Tabletop RPGs

Hey y'all!

In this thread I want to talk a bit about tabletop pen&paper RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, The Dark Eye or any others, including homebrew systems.

I vaguely remember another thread about it but I cannot find it right now.

So if you want to share any stories or ideas or just want to discuss your favorite RPGs, this is the place for it.


I'll go ahead and just talk about what tabletop RPGs mean to me.

My tabletop RPG experiences start in... 1999 or so. I had played the AD&D based RPG Baldur's Gate on my PC and was intrigued by the rules it used. But since I didn't exactly have a lot of friends I never played AD&D on the tabletop.
I did however do some LARP and that's where I met a few people who did play an RPG, called The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge in German). One of them played a single player yesterday session with me and he also let me borrow all his books to get to know the system.
....I didn't like it. It wasn't bad per se, but I had already learned some things about AD&D and compared to that skills and combat system of The Dark Eye seemed clunky and a bit boring. We played one or two sessions but then the DM moved away and I never played that game again.

I went back to RPGs on the PC and played Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale 1+2 and eventually Neverwinter Nights which introduced me to the 3rd edition of D&D in 2003.
I had become active in D&D forums on the Internet in 2000 or so. That way I managed to... obtain some of the rules, which I printed and learned.
I remember that I played D&D solo. A lot. I basically built scenarios, characters, and monsters, then I played them, all by myself. In retrospect it didn't have a lot to do with actually playing an RPG, it was more of a technical thing, playing with the rules and without all the stuff around it.

A short time after that I managed to play my first proper session of D&D. My brother, his girlfriend, and my mother were my group (and I think I played an NPC rogue to support them). Of course I had to be the DM since nobody else knew the rules. In fact... even I didn't really know the rules. I only had the player's handbook and a few parts of other books.
We played only a few nice sessions, a campaign heavily influenced by Baldur's Gate, but they were fun once we realized how it worked.

Another few years passed, and I was back to PC gaming. And then I met a few of my old school mates again. When I mentioned that I had DMed D&D at some point, one of them mentioned he had played it and we convinced a few others to join.
I bought the basic books of the 3.5 edition and prepared a campaign. Our first session in... 2005 I think... was just me and three players, but when they told their girlfriends and a few other guys I quickly ended up playing sessions with up to ten players and twice or even three times a week.
If you know 3.5E D&D rules then you know that that was a frickin' handful. I quickly learned to simplify some of the rules because especially combat took forever otherwise. I liked the 3.5E rules (I still think that with prepared players those are the best D&D rules ever) but the thing was: none of them really knew the rules and for many of them it was just a fun pastime and I wanted to keep it that way. So the way we played the game was basically that I was like the PC in a PC game: I handled all the rules, kept their character sheets, planned their characters according to the way they described what they wanted to be, told them what to roll and when, and of course provided the story and the monsters. We played in the Forgotten Realms of course, since I knew the world from my PC games.
At the end those sessions I was exhausted, but usually very happy. Good times.

Sadly the priorities in life change a lot when people are in their 20s, so some of my friends moved away, some married and had kids and so on. In 2010 we were basically done. We tried to revive the campaign a few times over the years, but with one or two sessions a year things became even slower since usually nobody except me really remembered what we had be doing or what the rules were.
We played our last session in 2012.

In 2017 and 2018 I played Silver Tower (which is basically a tabletop RPG light) with my wife and two of my friends (who were active members of the old group) and we decided that we should try D&D again. I looked up the free basic rules of D&D 5E and (unlike the 4E book I had read a few years earlier) I kinda liked them. I considered playing 3.5E but to be honest: we all have gotten older and with less time on my hands it is just easier to get going with more streamlined rules. So 5E it is.


Now, in January 2020 the time has finally come. I got the basic books and we played our first few sessions of D&D after 8 years of pause. I prepared everything and we all had a great time. The new rules are mostly fine, I will probably house rule a few things but for the most part those are fine to me, and the players have it easier, too, which makes the sessions more fun for me. I can focus on the stories, which I enjoy. I usually write all the adventures myself they just work better. Sometimes I take an adventure from the web but I usually modify it heavily to fit my group, playstyle and campaign.
I don't like dungeon crawls. Some of my favourite sessions didn't contain any combat at all. On a scale between 1 (no combat) and 10 (mind- and soulless dungeon crawl) I would say my group and I prefer the 4-6 range.

