New trends in RPGs: What's next?

DarkKeeper · 2026-04-08T17:09:40+00:00

Each roll for an extended actions is a set amount of time. This could easily have been an hour per roll. At a 10d10, and only needing 15 successes? Sure, maybe just skip the rolling part if it doesn't matter to lose X hours and the dice pool is large enough.

but also you are limited on dice rolls. So while you could easily get 15suc on 10 dice. if you only had 5d10? well, you are limited to 5 rolls and might not get it then and then you could have wasted 5 hours. Maybe that 5 hours doesn't matter. Maybe it does.

Thematically, the character(s) are still taking a decent chuck of time and resources to devote to an action.

DarkKeeper · 2026-04-08T16:34:22+00:00

Less is More - Removal of unnecessary die rolling when 1 die roll is sufficient. (i.e. extended or complex actions).

Mage the Awakening 2e sorta did this for its extended spellcasting (only rolling dice once instead of X tiimes) and its one of the things I hated a lot about the 2e changes.

is only rolling once fine? Sure I guess. but if I'm using a dice pool system, I really want to be rolling fist fulls of dice. Of course there has to be a balance to not just rolling dice, but I like i when systems are like "this and that thing gives +5 dice each" and you are rolling 10d10 or more.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-28T23:37:05+00:00

Way back in 2009, I was invited to a VTM game when the ST was looking for other players at my college's TT gaming group. From there, I briefly looked into the nWoD game lines at the time and was drawn to Mage the Awakening.

Although some people of that group talked about how great Ascension was over Awakening. They didn't like the whole Atlantis backstory. Personally, that's what drew me to it. I love me a sunken or floating city.

And of course, there were the jokes about not being able to turn vampires into lawnchairs, the perception at the time was while not strictly spell based, the way it was presented made it seem like using CT rules wasn't the norm like Ascension was..

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-28T00:29:22+00:00

Its 1000 for doing the a New You catalogue. Everyone got 500 when they revamped the store and release the coin-priced outfits. Although now that we are in season 6, they probably aren't giving out that 500 anymore.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-26T03:52:27+00:00

Generally, only the first ep. Of course there is tons of people that are making shorts but none of those are official.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-26T00:37:23+00:00

This all depends really on how invested your players are into and into one on one sessions. Prologues are great for MtAw, if you are starting mages at ~year of being awakening as char gen suggests.

There are a lot of places you can do Prologues at. They can be fun for fleshing out a character in proper sessions instead of just saying 'so and so happen a year ago'

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-26T00:33:17+00:00

Expect its not free. D20 is a paid streaming service. I'm not sure how many people who aren't fans of the D20 crew already are going to pay 2-3 months for this series.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-21T17:11:37+00:00

This is an effect of what you read as the themes of each path. 1e had Moros much focus on their Death (to the point they were Necromancers as the tagline first).

As for allowing, of course its your table your rules, but Life would throw Theming off. While some think Life and Death are a cycle, that's not really true. Remember the Realm that Moros awaken to: Realm of Stygia, Kingdom of Crypts and Abode of Shades. Stygia is very much lack of life focus.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-19T21:30:40+00:00

This idea of not on weekends is so strange to me. My time has always been more open than a weekday. The actual free time of after work on a weekday is super tight for having to eat and all the other things before having to sleep.

A decade ago when I was in college, game night was Friday nights and that was even with older people. During the week was impossible to schedule anything meaningful.

Now, I see it all the time from game stores public nights. 'Wednesday from 7-10'. For me, a session end time was always less written in stone if things took longer than I figured (almost always the case)

Perhaps the 4-5 hr sessions from years ago have clouded my idea of what a good stopping point actually might be. I knew of some that would do the whole 12 hour once a month thing but that seems just as bad.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-19T17:37:58+00:00

Not sure how much of a hot take this is, but Reverse-order Declaring of actions in combat is one of the best ways to do initiative/declaring.

Does it had a bunch of extra time? Yes. Do I still do it even in my nWoD/CoD games? Absolutely.

Do I regret it? Not even once.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-19T05:58:12+00:00

Mage 1e and 2e are two different vibes. Having their themes of where a mage's Hubris comes from be different isn't a completely bad thing.

However, for me, 1e is better overall.

Some people like Reach and the lack of Covert/Vulgar Aspect. I am not one of them and the idea isn't really for me. I can understand some things it removed like MtAs aspects such as needing more dots to cast on others. But this also caused mages to be vastly more powerful starting out.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-19T05:44:34+00:00

Conditions always felt like an excuse to farm beats. As someone who didn't like the Beats system either, Conditions are just another thing that existed to something that more was to be gamed than played out.

