Kickstarter: ORBITAL, a space station RPG zine by Mousehold Press. Build a space station, full of threats and conflict, and then play to find out whether your crew of characters can hold it together. (Belonging Outside Belonging, No Dice No Masters)
@RevenantBacon specifically, the invention of radar
The myth that carrots let you see better in the dark might have existed in some form prior, but it took off during WW2. The British invented radar and were suddenly able to shoot down German planes pretty reliably in the night.
Of course the Germans would want to know why, so the British started advertising that carrots let you see better in general, especially in the dark, to lay out a red herring.
From what I understand, there's no signs they took the bait, although there's stories saying they started feeding their pilots carrots. Also, I think the pre-WW2 myth might have just been that carrots are important for healthy eyes.
Every background provides you with clothes appropriate for your character. Because it's listed as "equipment" and because the Adventuring Gear table provides weights for several types of clothing [PHB pg. 150], it's reasonable to conclude that this mass must be accounted for when ensuring you re...
Hey, @BESW, do you have any game recommendations about the day to day of being an “odd” (define that however) teenager in school? I’m looking especially for something with minimal mechanics (this is all for Reasons)
The tone and goal would be important to keep in mind. Like, Monsterhearts is probably the most famous "being in high school is weird" TRPG but it's very much for early 20-somethings to try playing out alternate scenarios of their teenage years.
Camp Flying Moose for Girls of All Kinds by Alicia Furness is a PbtA game about teen girls at a summer camp filled with strange supernatural occurrences. Inspired by Lumberjanes, and my own experiences of summer camp, the game investigates mysteries, monsters, and teenage identity.
Melancholy Trip by ThatAceGal is a oneshot RPG game about being trans, superpowered teens on the run from their shitty superhero mentors. As it's inspired by sad and angsty trans fanfics, please read the content warnings before playing.
Kickstarter: Never Knows Best: An RPG Inspired By FLCL.Teens transform into robots to combat absurd creatures embodying their own inner turmoil and societal expectations
"Inspired by Lumberjanes" is sweet music to my ears.
These are all very interesting! I don’t quite know exactly what I want to do, but I need a break from D&D for a couple of sessions cause I’m not in a position to plan anything rn and my sessions always seem to need hours of planning.
I’m looking for something that focuses more on the students and their interpersonal relationships than on mechanics cause I don’t want to do mechanics-related prep but I’m willing to do story prep. I may just write one using similar mechanics to [Ensign of the Week](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bRAPN6TgWo3X5mgjEC2RNqmdPRj9TSVq5qd8lP6HiMI/edit) which I thought worked well for the group. The problem is I made EotW with a focus on magic that I don’t want for this so I’m not sure whether it’d really work for the game I want.
My party and I are very new to D&D, so we are still learning a lot of the rules. Anyway, I have chosen the Oath of Vengeance for my paladin.
During a battle, I wanted to use Vow of Enmity against my enemy. However, my DM said I couldn't use it because I didn't have a specific vengeance against s...
This is also kinda going to end up a coping method for me cause I’m having issues at school (haven’t managed to sit through a single class without resorting to yarn or another fiddle, haven’t been able to keep from getting distracted, made a fool of myself in front of the class when asked to present, still haven’t managed to break my habit of commenting under my breath, embarrassed myself in front of my crush from last year I’m not sure I don’t still like-like... the list goes on).
@doppelgreener Carrots do contain certain vitamins that are good for your eye health. Probably not going to improve your eyesight, but might prevent it from deteriorating as quickly.
When you wonderful people were in high school (around ages 13-18), what kind of games did you play (especially TTRPGs), and what was the core mechanic? Did you find that easy or hard to use?
None of the people I knew who played TRPGs in high school were people I trusted to tell stories with, so my mild curiosity about TRPGs didn't last long. Then in college a friend decided I should GM a group of us after hearing me reciting the unicorn monologue from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and loaned me all his D&D 3.5 books because that's what had just come out at the time.
