I'm not gonna specifically recommend much/any, but I'll share some of the things that come across my feeds.
Free RPG Day 2020 Trophy Bundle! A sale hosted by Monkey's Paw Games. For today, all Monkey's Paw Games Trophy Dark content is 100% off. It's true! That's six Trophy Dark incursions for the price of none!
Free RPG Day Sale! A sale hosted by Viditya Voleti. This day really helped me start looking at different systems and new outlooks at design principles when I just started getting into the medium and being a designer in it! It's very important to me and my growth and I want to share some of my work with others as well! Even though it is Free RPG Day, I'm not really in the position to give a bunch of my work for Free, but this is a helluva deal!
Free RPG Day 2020 A sale hosted by Mina @ UFO Press. Grab four of our one-shot storytelling games, 100% off this weekend.
April Kit Walsh wrote a twitter thread "about RPGs that are Free as in Free Culture" and "some options to use open licensing to foster a community of collaboration and shared innovation and offers a legal hack to tailor CC sharealike requirements to our medium." Ajey Pandey adds that Quest is CC-BY and Bolt is CC-BY-SA.
@HellSaint It's hard to imagine sequences of events that lose one lots of rep (say, thousands) that wouldn't trigger autoreversal and/or staff review....
I'm not gonna call this completed; as you and everyone else reading this know, we do still throw away some votes for some user-deletions... and probably always will for the reasons you noted in your proposal.
But we have a system in place to prevent the most disruptive forms of vote deletion, a...
@BESW Yes--explicitly stated as playtest, feedback requested. Any particulars you'd be interested in? The two people who asked (after I told them how much I'd liked it) would both be playing solo.
Can I create a lens that will function as a magnifying glass or spyglass with Minor Illusion by using the illusion as a focus to warp or bend light as a lens might.
Alternatively, can Prestidigitation create a spyglass or magnifying glass?
You create a nonmagical trinket or an illusory image tha...
In a game I play, my GM allows a lot of custom homebrew (with approval), including spells. A situation has come up where my sorcerer is trying to make a version of Misty Step pulling a nearby creature to you, instead of teleporting to a nearby space.
My GM doesn’t have much of an opinion on it ye...
Free RPG Day Interstitial Playbooks A sale hosted by R.E.M. Speedwagon. For free RPG day, you can claim both of my interstitial playbooks, absolutely free! Interstitial: Our Hearts Intertwined is a game by Riley Hopkins, and found here.
The description of the Find Steed spell states:
...While mounted on your steed, you can make any spell you cast that targets only you also target your steed.
The Magic Jar spell is a "Self" range spell. How would these two spells interact?
Would both your souls go into the same container? Could...
Oh @AncientSwordRage, I just read the novel Invisible Library by Cogman. Dunno if you'd class it as an urban fantasy but it's a solid entry into the portal fantasy genre, first of a series. Got a hint of Thursday Next to its setting, which I appreciate, though it's a lot more staid than Next.
I'm gonna read the next book but if they insist on staying in the British Victorian world much longer my interest may not be sustained.
...my epic wizard used time stop to cast 520+d6 of nonlethal delayed blast fireballs sonicballs that would all go off when the time stop expired, and then with his last action jumped into a bag of holding to escape the blast.
(Sonic because in 3.5 it was the elemental type with the fewest things which resisted it, nonlethal because that left all non-living things unaffected. He was a librarian, he didn't want to hurt any books by accident.)
In one of my games, we discovered that the king was being mind cintrolled and was going to jump off the great tower in the castle. So we followed him up there and I just jumped with him and used feather fall.
He was still mind controlled. We noticed he had a worm wriggling around in his eye. So me and our warlock jumped with him, then dealt with the worm when we safely arrived in the courtyard below.
@ThomasMarkov Btw, shameless plug of an old meta-q of mine, but I think this is the most recent 'discussion' we have on the topic, rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9094/52137, the older questions I linked to in that is probably also useful reading
> Repeated failures, especially in short succession, can lead to your review privileges being suspended for a few days or longer, depending on the frequency of the failures.
I recently received this rather amusing message while reviewing a user's first post:
Congratulations!
This was only a test, designed to make sure you were paying attention. This post
has already been removed, but thanks for taking time to leave feedback for the
author.
What is the purpose of t...
For sci-fi games, what kinds of galactic species do people enjoy playing as, thematically or mechanically, beyond humans? For instance, in Star Trek settings, Vulcans or Caitians or Bajorans or Ferengi, while in Star Wars setting there’s the Ewoks and the Wookiees and the Trog (yoda’s species) and even humanoid varieties from other planets.
I mean, non-humanoid is (while a tall ask) quite cool to me (and some others). Also, maybe especially for sci-fi, organisms with biology which is not earth-like is an interesting prospect
Alright, I’ve got the Whalin, basically space whales that are silicon based biologically, the Suna which are like centaurs but are completely bald and covered in scales, and the winged humanoids (for the kindergartener) the Winged (which is only the translation of their name, it’s hard to pronounce)
@MikeQ I'm not sure which way I'd go with it in the future, though. I get the RAW, and obviously I'd have to rule that way in AL, but I feel like allowing it is more in the spirit of the Rogue's "knows how to exploit subtle...."
@Someone_Evil On the new Meta answer maybe also change the "it" in "This means to specify what game system it is" since you can't say "This means to specify what game system the question is" (or just changing a few of the instances of "it" throughout to more explicit/concrete words?)
