Tabletop RPGs in 2017 AD

Games
1

Don’t think there’s an active thread for tabletop RPGs right now aside from the Fate game. Many people here still regularly running RPGs?

I just got a group started on D&D 5e as a rookie GM and we’re all having a great time. I should probably hold my ground and let D&D have its day in the sun, but the success of an RPG makes me curious about other options, specifically the newest Traveller.

Sci-fi in all forms is my favorite setting and I’m going to try a sci-fi Fate after we finish our current 5e campaign, but I’ve had fantasies of playing Traveller for about 15 years. Is Traveller (I think the Mongoose version from what I’ve read) still relevant? Too hard to play/teach? We aren’t a hardcore group so intense rules might be rough.

2

Speaking of which, any one in SoCal down for a tabletop RPG session? I kind of want to do an Amber by Erick Wujcik (1991) campaign.

3

No, it’s not too intense although you might have more prepwork ahead of you than you would in 5e (depending on how much you are using or leaning on published modules). Traveller lends itself to an interesting sort of sandbox play if that’s what you want (it arguably shines brightest when you let some of the sandbox into the game, I think, but this is an arguable point and there’s no “right” way to play). You can still do a big story campaign too. Traveller, in all it’s forms, will lend itself to the type of game you want to play.

There are a number of different versions of Traveller now. There’s the mongoose 1st and 2nd editions, Traveller5, GURPS traveller, and D20. Mongoose 2e and Taveller5 are the most recent but there’s no reason you can’t do GURPS or D20 if you’re particular to those rules. I’ve personally played in a D20 and my group had a lot of fun with it.

4

Mongoose Traveller is pretty accessible. It’s not too crunchy (close to 5e I would say), though you can get bogged down in some of the sub-systems around sector creation and such. Just stay clear of the splat books. I’m not too familiar with the new edition, but with the previous one the core book had all you really needed and the tons of splats just complicated matters (and editing was sometimes dodgy).

If you play, tell us how it goes. I’ve never been able to give it a try. I’ve stared wistfully at it in my PDF library.

I’ve been working on my own tabletop RPG, sort of inspired by some new-school stuff such as the Apocalypse World engine games. It’s been a ton of work but getting there … hopefully by autumn.

5

I’ve tried to start a couple to no avail, alas ;-)

Oh yes :-D

Aside from wrapping up the recent second season of the Qt3 Tabletop RPG Virtual Book Club (hey @mtthwcmpbll will we see a 3rd season? Oh I hope so!), I’m still running my lengthy homebrew-setting scifi comedy Fate game, Spaceward, Ho! (including a session on Saturday) and just finished my stint as GM of a rotating-GMing Fate game in the world of Abirsta that the other players and I made up together using the Dawn of Worlds system. We just had our first session under the next GM tonight, and it was an absolute hoot.

And, of course, I’m organizing the local RPG Meetup Group’s next big Quarterly event, Tales of the Crimson Boar, where we’ll host 10 tables over 10 hours for ~40 players and GMs, if all goes well, with the theme of “mysterious strangers” (The Crimson Boar is a classic high fantasy bar/inn location the Meetup group has co-designed that can be dropped into other settings as needed; all participating GMs just need to incorporate the inn and one or more mysterious strangers into their scenarios this time around).

And then I’m also helping organize our next season of Semi Organized Play, this one using the Exalted 3E system and setting to run a co-GMed campaign we’re calling Corsair Stir Fry: Wayward Suns about a group of Solar Exalted arriving on a tropical island in the far West beneath which slumbers an ancient Behemoth that various factions of Dragon Blooded, Sidereals, Lunars, spirits, gods, fae, and Death Lords are all vying for! Myself and three other GMs will run a total of 18 sessions over the course of 3 months to a player pool of about 20 in an interlinking, multi-table story. It’s been absolutely crazy to get organized, but we’re in the final stretch now (character creation’s in just over a month) and I am SO excited :-D

Oh! And I’m running two sessions at GenCon in August: my “heavy metal band seeks to ascend to godhood” rock opera comedy, The Final Performance of the Hellknights of the Underdark and also my “third-string supervillains get roped into saving the world, somehow,” supers game, Minor League Evil. Both powered by Fate in this iteration, though I have a full setup to run Final Performance in Pathfinder, as well.

Sorry, I got overexcited. I love talking about tabletop gaming!!!

I have been so, so happy with Fate for scifi. If a group wants the uber-crunch, something like Mindjammer or Nova Praxis would be fine, but the base game, with a few tiny tweaks, handles space opera style pulpy action amazingly well, and you can slowly scale up more complicated elements. Bulldogs! is a great pre-made system that is about halfway up Fate’s potential crunch-tree with an awesome Futurama-esque setting and all sorts of cool bits to play with regarding ships and items.