That’s helpful, but made me realize I worded it wrong. I should say: What basic type of game mechanic (dice pool, die+mod, etc) do you think you would have best liked using in high school, and if you played anything in your early years what kind of mechanics did you like using?
Well, I was the kind of kid who memorized lengthy poems, had notebooks of ideas for TCG deck combos, planned out Wiz8 party progressions in high detail... I probably would have been attracted to high-complexity games with lots of opportunities for out-of-session fiddling with character builds, and long-form campaigns with high structure. Large handfuls of different polyhedrons would've been very shiny for me too, and chances are I would've thrown myself into designing home-made props and fancy model setpieces. But I probably would've quickly become uncomfortable with the violence focus of m…
As far as TTRPGs, I started with solo books - Choose Your Own Adventure and the like, where you just decide which page to turn to; then Fighting Fantasy etc, where you roll dice to fight monsters, inventory (sometimes) matters, etc. By this point I'd heard of D&D but didn't know anyone who played, & couldn't have afforded it anyway. But I found Dragon Warriors, which was originally published as a series of novel-sized paperbacks. I had one friend who was interested, so we'd take turns GMing & playing a whole party. I don't remember the mechanics.
@BardicWizard I played board games and video games. I hadn't yet played RPGs until I was 19 (or 20? don't remember) but I'd heard of them. I was very used to a dice+mod system and it was pretty easy. I was also used to the board games I played using cards to some degree to determine what we could do.
I'll caveat that though with this: I basically just picked up and learned whatever it was we were going to play next. Was the game's core mechanic this way? Cool, I'll learn that. Is this one completely different? Sure, it's a completely different game so that makes sense, I'll learn its way of doing things too. Dice+mod was simply the most common, but there was always a lot more going on around the dice roll I had to learn too. All of that was true for board games and remains true for TRPGs.
D&D had me roll d20+mod, and I was fine with that. Then Fate asked me to roll a distinct set of dice that had a bell curve, and I was fine with that too. Cortex has its own quite unique dice pool system where I roll various sizes of dice and the die sizes themselves are as significant as the numbers I rolled on them. When I was introduced to that, I just picked it up and learned it and that was fine.
I mostly played board and video games until around like 17 or something
if I'm even remembering my age right at all
XD
I learned 3.5 but never felt like I had everything down, it just felt overwhelming
I enjoyed it for a while and then slowly the fact that I didn't like class imbalances, and that all these cool prestige classes I liked were functionally useless in the actual game, and other such things crept up on me
Then I played 4E and everything just clicked
even though it was still just "roll D20" (very reductive but wtv I've talked for 2 million years about why I like 4E and how slept on that edition has been)
BTW, @BardicWizard, I was thinking about TRPGs with a strong focus on teenager sociality, and my conclusion is that they usually aren't *for* teenagers, but rather are by and for people who want/need to re-litigate their own teenage identities. You may have better luck with games which deal with the themes you're interested in, without using a teenage lens to do it. Chances are they're more likely to be designed by and for people currently experiencing those themes, rather than by and for people remembering them.
@BardicWizard I'd take a good look (if you don't mind me butting in) at Tales from the Loop. It's predicated on kids slightly younger, but only by two or three years. And it's got a lot of the PC-PC and PC-NPC interaction stuff built in to the system. And the genre ("kids on bikes with walkie-talkies") it's derived from is pretty soaked in the "group of outsiders/outcasts" feeling. (Which, we all eventually learn, is actually how most everyone feels.)
I've got a back-burnered project to mash together my favorite bits from several different kids-on-bikes and kid-sleuth games, including TftL, into one low-crunch high-cozy system.
If you want I can ask about your situation in a private Discord server where there are more younger people and more spaces to talk about anxiety, stimming, etc. A lot of them are devs who make indie games.
But it's just an offer, no pressure. I'd probably be wary of people talking about me where I can't see, if I were in your position.
Garfield ± You by DannyMakesRPGs is a two player RPG about a person experiencing major milestones in their life, at which time they also are visited by Garfield. One player plays the Human, and the other plays Garfield. Garfield is also a phone.
