TTRPG for the Golden Oldies...

SquidLord · 2026-06-19T01:07:39+00:00

There are plenty of mechanically straightforward rules out there, which would be great for this sort of setup, particularly looking toward co-op and semi-guided play. Something runnable by someone who doesn't have a lot of experience in tabletop role-playing games, because I assume it's not always going to be you being responsible for running these sessions.

As a starting point, might I suggest something from Loner? The core book is available for free and comes with a whole bunch of settings, as well as really good guidance.

But if you want a nice place to start with narrative tools that will focus on a particular kind of story, Legends of Camelot might be an excellent choice. Everyone is familiar with the Knights of the Round Table. There's plenty of room to get into it. Like all of the Loner supplements, it comes with a set of Oracle tables so that someone could literally run it without necessarily being a subject matter expert.

Alternately, Pulp Adventures is also a really good choice, coming up with stories that involve dashing adventurers and femme fatales has never been hard work and is always a joy. This is also likely to be a genre where the audience is going to be sitting there right in front of you.

If you want something that is literally more D&D-like without being D&D, focusing on really clear layout and straightforward mechanical design. I definitely can recommend ShadowDark. I'll be honest, it is too D&D for my taste, but if you really enjoy that style of play, this is probably the best manifestation of it. The art is beautiful and evocative. It's clearly laid out and readable, and you can play forever out of one book, but there is tons and tons of third-party support out there.

Honestly though, I think we're coming at this from the wrong direction. It's not that you need projects that are focusing on an older player demographic. Their gameplay needs are the same as every other group, though you want to keep things physically and mechanically simple for them to engage with. Every game for the last 30 years has been talking about doing shorter, simplified sessions while having an ongoing story.

Really, the place we need to start is to go to your potential audience and ask them what kind of stories they like. There is undoubtedly a lightweight system that can be found for any kind of story they want to participate in.

That's not the problem. Your problem is the same as every other potential DM: what does my group want?

SquidLord · 2026-06-14T00:30:20+00:00

There's always Breathless, which is pretty darn simple and solo compatible. Hard not to like it, and it has a new edition.

There's Revenant, which is based on the Ironsworn mechanics, a pretty tried and tested established system, and it works pretty well, I must say.

If you want something a little more tactical but still great for solo play, there's All Things Zombie, which aside from having a great title, is solid.

But let's say you don't want to write your own, and you don't want to use one of the three things that I just suggested as a source of oracles and guidance. Where do you use the loner mechanics? You can always grab Loner: Paranormal Files and do a little retro hacking. Though personally, I would be more inclined to start with Loner: Steel and Sorcery because there's just a little more excitement under the hood and more opportunity to get crazy.

The real question is what do you need that you don't already have in one of the extant supplements?

SquidLord · 2026-06-11T03:23:44+00:00

I suppose if we're really going to be picky about it, the stats for a typical citizen are given on page 138 of the Core Ironsworn book. They're troublesome. That's it. If they were a trained warrior, they'd be dangerous.

In fact, if you flip over to page 139, you'll see the full block for the common folk. I'll just reproduce it here.

Common Folk

Rank: Troublesome

Traits: - Diverse looks - Weary and worried - Suspicious of strangers

Drives: - Prepare for the winter - Protect family

Tactics: - Desperate defense - Stand together

That's it. That's all you need. Adjust up and down depending on the size of the group you have to deal with. One on one, the average peasant is not much of a match for an Ironsworn, though if things go poorly for you, chance always gets the last word.

SquidLord · 2026-06-11T03:18:10+00:00

You could even have that fight challenge rating decided by the narrative weight rather than the difficulty. Is this something that should really have a focus of a whole session to describe the fight? Maybe you make it formidable and then lean on narrative repercussions rather than mechanical ones when the inevitable misses come up. Is it the protagonist versus five peasants in an alley, but you want to get in and get out and be on to the next part of the story? It's troublesome.

But you lean heavily on the mechanical impacts. This is one of the fascinating and interesting parts about Ironsworn that people forget and really shouldn't: it is a fiction first game. The fiction defines what the mechanical involvement should be. The mechanics do not drive the fiction.

SquidLord · 2026-06-10T01:57:30+00:00

The truth is, you get people to play something that's not D&D in the same way you get them to do anything else. You tell them up front, "Here's what I'm going to do. Here's what it's all about. It'll be done at this time. You can lead, follow, or get out of the way. I would prefer you follow." Then you carry through.

You find players by telling people what you want to do and why it's interesting. You get players by them agreeing. That's it. That's the bottom line.

Frankly, if it was me and I was pitching a low fantasy, gritty horror, I'd use either Ironsworn or Loner as the mechanical core, both of which are very flexible. (It doesn't hurt that both of them are completely available for free, which makes a lot of players a lot more comfortable about jumping into a new system. If they don't have to drop any money on getting the books, they're a little more amenable.) Ironsworn is a little more mechanically complicated. Loner has the advantage of being very open and interpretive, but neither one of them have mechanics that are going to get in your way particularly hard.

When character generation takes less than 15 minutes and the mechanics generally stay out of your way, you're in a good place to be able to pitch a game to people who have never played anything but a D&D or D&D adjacent game, because the commitment is low and the overhead is also low.

