Xanathar's Guide to Cleavin' a Goblin Clean in Twain (feat. D&D)

King of Posters
686

I haven’t had much interest in solo play games before, but Thousand Year Old Vampire crossed my radar, and I was taken aback by how engrossing I found it. The vampire you make and follow is equal parts terrible and tragic; time slips past abruptly and strands you in eras and situations you’re not sure how to deal with, and your memory is constantly degrading and losing details and periods of your life. If any of you have played it, I’d love to hear about your experiences.

While looking into this, I noticed I have a huge list of physical games from that humble racial justice bundle as well, so now I’m curious about any other solo-play games you’ve enjoyed. Do you have any recommendations?

6 Likes
687

aaaaa that looks so cool
i want a physical copy

1 Like
688

I haven’t played this but I really find it interesting. Sort of an introspective LARP for one?

2 Likes
689

I never get into solo rpgs but here’s a few I’ve tracked down on itchio

2 Likes
690

This just showed up in my Twitter feed. I’m intrigued

2 Likes
691

One of my DMs, the one who ran a Genesys game, then current, a Stars Without Number game, is considering trying Shadowrun (5e) again. He swore never again, after 3e, but, nevertheless, here we are.

His primary reason is that in both Genesys and Stars Without Number, we the players pretty rapidly became way too powerful to balance against:

Yeah it’s poorly edited, and it’s fucking ridiculous in a lot of it’s rules, but it gets something right that has out and out fucked me on my subsequent games I try to run: Balance and power curves.

See, in SR5, everyone’s just a person shooting a gun or casting spells that don’t scale. They don’t actually get stronger. So that means that the curve of power is “Yes, you get marginally better at shoot gun over time, but you never become the GOD of gun.” WHICH HAS BEEN AN ISSUE IN GENESYS AND STARS WITHOUT NUMBER.

Combat in both of those systems, in order to maintain challenge in combat, must quickly become a fucking slog of enemies because if you try to throw smaller groups of equal power units, it doesn’t work. Players have so many tricks up their sleeves and are so strong they can take on entire squads. The only dangerous level is level 1.

So anyway I’m reading the Shadowrun 5e rule book again

Though Stars Without Number’s been pretty fun, it has been a cakewalk. One of us can control multiple goons, which you can recruit, so he’s just been collecting the most powerful people we encounter. I’m a warrior-class so I can deal crazy damage, reroll misses, don’t need to reload, etc, so almost everything dies immediately. Another player is all melee and is essentially unkillable in his defense. The last is a psionic which is probably the most vulnerable.

Real hard to balance any encounter with that level of player strenght.

2 Likes
692

Shadowrun 5e is vastly worse than 3e in every conceivable way. It has only gotten more obtuse and complex. 4e isn’t…good but it did streamline a bunch of stuff relative to 3e, but 5e really cranks up the bad mechanics to a degree that boggles the mind.

1 Like
693

You know if you just want a solid super trad system Savage Worlds is pretty ok? Like it’s way more trad than I’m necessarily looking for in a game, but it’s at least straightforward easy to understand and while it looks like it’s easy to max out the power level it’s kind of hard to actually be invincible in it?

Lotta people like Fate. It’s not my favorite but as a more ‘indie narrative’ generic game it’s pretty straightforward and does it’s job.

Ditto with Cortex+

Like is there a specific genre or theme your group wants to play? there’s almost certainly a Powered by the Apocalypse or Powered by the Dark game that handles it tolerably well too.

But you can definitely do better than Shadowrun 5e. So much better.

3 Likes
695

It’ll be cyberpunk with guns and vehicles, certainly.

We’ve tried PoA before and just didn’t like the feel of it, outside of roleplay.

I’ll check out Savage Worlds, Fate, and Cortex+.

696

Sounds like y’all want a crunchy tactical combat thing, but if what you want is this cyberpunkiness and an emphasis on the shadowrun-as-crimeheist, you could run Blades in the Dark and just use the SR setting.

I love Shadowrun more than almost any other fictional property but I don’t think any version of its rules have ever been acceptable for actually playing with other human beings, really.

3 Likes
697

This is why I’m recomending savage worlds. It’s not the most detailed but it’s sorta crunchy and has some interesting positioning and combat mechanics that might work ok.

1 Like
698

Wild suggestion but there is a film noir tabletop rpg based on the One Roll Engine and it fuckin rules.

It’s called a Dirty World. I can hook you up with a pdf if you want

3 Likes
699

I knew I was forgetting an ORE game!

1 Like
700

ORE is like the perfect engine for “I want something crunchy but where the math actually works” so its my go to for this kind of scenario. Stolze, the designer, has always just stayed right around the middle of the trad/indie split so his games tend to feel appealing to both crowds for different but compatible reasons.

2 Likes
701

I happened across a Solomon Kane adventure book for Savage Worlds and what I could glean about the system made it sound like something I could get into.

My big plan when I’m doing in person shit again is to run it under the Wendy’s RPG rules after it’s prebuilt adventure module (do people still say that?) without explaining to my players what’s going on.

1 Like
702

So I finally got my English PDF for Brancalonia, the Italian-low-fantasy setting for D&D 5e.

I kinda really like it! It has a lot of fun optional rules, many of which serve to maintain a sense of levity. Example: Brawls, which are non-lethal fights that are designed to be more comedic than serious. Different classes have access to different brawl abilities and that’s a lot of fun.

Character progression with the included classes is meant to go to level 6, after which in lieu leveling up you start unlocking what are essentially prestige feats.

Part of the core of the rulebook is underlining that you and your compatriots are not heroes but just a sort of group of lazy dirtbags who occasionally risk their lives for coin. Which I suppose is totally a thing you could do with vanilla D&D but I like the way it’s presented here and the optional rules around it.

8 Likes
703

WAS LITERALLY JUST TALKING ABOUT A SET OF 3.5E HOUSERULES THAT DID THIS!

I was talking about how I think it would be a really good fix for the scope issues with D&D 5e to bring back those houserules, and here you are telling me such a game exists!

Instantly much more interested in this.

2 Likes
704

but seriously, level 6 has always been a very good dnd stopping point because that’s right when spells get exciting but don’t obsolete martial classes, and every class is generally well situated to iconic dndish adventure. Any monsters that are too powerful for a level 6, instead of becoming something that players would wait to level up to face off against, instead become puzzles/challenges just to find how to defeat them. Fighting a dragon is fundamentally not like fighting an orc if leveling is limited before dragons become a ‘moderate challenge’.

6 Likes
705

A friend of mine recently moved into the middle of nowhere MI, and is trying to figure out different ways to make money online.

One of the ideas was for him to be hired as a GM, which I know is a thing. Anyone know how much GMs would typically charge? And if there’s any resources he could use to connect with groups?

1 Like
706

I have no answers to your questions but I had no idea this was a thing. Man, what a weird table dynamic that would generate…