I GM'd all SR editions (except for 6e, blegh) for over 20 years total, and let me sum it up for you real quick: To GM Shadowrun good you need to have GMd Shadowrun for 20 years before you even started, so you know which rules to keep and which to ignore at any given moment of play, otherwise just take a brick and eat it. Eat. The. Fucking. Brick. No fork and knife, just chew on it. Until you're done. When you're done with that, you achieved the inner feeling of what it is to GM Shadowrun goodly.
I understand the SR e5 rules... except of magic... and hacking... but it's a really great system for doing stealthy and really tactical style games where open combat is something you want to avoid. Also it can be really hard on the GM with how complicated some things can get so it depends how confident your GM is in their abilities.
Felt more like he was striking at a sore spot like friends are wont to do. I know I love bringing up FATE with a friend who absolutely hates FATE. Which is only slightly less amusing than bringing up owlbears with a friend who absolutely hates owlbears.
@@godofzombi Oh I see someone else has hit the brick wall that is Phoenix Command. My playgroup tried it ONCE. Both it and Aftermath are...like...woof...if Sim RPGs are your thing, god on you but seriously my group gave up after 2 hours of Phoenix Command and decided to do something else.
As someone who enjoys the Shadowrun world, I will be the first to admit that I'd poke someone about it being a good game just because teasing people is fun... but I wholely understand why people might be put off; it's a hard system to wrap your head around, mixing magic and technology is not easy (and the spells that work on tech make that known), and its a system that you either marry or kill it (No [kissing] with this one, sorry). And I'll be the first to say the lore is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
I'm not a big fan of mods. Sure, if the mod is only there to add content that goes right with the intended design of the game, why not. More spells in skyrim doesn't hurt (that's like homebrew subclasses for 5e). But once you're trying to mod skyrim into a sci-fi survival alien hunting game, i have a question : why aren't you playing a sci-fi survival alien hunting game instead ? It's going to be more stable, more fleshed out, and probably better. There are, for me, 2 valid answers : - You enjoy modding your game and messing with it. It's a creative hobby, but you are aware that what you are playing with is suboptimal and you don't care - You are modding your game to scratch an itch that currently doesn't exist on the market.
FWIW to other folks watching this: you can *absolutely* run Blades in the Dark without caring about the calendar or, really, anything outside the district and factions you decide to get started with. I’ve run it for years and no idea what the hours are called.
On the very page describing the clock. "If you want to keep things simple for the game group, you can refer to time in a standard 12-hour clock method, “3 a.m.” or “6 p.m.” Use the special hour names when you’re feeling fancy."
I dunno, this stuff about Blades in the Dark's lore...it's like saying you need to memorize the monster manual or you have to know EVERYTHING about Waterdeep.
"You don't know what a system is good at until you play it" is such a good idiom. There is so much value in trying a different system for a specific genre or game you have in mind; either you find a great system that does the things you want for your adventure, or you add new cool ways of thinking about the game to your current table. There's no downsides. Grab some friends and bust out that game someone's been dying to play!
I’d recommend Call of Cthulhu if you want to run horror. One of its really cool systems it has is chases where basically you have to run away but the GM will place obstacles in your path and it ends up usually like a movie style chase scene.
I kinda want a short "Shadowrant" on all the things they screw up as a system, entirely set in the seat of a rigger's van, with the punchline being that the rigger literally has never seen the city because he's stuck in the car. Edit: Which in retrospect is a fitting allegory brings up the critical issues of the compartmentalized design and sheer mass of knowledge necessary to know how anything is going to go down in the game without the GM prompting "That's good, that's bad, you can do something here" every 5 minutes.
Blades in the Dark (or its system called Forged in the Dark used to generate several spin offs) is amazing at what it does. It puts fiction forward but the dense lore of Duskvall can be drawn upon or forgotten about as much or as little as the story dictates. I've had some great sessions where lore barely came up. I think many D&D players forget how engrained D&D lore is for them. As a new D&D player (years back) it was a LOT to catch up on and learn. Also for those still reading, Mouse Guard (and associated system Burning Wheel) is also fantastic!
It's not that bad if played right. 6ed is a hard pill to swallow, much like 4e for DND. It's just so different. The 6e story has gone to complete shit. 1-5e had amazing world build but 6e is really bad.
@@Ashtor1337 It is kinda shit, to be quite honest. They seemingly invent a new way to make me scratch my head and wonder what the hell they were thinking with every new edition. I love Shadowrun's setting, but yeah, the rules are difficult to deal with as written. I haven't played any edition but 2e, but there's a good reason for that. That edition does some things well, like sourcing and acquiring gear, most of the shooting rules are cool and make sense, and I like the initiative pass system as well. Glitches are cool as are most "fail forward" rules. But mages are hilariously, absurdly broken, to the point where I must assume the writers were extremely biased.
As someone who has played Shadowrun before, I'll give this description: Three major aspects of the game are fighting, hacking, and magic. If you have a brute, a hacker, and a shaman in one party they are basically all playing different games as far as the systems are concerned.
I played Shadowrun with no one having any hacking/cyberspace ability; it was adorable. We kept intercepting drug mules, and I kept fencing a shoe box worth of product and the rest of my unit was not happy I didn't give them any the money. I pointed out everyone could have done the same.
Anytime I dig into Shadowrun, from the mechanics to the setting, all of it shouts to me one thing - The story doesn't matter, it's just "Meet the John, Dungeon Delve for McGuffin that turns you against the John, rinse and repeat." So I'm just like... I'll just play 5e in a cyberpunk setting.
@@DigiMatt52 that sounds more like a problem with your GM than Shadowrun itself. There are a ton of different types of missions you can do that don't revolve around "get mcguffin, get betrayed". Hell, the SR3 companion book tells you how to run campaigns where you aren't even shadowrunners.
Forged in the Dark is one of those systems that gets easier and makes more sense once you start actually playing it. I've had a fantastic time running Scum & Villainy (space opera version of Blades in the Dark).
this is why I love the starter boxes more RPGs are making now. It lets players know its just a "test" they aren't 'signing up for a campaign', and it comes usually with a good adventure that either highlights what the game is going for, or if its not is a good indication that the writers didn't really know what they were going for.
I saw Dungeon Dudes play Monsters of the Week on their channel, and I realize that even with the same players, their play style and acting was totally different. So I think a big thing with running other systems is not only the GM's issues, but having players willing to focus on that kind of play as well
Funny enough, the end where you say "maybe you'll become a shadowrun group" inspired me to say "fuck it, I'll give it a go." We are now a shadowrun group.
Zee, I think one of your stumbling blocks is that youre trying to do it all on your own as the storyteller. Blades is meant to only have the storyteller manage the NPCs and clocks, the narrative is supposed to come from every member at the table agreeing an idea sounds good. So throw out the lore except what people like. Use that. Let them make shit up. In other news, you should be trying Call of Cthulhu, its probably the most adaptable system out there for any given setting.
I'd say the ghosts, the weird death people who deal with bodies, and the class inequality are the three major parts of the setting, even the demon blood isn't too integral, mostly just a way of adding some pressure onto the crew that can't just run away
That sounds like you need a very dedicated group, who's all very into the specific game, setting, and system. I'm not saying that's impossible (or even difficult among a group who already identifies as pnp players) to find, but you may have to be more selective of your players due to the niche nature of the game. Some people who just like playing in the same group with you regularly might not fit as well in particular games. It can be hard to say no to your friends, if they don't know to say no to themselves on games they won't enjoy anyway.
I've played BitD, and our group did fine without referencing the specific names of the hours or any of the calendar system at all. A lot of that is possible to abstract as simply "a week later" or "late at night", and it still works fine. The districts are a bit more important, but it comes with a handy cheatsheet, and how many of the plot hooks for each one are in motion in a way that affects the players is mostly up to the GM.