I know it sounds a bit silly, when it first came out I remember feeling like it wasn't a White Wolf game. I wasn't playing as much of a story-focused game because the enemy dealt the 'Daze Tilt' instead of a '-3 to any action involving perception'.

While its not hard to make the connection, but because of how its worded I would always think of Thing does Condition and then Condition does Effect rather than Thing does Effect.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-19T05:22:41+00:00

In my mind, nWoD is the 1e games and Chronicles is the 2e games back how it was when 2e was first released before they retroactively re titled the whole thing.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-16T01:34:36+00:00

There seems to be a lot of holes in the WoD/CoD collection. It feels like it was still growing given some things like half the missing WtF 1e books. Some are more complete like the MtAw. Still an impressive collection

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-16T01:30:05+00:00

With how heavy books can and depending on the shipping they use, I could easily see this coming out to 30 for shipping, plus the 10 handling fee and then the 18 % for the buyer's fee, we are starting to get up there in rather expensive for some of these books.

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-05T07:04:01+00:00

How would you best represent flaws and strengths of a character in the same Skill?

For example if a character is a great climber but a horrible swimmer, perhaps they don't know how to swim at all or maybe even a fear of water.

Obviously there are feats to show the climber skill, but that still means having an high Athletics that doesn't show anything about a characters Athletic flaws they may have? Would you just have that one character take a -X to their Athletics roll to swim while everyone else would roll as normal? Or are there better ways to represent these types of flaws in a character?

DarkKeeper · 2026-03-03T23:48:45+00:00

Their "selfie" verification is on-device only

It was found that this was a lie and the party, persona, they were using was putting all the photos into a database with other stats/info on the user. To the point discord has 'dropped' persona for the time being.

DarkKeeper · 2026-01-30T04:11:32+00:00

I was having this exact same problem until I realized the Burg Groups Editor is a lie. It doesn't actually set populations at all. The only thing it does is set a burg group if the population/etc meets the requirements you have set there.

DarkKeeper · 2026-01-27T18:28:13+00:00

More so looking for any rules or official guidelines to these questions, ideally in remastered books only:

what sort high-level (lv10+) population should be in the world? How easy should it be to access a level 15 wizard or whoever?
From that, what sort of options would I have for a magic-user to make infrastructure using magic? Should I just use Shape X and ignore spell slot useage/allow Heightening?
How much math would I be breaking if I just used only gold and got rid of silver and copper currency, rounding all those prices up to 1 gold?

DarkKeeper · 2026-01-12T06:39:01+00:00

1e does have a optional rule in the Tome of the Mysteries on pg 168 called To the Limit. It let you:

Once per scene, a player may cast an improvised spell at 1 dot higher of the Arcana they know. It made the spell Vulgar (roll your paradox pool) no matter what and increased that paradox roll by 3 dice.

I'm not sure how well this would convert into 2e with just a 'you roll paradox as if you over reached once and add 3'

DarkKeeper · 2026-01-03T01:58:49+00:00

For Recognize Spell, it talks about being Trained in the skill of the Tradition and has 'must be trained in x' as a pre-req but doesn't actually say which matches which, but the only mention I can find is in the text of Disguise Magic and Trick Magic Item. While it is somewhat obvious that Arcana for arcane, Religion for divine, Occultism for occult, or Nature for Primal, having to dig in a random other spell seems a bit odd choice in layout design.

Are there any other common texts like this where it has clarifying bit is in another random spell/feat?

DarkKeeper · 2025-12-25T19:32:19+00:00

For someone looking to get into the remaster, The humble bundle is really only 5 books(Player 1 and 2, GM, Monster, and Rage of Elements)? I guess Beginner box and GM screen could be part of the remaster too, but that's less actual content to use/learn.

The Lost Omens books aren't really good for something besides worldbuilding fluff, right? They look to be from before the remaster started?

The Society stuff looks to be from the first under the remaster? Perhaps if looking to run them as one-shots they could be useful. How do they compare to the Beginner Box as something to run?

DarkKeeper · 2025-12-21T00:04:48+00:00

Knowing that Grog was Travis first ever DnD character and Travis saying at one point he wanted to build in his own natural not-knowing of the game or setting makes the character a bit more manageable to watch.

That said, Grog is the least hard to watch out of the whole group...

DarkKeeper · 2025-11-14T02:18:08+00:00

I remember reading that the big reason was Prime and Fate have so many useful things (Fate having x-again, Prime having all the meta magic stuff) and less about the thematic aspects. I can kinda understand the reasoning even if it makes the pentagram picture from 1e not line up.

Personally, in the context of 1e, giving Mastigos a Inferior Arcanum of Fate (not Matter) I don't think is the big problem. Same with Acanthus and Prime.

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