@Someone_Evil I was just tracking the antecedents and stuff and I was like "Oh this sentence is linguistically interesting! Wait... that's probably bad for reading"
Also this post is to be used under the Help page right? It would feel weird to link it under a question closed for not adding a system tag instead of just explaining that they should add one. Though one could do a "see this question for more details" hmmmm
@AncientSwordRage Portal fantasies are stories centered around a person moving from one world to another, stranger one. In the most famous ones it's usually a child and the travel isn't entirely deliberate, though Invisible Library isn't doing that part. Summer in Orcus, Alice in Wonderland, Spirited Away, Akata Witch, Wayward Children, Kindred...
@AncientSwordRage You're welcome! There are some similar apps out there for more/other services but NP is what's been working best for our needs.
I asked a question and it got closed with users asking what system I was asking about. What do they mean, and why do I need to say it?
Someone said my question was missing a system tag. What do they mean?
So my players just tried to get down the side of a pit using a javelin and a lantern of revealing, and might just have angered “something big, faintly glowing green and moving in the distance”. Being an evil GM and ending on a cliffhanger is fun.
@AncientSwordRage hopefully... we had to cut it short bc one had family stuff today, but if you’ve ever watched Star Trek TNG encounter at farpoint, everything but the Q is this week (and next week’s) plot... they’re about to meet the farpoint alien
I watch a lot of TV. Probably too much.
Shows like Buffy the vampire slayer and Firefly have a whole slew of characters, which is perfect for a gaming party as you fill in the slots to the point you think you can handle.
But some shows like Supernatural focus around only 2 characters maybe thre...
The Artificer's Flash of Genius says:
When you or another creature you can see within 30 feet of you makes an ability check or a saving throw, you can use your reaction to add your Intelligence modifier to the roll.
On the one hand, an initiative roll is an ability check, which means that it's ...
Yeah, a lot of great TV/film/book scenarios just don't work when the audience is also the cast, and the number of characters is expanded.
That's why I appreciate innovations like Black Armada's expanded and rotating roles: if you've got a game conceit with a very limited number of characters to be played, you can create extra roles like "watcher" who add detail and play NPCs so the GM figure's load is reduced, and you can rotate all the roles each scene so everybody gets a chance to play the character, to be the GM, to be watchers, etc.
And I've found that expanding player agency outside the character's body, like how spending fate points can establish truths about the scene unrelated to the character's actions, and the player gets to decide what KIND of bad thing happens to them even if they didn't choose THAT a bad thing would happen, really opens up potential stories without making players feel bored or helpless.
This has been reported a long time ago; things might very well have been fixed by now. I can hardly imagine this is a real issue, but maybe it's not too nice for SEO or the data dump? So:
A question on Super User had its comments about duplicates removed by a moderator. However, the "Linked" sec...
For my group it was as simple as identifying (a) things in D&D we were dissatisfied with and (b) an alternate game system associated with an IP we all liked.
"Hey, here's a game about the thing we like, and it seems to be addressing the stuff we aren't liking in D&D!" "Ooh, let's try it."
Getting players involved and invested in contributing to the challenges their characters face has been an absolutely amazing leap when it comes to satisfaction and engagement in the stories.
For my group.
And it tended to happen when we moved to PbtA that puts some of those things in the player's hands.
As you can tell almost from the obscure-the-actual-point-and-act-like-we're-inventing-everything-we-think-of naming alone, this is from the heyday of Czege's time in the Forge.
That does not match my experience. At least I tend to give my players some input in the form of suggestions and I've never played a game that gave them full control. (wrt my quote above)
The absolute BEST gaming experiences I've had, with the players most invested and the story at its most creative, have been when the players invent problems for their own characters which they don't know how they'll get out of, and then we play to find out how they get out (or don't).
@Rubiksmoose Especially since Google returns no results for "The Lesson of Chalk Outlines" except Czege saying that's the real name of the Czege Principle.
I suspect he'd be better served disowning it as "Not my formulation, somebody else slapped my name on the thing" and stating his own ideas independent of the so-called principle if he wants to.
But yeah, in the original context of the GM being the one who creates and resolves a tension, that is often a problem.
But it's not usually because the GM is the person in charge of both those things.
That action is, in my experience, a symptom of a GM who is using players as props to tell their own story, rather than collaborating with players to tell a shared story.
And that? Players don't tend to like that. I've played in games where the players had talked themselves into thinking they liked it, but there were still lots of rumblings and symptoms of unrest and the game fell to pieces at the first outside pressure.
@Rubiksmoose And yeah, a big problem with looking at the Forge from the outside in, is that it's so full of self-referential jargon and insider terminology that any insight to be gleaned requires more effort to parse than it's worth--the same lessons can be found elsewhere in more accessible forms.
And a lot of the principles the Forge was throwing around are incomplete forms of things that now have much more developed expressions coming into mainstream gaming spaces. Like, the "lumpley principle" which basically boiled down to "the people playing the game make the rules, not the people writing it," is trying to create the kind of attitudes which safety tools now provide specific structures and guides for.
@RedRiderX I'll step up to bat for it, absolutely, with the caveat that engaging the rules of the game to prompt or limit your options means you don't have full control over the resolution of your problems?
@Glazius If following the rules of a game means you aren't the author as stated in the principle, then its point is incredibly moot.
I think the principle speaks to some truth in the context BESW provided, but in the wider of world of what games have become, it's too general a statement to have much value.