So yeah, that's my personal tabletop RPG history so far. I'll end with a fun fact:
I have never played a single session of D&D as a player. I might eventually get the chance to do so though, we will see.

My next posts will probably be about DMing, funny stories from the table, and D&D 5E rules.

But I am curious about your stories and thoughts about tabletop RPGs. What systems have you played, and how do you like your games?

 

Table Top RPG's are probably my favorite format for gaming. One of the nice thing about playing AoS is that I have eneded up with a large collection of miniatures and terrain to use in D&D.

I have the awesome privilege of being a player in an RP heavy campaign at the moment. Out of 10 weeks worth of sessions I think have we have had one instance of combat. Our group tends to be the opposite of murder hobos. We have instead been befriending or trading with most groups we encounter. Combat is our last resort. I think this is partly due to a large chuck of the group overlapping with my competitive AoS group. We are more interested in RP and exploration. We get enough carnage in the mortal realms.

 

That has inspired me to try and play D&D on a grid for the first time in a few weeks. We usually play without miniatures.

 

I really like Theater of the mind. The group I play with generally only breaks out miniatures and stuff for combat. It helps to prevent confusion about NPC and PC proximities.

 

Ok, let's do something about game mechanics:

How do y'all like traps?
I have alwayws been a bit torn about them. This article sums it up well and also has some interesting possible solution in the end.

https://theangrygm.com/traps-suck/

EDIT: To further expand on that: What I don't like about them is the paranoia they cause. You have a trap-filled dungeon _once_ and from there on every second sentence from the party's rogue (in this case my wife) is: "I search for traps". Everywhere.

 

I like traps. At least as a player I like them.

As a mechanic they can be over done. Or they can feel like they are a minor puzzle that you have to assume is in place at all times. My favorite traps are cursed and enchanted things. Basically I am all about story. If the trap is just a poison needle that makes a player take a few d4 damage then they can be bland and taxing. Howevber, if its a poison that will cause the player character to go blind until an antidote is found of enough time passes then there is opportunity for store. Now you have a dungeon side quest to find the antidote!

I also like to see PCs be able to fill their out of combat roles. Most rogues want to pick locks, steal trapped treasure without setting them off, and find that hidden pressure plate that could have downed a party member.

 

Last session I played, I tried traps out for the first time in my new homebrew system. Funny thing, is the opposite happened with my friend's wife. She had her character act fairly recklessly. The lich that set up all the traps they faced was OCD and he kept using the same trap types over and over again. He also had a dozen skeleton servants with brooms and mops to keep the dungeon spotless. Commonly exploding treasures chests with poisoned needles on the lock and her half orc kept smashing the chests with her battle axe.

If anything my players weren't cautious enough. I don't do traps in my games very often because my players are not fond of traps. The traps worked okay in the last dungeon because I tied them all to the lich's OCD. The lich wrote a bunch of mathematical formulas on the wall of his workshop including over a hundred digits of pi. A lot of his traps were based on pi.

The library was three dummy books (magically trapped), one good book, one dummy book, one good book, four dummy books and so on and so forth. The chests of treasure and supplies were reversed. Three good boxes, one trap, one good box, one trap, four good boxes, one trap.

One thing that helped is that I have good players. They didn't say "I'm searching for traps." They got more specific "I open the box with a stick" and other specific actions. When they found traps they also described how to negate them. When they spotted a trap door in the middle of the floor, I'm surprised they didn't just walk around it, they insisted on filling in the pit.

I guess my thoughts on traps are

1) Use traps sparingly
2) Tie traps to the narrative
3) Create patterns that reward players who pay attention.

Not that I'm a savant on traps. My group plays a lot of D&D but my group tends to prefer wilderness adventurers over dungeon crawls. We pretty always have a ranger in the party and usually other characters with a outdoorsy bent.


So my group of friends played very crude homemade RPG in 5th grade through 8th grade. We played D&D 2nd ed somewhere in there but decided we preferred our game. Then we found the Star Wars RPG from West End and played that game like crazy. Sometimes we had four games going. A group game I ran, a group game someone else ran, a solo game I ran for the friend I hung out with the most, and an on again off again solo game for the friend I hung out with the second most.

The West End system is very easy to adapt, I created a homebrew game based on that system based on Ancient Greece mythology. We played that a lot then kind of went back to Star Wars then D&D second edition. Then we started playing World of Darkness games and played those mostly till we graduated high school with a few D&D breaks. Over half the time I was running.

