#tabletop-rpgs

[kitaurita]

the way you win at DnD is making your friends laugh

[mightofmerchants]

Some people have asked me if I can publish my mapmaking tools. So I developed a software. 🙂

Here is the result:

[quinnydoll]

being a GM is really fun because sometimes you can make your players go through some really traumatic Evangelion bullshit, but other times you can force them to go bowling for no reason

[saja-star]

I am obsessed with this idea

[fanonical]

i am looking at you, new ttrpg players. i am looking you in the eyes. you do not need to be like the professional players. it's okay if you can't do voices or stutter or need to pause to think about what you're going to say or how your character would act. we are doing this for fun. gaming should never stop being fun

[valtharr]

Saw someone post this on Facebook:

And like, if this is you, here's a screenshot that will shake your worldview to the core:

(to put this into perspective: if you played one of these games per day, it would take you almost 33 years before you're done)

[anim-ttrpgs]

(Exerpt from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.)

[karagna]

MECHS MECHS MECHS

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played DALLAS : The Television Rolepalying Game

By James Dunnigan

Playing through scenarios, mostly as a character from Dallas. Seduction is an actual stat (along with Coersion, Persuasion, and Investigation, as well as Power and Luck)

[prokopetz]

Low-level Dungeons & Dragons adventure where one of those big goofy skywhale things has died and crash-landed in the middle of town, and what initially appears to be a simple cleanup assignment abruptly takes a combat-heavy turn when the party gets to find out what feeds on skywhalefalls.

[roguecentaur]

You are something ancient.Something terrifying and unknowable. You are rage itself.

You are Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle.

My newest SoloRPG has dropped today! Play as a vengeful goddess of impossible strength, as she struggles to restrain herself from destroying the world.

Can a god be so mighty and unstoppable that they cannot stop even themselves? Is it possible to overcome instinct? Are we more than our ugliest moments? It seems inevitable that you will only grow colder. Change feels like an impossible task. Maybe it is already too late for you. But you must try, all the same.

[ordheist]

tech priest commission

[zetrystan]

"Oï! Do ya need a mercenary blööd hunter? Aÿ am a glörious warrior! Bwëhëhëhëhë."

(Sir Vladimir, small bat, talking to some random person in a tavern) ___ Based on this post!:

[nudityandnerdery]

It's a great day to consider the vast array of other RPGs out there other than D&D. If you want that style of game, Pathfinder is great. And if you feel like trying something new, there's so much to explore...

Amazing timing for this article to come out the day Critical Role opens the beta for their own RPG system...

[sprintingowl]

Deadball

Deadball Second Edition is a platinum bestseller on DrivethruRPG. This means it's in the top 2% of all products on the site. Its back cover has an endorsement from Sports Illustrated Kids.

It's also not an rpg I'd heard about until I discovered all of these facts one after another.

I was raised in a profoundly anti-sports household. My father would say stuff like "sports is for people who can't think" and "there's no point in exercising, everything in your body goes away eventually." So I didn't learn really any of the rules of the more popular American sports until I was in my mid twenties, and I've been to two ballgames in my life. I appreciate the enthusiasm that people have for sports, but it's in the same way that I appreciate anyone talking about their specific fandom.

One of the things that struck me reading Deadball was its sense of reverence for the sport. Its language isn't flowery. It's plain and technical and smart. But its love for baseball radiates off of the pages. Not like a blind adoration. But like when a dog sits with you on the porch.

For folks familiar with indie rpgs, there's a tone throughout the book that feels OSR. Deadball doesn't claim to be a precise simulation or a baseball wargame or anything like that---instead it lays out a bunch of rules and then encourages you to treat them like a recipe, adjusting to your taste. And it does this *while* being a detailed simulation that skirts the line of wargaming, which is an extremely OSR thing to do.

For folks not familiar with baseball, Deadball starts off assuming you know nothing and it explains the core rules of the sport before trying to pin dice and mechanics onto anything. It also explains baseball notation (which I was not able to decipher) and it uses this notation to track a play-by-play report of each game. Following this is an example of play and---in a move I think more rpgs should steal from---it has you play out a few rounds of this example of play. Again, this is all before it's really had a section explaining its rules.

In terms of characters and stats, Deadball is a detailed game. You can play modern or early 1900s baseball, and players can be of any gender on the same team, so there's a sort of alt history flavor to the whole experience, but there's also an intricate dice roll for every at bat and a full list of complex baseball feats that any character can have alongside their normal baseball stats. Plus there's a full table for oddities (things not normally covered by the rules of baseball, such as a raccoon straying onto the field and attacking a pitcher,) and a whole fatigue system for pitchers that contributes a strong sense of momentum to the game.

Deadball is also as much about franchises as it is about individual games, and you can also scout players, trade players, track injuries, track aging, appoint managers of different temperaments, rest pitchers in between games, etc.

For fans of specific athletes, Deadball includes rules for creating players, for playing in different eras, for adapting historical greats into one massively achronological superteam, and for playing through two different campaigns---one in a 2020s that wasn't and one in the 1910s.

There's also thankfully a simplified single roll you can use to abstract an entire game, allowing you to speed through seasons and potentially take a franchise far into the future. Finances and concession sales and things like that aren't tracked, but Deadball has already had a few expansions and a second edition, so this might be its next frontier.

Overall, my takeaway from Deadball is that it's a heck of a game. It's a remarkably detailed single or multiplayer simulation that I think might work really well for play-by-post (you could get a few friends to form a league and have a whole discord about it,) and it could certainly be used to generate some Blaseball if you start tweaking the rules as you play and never stop.

It's also an interesting read from a purely rpg design perspective. Deadball recognizes that its rules have the potential to be a little overbearing and so it puts in lots of little checks against that. It also keeps its more complex systems from sprawling out of control by trying to pack as much information as possible into a single dice roll.

For someone like me who has zero background in baseball, I don't think I'd properly play Deadball unless I had a bunch of friends who were into it and I could ride along with that enthusiasm. However as a designer I like the book a lot, and I'm putting it on my shelf of rpgs that have been formative for me, alongside Into The Odd, Monsterhearts, Mausritter, and Transit.

[fanonical]

one of my favourite things i've ever done from the tabletop game i run is one time when my players were talking to a magical shark, who claimed that sharks cannot die

two of my players immediately went "okay i'm gonna do a check on that because there's no way that can be true"

one player rolled better than the other, so i addressed the one with the lowest number first

"well, this guy is literally a talking shark, so maybe he's got some kind of information that you haven't? he's a shark, he knows more about sharks than you squishy humans, maybe he's onto something. you're willing to believe it."

and then i turned to the player with the highest roll

"no, sharks can die, you've literally seen it happen, what the fuck?"