Being Something Else: Tabletop Role-Playing Games

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I’m taking the mention of TTRPGs on the show today as my cue to finally make a TTRPG thread.

Who plays 'em? Whatcha been playing? Any fun role-play stories? Do you like playing a character or GMing more (or do you prefer GMless games)?

As for me, I’ve been playing TTRPGs actively since 2017. I dabbled a bit in DnD before that, but I didn’t get into ttrpgs until I learned about less systems-heavy games.

I have played a lot of Powered By The Apocalypse games, and probably will again in the future. Started with The Sprawl, which was the first campaign I DMed to its end. I’ve done a bit of Dungeon World, The Veil, Interstitial, and Masks as well. Weirdly, never played Apocalypse World. The PBTA system just works so well, I feel. The “failure, partial success, full success” system is wonderful and I try to keep the “fail forward” philosophy at heart no matter what I’m GMing.

I’ve also played a few Forged in the Dark games, mostly just Blades in The Dark. Extremely cool system that I would like to revisit with a bigger group. My group is on the smaller side, and we bumped into some friction with it. Mostly worked out great though.

The coolest ttrpg I’ve played, though not necessarily my favorite, is Troika!. I’ve never had quite the experience I did trying to GM Troika!. One of my players could understand how any item worked by eating it. Weird, original classes abound in that game. “Befouler of Ponds” might be my favorite.

Currently, I’m playing a campaign of Extracausal which is an interesting sort of system where everyone can be the DM and a player at the same time. In practice, that’s extremely hard to work with and we’re having trouble hitting a stride. We’ve recently switched to a more solid DM role that still has room for fluidity and that’s working well for us. So far, my biggest lesson from playing Extracausal is that it’s very easy to propose out-there X-Files style ideas, but actually playing them out is pretty difficult.

I think I’ve rambled enough to justify this as a thread. I want to hear from everybody else. What’s your ttrpg experience?

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I’ve been doing Mork Borg sessions every month or two and really love the atmosphere and flexibility.

I also live at the place where Gen Con is and have been working or volunteering with different organizations over that four-day event for the past few years. I found the sweet spot this year of volunteering two days and experiencing a bunch of stuff the other two days. I got to try out a bunch of cool stuff this year! Vampire: The Masquerade, a Pokemon/D&D Battle Royale Mash-up, play tested some in-development stuff with the creators…

I really enjoyed a new TTRPG called Shadow Scar from R. Talsorian Games. It’s created by the son of the creator of Cyberpunk, and it’s like multiversal Hitman with yokai. I really want to GM a local group for that eventually!

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I have a handful of stories from a lot of campaigns that were never finished; the two that I always remember most fondly are my “two wolves” of tabletop roleplay:

  • I spent a whole combat session climbing a tree for a sneak attack only to fail said sneak attack.
  • While roleplaying being intoxicated, I accidentally headbutted our table and nearly knocked myself out.

Most of my previous experience has been in DnD, but right now I’m playing Lancer with an online group and find it both fascinating and intimidating. Our GM probably gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten for gaming: HP is a resource like any other. We’re just getting started but it’s been a blast so far.

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I play DND a lot and have for a decade now basically. I prefer to DM in general but currently I’m playing a wizard in my friend’s campaign. That’s the primary TTRPG we play, but we’ve also run shorter campaigns in:

-Monster of the Week
-Starforged
-Marvel Multiverse RPG

The only one I didn’t really love was Starforged. It’s interesting, but the fact that it’s a collaborative role playing game and we played without a true GM made the experience a bit less for me. It’s harder to separate yourself from the world and become a character if you’re also building out the world as you RP. I like to have someone at the wheel even if that means they don’t get to be a PC, and as I said GM is my preference anyway.

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I have loved tabletop RPGs since I was a kid. I would stare, starry-eyed, at the Dungeons and Dragons manuals at the mall, but I didn’t have anyone to play with until I went to college. In my first year, I joined a Buffy TTRPG which was a lot of fun. The GM and his best friend moved, and the next semester we cobbled together another group to play second edition D&D. That fizzled after a semester, but not before getting a girlfriend from it.