My friends still met in college and we played two long running Mage: the Ascension games plus a more sophisticated home brew game my friend was running (combining. Then after graduation we kept playing more World of Darkness games with frequent D&D interludes. We do other things, but RPGs were sort of the glue that brought my friends together initially which we still do today.

Now I am running a sophisticated home brew system D&D10 which I have a really lengthy thread musing about.


Here's another RPG question. Not as in depth as traps. But intimidation as a rules mechanic.

First off, let me cover a roleplaying strategy my group discovered a few years ago that has improved our games a lot. See, it's generally more enjoyable to roleplay out conversations with NPCs rather than toss a bunch of dice for social skill rolls. BUT it punishes players who build socialite characters by making their best traits useless.

Here's what we do now. We roll the dice and then aim our roleplaying to match the dice roll as close as possible. If say we have a character that rolls badly (or perhaps the character has negligible social skills) we try to ad lib the social missteps that resulted from the poor roll. If a character rolls well or in general has high social traits, the Game Master should take that as a cue to be extra polite and helpful when roleplaying out the conversation. Best of both worlds.

So if an NPC faces a successful intimidation I know how to portray the NPC. As a Game Master, is it ever appropriate to make an intimidation roll for against a PC and order the player to act scared?

Back to NPCs. So I got a character that has really poor dice pools for Intimidation but his character is extremely formidable and regularly gains the upper hand on foes with his swordplay and magic.

In movies and TV shows I have seen people manage to act intimidating despite having a position of weakness, so that's something I can wrap my head around, but what does an un-intimidating person look like if they just killed half your crew with magical fire magic and now hold your life in their hands? Rolling Manipulation + Intimidation to shake down the enemy for information, does a poor roll mean he somehow convinced the helpless enemy to die in defiance? That doesn't make much sense.

That happens more than once where the character is super menacing in actual capability but flubs his intimidation check. What does it look like role playing wise when a genuine bad ass is really lousy at intimidating people?

How does a sane person react to an opponent, who is clearly a superior foe, but he is bad at acting scary?

I also do not like playing tabletop RPGs on a grid with miniatures. Too video gamey.

 

Interesting points!
I am going to make a longer post about those later.

 

Me too. I combine both though.

Definitely. The thing is: a weak player can play a strong character, so IMO a not charismatic player should be able to play a charismatic character. A average intelligent player can play an insanely intelligent wizard and so on. Those stats should do something.

Interesting!
I do... the opposite actually. I let the players act out (or describe, some hate acting out scenes) and depending on what they do they gain advantage on their roll, or even auto-succeed.

I do something like that. I tell them they are scared. I describe how they are sure that their opponent is stronger than them, and that the threat is believable.
They usually act like it (at least a bit) and I apply the "frightened" condition to them. I do allow them to try and pull themselves together after a short moment though, especially if something happens that helps them to overcome their fear.

The current D&D rules allow the DM to apply bonuses (usually advantage/disadvantage which means rerolls and take the better/worse result) to rolls. The menacing character or the one that just slaughtered a bunch of people would gain a substantially lower DC on the intimidation check against the enemy' friends, and possibly advantage, too. If the player is physically intimidating looking (because they have 18+ strength or something) the DM guide also says that they might be allowed to use their strength modifier on intimidation checks instead of Charisma.

In that case I would still play it out and describe the situation like this: "the clumsy try at intimidation almost makes you laugh, but you still feel that you should be cautious".

Or maybe like this for a player with good perception/sense motive skill:
"Coming from any other person that remark would not sound threatening at all, but looking at the the hulking figure that stands before you, his sword gripped with the firm grip of a seasoned veteran, you feel that the words should be taken seriously."

...so basically I would let it auto succeed. But not use the "frightened" condition or anything. Just tell the players that they feel alarmed.
If the players are supposed to get the hint that they should be intimidated, then there is no need to roll.

In the same way that I let players auto-succeed in trivial tasks (or if they have time, the old "taking 20" rule) I let enemies auto-succeed if it drives the plot. Some may call that railroading, and in fact I agree that it might be dangerously close to railroading, but my players enjoy a good story and trust me to find good justifications for using that technique and use it rarely.

 

That is the nice thing about White Wolf's d10 system and D&D10 which basically uses the same system.

Attribute + Ability is flexible.

Put veiled threats into polite conversation Manipulation + Intimidation

Pick up the target by the scruff of their neck and glower Strength + Intimidation.

