General Q&A about playing or creating role-playing games. All human-mediated games, tabletop or virtual tabletop, are welcome.
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In this question, a "story game" means a game where all or most players have great degree of power to set scenes and generally add to the fiction. The ones I have played are Follow, Huldran, Fiasco...
I played a convention game of the Dallas roleplaying game, which is quite an interesting beast. After the session it was unclear to me whether the game has rules for ordering of actions. There are...
In D&D 3 (and related games), a spectre can easily kill normal people and spawns other spectres, leading to an exponential apocalypse fairly easily. What reliable means of long-term protection...
I have a lot of things I need to keep track of for a game: NPCs, monsters, the different cities in the world, the lore and history of the world... Of course, I'm unlikely to need to know the name ...
Rumours tell that Vampire: The Masquerade was designed with purpose to be a trainwreck when it comes to the mechanics, so that people would not use them. Was this really the case? And what evidenc...
The Armorer subclass of the Artificer has this cool Arcane Armor feature: Beginning at 3rd level, your metallurgical pursuits have led to you making armor a conduit for your magic. As an action,...
The first online RPG community I found, after Johnn Four's gamemastering tips email newsletter, was the forum hosted by Wizards of the Coast. This was certainly after the publication of D&D 3.0...
Wizards of the Coast recently announced via D&D Beyond that they are releasing the "SRD 5.1" under a Creative Commons license. Within the announcement itself, they linked to a 403-page PDF that...
Brancalonia, built on top of D&D 5E, adds rules for non-lethal brawls. The rules say that you can't use class abilities like extra attacks, but passive class abilities like Unarmored Defense d...
For my Call of Cthulhu 7e game, I've used dream sequences for setting the tone, imparting subtle clues for the plot, and character development. They've convenient for dialing up the horror aspects ...
As you use skills in Call of Cthulhu 7e, any successes get marked on your character sheet, and can be used to make skill advancement checks when requested by the Keeper. Any extreme successes are a...
I'm planning on running a horror game of Call of Cthulhu 7e soon, over a text format. I'm familiar with the concept of safety tools in RPGs, which include ways for a person at the table to indicat...
In a Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition game, I am playing a Wizard and considering the interaction between the contingency[1] and vampiric touch[2] spells. My goal is to explore the possibility of...
I'm basing my character creation off of this CthulhuWiki page, which says this about Language(own): A character’s Mother Tongue. Choose the language best known to your investigator, such as Engl...
When are Size rolls used in Call of Cthulhu 7e? I've given my character a size of 80 (using the character generation guidelines on cthulhuwiki. I did so as I wanted to play a tall and fat chara...
In the RPG "A Familiar Problem" published by Darrington Press (with the basic rules available as a PDF), the rules state: When you fail a dangerous task, mark 1 Stress. When you roll a die to re...
Monsters! Monsters! is a less known game by Ken St. Andre, the designers of Tunnels and trolls. From what I understand one plays monsters there, rather than adventurers. Wikipedia claims the rules...
For my sorcerer character, I chose the "Distant Spell" metamagic option, which allows me to spend sorcery points to extend the range of my spells: Distant Spell When you Cast a Spell that has a...
Several party members are in a dungeon together, but one party member has (perhaps foolishly) run off by themselves, and is now separated from the rest of the party by several hundred feet. This so...
Did Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer play together in one more sessions of D&D (or some other roleplaying game)? They worked at TSR and co-authored D&D products. One would expect one of them t...
Being a person with some semblance of a real life, and the same applying to my players, I often find myself in the position of only having several hours of free time on Saturday - Shabbat (the Sabb...
As far as I understand, the term is sporadically used in the indie community or former Forge diaspora. I searched for it in the Forge archives, but got no hits. What is the source of the term and ...
When did "sandbox" become a popular term in rpg discourse? It has been suggested to me that it came from computer games to roleplaying. Was this the case and when did this happen? This thread at ...
In the DMG (p. 128) it is stated that to craft a magical item during downtime, a character must have a formula that describes the construction of the item. However, it does not give any more ...
Wish is the most powerful spell in D&D, being able to alter the very foundations of reality with one spell. The description for use of the Wish spell in the Player's Handbook is this: The b...
The players in a Princes of the Apocalypse campaign I'm DMing have just defeated Morbeoth, a one-eyed shiver in the Crushing Wave cult. One player saw the magical orb he had in his eye socket and i...
Looking at the Call of Cthulhu 7E character sheet, I see two "investigator skills" that look very similar to me: "Elec Repair" and "Mech Repair". One is short for Electrical Repair, the other for M...
In my current 5e campaign that I'm a player in, I'm playing as a Wild Magic Sorcerer. The main attraction of the Wild Magic subclass is the Wild Magic Table, which is a list of 50 random magical ef...
In Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, there are several spells available to Player Characters that allow them to resurrect dead PCs or NPCs. These include Revivify, Resurrection, True Resurrecti...
To my understanding, the Fighting fantasy rpg (and Troika! as a more-or-less retroclone) use the same rule system as the choose your own adventure gamebooks of Steve Jackson, Warlock of firetop mou...
Sorcerer has a number of supplements: Sorcerer and sword, Sex and sorcery and Sorcerer's soul, if I remember the names correctly. How relevant are they when running the game for the first time? Is...
Some games, like Call of Cthulhu, have remained pretty much the same from edition to the next (except the newest edition, which has significant changes), while for other games, like D&D the dif...
I was planning on DMing a RPG - specifically, D&D 5e, although this question applies to a broader audience - in person for at least the first session, after which the plan was to switch to a re...
In the D&D 5th Edition Player's Handbook Spellcasting section, under Casting a Spell, we find a loose definition of "target" for spells. A typical spell requires you to pick one or more targ...
This question is about the role playing game The Resistance and in particular one of the versions of the game which is the most popular version Avalon. Suppose we are in the first mission , last r...
In a game I was running, a player tripped a magical effect that would alter his behavior (failed save against compulsion magic). I took the player aside to explain, out of game, what had happened ...
In a con game, or other one-shot with strangers, I often meet the problem that I don't really know how the game master and the other players are going to approach the game, or would like me to do t...
I'm looking at starting to DM a game in the near future, and I'm trying to prepare myself as best as possible (I've only played as a player one time, so I'm not the most experienced RPG player out ...
While teaching my siblings the basics of D&D, one of them decided to create, as a first character, a Dragonborn Sorcerer. One of the Sorcerer's proficiencies is with light crossbows, and is par...
As a player, I enjoy the role-playing part of a game more than combat. My style of playing will often include wisecracks, quips, and other "witty" remarks directed at both other players and NPCs. ...