I would play D&D off and on until graduate school, when I fell in with a group of graduate students and staff who were playing Trails of Cthulhu. We did Masks of Nyarlothep, which was one of my most memorable runs. I played a naval captain who was well-put together but slowly losing it. Our culminating moment was going to an eldritch cult base under the deserts of western Australia, infiltrating it, and getting split up by the enemy. A couple of PCs were captured and tried to mislead the cultists from the inside. My captain, with a loose hold on reality, set up booby traps and, before he could effect a rescue, wandered into a time portal and was never seen again. The traps went off, blowing up both the enemy and the captured PCs; a fourth PC got back to our fuel truck and was driving away as the desert collapsed behind him. I was hooked.

Since then, I’ve played in several kinds of games:

  • Savage Worlds, esp. base system, Eberron, The Sixth Gun, and Necessary Evil
  • Diaspora and Starblazer Adventures, which were my first introduction to FATE and led me to Fate Core
  • Apocalypse World, which led me to a few other Powered by the Apocalypse games like Monster of the Week
  • Pathfinder 1e and 2e
  • Dungeons and Dragons 5e
  • Runequest (one of our regular GMs is a big classic Chaosium fan, and his rendition of this game is the stuff of legend)
  • Shadowrun
  • Paranoia (really good with players who are friends and not power gamers, given its inherently competitive nature)
  • Tekumel: Empire of the Petal Throne

I’ve probably done a number of other systems in one-shot, like BESM. I’m currently between games - my regular Pathfinder game (going through the Reign of Winter Adventure Path) is on hiatus for very good life reasons, and I’ve tabled running my next game until after I move.

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I’m the forever GM for my friends – lately, I’ve realized horror is really what I do best and am most gung-ho about, so I’ve primarily been GMing Kutulu.

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It’s a Lovecraftian TTRPG in the vein of Call of Cthulhu, but a lot more rules-light, and crucially, it handles insanity in a far more interesting manner. In Call of Cthulhu, the players have a sanity meter that drains, and as it does, they must roleplay being less and less sane. Being stressed; speaking in tongues; making irrational decisions; et cetera. In Kutulu, on the other hand… insanity is entirely on the GM side.

In Kutulu, the GM is an unreliable narrator. She tells you not what happens, but what you perceive. Of course, what you perceive may not match reality – especially if you aren’t ready to process the deepest of inconceivable cosmic realities. And it only makes sense, doesn’t it? Insanity isn’t irrationality – from an “insane” person’s perspective (using this in the pulp sense here), they’re only acting rationally based on how they perceive reality to be. Thus, by acting on the information the GM offers, the player characters appear insane to the world around them. As is often the case in Lovecraftian fiction, however… “insane” people are often the most sane of them all – what sets them apart is that they perceive more of reality. The less “sane” you are, the more truly accurate your perception of reality’s various guises is.

It’s a Swedish RPG, though has a Japanese version that is far more popular. I spoke to the creator recently, and apparently an English version is coming!!!

(I’d love to tell y’all about the adventures I’ve been GMing sometime – one I wrote myself, and one incredibly effective one-on-one adventure I translated from Japanese!)

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I play in a Pathfinder 2e game and run various one shots from time to time. I’ve run Mothership, a Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel or two, some small 5e campaigns, Viking Death Squad, Shadowdark, Call of Cthulhum and maybe some other stuff. Something about TTRPGs has felt deeply unsatisfying to me, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. I think it may have to do with boxing myself in too much, and being unsatisfied with the level of imagination I have been able to summon in running my own games.

I’m trying to get away from the more generic stuff while still being accessible to the wide variety of players I have. I’m thinking of trying a Dragonsbane session modeled off Scavengers Reign since I know that game has strong camping and skill mechanics. What’s with the Swedes making dope ttrpgs?