Pull rank and browbeat a subordinate Charisma + Intimidation

Social humiliation, threatening his family, implying bodily harm. One of three things will make the noble cooperate by tapping into his deep fears while the other two will just embolden resistance. Roll Intelligence + Intimidation to figure out what method to use.

Means Girls, get away, I'm above you socially. Roll Appearance + Intimidation.

(never used Appearance or Intelligence + Intimidation sadly). Now granted telepathy helped in a past game where a player cornered an animistic spirit that was basically a giant eyeball monster and found his greatest fear was falling into the abyss, but the player, not the character, intelligently added the detail ("if you don't tell me I'll throw you in the abyss where you will never see anything again.")


Experienced Storytellers/Game Masters like to justify odd Attribute + Ability pairings. One friend said his goal was to figure out how to combine Strength + Academics. I haven't got any real weird attribute + ability combinations but I pat myself on the back whenever I can justify a player rolling Wits. It's an ongoing debate whether Wits or Appearance is the least valuable attribute in the game. If it wasn't for the fact that most players prefer to play attractive characters, no one would invest anything in Appearance.

Anyway, the character in question that is usually doing the intimidating stuff is a jack of all trades sort. he doesn't have any high or low attributes. He just bought no dots in Intimidation.

I guess an intimidation roll is not necessarily about making them scared. It's about convincing a scare person to do what you want. An scary person with a poor intimidation is going to make their enemy scared but they are going to busy whimpering to spill their boss' plan.

Both directions works but I think it's more fun to justify role playing a bad roll.

That said, I consider myself above average intelligence. When I make a character I always make sure to make a character at least as smart as I am in real life. If I take Intelligence as a dump stat I feel bad when me as a player makes my character come up with a brilliant idea to solve whatever problem we are facing.

In 3.5 D&D I can never get enough skill points, another reason I never use Intelligence as a dump stat even when it's not used in my character class directly.

 

Yeah, that was pretty much everyone's problem, unless one happened to play a bard or rogue.
That's one of the things I didn't like about 3.5E. Sure, the skill system was quite refined, but chances were high you were just too crappy in exactly the skill you needed.

The 5E skill system has its flaws, but it isn't too hard to build a character that is quite diverse in his or her skill set if a player really wants to go the "skill monkey" way. Which can be a fun play style.

 

I gotta say, the Advantage/Disadvantage status in 5e has to be one of the best simplifications of rules out of WoTC.

 

The reason D&D6 was pretty crude is we tried to directly copy and paste 3.5 spells into West End's d6 system and that was messy.

No system is perfect. The main problem with West End d6 is that it is highly variable. We had a lot of David versus Goliath moments where the underdog utterly crushes the superior foe.

It's not always the good guys who are the underdog. We let players retroactively spend character points on soak rolls (which is not technically allowed under the rules). Without this, player characters would have died a lot more. Not at the hands of the major villains but by lowly storm troopers getting a lucky shot. Just for a joke, a PC (who was not a pilot and had nothing to do during a space battle) shot at a Y-Wing with an E-Web blaster. By freakish luck, he destroyed the Y-Wing. That was a treasured memory. Lightning in a bottle. But the player wanted to relive this, so he insisted on putting on a vacuum suiting and shooting his e-web out the airlock every battle. That got boring quick.

My friends and I like d10 best as a mechanics. That I why I spent many hours adapting D&D lore into that system. It's very simple to understand and easy for players and Storytellers (that's a fancy word for Game Master) alike to improvise on the fly.

My friends and I really like the points buy system for character creation and advancement. None of us like being locked into character classes. The system is flexible and it's easy to scale heroic characters with ordinary people.

The system also works very smoothly for non-combat actions.

The disadvantage of the d10 system is that combat is slow and not very dynamic.

D&D 3.5 is the inverse. Combat is fairly fast paced and dynamic, but characters are locked on railroad tracks on linear progression of advancing levels, maxing out this skill, not that one. Non-combat in D&D is a bit dry and over simplified "I check for traps. I make a diplomacy check, etc." I have not had the opportunity to play 5th edition yet. I hear good things about it having smoothed out some of 3.5's rough edges, and I'm eager to try it. I never played 4th edition. I have never heard anyone say anything good about 4th edition other than complimenting their fluff and illustrations.

Now that we are in our mid thirties, we tend to prefer intrigue and mystery of pure combat slugfests, so d10 works well for us. All the same, I'm working on little tweaks here and there to try to make combat faster and more dynamic.