On the one hand, play what you know. There was a heist-like story arc in a D&D campaign where the DM included a similar flashback system and it worked quite well. Far better than recreating our characters in a different system for a few sessions. On the other hand, know your system's limits. There comes a point where you've removed every class except fighter and rogue, chucked out the spell list and the monster manual and started trying to model modern technology in D&D. Eventually it's easier to learn something new than to delude yourself into thinking it's the same system just because you still roll 1d20 to attack.
I actually really like the the Blades in the Dark system. It's possibly the best easy to start RPG I've ever played because, unlike D&D, it's not that rules dependent. D&D has all sorts of statements which invite rules lawyers, whereas Blades pretty much directs all rules questions towards the narrative. Does being able to channel the entire power of the city electrical grid through your hand make sense? It does? Okay, you do it. Blades is definitely my favorite RPG to bring in somebody who is new to TTRPGs, but also down for some grim steampunk crime-doing.
I'm publishing a Powered by the Apocalypse game currently, and here's my two cents on D&D (which I love and have professionally GM'ed for years): 1) It's a far more limited system than most people think. When you talk about Blades in the Dark not being "setting neutral" - that's entirely true of D&D as well. You're just used to its parameters. 2) D&D is a war strategy game, and is structured like a war strategy game. So I think the question, when you want to explore other systems, isn't "What genre do I want this game to be?", it's "Why am I playing this game?" For D&D, the answer is "because I want to win big cool strategic battles". If you play D&D because you like collaboratively telling stories with your friends, consider playing a Powered by the Apocalypse game instead. If it's because you want to experience emotional catharsis with your friends, consider a No Dice No Masters game. D&D CAN do those things - but if you want it to do those things REALLY WELL, the GM is going to have to do backflips to make that happen. And that's neither fair nor should it be expected! Like seeing people dipping their toes in other RPGs. Hopefully we'll see more of that in the future!
Lancer! It's a good mech system - the crunch is in the tactics, not figuring out how to build a working mech, and the lore, while sometimes gritty, is overall about a hopeful future
I will say that I *have* switched systems on a game I was running midway through from D&D to a system that more mechanically supported the kind of story I was trying to tell and it turned out to be the best thing I ever did for that game.
The danger with running other systems is that sometimes half of your table refuses to continue in the new system, and the other half refuses to go back.
@@runelea8920 That's the new systems, especially Shadowrun 6. I still play a lot of Shadowrun 4. Edition and it is one of my favorite games! My group also really likes it. Some eveb way more than DnD
Shadowrun, has 1 objectively good rule, It's conceptually great, but mechanically tedious. That rule, is the 5th edition rule on blasts and explosions in a confined space, AKA, the Chunky Salsa rule. I include a homebrew version of it in any game I run, regardless of engine. "I didn't ask how big the room was, I said I cast fireball" "you sure about that?"
@@UnNuclear Best rules, except for the way that blasts in shadowrun work by counting down damage by distance from the source, AND walls having health. It's very realistic, but it's tedious to do. If you wanna test out that deadlyness in D&D here's how I homebrew it. be aware, it's a bit extreme, and also makes large creatures easier to kill. I do it with fixed-damage or fixed-dice across the whole blast template, and say "the listed damage is what each 5x5 space takes", and when it hits a wall, the shape of the blast just folds back over,again and again until you stop hitting walls. Creatures and objects then take the amount of damage for every 5x5 space all at once, Per 5x5 space occupied. applying DR per 5x5 space occupied. so a creature that takes up a 10x10 space, with DR20 vs fire, gets hit with fireball (8d6), and the fireball blast folds over once, such that all 4 tiles the creature occupies, each has 2 blast tiles on it. each tile occupied is thus taking 8d6+8d6, that is going into DR20, and this is happening 4 times, once for every tile occupied (8x 8d6 into dr 80,). DR applies per space occupied, Not per instance of blast reflection. Certain spells should not reflect because of what their effects are, and I have not worked out how to have a blast deal with an opening. a 15x15 room with a doorway in the middle of 1 wall, with no door, and someone standing just outside that doorway, and a 30ft radius spell going off in the room, The person in the doorway should be realistically taking more damage than someone in the corners of that room, because path of least resistance, buuuut I don't know how to account for that. And as a side note, I also replaced AC with DR, and AC to hit is just size/dex/magic. equipment is exclusively DR. And in D&D I almost exclusively play 3.5x, because 4E put such a bad taste in my mouth I didn't even trust trying 5E. Oh yeah, and warcoats from iron kingdom / warmachine, because extra armor that can be worn on top of armor, is kind of necessary when the damage can go this high.
Don't let Zee's anecdotal experience turn you off of trying new games! There are now more resources for playing new and simpler games than ever before. More players who haven't even played D&D at all, but have been playing RPGs for years now.
I loved the fact that your character is smarter and better prepared than you are: You chose and spend the equipment as you solve situations. A bit as if your money magically turns into goods as you need them. Ofc, there are some limits, ie: you have to be "heavily equipped" to be able to use a lot of stuff. The more you "carry", the more like a warrior in a mission you look like, aka: not very stealthy.
I've always wanted to include a "flashback" mechanic in 5e to replicate that feeling. After all: the players are getting their information from the DM. They're going to skip over many minor details and such that a person in that situation would notice, or at least better take note of its importance. I feel that the flashback lets them get the feel of having planned ahead, without the actual planning, and ignoring the thousands of small things that get left unsaid or unnoticed by the DM or the players.
I ran BitD for the first time, having never played it before, and it was a dream to run. I loved it so much and so did my players. Great game. Sorry your experience was the exact opposite of ours.
I think you might be trying to run Blades like a DnD dm, when it's based on the Apocalypse MC. The MC doesn't actually need to know all the setting stuff, you can do a lot of asking the players what it's like, what they see, and they are kinda in charge of their rival and friend npcs and even what their gear actually is. In the beginning you just pick a few of the gangs and one district, so you dont need to know much about the other districts besides the single page, which you have on hand. The creater specifically has a problem with the line "the DM knows everything" that dnd has, so you are supposed to work togeather with the other players to decide things rather than have some huge book of lore and maps and tables. Even the thing about ghosts powering the city doesnt need to be touched if you are just strong arming a couple gangs, and if it is, it's usually one or two players bringing their own playbook things.
I think Blades is probably a great system for a group where most have DMd a bit and/or are very keen on improv. _However_ , for a lot of players too much agency over the lore breaks verisimilitude. To them, if you don't have an answer of what the world is "really" like (or you can at least pretend that you had one) it makes the world feel fake. They don't _want_ to be part-time improvising dms, they want you to tell them what's 'real', ie what's in the book so that they can make informed decisions and play off of that. The book does have some good information in it, but it could probably have spent a few pages to make a few scores that are more than a concept blurb so that new DMs could run through a session or two and not have to worry about which parts of the lore were important while they get comfortable with the system. The 'opening situation' is the closest there is but it doesn't actually provide you with much of anything beyond setting up the playing field.
@@havcola6983 tell the players to accept that there are different kinds of games and playstyles demanding that every piece of lore be set in stone is like demanding that every video game be a 'sim' game with no double jumping. Sometimes you're in the mood for a hardcore sim (even a 'fantasy' sim like blacksmith sim or Recettear) and sometimes you want something with a different style
This comment needs to be higher. The only important detail that you cant make up or alter to suit your needs on the fly is that the players cannot skip town easily. boom that's it. if you want to make up your own gangs or decide that the lamp blacks are actually a gang from six towers district and not from crowsfoot it really doesn't matter. weve had amazing moments where we realized that someone's marked enemy on the sheet was the person we just met simply because the game has them as an enemy option on the char sheet and calls them out as a gangs second in command but weve also had times where established roll play ment my Nyryx and another players Nyryx must be different people with the same name. Its not constraint its opportunity.