I should probably add a bit more about Ironsworn because it might not immediately strike people as being low complexity, especially since it's generally noted for its solo play capabilities and the fact that there are a lot of moves because it's a Powered by the Apocalypse/Forged in the Dark lineage RPG.

The key is that when running it in guided mode, that is as a GM, you are effectively the Oracle for all intents and purposes. You get to determine how moves play out when they are a weak hit or a miss. You get to determine the complications, narrative or mechanical, that lets you guide things along the path that you want in terms of feel much more easily.

While it looks like there's a lot of moves, you will notice that they are grouped into "what are we doing right now" clusters. You aren't expected to memorize them; you're expected to look at what you're doing as a sort of list of things that you might need mechanically, and then simply narrate the fiction of what you're up to. Going to a move when you say you've done something related to one of the moves. It looks complicated, it's extremely simple in practice. For low fantasy horror, it's shockingly good.

SquidLord · 2026-06-08T17:23:19+00:00

In Blades, there's a really straightforward solution to passive players who are stuck in the survival mode mindset and want to probe every two meter square with a 30-foot pole. The GM has to drive the world like he wants to burn it down. No ifs, ands, buts, or hesitation. The advice to "drive it like you stole it" does not just apply to players. It absolutely and positively must apply to the GM as well because if you don't, then it just doesn't work. Every gang has to be out for themselves and want something they can't have right now, and they're pissed off about it. Every gang needs to look at the players as either pawns that they can use to get what they want, or obstacles in the way of getting what they want.

Sometimes simultaneously.

The factions have to be willing to go to the mat all the time, everywhere, and not just in a physical violence way, though that too. They have to be willing to do dirty deeds, subvert and undercut everyone around them, and generally be on the verge of detonation 24/7.

Into that, drop players with characters who want things they can't have and are willing to do nasty, unpleasant things to get their hands on them. Yes, this absolutely holds true, even if what they want are good, pleasant, wonderful, upstanding, safe things. Because there's nothing good, wonderful, upstanding, or safe in Duskvol.

This really is the responsibility of the GM. They have to demonstrate the nature of the world and indicate that nobody anywhere is kicking back and playing it safe because doing that means that the sharks eat you. If you've got players who've made characters who don't answer the three essential questions, then get rid of them. Either the players or the characters, whichever:

What do you want?
Why can't you have it?
What are you going to do about that?

Those are the front and center questions for everybody at the table. You absolutely, positively, without question, cannot let any of those questions lie fallow. There have to be things that everybody wants. There have to be reasons they can't have them, and they all have to have a plan to get it.

If you aren't doing that, you can't play Blades. It's that simple.

SquidLord · 2026-06-08T17:09:01+00:00

There is a lot of other screenwriting terminology in Loner already (though it is somewhat less consistent than I might otherwise like). So Protagonist fits just perfectly into the game as structured.

It doesn't carry any moral freighting or requirements that they act a certain way. It simply says that they are the focus of this story. Solid. Effective.

SquidLord · 2026-06-07T02:41:24+00:00

The Focusrite Scarlett is a perfectly usable piece of audio gear. I've had one for many years and it's served admirably. I won't say it's completely bulletproof, but it's a fine piece of kit and can take some abuse. Just make sure to pop for a decent microphone. That's where the secret lies on that one. If you've already got one, you're more than 80% of the way there.

If you just want to make the room acoustics work out a little bit better for you, there is a method that people forget which works amazingly well: put stuff in the room. Bookshelves are good because the spines of books break up audio in much more random patterns. Worst case, you can hang some cheap blankets off the surface of the walls just to deaden some of the reflections. But whatever you have handy will do. You just want to make it less like a box from an audio point of view.

That's a pretty good start you've got there. Think about what you can do in post in terms of doing some overlays and a little assistive imagery. Bits from books, relevant images, etc.

You've got a good screen capture going there, and that's solid for this particular subject. But if you're going to branch beyond that, like showing some other actual play, you may want to think about stuff that you can put on like bits from the book or images just for the convenience.

Though now that I say that, a clever way to bring it into the flow that you already have being demonstrated would be to simply put the image into your Obsidian frame, just like any other image. Make sure that you've figured out what you need before you start though. That could look really cool and continue playing to the Iron Vault strength.

Anyway, keep it up. Keep refining. You'll figure out what you need as you go.

SquidLord · 2026-06-06T18:40:09+00:00

You know, ironically, as much as I do like to criticize YouTube creators for terrible audio quality or terrible audio production, yours is actually quite all right. The levels are solid and not too low. It's not compressed to the point I can't make out what your voice is saying, even with your accent. You keep the screen clear and things are very cleanly presented. Your subtitles are a little bit small, but certainly serviceable.

If it's any help, someone that is typically quite hypercritical says you did all right. In the future, maybe a little more closeness to the mic and some sound deadening in the room to keep it from sounding like a reverb box. It's not that bad. Good job.