The 3.5 Dungeon Master Guide has a section very early in the book talking about Deep Immersion style stories and Kick in the Door style stories. As the DMG states, neither system is right or wrong and not every session in a campaign has to be the same.

In a Kick in the Door style campaign, the bad guys are obvious. The objectives are simple. PCs kill the evil monster, grab the treasure move on. Lots of combat, trap avoiding, saving children from burning buildings, smashing through the skylight heroics.

In Deep Immersion, the bad guys are not obvious. The objectives are not always simple. PCs have to play politics, build alliances, solve mysteries, figure out who is on their side and who isn't. Moral quandaries are likely to come up.

In general I would say my group prefers roughly 70% Deep Immersion to 30% Kick in the Door but it's very cyclical. After my players completed a several session arc to carefully take down a crime lord, all of us, myself included were in the mood for something more simple and action driven. After looting a dungeon full of undead and traps, the players are angling towards another political story. Then there is player balance. I got three players, had two players for a while. I would say my third player is more fond of kicking in the door than the other two, her character is built to be good at literally kicking in the door for starters.

It's been ages since I had six or more players in a game. The last time I tried that was my WWII Mage the Ascension game. It was very objective focused.

Besides balancing Kick in the Door with Deep Immersion there is another important thing to balance. Sandbox versus Railroading.

Railroading is you follow the tracks to go through the basic story the Game Master sets out. The players have to do the adventure or terrible things will happen. If the characters are on their way to a big city to buy some stuff and they pass through a village and the villagers say "Help! Help! Evil plant monsters have been attacking us!" the Game Master is setting railroad tracks towards fighting an evil plant monster.

Sandbox is where there is an open world and the players act as they fit while the Game Master adapts. This is normally a good thing, but if the Game Master has no major story elements to impose on the players eventually the game will get old as the PCs run out of things to do wandering around breaking things.

Too much Railroading and too much Sandboxing will cause a game to stagnate and then die. I'm still working on the balance myself. Usually at the end of the session I ask my players what they want to do next.

"You okay saving random villages from Monster of the Week problems or do you want to move on to something else?"

After some sandboxing, my players have made friends with a wise and just duke that rules over some remote barely settled lands. Now that the players, not me, have decided via sandboxing they want to support their new friend the duke, I can lay down railroad tracks about the various threats to the duke's lands and people.

 

Mathematically it isn't that different from just adding a numerical +3 or -3 modifier, but it sure feels better.
In general I'd say that 5E has removed a lot of the modifier juggling of 3.5E which I initially thought I would dislike, but actually I am fine with it in most cases.

Really? I mean... compared to some other systems (The Dark Eye uses a VERY complicated system, which sure feels cool for duels but the fights take ages) but with all the possible modifiers it always felt a bit sluggish to me as soon as more than 6-8 combatants were present.

I wouldn't say locked, especially not with extra content from some of the extra books (book of war and book of faith IIRC), but yeah, it was definitely focused on that. I feel that 5E is a bit better in that regard, despite of, or maybe because of simplification.

That's something I never understood. The system provides the means to do it that way, but the books never say that you have to do it that way. I certainly don't.

It is streamlined but not dumbed down like 4E was.
I think you might like it.

There were a few gems in those rules where I thought: Ok, this is cool.
But overall I disliked it. I disliked most of the lore, the combat system, the magic system, it being dumbed down to what felt more like some dungeon crawler, yeah... pretty much most of it was inferior to 3.5E in my view.

I don't ask them, but I also have a mix of preferences on the table so I try to include at least some combat in all of my adventures. I have one player that would probably be fine without any combat but the other two have a tendency to favour combat.

What I struggled with for a long time were quest hooks. My players tend to play the good guys, but not the GOOD guys and not necessarily lawful either. They don't do something just because it looks like a quest. I usually have to present something interesting or just plain necessary to them or they will lose interest, which in turn affects their enthusiasm for playing and paying attention.
That being said: once they are on a path they usually like to have some broad rails to follow, very open scenarios tend to be less fun and more confusion. I help them through convenient NPCs but still think about alternative paths in advance.
And what helps immensely is that I sat down with all of them and defined their long time goals. Every adventure will bring one or more of them closer to their individual goals and I make sure that they know it will.

My next post will be about house rules for, and perceived weaknesses of D&D 5E, now after playing a few sessions and having read through most rules a few times.