Feckin RIGHT?! "Blades has really dense lore" Mate I installed D&D Beyond for a one shot while our Powered by the Apocalypse GM was ill for covid, it's like its written in patois. Had to Google every other word , every critter had numbers associated with it and apparently I was naked cos armour is a whole process? D&D isn't worth the cognitive burden to me. I had fun, but that was cos of the people and us being peak bullshit mongers
This is why, in the last 18-24 months, I made it my intentional goal to sample (ideally play but sometimes just read) a bunch of different RPGs. That included D&D (including Pathfinder and Pugmire), Genesys, Tails of Equestria and Magical Kitties Save the Day (Hey, I have a 6-year-old daughter), Alien, Dark Heresy, Numenera, Cortex Prime, Active Exploits, Dungeon World, and Archipelago. I managed to play at least at one-shot for about half of those and read the other half. Cortex is far and away the "winner" of that experiment. I used to be be of the mindset that "good roleplay is system agnostic". It's technically true but I didn't realize until this experiment just how much a system can facilitate or hinder a style of play.
You can run a great Blades campaign so long as your primary setting is a steampunk city full of ghosts. You don't need to be a master of Doskvol lore. The sourcebook may have tons of detail, but it's best to treat that lore like a recipe book: you only have to make one dish at a time for your players. (Raiding a haunted mansion. Winning a high stakes balloon race. Driving a rival gang out of town. Etc.) There's no need to serve up every single recipe in the book for one session!
I'm gonna reiterate what I've seen at least two other people in the comments say, and point out that the lore and storytelling is *not* all on the GM to handle. I say this as a Blades GM of some experience, having run two successful campaigns, plus an introductory one-shot before those, and I'm also working on my own setting hack. Above all else, Blades is a system that emphasizes *Collaborative Storytelling* . As an example, I never really worked out for myself my own personal lore for Tycheros, which is left *incredibly* vague in the corebook. If I have players who roll Tycherosi characters, what the mysterious island nation is like is *entirely* up to them. One campaign, Tycheros was not elaborated on much, as the lone Tycherosi character was born in Duskwall, but the sequel campaign had a character who *was* from Tycheros, and had developed a pathological hatred of demons and those who consort with them because of his formative years there. The players' Crew starts at Tier 0. The highest Faction Tier they really need to be aware of at campaign start is, like, Tier II factions? Maybe a smattering of knowledge about some Tier III factions, and the Bluecoats of course. Not all of the lore is relevant to every campaign. Maybe the crew wants to run a mundane crime family story, in which case they probably won't give a shit about the Dimmer Sisters. Maybe another crew wants to go full-bore occult and summon an avatar of a Forgotten God. In *that* case, they likely won't interact much with the Dockers, or the Ink Rakes. Blades is what *you* , as a group, make of it, not just the GM. And the system *is* setting neutral, it was designed to be easily hacked and dropped into any setting with a minimum of work. Scum & Villainy is a Forged in the Dark game inspired by, depending on the ship type you pick, Star Wars, Firefly, and Cowboy Bebop. Band of Blades is a dark fantasy military fiction setting with some *very* interesting additional mechanics around running the group's Company while also playing boots on the ground. There's even at least *two* different Shadowrun hacks, for people who adore the setting but hate the system!
Collorary: Everyone, regardless of what system they're running, should read the Player and GM Best Practices chapters of the Blades corebook. Quite frankly, D&D instills some pretty unhealthy and counter-intuitive habits regarding storytelling, participation, GM use of Rule Zero, and who's responsible for making things fun when not actively in combat.
Fully agree with all of this. It's true that the setting *is* embedded into the systems, but its perfectly painless to just ignore the things you and your players aren't interested in. I also don't think knowing the hours and months is at all necessary to run a game, after all how many DMs know the Faerûn calendar? As for knowing what's going on in each district, that's mostly for the GM to read *between* sessions, the game is explicitly designed to help the players direct the action once everyone's around the table together.
Right, totally agree. I think people from a mainly D&D background get confused when most of your book isn't fiddly rules you wont use anyway (jokes, don't @ me). I love Blades a whoooole lot tho. You don't need to remember most of the lore, and its no more or less dense than a D&D setting. If anything having a rundown of "Here's some people in the city that might be important." is nothing I wouldn't expect of a Waterdeep supplement or something. I pay money for these things, I don't need a book with a prefab system like the Apocalypse World system telling me "As far as setting or characters...........eh. Just do your own."
YES. Everything here YES. Blades in the Dark is when you tell you players "NO...YOU tell me the story, and I'll make sure its fair and interesting". It was a good system for my group; they had just started to get heavily into RP stuff, yet were still chaotic enough to want to run their own criminal organization. Incentivizing RP with mechanical bonuses (you wont earn the cool stuff unless you focus on your Playbook's skills, and show how their backstory actually impacts them!) dangles the carrot of rewards in front of the players to lead them down the road of Good Roleplaying. I also love how the book describes its setup/initial moments like a cop show; makes it easier to wrap around my head, plus it's kinda cool to think about the game that way.
The group I’m part of found that you don’t really need all the details of calendars and such for Blades in the Dark. The ghost stuff is woven in deep as is the social darkness of lots of gangs and corrupt cops, but otherwise names of groups and fine details can shift without much issues. At least in our experience
"What system doesn't have finicky combat?" Might I suggest Blades in the Dark? It's got a neat system of the player, through a single roll, determining the outcome of not only their character, but also the NPC they're fighting. Also, narrative flow instead of an initiative helps to create a more fluid and story driven combat. Again, for less finicky combat I suggest Blades in the Dark.
My D&D group was running a heist-centric 5e campaign for a year or so before I stumbled onto Blades in the Dark and ran everyone through a trial game. We were able to just kind of keep everyone's character mostly the same - like, not ability-for-ability, but broad strokes. I disagree that the setting is integral to the system - there are a *few* ghost-specific playbooks, but it's not a huge reach to reskin them as generic magic, or even remove magic from your campaign altogether & make Attune a generic "intuition" skill. The beauty of the system (imo) is that it encourages you to just free-form describe what your character is doing first, and then negotiate the mechanics with the GM afterwards.
Having played a fair bit of Blades in the Dark at this point I think it's pretty great and intuitive once you get your head around it. I like that the players can pick the skill they want to use to solve problems, and this often stems directly from describing an action. I've also run the starting adventure for some people as well. Alot of the extra lore stuff like times and months aren't really necessary and you only ever really need to actually know about 3 -5 factions tops (which don't have to be the ones in the book) to really make the city feel alive. Generally alot of the fun is working with the conflicting gangs, working with some or trying to play them against each other. It probably helps that I love the setting, best described with the sentence: Corrupt Victorian age city powered by demon blood. Yes that is excessively edgy but I love it. Also if there is any part from this game to take to other systems it is the clocks to track stuff, very good as a consequence or to mark progress towards long term stuff. Something about paying in stress and getting traumatised by exceeding the limit hits surprisingly close to home but is definitely cathartic as low life criminals just scraping by doing whatever that your crew does. In short, fun system that needs WAY less prep than dnd (at least as far as I've found). We'll worth a go for a session or two, really lean into the trauma.
Solid advice. An enormous part about improving as a DM/GM was recognizing that the system is only there to support the kind of story you want to tell, but certain systems are better for those story genres. I'll gladly use 5e for tales of cinematic high adventure, but will use a highly hacked/modified version of World of Darkness for a Ravenloft game.