I didn’t really like the sanity mechanic in Call, either. I’m definitely going to look into Kutulu for my next pulp game. My players liked the aesthetic of Call.

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Do you all ever play published adventures? I never thought we would, but with time constraints and everything that’s been easier lately. I’ve run multiple fully homebrew DND campaigns and they were very satisfying experiences, but I also ran Critcal Role: Call of the Netherdeep in 5e over a year and a half or so. The current campaign is the older adventure Out of the Abyss, and I think it’s cool but I really don’t care for the survival aspects and our DM has pretty much given up on using them anyway.

When we’re finished with Out of the Abyss, I’m getting back behind the screen to run Vecna: Eve of Ruin. I’m sure some day I will get back to homebrew, but I actually do have a lot of fun running the published adventures and putting my own spin on them where I can.

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I haven’t played since high school (which in me years is … a very long time ago) but I sometimes study the books to try and learn something or other about game design and world building. I was really into the Vampire The Masquerade books in college (never actually played it).

The most recent one I’ve read was the Alien RPG core book, which seems like it’d make for a rather limited range of experiences, but had some food for thought about resource scarcity and stress/panic mechanics in RPGs.

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About to GM my first game of Star Trek Adventures 2e on Friday night! Haven’t done a proper GM thing in maybe 4 years now so I’m pretty nervous, but I feel pretty prepared and I have a lot of trust in my table that we’re all learning together. Modiphius’ 2d20 system is also incredibly flexible and scaleable in terms of things one needs to know to play, and then the layers of rules that supplement that.

Other than that I’ve been playing DnD 5e for about 7 years now. My GM’s kicked off our third campaign together and I’m in a group of seven players he’s gonna have to wrangle. He’s taking it easy on himself though, and for the first time in our games together, he’s running Lost Mine of Phandelver instead of building out the whole thing from scratch. It’s been interesting seeing how he’s adapting his style to the book and vice versa.

I also love reading and sometimes running indie TTRPGS with unconventional rules or really quick setup. Apollo 47, Lasers & Feelings, and The Quiet Year are standouts I’ve come across in the past year.

I’m hoping to get a session of Stoke-Birmingham 0-0 going one day. 15 minutes of flat conversation and awkward silences as you sit at the pub? In game form?

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Played a game once that used The Quiet Year to do some world building before we got started proper. It kinda worked; it’s a good idea anyway.

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I’ve been on both sides of the table, and which I prefer honestly depends on my mood at the time. I do always end up getting character ideas when I’m the one behind the DM/GM screen, though, so on balance I think I prefer to be a player

I’m currently in a weekly Pathfinder 1st Edition game, set in an old friend’s homebrew Dungeons & Dragons setting that he’s been running since the 90s and loosely based on Paizo’s Kingmaker Adventure Path

I’m playing a drow wizard/psion, whose magic taps into cosmic power sources (such as Entropy) instead of the traditional wizard schools, one of my favorite aspects of the GM’s setting. Last time I played in one of his games, when we were all in college, my previous character actually ultimately became the deity of this new kind of magic (that campaign lasted ~10 years and ended with us having the opportunity to ascend), and I could not resist the amusement of worshiping “myself” in this new game

While my new character began the campaign as a rather devout worshiper (with unrealized childhood dreams of being a priestess herself), she’s recently had a rather direct falling out with her goddess while still having sworn to complete her deity-given quest. It’s been quite an interesting experience, seeing the GM take the reins of a somewhat different version of a character I played some ~15 years ago, and using that as a springboard for conflict: I quite intentionally based my new characters interpretations of her faith more on the version of the character I played in the past, rather than the one that exists in the setting now, many in-world decades later

On the GMing side of things, I haven’t run anything in a few years, but I have a feeling once this campaign is over (which, given our track record, could still be years from now!) I’ll have the itch to crack open the metaphorical book of my own setting and run a new game myself

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