So yesterday I was DM’ing our weekly D&D 5e session. For practical reasons it was a one-shot. At some point, one of my players, a Lvl 10 Bard, ends up in the BBEG’s lair alone (an adult red dragon, CR 17). Partially his fault for ending up alone (because he tends to act impulsively), but that’s n...
@ThomasMarkov I'm just not excited for teaching somewhat. Especially since I now really need to be teaching in Virginia as not every state will accept online courses and online practica (pre-service teaching) and student teaching. But at least Virginia does
Just wasn't particularly ready for my upcoming license (and, to an extent, my upcoming Masters) to be rejected due to courses being online. But it should all work out if I stay in Virginia
I posted on a thread, but users downvoted and replied saying it
wasn’t an answer. What do they mean?
What does it mean for an answer
to be too forum-like?
Someone told me not to comment in an answer.
What is that?
What should answers be used for?
This Q&A is an agglomeration of guidance often ...
@BESW I don't find that to be an accurate summarisation. I don't play Monsterhearts to re-experience my teenage years in any fashion; I want to stay far away from those. I play Monsterhearts to explore queer stuff—like the same way She-Ra lets us explore queer stuff—and Monsterhearts gives us messy circumstances within which to do that.
BTW serious kudos to @Someone_Evil for taking it upon themselves to write all these posts. Peeking behind the curtain, this has been an effort 100% by them.
@BardicWizard Could I suggest maybe a game that emulates being an odd teenager in school is probably not the best fit for this task? Like, imagine if work came to you with a stress relief activity where you roleplayed being someone at an ordinary desk job. I got through some personal issues and learned more about myself by playing a sentient tree woman on a rogue planet hurtling through our solar system, I didn't need to play an early-20s junior at a desk job.
If it's stress relief, it would, hopefully, let us venture outside the environment of our stress.
If you want to stick close to home, Bubblegumshoe was pretty fun, and I'm sure teenage me would have enjoyed it. You play as teenage kids solving local mysteries (important ones that need to be solved, but which aren't important enough for the adults to take them seriously) and you have some major agency in how you go about solving them and, once you've figured out what happened, working out how to resolve it.
@BardicWizard Well the most basic level is you go to that MSE post and see if someone already has submitted it. If not, you are going to want to add that info as an answer. Happy to help further if needed.
@smbailey you should try to use headers instead of otherwise formatted text as headers, I think, even if it's not quite visually what you're going for it's better syntactically for assisted parsing
Unnecessary. In order for those tags to have meaning on this site, they'd have to be used in a mostly consistent way.
I don't get the impression that accessibility nor semantic meaning are top on people's minds when selecting their headers. So, probably just leave it as the OP intended.
Sometimes it takes time to write a (hopefully) good answer: you have to search for references, for the exact wording of rules on manuals, looking for the description of a particular magic item, etc.
It happens to me that while I am writing someone else answers the question, coming up with very si...
Many creatures in D&D 5e have a feature called Magic Resistance. One such is the Archmage:
Magic Resistance. The archmage has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects.
So the Archmage has advantage on saving throws against magical effects. Suppose I wanted to weaken t...
@ThomasMarkov Yeah, that's what made me immediately look for the MSE post earlier. lol
thankfully I already avoid H1 headers when posting or editing anyway, since they're used "wrongly" to put multiple headers on a single post (and I believe it's also "wrong" since the question title itself uses an H1 header?).
I posted on a thread, but users downvoted and replied saying it
wasn’t an answer. What do they mean?
What does it mean for an answer
to be too forum-like?
Someone told me not to comment in an answer.
What is that?
What should answers be used for?
This Q&A is an agglomeration of guidance often ...
I am creating a Dragonborn warlock character and was just wondering if I could get a crystal arcane focus set into the middle of a gauntlet?
Many creatures in D&D 5e have a feature called Magic Resistance. One such is the Archmage:
Magic Resistance. The archmage has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects.
So the Archmage has advantage on saving throws against magical effects. Suppose I wanted to weaken t...