You can play whatever you want in any system you want. Don't let other people dictate how you want to have fun. That being said, its extremely frustrating when you want to play something different and your friends solution to that is to Frankenstein Pathfinder, instead of trying a new system you wanted to try and not necessarily make a campaign out of it. Of course if thats what they want to do, thats what they want to do, but I can never find anyone that wants to play the things I want to play unless they are some form of D20 system (Dnd 5e, Pathfinder (1e/2e), Starfinder). Heck, I even brought up Mutants and Masterminds, which is a form of D20 system I'd be willing to give a try, but its different enough from the normal D20 formula that everyone I brought it up to turned their noses up at it.
Not to be rude, but in these scenarios are you offering to run a game in a new system or are you asking your friend to run a new system you can play in? Because if it's the latter, you have to acknowledge the time commitment of learning to run a new system. As a player, I am always down to try a new system but as a GM, I have 3 I know and feel comfortable with and I am just not going to take the time to learn a new one solely because my players are looking for some novelty
I am starting to realize I am not the average player. I will literally try any system at least once. I just love playing. I don't actually care what the system is, except 4E, I hate that rubbish pile. Now, there are systems I prefer, and systems I that are not as fun, but ultimately, if someone says they want to DM a new game I am always down as long as I have the time.
The only thing you absolutely have to have is some kind of “ghost field,” because certain player abilities interact with it. Every other detail of the setting can be modified or replaced at will, just like with any other RPG.
In prepping for a Blades in the Dark campaign, here's both a strength and weakness. The HEIST aspect of the game is extremely well fleshed out and has everything you need. This is how the game can be concise and contained in one book. However, the book asks you to "put forth a haunted setting" and puts forth all these haunted elements with short descriptions. Then it adds a magical character class (whisperer) and a supernatural gang type (cult) to embed these aspects into the game. But it does not give you the tools to properly run a horror game or one with supernatural forces. Most people seem to discard the vast majority of the supernatural elements and run this simply as a heist game... but I am going to run the original idea. This IS challenging prepping for this.
That makes me sad to hear, and also makes me wish they made versions that a) Allow players to run a setting-agnostic version of the heist stuff b) Run the actual "haunted setting" with the supernatural stuff in the base setting.
The PCs are scoundrels. There are many ways to make coin in the game. You aren't limited. You are free to create the Duskvol you want. I wouldn't plan a campaign. Instead use broad brush strokes to begin. Allow your player's interactions with the world to add flesh to the bones. Whether that flesh is decayed or healthy is up to the GM's creativity. You can nudge descriptions and consequences towards the flavour of game you want. But let it come from the players. Jared Logan's Haunted City game on the Glass Cannon Network is a fantastic example of a heavily supernatural BitD game.
The setting lore for Forgotten Realms, the "default" setting for D&D, is more dense and even less comprehensible than Blades in the Dark. You just don't notice because you ignore it as you see fit, and guess what? You can do the same thing for Blades.
DnD isn't really pitched as a pure sandbox game and while the lore is much more massive most of it isn't concentrated to within a few blocks and a single moment in time. Part of the premise of the system is that the players are presented with an adventure, which gives you a filter during prep of which things are irrelevant. If you decide to run an adventure in Homlet you know you can ignore 99% of Forgotten Realms lore simply because there's no feasible way the players could interact with that stuff in the next session. By comparison if your gang sets up in Brightstone every single thing elaborated on in the setting is still within a few miles and are supposedly just a few in-game choices away from being plot-relevant.
@@havcola6983 If you're running an adventure in Hommlet you can safely ignore 100% of the Forgotten Realms lore because Hommlet is from the Greyhawk setting, lmfao
@@havcola6983 What Blades is giving the table at that point is a sense of place. While you placed Homlet in the wrong world setting, it is 100% "Generic Pseudo-Medieval Town" for ye olde generic fantasy RPG. There is NOTHING special about it that can't be replaced by a decent GM completely on the fly. On the flip side, there's nothing memorable about it except the memories most of us have playing with our friends in place for the first time. I bet most can't name much about the setting at all, because it's intentionally not important to the function. Blades in the Dark is a setting. Forged in the Dark is the SYSTEM. All of the FitD games use the dice mechanics and playbook/character functions in a similar way, but they also place the adventures in a specific place. This is to jump start the action. It's not sandbox, and never claims it.
I recently started writing rules for my own system, but learning about Blades in the Dark taught me that I only really know D&D 5e, and I should learn other systems before I write my own 5e spinoff.
You should also look at games like Shadowrun or the White Wolf games. While not perfect, I think any designer should be aware of the dice pool concept and see how it works in game.
I think what a lot of people get annoyed at is that D&D is already massively popular as a TTRPG, to the point it is synonymous with the medium. Its just a way of saying "Give other RPGs a shot please.", it is healthy for TTRPGs that other systems and publishers get support are successful. Also many GMs have wanted to try new cool systems at their table, only to be rejected cause it is not D&D. It feels like a refusal to learn new things.
I do believe that part of the reluctance to learn new systems is down to people who have only played D&D and D&D derivates like Pathfinder expect those games to be of a similar level of complexity, where as D&D really is one of the more complex games on the market, and the vast majority of RPGs are far far easier to learn. Heck, I would argue that just learning a new class in D&D is more work than learning most other RPGs. There are exceptions of course, other rules heavy RPGs do exist. Like Shadowrun, A Time of War and so on. And some RPGs do require you to learn a new way of thinking when playing RPGs, like the 2D20 system or FATE, but for the most part learning a new RPG is far easier than most people who are just playing D&D seem to imagine.
@@wititorac Not what i said, i mean supporting RPGs other than D&D should be encouraged because variety is good at the market and at the moment D&D has over 50% of the pie. I play D&D a lot myself and i like it lmao.
I really think this is arc of all of table top. Get invited into the scene arguably I started on WW. Though we played a lot of 3.5 . I moved a way and while I was setting up in a new place Pathfinder became the new D&D. Found a new group. We started to bust out into other systems after a while. Then 5th ed hit. It has been a few years. The simplicity of 5E has branched into a lot of extra books. We have all seen where the glaring mechanic problems are. That friend we picked up few a few years is comfortable in trying something new, or something new to them. Maybe one of your friends *really* wants to DM a one off with a book he picked up (I am always that guy). Hell, make system mash ups *A LOT* of 5th ed is pretty compatible with 2nd Ed. I use pathfinder all the time in dnd. Most of the time it is only one mechanic. That doesn't mean it can't be more. That is the cycle of the TTRPG goes... D&D does an Edition we all play the hell out of it. We look at other stuff as it comes our way. D&D puts out a new edition we play for years... TTRPG is not subtractive in that just since there is a new edition we stop playing older editions, can't try new stuff, or go back to stuff.
It doesn't help that DnD is kind of bad and plays more like a board game than an rpg. it's kind of like enjoying all sorts of good meals, and then you go out and literally everyone you know eats exclusively sauerkraut for breakfast lunch, and dinner and refuses to try literally anything else.
Shadowrun is indeed a flaming trainwreck -- with a great setting -- in almost every edition. I played 2 campaigns with a GM who loved it, but we had to play 2nd edition and he basically told us not to pick a mage (adepts were fine). I had already known him a long time so I trusted his judgment. When I later played Shadowrun with a different group that had a dwarf mage, I completely understood why he banned them. Some spells, like spirit summoning, are so incredibly vague that they can basically do anything (Accident power comes to mind). It's also a huge sticking point in the narrative (mages are supposed to be extremely rare, and yet wizard gangs somehow exist)
I was so sad, you brought up the Song of Ice and Fire RPG, everyone in the group said it sounded awesome, but I was the only person who read the books (TTRPG, or novels), but I managed to get everyone together for what turned out to be 3 Session 0's while we made the house, their characters, I got a story all planned based on all of it, then the day of session 1, everyone was like, "nah actually, I don't want to even like watch a few episodes of the show". I cried. But... I learned much about DND groups then.
