Tabletop RPGs in 2017 AD

Another free and helpful, if limited, 5e resource is that edition’s System Reference Document, which mashes together much of the player’s handbook, dungeon master’s guide, and monster manual. It leaves off some of the especially DnDish monsters like beholder or displacer beasts, but there’s plenty of dragons and dungeon-type activities to scan through.

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/systems-reference-document-srd

Thanks!

We’ve moved on into 2018, but thought this might interest some folks nostalgic for the old days:

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/CarWars

I’ve got warm fuzzy nightmares from my CarWars days. I loved futzing around trying to get all I could out of a car design. Actual play was just as fiddly though-- did they ever smooth out the impulse thing?

I remember we toyed with all the big books, but really had the most fun with the basics. I seem to remember our typical battle was something like this in a free for all

player 1: Van with best weapon he could afford (lazers!) but basically no armor

player 2: Pickup with limited weapons but a ton of armor and a ram front end

me: compact car with twin MG turret and mine dropper escorted by a bike with a light MG and smoke screen.

I could win if I could use the smoke to keep the laser-van at bay while trying to get the pickup to run over a mine.

I am the last person in the world to hear about this, right?

http://whothefuckismydndcharacter.com

It is a classic, but really, you’re just one of today’s ten thousand!

Someone should link the xkcd strip for me. I’m on mobile and it’s hard.

Any thoughts on Heroes Unlimited? Is Champions to best superhero rpg?

What are you looking for in a super hero RPG? There are a lot of them, and they optimize for different things.

I can’t think of any criteria where “Heroes Unlimited” would be the correct answer though.

I can - it’s definitely the best superhero RPG for rolling on random charts and giggling at the horrifying monstrosities pretending to be characters so produced. Probably don’t actually play it though. or indeed any Palladium game. Hooboy.

I’ve been really enjoying Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Ed. as part of one of Raleigh Tabletop RPGs’ SOP campaigns and also as the system of choice for a short arc of one of the home games I’m in. In that one, we’re the animated childhood toys/objects of a young girl who’s being targeted by some sort of dark entity, and we’ve been brought to light by some equal-but-opposite force of probably good. I’m playing an enormous animate blob of Playdoh named Doh (superhero alter-ego: DOH). It’s a ton of fun in action, though character creation–especially for things like shapeshifters–can definitely be intense.

Mutants and Masterminds is great, especially if your group likes d20s. However, like many (most? all?) point buy superhero systems, there really needs to be a lot of communication between the GM and the players to make sure that nothing breaks too hard. Or even worse, one of the players feeling useless.

Probably more accessible than Champions/HERO these days.

Heroes Unlimited is primarily good for a laugh. I do not advocate buying a copy, but the random roll tables can be fun.

M&M makes me think a little of Storyteller System’s cornerstone combat quirk (applying a damage pool vs. a separate defensive stat after to-hit is rolled, plus the whole “damage boxes as increasing states of harm/disability” rather than the classic all-or-nothing HP thing) combo’ed with a massively stripped down d20 variant (Ability scores are basically just carved down to the ability relevant modifiers rather than the tried-and-true 3-18 scores of yore, a change I’ve actually recommended for systems like D&D and Pathfinder a couple of times), so the combat math takes a little getting used to.

So, I do agree it’s easy to build a character that is “bad” insofar as it interfaces poorly with that system. If you lob all your points into overcoming a to-hit defense and have no capacity to breach the “actually taking damage” defense behind it, for instance, you might well be the world’s most accurate pea-shooter, or what have you.

But once you get used to it, and the whole “give and take seesaw” side of the math (Pump your your ability in this area? That will lower the max amount you can put into this linked ability over here!), it’s also easy to see the balance elements the designers intended to leverage to keep things from going nuts. Yeah, there’s weird-out powers that can break that molding, but for the most part, it does a good job of maintaining this leery sort of “Tough but slow vs. Fast but fragile; accurate but weak vs. inaccurate but potent” balance point among characters of similar power level.

AKA, as initially: character creation can be intense. Strong GM-player communication to avoid the pitfalls is definitely, definitely recommended, as you noted. I’ve been lucky to play it with folks who know the system well enough to guide folks away from the bad ideas and toward really cool, expressive ways to showcase their powers.

I mean, this is the same system where I built my poser-goth teenager empowered by an ambitious Unseelie Court Fae princeling who uses his crippling (albeit false) depression to make foes wallow in their own misery until they pass out, totally stole the chic looks of The Crow and the bitchin grapple-chains of Spawn because he used to watch those movies with his dad, and has just enough facial hair to get the “Looks 2 Years Older” benefit (useful when stealing cars. I mean, until he has to drive one).

All told that was about 30 minutes of chatting between me and one of the GMs and tapping buttons in Hero Lab.

Shit, I’m just gonna come out and say that full Hero Lab compatibility alone makes M&M the system to go with for superheroics these days ;-)

I really hate the “seesaw” balancing you refer to, and that plus various other d20isms make me not fond of it as a superhero system on the whole. Not sure I could go back to Champions either though.

http://www.deadlyfredly.com/2018/02/the-importance-of-streaming-and-actual-play-online-in-modern-tabletop-publishing/

Looks like online streaming can be just as much of a boon to tabletop RPGs as it can to videogames.

I remember watching the first season of ITmeJP’s RollPlay gosh, 5 years ago now? Mostly cuz it was a ton of pro Starcraft celebrities playing. And thinking it was the wave of the fucking future.

Nowadays, between Critical Role, RollPlay, Acquisitions Incorporated, and all the rest, tabletop session streaming is a big business and increasingly tough for publishers to ignore. Those that court this kinda stuff actively are gonna do well for themselves.

So, I guess we don’t have a Tabletop RPG 2018 thread? No? I guess I’ll post this here.

My tastes in TTRPGs are pretty strange, I’ll admit. I have no desire to play a combat-oriented game- My thinking is I have boardgames like Gloomhaven (or a dozen others) that are actually designed with solid mechanics that focus on combat to make it interesting and fun, and if I’m going to play an RPG, I want the game to focus on character and story, theme, ideas, and setting. Conflict can (and should?) be handled in other ways than combat.

James Wallis is one of my favorite people in the industry. He finally came out with his new game a few months ago- a really, really, really late Kickstarter project (that I didn’t hear about until after it was over, so didn’t have the anguish of it maybe-never coming out, but I digress), Alas, Vegas.

Kind of the ultimate one-shot (really four sessions, but hey.), “‘Alas Vegas’ is a game about sin, memory, gambling and redemption, with a heavy dose of allegory and a coating of classic 1960s heist-movie style. Think of it as Franz Kafka’s Fear and Loathing, or Ocean’s Eleven directed by David Lynch, or The Hangover meets The Prisoner. It is a journey with a structure, a single destination and a suggested route-map, but the details are left up to the Dealer and players to choose along the way.”

Not really sure why I’m posting this, but it sounds really cool. I grabbed the pdf off drivethrurpg.com earlier today, and have been reading though over dinner. Also comes with a few bonus campaigns using the basic premise of “players start with amnesia and through flashbacks uncover who they are and why they’re here”- one where you’re resurrected Witch-King-Style Generals in the army of an evil necromancer, and another where you’re both a superhero and a cop investigating the murder of the most powerful hero in the world. Seems like neat stuff.

Shameless plug for my son’s latest RPG kickstarter, a 5e-compatible dark fantasy setting guide and worldbuilding toolkit. Putting aside my obvious bias, it looks awesome.

Looks like it’s about to reach its goal. Congrats!

Pathfinder 2nd Edition playtest hits this August, FWIW.