Little Fears is the kind of game that requires a really good, trusting group that know each other deeply.
My personal games of choice are WoD 2e stuff and Ars Magica.
I might actually start my own thread about Ars Magica, in which I talk endlessly, maybe go back through the books.
…a third time.
…a third time to talk about to other people, that is.
I loved reading through your reviews of Ars Magica, even though its a game I could never imagine myself playing. The rules seem a bit dense.
The character creation rules absolutely are.
In actual gameplay, only the GM really needs to know more than ‘roll a d10, add numbers, 1s cause explosions and 10s are bad.’
So, 3 years ago I took the plunge and bought the Pathfinder Core Rulebook to try and jumpstart an RPG game across my friends. We had been talking about that for a while, but indecision ended up always gripping us and the mixture of tons of free alternatives made everybody not want to take the first step forward. My decision ended up working a bit too well. One year later the group had blossomed from 5 players to 9 and I ended up splitting the group.
Currently I GM for what I call the Party Sapphire and Party Ruby, both of them having started playing the Rise of the Runelords campaign which the Sapphire party continued while the Ruby party changed to the Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign one third through, Currently both of the are 66.(6)% done with their story and due to conflicts we’ve been alternating between that and other one-shot-session campaigns, including Pathfinder Society(and I haven’t been the GM of all of them thankfully 
).
I’ve been wanting to discover and try some more roleplaying heavy systems for a while, but between the conflict of English not being our native language and the fact that most of us are still engineers too focused on mechanics instead of roleplaying, I haven’t found a good option yet.
What’s up fam, I’m here to shill for FATE. Fate is a story game at heart, but it has a bit more in the way of stats and moving parts on your sheet than a lot of them, which may appeal to your players. The idea is that your actual skills that you roll on have pretty predictable results- the probability curve is such that you’re likely to roll [skill]± 1, with more occasional outliers of up to ± 4. So, to make up the difference, Fate’s big core idea is that of “Aspects”. Aspects are tags that you apply to characters, locations, and sometimes events that are, as far as the fiction is concerned, absolutely true until otherwise disproven.
The place where they will get hung up on, probably, is the very broad nature of Aspects. Like, it’s literally a sentence or phrase that you use to describe a feature or state of something. There’s nothing directly in the rules to prohibit somebody from stating, “I would like to create an Athletics Advantage to make myself Intangibly vibrating through the Speed Force”, except that the roll would be prohibitively difficult and the GM would be like, “be serious, please, this is swords and sorcery 
”
The hard part of GMing Fate, coming from a more crunchy, simulation-oriented game is going to be managing your different types of scene. Fate has a lot of kinda templates for broad types of interaction between characters and character-like structures, but it’s up to you to decide which is actually appropriate. The general rule of thumb is, “Will it actually be interesting or important to zoom all the way into this course of action”.
So, let’s say a PC is trying to sneak past some guards. In D&D, you would probably actually plot your course across a map of the area, and roll vs. Notice for every guard. This is interesting for the rogue, maybe, but it’s not interesting for everybody else necessarily. Moreover, failing at stealth in this case all but guarantees a “fail” state of open combat. In Fate, what’s really important is that the rogue gets in there and opens the side door for the rest of the party. That’s a 2-part challenge where the rogue makes a Stealth check to get through the facility, and a Burglary check to open the lock. If these rolls are “failed”, the rogue has the option to succeed “at a cost”, which is somewhat up for debate. If he fails the Stealth roll, then his cost might be that one guy spotted him for like a second, and the whole castle now has the Aspect “Guards are on alert” to come back and haunt the party later. If he fails the Burglary roll, then the cost might be that guards actually do pour into that wing of the building because it took too long to open the door, only now it’s okay to have a fight because the party has reconvened.
The main thing that Aspects do, besides “being true”, is that you can invoke them for bonuses on your rolls. Any aspect that a character creates in the scene gets one free Invoke, and otherwise it costs a Fate Token (which is a renewable metagame currency). You can invoke any aspect that would plausibly assist an action, including inherent character aspects, Consequences (which are a type of long-lingering negative aspect that you get as a result of damage), or temporary situation aspects, such as “I’ve seen the blueprints to this building” or “knocked to the ground”
With regards to aspects “being true”, that sounds really vague on puprose. Like in fiction, a fact doesn’t really matter until it becomes interesting. A common example is something or somebody being On Fire. In D&D, this would probably mean that you’re taking damage every round and getting major distraction-type penalties. In Fate, the fact that you’re on fire is mostly a passive risk under the majority of rulesets. The GM has the option of playing hardball by “compelling” the aspect, where you get a Fate Token in exchange for being bound to an undesirable decision. This could either be requiring you to take the Moderate Consequence of “Bad burns on arm and shoulder”, or simply a promise stating that your only meaningful actions in this scene will be “trying to stop being on fire” for as long as you’re still burning. A player can resist this by immediately spending a Fate Token, instead. Another issue of being On Fire, though, is that it gives characters and the environment “permission” to take on actions of statuses that reflect that. Like, maybe throwing lamp oil on somebody isn’t immediately terrible usually, but throwing lamp oil on somebody who is On Fire constitutes a rather powerful attack. Maybe you don’t normally have the option of bringing down an entire building by kicking a support beam really hard, but it’s a different story if the building is On Fire.
It takes some getting used to, but it’s heavily modifiable and pretty good at simulating genre fiction. If you want a little more crunch to the system, look into the Atomic Robo RPG, which expands heavily on the rules for Stunts, which are roughly analogous to D&D feats, but otherwise you can get away with a lot by deciding that, within the plausible bounds of the setting, you just have permission to do something because of your aspects. So like, if it’s agreed that elves have low-light vision, then anybody with an Aspect related to being an elf is assumed to be able to do things that require low-light vision, such as reading or disarming a trap without a light source.