My group has played a handful of TTRPG systems, but we keep coming back to Pathfinder. At this point we're so well versed in the mechanics of that system that we can get a better game by customizing Pathfinder's rules to get what we need for each setting than trying to learn a new system and spending the first 5 games fumbling through new mechanics. I still love trying out TTRPG systems I haven't played before, but if my group wants to actually play a story, we've discovered that we're much better off sticking with what we know and making it work.
My group prefers Pathfinder too over DnD 5e and even Pathfinder 2.0. Much more character options and the complexity adds more realism. Characters feel more powerful too. It's also nice that everything is free and open source and can quickly google things.
@@brockwidmann9210 agreed. I also like how Pathfinder uses templates and is so consistent with it's rules and wording. That's the thing that makes it so customize able compared to other systems IMO. I watch a lot of Rookzer0's youtube channel, and he's always talking about talking about customizing your game to get what you want, usually using Pathfinder as reference and example of how to do it.
@@brockwidmann9210 Ya, no idea, no one will play it with me yet, so I can only speculate. It's all supposed to be backwards compatible to some extent though, just like P1 was supposed to be mostly backwards compatible with 3.5, so maybe? and maybe we don't have to wait if we can figure that out? There are a lot of features of P2 that I really like, and it's definitely friendlier to new players than P1, soooo.....Possibly?
@@DaveTpletsch I played it once as a player in the adventure module paizo made. It was ok, I like certain things like background, some of the new skills, how cantrips work, the feat system and ancestry was cool. There just not enough of it for character optimization and customization. The characters in general did feel more nerfed and a lot of things felt very tightly described so as to be so balanced it did feel like a lot of options were removed compared to P1. I think if they get the same number of splat books and third party content it could become very good.
I've actually started running/learning a new system after 5 years of being a 5e dm for a good many years! Mutants & Masterminds is the name, and while it's core rulebooks and settings are in Modern day worlds, it's HIGHLY flexible enough that you can reasonably put it into any setting and make any character with any kinda power/skillset appropriate for them with minimal effort
i think the "smugness" comes from people feeling vindicated that the DnD centrism causes issues. DnD players often have that "oh? Greek restaurant? So its like McDonalds, but like different lore? tbh i find the names confusing, they should add in some fries, also why doesn't this have a drive through?" vibe.
My group has found that a lot of the lore minutiae in Blades (like the weird hours and days) can just be ignored. It’s your table, read the book then if you don’t remember a lore piece make something up.
I've played in and run a few homebrew Blades in the Dark campaigns (admittedly mine was just one session) with custom settings, and it works pretty well! I had this grand high fantasy city in the clouds run by a wizard-ocracy, and first session I just ran over everyone's character sheets and if we ran into something entrenched in the lore, we just talked about what that REALLY meant for their character. Admittedly, it's just replacing all the lore baggage in the system by spinning your own lore wholecloth, but that may be easier for some DM's. And for the record, I adore Shadowrun's character creation system, the only problem is that it makes characters for the Shadowrun system.
I’ve run Monster of the Week for a few family members, several of whom don’t really play rpgs, and it was a lot of fun. They got surprisingly really into the roleplay, with my two cousins in particular going really extra with it (one was a Flake who really played up the conspiracy obsession and the other was an Initiate who played a hilarious caricature of a valley girl who accidentally joined a sect instead of a sorority), and the more stripped down, improv focused system facilitated that. It’s also pretty simple to create the story for your mystery, since it lets you set up a barebones framework with bystanders, locations and minions, then fill in the blanks from there via making shit up. I ended up creating a story about a pack of wendigos attacking ski resort town, and the hunters were able to identify the threat faster than expected because the Initiate had a move that let her use magic to investigate, but I managed to, on the spot, flavor it as her re-living the suppressed memories of an attack survivor I have to say, though, I don’t think it’s really suited for long term campaigns, more for short term and one shots, since what a given character can do is limited, even at later levels, so unless your group is super into the interpersonal stuff of their characters, they could lose their luster after a while.
My main hangup with other systems is that I'm not the only one who has to learn it. My group, and I say this with nothing but love, are are stupid. I have to teach myself and all of them the new rules.
For me it's opportunity cost. I know for a fact if we play 5e we will have, at a minimum, a pretty good time. And maybe if we play another system we could have an even better time! But that's a really BIG maybe, and we don't get to play often, and I'm not sure it's worth that risk.
@@davetronred11 The opportunity cost is much lower than you think. I have played quite a few RPGs, and I was raised on D&D and its licensed properties, and I will say that 5e is worse than almost all of them. That is not to say that you cannot have fun playing 5e, of course, but it makes it more difficult than you would imagine. D&D is a game that has been slowly pulled in various directions over the years and now it resembles a tangled mess of yarn. It's not that I am biased against combat heavy games, it's that 5e does that, but poorly.
One of my favorite games to read but not actually play is "Feng Shui". It's designed to run on Rule of Cool, with fast paced combat. The biggest problem for me, is the fact that the initiative system in combat is a PITA. Basically a round of combat is split into multiple "Shots". The number of shots per round changes based on the highest initiative roll of anyone in the combat. Usually in the 15-23 shot range. Then, individual actions cost differing amount of shots, like a standard attack (Punch, shoot, magic blast) costs 3 shots, which moves you down the shot tracker. So say, your assassin acts on shot 19, and shoots, they act again on shot 16. This, in the few games I played, means that it feels like waiting for your ticket # to be called at a deli counter. "Alright, now letting Shot #16 act. Who here is acting on shot 16?" Every time this little extra bit of bookkeeping has bogged down the experience for me. Granted that might be an implementation thing, and as DM I might just take it upon myself to keep track of that stuff myself. It's a big problem given that the system is more or less designed to go from Fight to Fight to Fight. The other issue I have is that the characters are all based on movie archetypes. The Hitman. The Adventurous Archeologist. The Kung-Fu Sensei. The Everyman. This is fine in concept but the problem is that you can _only_ really pick from these archetypes, modify the skills on one to fit the flavor of your idea, or have to do a lot of heavy lifting to homebrew one. The first edition was especially bad about this since the attack and defense stats were by default, the same. You could not mechanically make a glass cannon character. That said I loved the lore of the setting, which was set up for epic time travel adventures across multiple genres from Wuxia to Wild West to Modern Gun Fu settings. I particularly love how the Future setting changes between editions, and how the group that controls both the 1850's and Modern settings have tons of political tension within themselves due to the time difference (They _know_ from the future zone that they lose control at some point and are terrified by that) and the fact they is an inherent classism baked into the structure. There are I also love how each of the skills not only had the utility of the actual skill but also knowledge and contacts related tot eh skill, letting characters help move the plot along. For example, a gambler might not only be just good at cards, they can also know where to find the local bookie, or be able to talk in depth about the casino where the macguffin's being kept. I do like how characters are designed to either start out strong in a fight and get weaker (The Hitman gets increased damage during the final fight of an adventure and the Sensei gets weaker attacks every time they take a hit) or get stronger under certain circumstances (the Archeologist gets a bonus when fighting over historical artifacts or sites , and the Everyman gets to replenish luck die mid-fight and gets a bonus to using improvised weaponry). Overall I love to read the book, and If I made a TRPG I would include that skill flexibility thing. In fact I love reading differnt TRPG books just to see their solutions to challenges. Some do it kind of clunky (Even after making at least 5 shadowrun characters I cannot tell you how hacking or magic work), but ultimately I think they all have unique insights to their challenges.
