, I wrote a book report on said monster manual and read in front of the class completely straight faced.

Was cringe. Still cringe. Will cringe again for TOOOOMES.

i'll talk trash about D&D 3/3.5 all day long but i gotta say the core book cover aesthetic fucked so hard. everyone got hyper burned out on this kind of thing 20 years ago because everybody did it all at once for a while but look, get over here and gaze with new and forgiving eyes.

3rd ed went "oh wouldn't it be sick if we made them look like fantasy books?"

and 3.5 fucking doubled down.

do you not wish to crack open a fucking tome, boy?

do you not wish to gaze upon my magical spells?

they were so filled with fantasy and wonderment that the nostalgia reprint premium edition in 2012 was like oh shit we dreamed too big we gotta reduce the whimsy so nobody knows we were cringe in middle school.

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every time I lose to another selesnya enchantments deck on ladder I turn into Day[9] doing his "larger and larger men" rant

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I need some of yall “BG3 is my first ever cRPG ever” mfs to understand that Owlcat games are way bigger than Larian games. Both Pathfinder games alone are about the length of 4 Baldur’s Gate 3 runs. These games have a level 20 cap, BG3 only has a level 12. People are talking down on Owlcat but haven’t even played a single game of their’s. I love Larian and BG3, but Owlcat games are way more complex and way more dense. These games have extremely accurate table top mechanics, city builder mechanics, and army management strategy game mechanics. Along with a shit ton of dialogue that’s partially voiced.

Pathfinder has over 120+ classes subclasses. It has 12 different mythic paths (stuff that alters the story and dialogue). And like 11-12 different races. These games have 5 dlcs and counting and some of them add new classes and subclasses. Regularly. WOTR just got new DLC a couple months ago

I’m sick and tired of mfs who haven’t even touched the genre outside of BG3 acting like Owlcat is making excuses. Mf, we let their games have rough starts bc we comprehend how huge they are. I’m not dissing Larian, I love Larian, but Owlcat deserves way more flowers for their work. Pathfinder isn’t even as big of an IP as Dnd is. They don’t have the dnd machine backing them. They make these games in Unity, dawg.

I’m not tryna pit two legendary studios against each other but I can’t stand these mfs who never even played a single cRPG other than bg3 talking shit about Owlcat. Mfs acting like Owlcat is making excuses or whatever when they’re able to make huge and expansive cRPGs with half the budget of Larian. I can’t imagine how incredible of a game they’d be able to make with Larian resources, bc they’re already a cut above Larian with half. Again, I love Larian but I’m not going to act like BG3 holds a candle to the Pathfinder games.

Mf you’re playing baby’s first cRPG but you wanna talk shit about a big dawg cRPG studio who makes big dawg games?

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Not to mention the arguments over appropriate snacks to bring.

I am a tabletop roleplaying game enthusiast and I live in the south life ruined

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First stop, a bar. Bero is old, probably cranky, and completely out of touch with just about everything.

Second stop, the comfiest seat he can find where he can people watch. He doesn't really want to socialize, but he shows up to the party anyway because he'd feel it to be impolite to decline.

Where is your WoL most likely to be hanging out during a house party?

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Frustrating thing about tumblr is its not mandatory to see timestamps on posts. If you arent using them in this day and age, youre at risk of not understanding the context of a post or that the information on it may be out of date. I dont think this will reach a wide audience but if you dont have timestamps enabled go to your general settings->dashboard settings and turn timestamps on so you can see when a post written like it’s breaking news is actually from 2017.

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For any players reading this. Please do this. Please schedule for your DM. Please track things for your DM. Please be just as much of a participant out of the game as your typical DM has to be. There's enough mental overhead for many a GM that requires our attention. Even just a "Hey are we good for tonight?" To get that out of the way on game day helps so much. So anything you can do to reduce it helps so. So. Much.

Snacks. Snacks also help.

That's the thing isn't it? There's a culture of giving out GM advice in the RPG hobby, a lot of which actually doesn't relate to how to run the games themselves, but how to handle the interpersonal side of the game and the administrative side of things like scheduling and so on. I've said before that the GM should be treated as another player and thus the rest of the group should actually make an effort to make sure the GM isn't overwhelmed with work, including helping out with the rules (I think players should know the rules, because having to arbitrate the rules while also running the game can easily get exhausting), helping out with administration (scheduling, arranging a play space, etc.), and also helping with various jobs in game that don't need to be arbitrated by the GM (initiative tracking, tracking statuses and effects, etc.)

But we also need to start giving more player advice of the interpersonal variety. The GM shouldn't have to work to motivate the rest of the group to engage with the game. The GM shouldn't have to fumble in the dark not knowing what their players want to do in the game. The GM should be able to know what the players want to do so they can prep accordingly and then have the players respect that prep.

And to be clear, this isn't a major source of frustration for me personally, but just an observation about tabletop RPG. We obviously shouldn't stop with the GM advice altogether, since there are parts of the job of facilitating an RPG that are exclusive to that role, but I think we should be giving player advice in general.

Respecting the prep others put towards the game should of course be reciprocal: if a player writes a cool backstory in their own time it should be respected by the rest of the group. However, players should not expect the GM to include that in their prep without discussion. This should be an ongoing conversation about the facilitator's vision of the game and what the players want out of it: the GM's vision of the campaign might not have room for detailed player backgrounds and if this was something that was made clear at the outset of the campaign and agreed upon by the group, suddenly jumping the GM with a multi-page backstory and expecting them to include it in the prep is a breach of that agreement.

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First post- hello!

I noticed that tumblr has surprisingly little in the way of a solo ttrpg community, despite that seeming like exactly the type of hobby that this site lends itself toward?

I kept thinking how nice it would be if there were some sort of “hub” blog where people could share cool stuff from their solo game, find tips and resources, and otherwise explore the solo ttrpg hobby. Eventually I realized that I’d I wanted this blog to exist so much, I ought to make it myself.

Things here are still a work in progress, but I can’t wait to hear about your game! Any solo (or solo-curious) adventurer is welcome to join the guild.

Submissions: The Solo Adventurer's Guild welcomes submissions! If you would like to share a story from your solo game, a character or location that you are excited about, or really anything about your game at all; all I ask is that you include what game you're playing, and that you keep the submission PG-13.