If you ever wanna chat Fate scifi homebrew, though, hit me up. I’ve got about 60% of a really cool (to me) rulebook written for my home game mentioned above, Spaceward, Ho!, and it’s supported almost 3 years of wacky, wonderful adventures with the fabulous crew of the starship Savage Heart. My general prep for a session is “generic brain-thinky time” for X-hours to decide on a very rough idea of where I want a session to more or less go (if it’s not directly continuing from the last), then 1-3 hours of “write out some basic outlines, sketch out some three-line NPCs/enemies, and maybe plan out a couple of explicit challenges/contests, if appropriate” time in Word. Print out 1-2 pages of stuff and we’re set to game for 3-4 hours :)

Of course, like any RPG, 50% of that is tossed out within the first five minutes when the players, say, decide to help the crazed religious fanatics overthrow their own government instead of proving their own innocence in the frame-up job to rescue the existing government.

6

I’m definitely giving Fate a shot. My worry is that this group is pretty green to tabletop RPGs (their references are PC RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and KotOR) and might just bounce off the game when they realize there are no physical mechanics for combat/spaceships/etc and there’s no real progression other than story. From a distance Fate kind of looks like doing improv comedy, but without an audience to laugh at you and without most of the troupe members being funny.

7

[quote=“BiggerBoat, post:4, topic:130016, full:true”]I’ve been working on my own tabletop RPG, sort of inspired by some new-school stuff such as the Apocalypse World engine games. It’s been a ton of work but getting there … hopefully by autumn.

https://www.ironswornrpg.com/[/quote]

A soloable tabletop RPG? That sounds really good. I will definitely take a look at it when you release!

8

The combat is a little pared down, but you can actually run pretty sophisticated fights with it if groups are interested in that. Most of my combats are 2-3 Zones (the game’s abstraction of discrete areas within a Conflict), max, and over in a couple of rounds, as most of my players don’t relish them. You can easily map out a fairly compartmentalized map for an encounter, blocking out more Zones and layering on descriptive Aspects to give the whole area a really distinctive feel (and thus also making tokens more handy to track everyone’s location). The Stress/Consequences system reminds me a little of the StoryTeller system’s penchant for dual damage tracks, so it can get a little crunchy if you care to let it. Spaceships get more detail in Fate-based systems like Nova Praxis, Mindjammer, and Bulldogs!, so if you did want to trickle in more sophisticated mechanics for those, you as GM reading and stealing from one wouldn’t be a bad idea.

And for Progression, recall that players should be gaining a new Skill Point about every 3 sessions, and a new point of Refresh (and with it the ability to buy a new Feat-esque Stunt or even more complex Extras in some versions of the game) every 6-9. Players can crack into the next “tier” of +5 Skills within about 15 sessions of fast-paced progression, though getting up to +6 is substantially harder and feels like a real accomplishment (my Spaceward, Ho! players are all sitting on stuffed-full +4 Skill Columns because no one wants to be the asshole that takes a +5 Skill and makes the whole game “harder” in response, hah).

Sorry. I am a Fate evangelist, as I really feel like it’s transformed my GMing and play substantially from my D&D/Pathfinder roots. Not to say I haven’t loved other systems I’ve been playing recently (e.g., Mutants & Masterminds 3E, Exalted 3E, D&D 5E, etc.), but yeah. . .

I somehow missed this last night. Reading material for work :-D

9

No worries this is all stuff I want to hear. I’m on the fence and trying to convince myself one way or the other whether my group will enjoy Fate. I’ll probably order the Mindjammer or Nova Praxis books for the pure fun of reading some sci-fi rules. We’ll see how that goes.

What’s the hook with PbtA games? I’ve read a bit and understand that it’s also narrative focused and abstracts almost everything to “moves”, but I have a hard time imagining what the differences to Fate mean in practice.

10

[quote=“fenrrris, post:9, topic:130016, full:true”]What’s the hook with PbtA games? I’ve read a bit and understand that it’s also narrative focused and abstracts almost everything to “moves”, but I have a hard time imagining what the differences to Fate mean in practice.
[/quote]

As I see it, the mechanize the narrative (Fate does mechanize the drama, but not so much the narrative) to create genre specific stories. It’s also more prescriptive in what player characters can do mechanically (you are limited to your moves).