My big thing with people who say "Stop running D&D!" is I have two groups I have been running in 5e for years. I love them, I love the game, and we all know what the game is, what we like about it, how it works, etc. I have spent a lot of time and effort learning the ins and outs of 5e, to the point where I could give you a fairly accurate answer about many of the obscure rules, spell descriptions, etc. without looking it up. And that's something I really enjoy about running 5e-I can run it with little to no issue, because I've invested so much time in it. Stopping or interrupting a campaign I'm in just to start a new campaign that the players may not even like-that I may not even like-after having to learn all the rules, how they work, and everything else is fucking hard. It's not an easy thing to do. I know this system, I like this system, I don't have time to learn an entirely new system and have possibly 0 pay off in the end.
Hey, nothing wrong with one-shots. I can't really play a dedicated campaign, so thats how I roll. Gives your players the chance to experiment without devoting themselves to a whole new world.
Honestly Blades in the Dark has become my favorite game system. It gives soooo much creative freedom to the players and I don’t feel like it took too much of me as a DM. For DND 3.5 I feel like I spend 2-3 hours a week prepping a 4 hour session. For Blades in the Dark I spend maybe 40 minutes prepping. In my opinion, it takes less prep because it allows the players to solve problems in a way that makes sense to them, not in a way that makes sense to me. Just my two cents.
If you have a group that's keen to pick up the slack and actually engage as the part-dms the system expects it seems great. If your group is reactive rather than proactive, though, DnD is the easier game to run.
I've been playing in a Dresden Files group for a couple years now. We like it a lot, but I think what we mainly like is our group, which is small, and super tight-knit. We're also all really attached to our characters at this point. It's a good game for people who REALLY want to get 'into' their characters, and have a lot of imagination. It is NOT a 'beer and pretzels' game where you shut your brain down and kill monsters. I think one of the reasons for D&D's popularity is that it CAN swing either way. It's not GREAT for heavy role-play, I would say? But it does ALLOW it, without REQUIRING it. And it's certainly good for 'kill monsters, loot dungeon'. Anyway, no system is perfect for everything, and sometimes you want to stick with what you know.
@@faeriesin1424 Honestly, I don't think D&D is all that great as a 'generic' system, even, just that it is OKAY at MOST things MOST people play RPGs for. It's "good enough". And I actually think there are systems out there that do the job better. (Personally, whenever it's my choice I roll Savage Worlds.) But yes, if you have a group of people who are SUPER into role play and / or narrative, Hillfolk is great--but the combat system reads like something you don't ever want to use. If you want a game FOCUSED on investigation, the Gumshoe games are literally made for it.
I'm always for using systems for stuff they weren't inherently designed for just to run with an idea without having to worry about teaching everyone a new system. A couple months ago I got the idea for a one shot where the players were a cyberpunky corporate security team. I could have run it in a system that is specifically designed for something like that (shadowrun/ cyberpunk etc.) but my players and me don't know those systems, and I wanted them to focus on the fun stuff, not on learning how things work. So instead I ran it in mutants and masterminds, the system that is designed to make you play with superheroes. We've played a whole campaign in that before so we knew it well enough. I tweaked some rules, added some custom ones for special toys/abilities they had, and in order to not have them be too powerful and to specilise on particular roles in the team I've limited their hero level to 5 (Normal baseline is 10). I also banned teleportation abilities. I had a blast (and so far as I know my players did too), we knew the system so the game was focused on roleplay and the players knew how to do various actions without having to slow eveyrthing down. Because everyone had specific roles and the system supported that kind of specialisation everyone had a moment to shine. And most importantly, because we could just run through it no problem the oneshot ACTUALLY ended in one game, I was so pleased with that. It was also a very fun and education experience for me to create custom rules and tools for the game, in order to make the players "behave" in the way I kinda wanted them to. I created a whole one page breach mechanic in order to incentivise them ambushing enemies and it worked great.
I've attempted to run heists, murder mysteries and wilderness survival in 5e. It was always hard work and not the most satisfying. When I finally tried other systems, it was night and day. Blades in the Dark makes the heist run so much smoother and being a narrative game, you simply cannot have this in 5e which is just too mechanics heavy and there are so many spells to ban. GUMSHOE has been amazing to see how different they make clues. No more throwing in a million different clues because the Players will likely roll and fail to meet an arbitrary DC to learn an insight. Instead its automatic and the focus is making connections and actually solving the mystery. Its designed so all Characters will share the spotlight. And Ryuutama is built around that travel and wilderness survival. It has simple and easy to use mechanics for carry weight rather than tracking every pound. It is built around creating cool roleplay moments and has a fun and cute spell system. My favorite, is that it is designed to have roles for Players so everyone is working together rather than someone like a Ranger hogging the spotlight and Goodberry immediately ruining survival.
I feel like you have a very shallow reading of Cyberpunk and Shadowrun there though. Shadowrun is organised around trying to create a world with a particular kind of magic/cassette futurism vibe, Cyberpunk is a noirish game based around a system where half the classes aren't even combat related (this is a game with rockstar, journalist, talky man and corporate suit as genuine class options) and said combat is best engaged with tentatively and smartly lest it instantly murderise you. If you just want to reskin something as cyberpunk homebrew works fine, but those games mechanics are designed around making games with feels that you can't simply replicate in a sytem not designed for it, they organically push players into certain playstyles with their mechanics while a game like M&M is often pushing in a different direction. .
@@Miycu I feel like you're talking about something completely different. My main point was that the benefit of reskinning a game to fit a different setting or style is easier on most people because it doesn't force others to buy new books and learn a whole new ruleset. Yeah I could have used shadowrun or cyberpunk, I could have forced my players to learn a whole new system for a one shot, gone through all the effort of learning how to organise encounters (both combat and non-combat) within it myself, and I wouldn't have to reskin things as much. But if I wanted to do that we wouldn't have played the game, I would be left in the limbo of "getting ready for it" and my players wouldn't know how to play. You want as few barriers as possible for both your own work as a gm and the effort needed from the players. If we wanted to play a whole campaign in the setting, fuck yeah I'd use a system designed for it rather than reskin. But for a one shot, or even just a couple of sessions that's not something one can reasonably expect. Also having run a campaign of shadowrun (5e), the combat system in that game is only "murdery" if you let it. Creating characters that completely break it is actually shockingly easy and it's one of the many reasons I eventually stopped using the system.
@@dylanba5251 Gumshoe is really excellent, Esoterrorists uses the same system and its fuckin brilliant not having to watch players pick up and rub everything to try and get clues to come out.
Firstly: If you want system suggestions check out matt and Amy Vorpals video! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6XKqco4ZwUQ.html I've got a lot more to say and I animated some of it here: (THIS IS A MUCH BETTER VIDEO ABOUT BLADES) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-OeDTUAdGXSQ.html **I loved blades in the dark** ANYWAY thanks for watching!
Blades, or by extension, Forged in the Dark, *is* setting neutral. That was one of the goals going in for John Harper. Its so easily *hackable* , all you need is a couple short campaigns of experience as a GM, if even, and a solid setting idea. Its also under a Creative Commons license, so its really easy to self-publish settings. Personally, I'm picking away at a Frostpunk-inspired post-post-apocalypse setting, but with magic, and ancient artefacts sealed away like nuclear waste, and a divide between the long-settled Heartlands and the ever-expanding Frontier.
The Roll20 tools for Blades in the Dark are fantastic. The playbook sheets for characters and crews make it really easy to track things, and to keep your whole little gang updated as they grow and change.
my 3.5 group ran into some issue why back when because of trying to use setting specific content(3.5 had a fair bit of it in supplimentals) in a homebrew setting. too much payoff, not enough of the inbuilt drawbacks innate to the setting it was peeled from. setting specific content is great, it just needs its context in the minds of everyone ESPECIALLY the gm.