Anyway, the entire Fate SRD is up free on https://fate-srd.com/, which includes a bunch of the variant SRDs like Atomic Robo, and Sails Full of Stars, so you should check it out if that sounds interesting.
I’ve been wanting to get into a tabletop for a while, admittedly The Adventure Zone has made this jonesing more apparent. Unfortunately I live in a remote corner of Scotland, I know of nobody local who runs games and I have long distance travel anxiety. To that end how do people feel about virtual tabletops like Roll20?
As far as systems go I’ve been curious about Pathfinder (My first game I played was homebrew DnD 3.5 so it’s a bit familiar), Traveller (Space adventures sound like a lot of fun!) and Shadowrun, which I’ve been building a changeling character for in case I get the chance to play.
I’m used to playing RPGs over text chat but I’d love to play a game over voice chat, again TAZ has me loving the concept of vocally role playing interactions!
I’m not a huge fan of Roll20 but it definitely works. Online RP stuff is definitely doable, though I prefer text to voice because I am much better at text RP than vocal improv.
Traveller is, sadly, at its most fun when you’re making characters rather than playing it, for the most part.
I use Roll20 and like it. It isn’t perfect, with a lot of good stuff hidden behind a paywall but it is otherwise completely functional, and has a built in LFG function.
All of my tabletop has been with roll20. It’s perfectly serviceable for long-distance stuff with some nifty features, such as piping in youtube links to play as background music with it. And with Discord becoming the new hotness, it’s super simple to just make one for your group, decide on some times and dates and throw an @ at anyone who forgets.
Roll20 has been my (incredibly sporadic, recently defunct) group’s go-to ever since we got sick of MapTool and the complicated shenanigans to get a stable connection. It’s got a pretty solid feature set, though there’s definitely room for improvement. Added to that, a lot of people have made some really pretty good character sheets for a wide variety of systems (as well as some not-so-great character sheets filled with bloat and auto-calculation that does more harm than good) so there’s a lot less worrying about keeping track of physical sheets or losing your character sheet due to a technology failure.
As far as the systems you talked about, Pathfinder is okay (It’s good for what it is, but very crunchy and has a lot of power creep. Some people like that though, and there’s nothing wrong with that.), Traveller I have no experience with (It always seemed a little too hard sci-fi to me, but I never gave it the deep look it probably deserved), and Shadowrun I want to love, but really dislike because of its balance issues and the fact that I never did figure out how to make an effective character without hyper-specializing.
You don’t. Shadowrun is absolutely riddled with bad design choices and atavistic mechanics and subsystems that refuse to die.
If there’s interest in multiple threads for different tabletop RPG systems, would it make sense to have a Tabletop Games subforum?
I suggested one already, we’ll see if we get one.
Yeah, I figured as much just from playing with its character creation. Anarchy is supposedly better, but I couldn’t get anyone in my group to bite on that and seeing some people going over the rules it seemed a little too loose for me. I’ll have to give it another look later on. It’s a shame, I really like the idea of Shadowrun as a crunchy game, but if there’s such a thing as “elegant” crunch, it most certainly doesn’t hit that note.
Good idea for our own part of the forums for tabletops! Hopefully we will get it so we have a bigger space to huddle around and exchange war stories about games we played.
It’s already been hinted at by my misadventures of reading FATAL (don’t do this) I have the habit of reading tabletop books just for the hell of it. During one of my trips I stumbled on Pokemon tabletop called Pokemon Tabletop United. Me, being excited about possibly making Pokemon game with a Fairy-type gym full of buff dudes with cute little pink harbingers of death loaded it in and started to read it.
Holy mother of Pikachu, I don’t know if my dyslexia was kicking in high gear but it was so overly complicated I barely understand what it was trying to explain to me. Anyone who ran in to this game have the same problem?
Edit:
Whoops I think I doubled posted?
There has literally never been a good or coherent Pokemon-based RPG, with the possible exception of Monsters and Other Childish Things.
Elegance in design and mechanics is my white whale. Dread, mentioned upthread, is a great example, as are some other games like Ten Candles. The holy grail of a game mechanic to me is something that implicitly informs how you play the game, or intended tones, narratives, experiences and themes, without actually requiring an explicitly stated connection. A lot of games have elegant pieces like this, but finding a large game that completely nails every piece is like finding Bigfoot.
Edit: a short example from Vampire is that everything you do that costs Vitae/blood mana is by extension measured in human lives and violence against others, but is successfully disassociated enough to make people very casual about using it, reinforcing the intended slips into unwitting (or sociopathic) detachment from the effective cumulative death toll you rack up by existing.
Not that stops me from doing goofyass shit in vampire from time to time to lighten the mood.
Ruling is in. For now, no special subforum.
I suggest y’all just make threads for specific games you want to talk about, so that crosstalk doesn’t make conversations impossible to follow. WoD thread, Pathfinder thread, D&D thread. Hell, make an Exalted thread, though I couldn’t guess why you’d want to.
It’s hard to wrangle, because of a couple of factors:
If Pokemon are as powerful as they appear to be in the anime, then any player character is going to break the universe over his knee by the end of the first adventure by making weird power plays that nobody in the fiction would do.
Every trainer consists of a self-contained party with 6 NPCs. How do you make those NPCs actually interesting and keep them from just being a big menu of superpowers that lives on your belt?
2-A: How do you differentiate pokemon from each other without bogging the game down with 6 statsheets? How do you decide what happens when a pokemon interacts with a human? Do they have the same type of character sheet as humans?
It’s very difficult to find a balance there and have it still feel like Pokemon, especially if you are trying to portray the type of world that they have in the anime or manga, where Pokemon have humanlike intelligence and considerable superhuman powers.