But more importantly, imho, it includes very specific sets of constraints to the GM as to how to play the game. It makes it easier to run it with little prep, as the decision space is limited enough. I think that’s the key as to how an RPG can be played solo to an extent…

11

A few key points about PBTA:
It’s fiction-first. You don’t roll unless you are narratively doing something that triggers a move (and they all have triggers unless they’re an ongoing passive thing).
It’s player-facing. The GM never rolls and it’s (generally) players failing that affords the GM the opportunity to make what are called “hard” moves - i.e. directly affecting a player without giving them a chance to respond or an alternate choice.
It’s very genre-specific. The system can be adapted to reflect many different sorts of stories but it requires rewriting moves and playbooks in a way that directly reflects the sort of stories you want to tell. Fate, by contrast, is deliberately very generic and its standard mechanics basically just require a different coat of paint to tell a completely different genre of story. (IMO to be satisfying you do need to introduce more specialized, setting specific mechanics. But that’s technically optional.)

12

Regarding Fate Core, I kickstarted it way back, but have yet to actually run something in it*. I did get an email with a notice that Tabletop had en episode playing it recently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOFXtAHg7vU

*= I am going to run one or two adventures with Fate Accelerated inspired by Renowned Explorers for a mini-con here in the fall, though.

13

Fate is an odd system, to be sure. It runs best when the folks playing feel comfortable contributing to the narrative and world, at least in small ways, now and again. They should want their characters to get into uncomfortable scrapes because tough, scary, difficult missions are fun. Sure, a competent GM can generate everything all the time forever, but IMO, some of the most fun I’ve had in my sessions has cropped up from player contributed madness (like one woman who paid a Fate Point to clarify that the short-lived aliens imprisoning them actually only lived one day. Changed the tone of the whole escape sequence!).

But it’s flexible enough to support a lot of different things, and having someone else do the design work for you as in the three scifi games I’ve mentioned is a huge boon.

As a little more to tack onto Juan and malkav’s excellent answers, PbtA games generally seem to adhere to a more familiar D&D-esque styling of stats, classes, etc. in the midst of the narrative/fiction-control elements, so to players coming from a D&D style background, something like, say, Dungeon World can bridge the gap between the d20 tactics of old and the nuskool narativist gameplay just by applying a veneer of more familiar terminology.

Compare that to Fate, which is class-less by default (though some games opt to package Skills and Stunts into class-like structures players can buy at character creation) and runs more or less all player activity through their Skills (so there are no real stats at all).

The point about Fate mechanizing drama (the players should be contributing to getting themselves into sticky situations and drawing their characters into the spotlight actively via Invokes and Compels) and PbtA-games mechanizing moment-to-moment fiction (more of the parries-and-thrusts or words-and-responses level) is a good one as well. They both take place a level removed from a pure simulationist experience like, say, D&D or Traveler, but the abstractions they apply are subtly different.

I am also slowly uploading the Qt3 Fate Core sessions to Youtube here:

The first video is combination character/world creation with a little mini adventure tacked onto the end, slowly rolling in more mechanics, so it’s not the best introduction to the system, but it’s pretty funny at points :)

14

I’ve run and played Fate and quite like it.

I’m really curious about Blades in the Dark, which is the newest RPG published by Evil Hat. I may need to pick up a copy.

Right now, I’m running the Iron Gods Pathfinder adventure path, since that group’s regular GM had to step aside for a bit and I don’t have the time to prep a game.

15

Nice Thread. I am currently playing in a weekly online game of Conan 2D20 and run an Uncharted Worlds (a PbtA) game. I liked Fate while reading but did not like it in play as it was too “meta” for me. PbtA like games I did not like from reading but loved once I ran it. There is so much to this simple engine that moves the game forward based on what is happening while playing. It really complements my improvisational GM style very well, it is a no-prep system.

When it comes to Traveller I currently prefer Cepheus Engine. Or go straight to Uncharted Worlds for more collaborative play or Stars Without Numbers for a more DnD slant.

Blades in the Dark looks brilliant, can`t wait for my print book.

16

Yes! I really want to check this out ASAP. But as my first post in the thread illustrates, I am a little strapped for gaming time :(

I read like 30% of this rulebook once and it was a really cool little OSR-esque take on the whole thing that rubbed my brain right in multiple places. I always meant to go back. . .

17

SWN is absolutely worth it for the GM sections alone. You can use the tools there with any system. I have all the books and buy everything from Kevin Crawford without hesitation. My favourite line of RPG books ever written. His Cthulhu RPG Silent Legions is great as well. I rarely use the system but the DM tools constantly.

18

A tangent, but: How did I not know there is a new version of Unknown Armies? I thought it was abandoned forever. Need to get this! I loved 2nd edition so much.

19

Yes you do. I’m reading the first rulebook off and on and it’s fabulous.

20

I’m a big fan of the UA setting. Care to run down the major changes?