God, I feel the Shadowrun comments. Shadowrun is without a doubt the most fun I've ever had playing a TTRPG, but I completely agree that the rules are insane. Hence why I can't get any of my friends to lay a finger on it :') Great video as always!
if you want a ttrpg that uses the cyberpunk/shadowrun esque world with simple to understand rules than "The Sprawl" is great. Not telling anyone this is the 'premiere' way to run this world, but it puts a lot of power into the players and dm's hands, and can create some amazing storytelling if you want to take it that direction.
It's this very attitude (it's easier to just default to D&D rather than figuring out a new system that may fit better) that contributes to the market being so difficult for games not named Dungeons and Dragons, and was in fact actually *weaponized* by Wizards of the Coast with the Open Game License. Their CEO is on record as acknowledging that allowing literally *anyone* to make their own game derived from the core 3.5 ruleset was designed to choke out all other competing systems by making the OGL rules so ubiquitous that everyone just finds it easier to play that rather than try out, like, Ars Magica or Mutant City Blues, and to just flood store shelves with OGL content to reduce brand recognition of non-D&D products. This is why, even today, most people who aren't already heavily invested in the hobby have only ever heard of D&D, is because WotC used some underhanded marketing to prevent other brands from matching their level of prominence.
You're right about the effect of the attitude, but that doesn't make the attitude any less true. Only with the best of groups have I been able to keep everybody on board through the friction of changing systems. And with a hobby where it can be this hard to get a group together?
@@octorokpie Hey, I get it, the struggle is real. My hard drive is packed with obscure PDFs that I've never gotten to play. There's no easy fix, sadly, just kinda the way things are.
Also, those aren't reasons not to try. If people don't try to branch out because they assume it's hard, they'll never get that game they want in a different state. There are now more resources for playing new games than ever before. More players who haven't even played D&D at all, but have been playing RPGs for years now. If you're on fb, check out the group "I'm begging you to play another RPG"
I'm prepping it right now and from the base-text, it does expect you to know a lot in order to run a fluent game. Sure, you can make up your own districts, detailed factions and npcs but that's just as much work as memorising what's in the book. I'm comparing it to D&D 5e here and as far as accessibility is concerned (from the gm perspective), the hurdle is much larger. That said, I love the ideas behind the system, so I'm still gonna try.
@@Rosmarus_Odobenus The thing is you don't need to have every single district laid out in your head before you begin. You could run several sessions just using basic setting conceits and the short blurbs on Crow's Foot and maybe one other district. The setting details can add texture but you can just have, "the museum is holding an exhibition for a rare and valuable painting. How will you all try to steal it? Also surprise the painting is haunted."
I’ve had a lot of fun playing a couple 1-shot games: Dread and The Quiet Year. Dread is played with a Jenna tower, and is perfect for Halloween. The Quiet Year is a collaborative map-building game, where all the players play a single community throughout a single year, building out the world. 100% worth playing both
I've run a variety of game systems and settings over the last 17 years, and the biggest thing to remember about roleplaying games is they are there for you and your group to get together and tell a story. The content of that story is malleable, based on what the group wants. I've slogged my way through systems like Cyberpunk (2020 and red now), Shadowrun and Gurps. I can tell you that no rule system is going to be perfect. As a game runner, I have found my players react best when we go over the rules ahead of time. Anything we don't like, we discuss and adjust to match our playstyle. Murder mysteries in D&D, political intrigue in Shadowrun, Rom Coms in World of Darkness; it's all possible even if not strictly intended. tl;dr, Do what you love and don't let other people tell you it's wrong. Play to have fun, that's why we call it 'play'.
I'm so glad you mentioned lancer, even if it was in passing. One of my favorite parts of tabletops is the character building, and Lancer knocks it out of the park.
Systems are just tools for the experience you want your table to have. If your table is satisfied with the tools you’re using, and the mechanics match the vibe you’re going for, what’s the issue? At the same time, though, it sometimes is tempting to try and hand someone a wrench when you see them going at a bolt with a hammer.
I felt that shadowrun comment in my soul. Love the setting. The rules however has a massive problem with favoring mages (not magic, mages, adepts that’s don’t augment themselves kind of fall) over everything else. And then there’s the matrix.
Worst character I've ever had the pleasure of GMing for in Shadowrun was a shapeshifter adept. Don't know if the latest editions support that, but shapeshifter adepts completely break the game because anything short of deadly damage gets regenerated quickly and they get as many actions per turn as a really cybered up street samurai (Shapeshifters are now banned at my table)
@@AFnord For me it was a shaman that used spirits for everything. Spirits scale stupid and I can't punish them for using them without hard punishing the other magic players that weren't a problem (living community woes). It got so bad that at one point the shaman just decided to send spirits halfway across the city to assist with the run and didn't bother to show up outside of the meet.
@@ralanr7 What edition had the stupidly overpowered shamans? Shapeshifters was a 3rd edition thing, more specifically from the Shadowrun Companion sourcebook (which I think is a must have if you play 3rd, it makes character creation so much more interesting)
My Old DnD group has started running a SciFi system called Traveler. It has a background roling mechanic like the house thing you discribed. The whole first session was us rolling characters, and it had some very memorable moments. I'd recommend it to anyone.
As somebody who runs Shadowrun 5th edition, I think it gets a lot more flak than it deserves. I think the biggest issue is situational modifiers. The way I dealt with this as a GM, was to propose a bunch of hypothetical situations, and then attempt to determine the situational modifiers for them. Not to actually memorize how to do it, but to get a sense for what situational modifiers look like in given situations, and then become able to guess what the situational modifier is to within a handful of dice simply by feel. This *significantly* streamlines the process, as well as running players through a mock skill roll to help explain how to use their gear and any powers they have to make the most of their situation. In doing that, I also have them jot down somewhere their dicepool, with a couple of bonuses listed for quick reference. When a character is shooting somebody with a pistol, I can ask "What's your pistols dicepool?" "Are you using your smartlink?" and finally, "firing mode?" Three simple questions is all I need, and once the number is first determined, they can repeat it whenever they need to. When rules do need to be referenced, I have a set of 9 folders with different sets of cheat sheets for things, and after flipping through maybe 4 pages, I have the rule I need. If I need information on a specific set of gear, I have a chummer installation hooked up to a full set of PDFs for the Shadowrun 5th edition sourcebooks, so I can search the gear and instantly tap a button and I have the description, full stat block, and if I'm lucky a lovely picture to show players. As for managing dicepools for NPCs, all you need to do is get a good idea for how many dice a person has for something. There's a lovely panel in one of the books that vaguely describes what a given rating in a skill represents, for example 6 means "professional," with a brief description of what that means. With a quick estimation of attributes, followed by what I believe their level of expertise would be, I can generate a rough dicepool for a character with no stats at all in a matter of seconds. I also think people completely discount the advantages of Shadowrun as a system, specifically the fact that well-made Shadowrun characters tend to just make sense. Shadowrun characters are consistent, and tend to be able to do what you would expect them to, at a level of consistency that makes sense, simply because of the larger number of dice used than in most other systems leading to less statistical variation. Because of this, you can plan on things working, without it being entirely a coin toss when it comes down to it, but still having a plan B if you do make an error. I also think people should talk more about the interesting character creation system, and how Shadowrun allows you to gain mechanical benefit for what would simply be a cosmetic description in another game, or you can actually hinder your character for extra karma by taking negative qualities. Basically, Shadowrun is the butt of everybody's jokes for a reason: if you try to use it straight out of the books you will crash and burn. But given a great deal of experience, the system has unprecedented ability to give a true sense of urgency, lethality, and security.
I think I agree with this post, but it also kinda just boils down to "People. Just read the book. This isn't D&D where you can just jump in and flail on through. If you take the time to read what makes this system great and what it's advantages are, it really is a better system for people who like skill consistency and great customization." I also agree with Zee. Sometimes the amount of granular rules can really wear down and bog down some people's experience when really, the granular rules are not all going to be used all the time every game. Swimming speed, treading water, free falling, and other minute things might not show up at all unless it is planned as part of the GM's mission.
I think one of the big disconnects between the group that wants to hack D&D versus the people who encourage trying other RPGs is how they view learning new systems. To generalize a bit, I think the first group views it as work, while the other views it as play. So when I reccomend (say) Torchbearer to my friend who wants to do a super gritty dungeon crawling campaign in 5E, I think I'm showing him a cool new thing he gets to read, while he sees it as a homework assignment. Part of this is because of 5E's stranglehold on the RPG market. The hardest part of learning games like Monster of the Week or Blades isn't learning the rules, but *un*learning what 5E teaches, because 5E is actually fairly complicated for most people's first entry into the hobby.
This, the unlearning thing! When my group first tried to play PbtA it was a big struggle to understand. the collaborative world-building, the agency of everyone at the table having a creative voice, but it was a rich experience that was great fun, even if we were still in 'D&D mode,' that helped break that mode a bit to better play later back in D&D and other games.
In some cases they also don't realize that learning the new system would have been less work than hacking D&D. Especially nowadays with how many systems on the lighter side have been created in the last few years
I CANNOT agree with this enough. I've kinda grown lukewarm with 5e for the kinds of games i want to run. Not because I think it's bad, or generic fantasy is bad; but more because I want something new and fresh and different. So I ended up playing a bunch of different games like Song of Fire and Ice, Call of Cthulhu, the WH40k RPGs, and so on. All of these systems have something about them I really really like, and I keep pitching the idea to my friends in one group to try it out, but 5/6 of them are pretty stuck in the "only D&D 5e all the time" mindset, for a variety of reasons. So what I've done is incorporated rules from those systems into 5e to get them to see what it's like, and they're cool with it. But then as soon as I say "well if you like that, you may like this other system I'd run after this campaign" and they still only want 5e.
I remember my first DnD group spending hours on character creation, and trying to wrap my head around the game's analogue mechanics. Five years later I can now make a 5e character sheet in two minutes, but I struggle entering new systems despite really wanting to try out more. I think when people start their first TTRPG, which will most likely be DnD 5e, their also trying to unlearn everything they relied on in Video Games which calculate numbers for them in the blink of an eye. It's like switching systems in it's own way.
I'd say it goes beyond "This guy might see it as work" and into the realm of "I am thinking about running this new system but that means convincing four other people to play this which means asking them to learn a new system which might also mean asking them to buy a copy of an untested system unless we're all going to share a book or rely on pirated copies of the rules before they invest the time and effort into it." Weighed against that, it's easy to see where a lot of people go back to "Ok, so this will be 5e but set in the 1800s western frontier..."
bitd for me is the "one" for heists and the like, especially the flashback tokens, love them so that players can get creative without alerting the whole graveyard because they just aggro everyone and die whenever the plan fails
funny enough it's a mechanic that can be imported to other games such as dnd fairly easily. And it works great too, you just have to find a sort of currency or counterpart that will determine the frequency of use.
@@chronic6428 The advice on using Clocks should be in every TTRPG when you something you want to convey to your Players. This gives them a system to know they are making progress or their enemies are making progress.
I feel you there, Zee, especially on the Shadowrun front. Which is precisely why I'm going to be a sadist right now: ... ...Chunky Salsa Rule, 10ft x 30ft corridor, 25Lbs of C4! *go*!
Blades in the Dark was fun - and we didn't have any of the problems you mentioned; but lemme add that Fate of Cthulhu was hours of our group literally laughing out loud, despite it being a Cthulhu game.
I think reading blades in the dark cover to cover is a mistake, or at least, maybe a misinterpretation of what the system is. The system specially wants the GM not to get caught up in endless prep and the party to stop overplanning in the actual game. This is why it places systems there, as Zee realised, to cut down on it. However, where he talked about it being mandatory in the setting, it really isn't. For example: the clock system page (iirc) even lists that an AM/PM system could just as easily be used. For blades my recommendation is this: read the starter rules, along with all the playbooks (basically classes). Don't be bothered with what happens in between heists and just run one, make it up yourself and make up a TON of stuff during the session. Be careful: take notes on what you ran because the players will love it and want to play again.
Currently in the middle of a blades in the dark campaign and my dm is great in that he knows when to focus on being life accurate and when to just wing it cause none of the players really care about what the months are called or whatever
Coming to Blades from more traditional systems can be really difficult - because it needs you to scrap basically all preconceptions about how an RPG is meant to be sequenced. I read the rulebook several times and ran two campaigns and I *still* didn't get how a lot of the systems were meant to fit together. Until I ran a Dungeon World one-shot with zero prep where everyone in the group collaborated to make up the world. It was like a lightbulb went off above everyone's heads, and when we went back to Blades everything ran *smooth like butter*. Blades hardly functions unless you have a collaborative table where everyone is comfortable taking charge of the setting to tell a story and roll with the punches. Also once you're past that point, the idea of adhering to a "canon" of the book is quickly thrown out. Also I think the game actually does a pretty good job of setting a narrow scope for the world at the start, as the crew starts entwined with three other factions and you're sorta meant to slowly branch out from that. It's by far my favourite RPG system at the moment, but it's definitely not for everybody. If you have a really bad case of D&D brain you may need to undergo a lobotomy for Blades to run straight.
Also, once you've got the steam up and running with Blades - there's much less to keep track of than in any game of D&D. You'll never have to track HP for monsters, or initiative order, or enemy equipment, or spell lists, or tactical positioning... you just decide if a scene is going to be controlled or desperate and how effective the players' approach is gonna be. That's it. That's all you do all day.
I ran Blades in the Dark after having previously run Dungeon World, and I had trouble with it, but I think it was because rolls in those two games tend to work the opposite way of each other. In DW, you just roll (when a move is triggered) and then you have a result, and you just need to figure what you'll do with it from there. In BitD, you figure out the Effect and Position of a roll, and then you need to decide if you'll Push or accept a Devil's Bargain (which is more like what you'd do after a DW roll), then you roll and the action is done, you don't make any decisions after that.
Would def reccomend Monster of the Week, it's pretty easy to pick up and play with, really most of the game is investigating the monster, finding weaknesses, setting a trap, and hoping it doesn't wipe out your measly seven HP in 2-3HP attacks between character moments and a good number of character concepts (rather than classes you get playbooks like the chosen one, the crooked, the monstrous, the spell slinger, and many more that you can flavor to your content) to tinker with. also the little silver play button shrine is 18/10
I've run a ton of one-shots and a couple six-month-plus campaigns in Blades, and honestly, I just don't worry too much about The Lore for the one-shots, and found gradually introducing deeper lore elements as the game goes on is helpful. Nothing too subtle, just once the players are comfortable, talk about the Imperial Calendar. I found that frequent reminders of the fact the setting is always night, and the eeriness of plasm-powered lights helps a lot. Not to mention food. Lots of eels and fungi, is the Duskwall diet.
Yeah, when we played Blades we found it super easy to completely jettison 'the lore' and run it in our own fantasy vaguely proto-industrial, poorly lit, grimy city. it's much less tied to it's lore that it appears - it's the vibes that are integral
I’ve recently played the game "Heart: the city beneath" and I would highly recommend it to people who like weird fantasy and horror type stuff. The rules are simple and even though it is setting specific, the nature of the setting gives you a lot of freedom. If I had to sum it up I would describe it as a mix of darkest dungeon, roadside picnic and perdido street station.