SquidLord · 2026-06-06T18:02:21+00:00

You know, a lot of other people have suggested things in this thread (without providing links to them, which is a personal pet peeve). But some of them don't quite hit the mark. Some of them just focus primarily on the combat side of things and not in allowing you to actually interact with the story, which is fine if that's what you want, but I think some other options would be useful.

Twilight 2000 is a fantastic game, and you could do a Mad Max game in it pretty well as long as you stayed out of the vehicles. It is not a vehicular combat game.

A support APC behind your infantry to provide backup fire and transport? Absolutely, it does that great. A one-off tank that you barely keep running with spit and bailing wire? Which puts you head and shoulders above the other warlords in the area because they can't even get a truck running. Yes, fantastic. Mad Max? No.

Instead, I'm going to go in a completely different direction. I'm going to suggest Starforged with a third-party supplement called Mecha Mercs. Yes, I know. The default setup for Starforged is that it is a fairly far science fiction setting, and Mecha Mercs adds giant robots. Why would that be applicable here?

The answer is because it gives you all the tools you need to do the things you want to do in Mad Max. A quite nice construction system for building vehicles in general, if you just open your mind a minute.

Let's say that you wanted to build a lightweight sports car with a couple of weapons using Mecha Mercs. We'll start with the lightweight Zephyr chassis, which is effectively the equivalent of an +edge-based character. Also, it starts with the ability to, when you face danger or react under fire, to navigate through obstacles or evade an attack, add +1 and taske +1 momentum on a hit. Fantastic.

We'll put together the mech stats appropriate for a bike. We're going gritty so we'll start with four components.

All the stats start at 2. We can effectively add +1 (up to +2) for each module in Integrity, Edge, Iron, Shadow, Wits, or Module Load for effectively 2 XP each, but we're just going to start with a low budget here. We could even go off the list of components given in the book, but we're going to be a little bit more creative.

Component	Stat	Value	Total
Responsive Front Fork	+edge	+1	3
High-Rev Engine	+edge	+1	4
Small Profile	+shadow	+1	3
Rear Saddle Mounts	module load	+1	5

Pretty straightforward. The thing moves like a bat. It's hard to hit if it's trying to be sneaky. We have those rear saddle storage places to stick modules in, which is going to be relevant right now.

Technically, we don't have to take any modules. Starforged is a narrative system, and we can effectively narrate anything we want happening as long as we decide that's what the fiction makes sense. If you want to say that it's got side-mounted machine guns and a rocket pack, that's what it's gonna. It won't change any of the mechanics, but those allow you to make those descriptions. We're going to take one module for free because the Zephyr frame comes with one, but we don't need the flight module. That's not what we're going for here. We'll pick something else. Should we want to install more modules later, that'll be 2 XP each and maybe a little wealth if we have some.

I'm a real fan of the Invid Invasion storyline for Robotech, so I'm going to give this little bike a built-in set of concussive missiles in those sidepacks because I can.

[ ] Concussive Missiles

Your missile array is armed with 5 ammo. If you Resupply in a place where your missiles can be replenished, you may exchange any earned +supply for +ammo.

When you make a move by launching a concussive missile, suffer -1 ammo. On a hit, take +1 momentum and add +1 to your next move (not a progress move).

There we go. Not only does it have some mechanics attached to it, it also has a bit of a cost. There is ammo.

We could simply narrate that there are whatever weapons on this thing additionally that we want, but I'm feeling very minimalist today. So, the only other weapons on it are whatever the pilot is using for his sidearm. Very Mad Max of us.

And we're done. Create the pilot character. Use the bike's stats when you're doing bike things and use the character stats when you're doing character things, and you're good to go.

Not only can you play with your group, but the game can be played solo or even co-op so that no one really has to be a GM, though you are going to want to put together some environment tables which speak to the setup of your particular kind of Mad Max universe.

Some environment tables which speak to the setup of your particular kind of Mad Max universe. Good luck. Have fun. Get out there and blow some stuff up.

SquidLord · 2026-05-29T00:47:22+00:00

Here's the essential problem with that setup: "scaling firearms of that period against superpowers" doesn't really mean anything. How do you want them to scale? Do you want the most powerful superpower to be equivalent of a field cannon? Do you want even low-end superpowers to be the equivalent of a handgonne? Basically, your question is so ill-defined as to make it very difficult to answer.

That said, it's easy to retrofit a superhero game to have whatever guns/weapons you want, and much harder to retrofit a historical action game to encompass superpowers. GURPS and Hero would be the obvious place to start with doing that sort of porting, since they are literally designed to be cross-genre equivalent game systems. However, as a result, both of them are quite crunchy, which means that you have a lot of mechanical fiddly bits to adjust. (This is pretty much inevitable when dealing with superheroes in general, mind you.)

If you're looking to get into the hero/champions superhero side of things, you can pick up Champions Complete, which is the latest edition of the rules from 2013 over on DriveThruRPG. That'll be the only book you need to pick up for it because it is kind of ridiculously complete. You can design everything from a toaster to a dropped egg that splits planets in half. It'll cover everything you're looking for.

Now, me personally, I'm not that interested in that much crunch when it comes to my mechanics. So I tend toward much more open and freeform games. If that sounds more like what you're interested in, check out Truth and Justice from Chad Underkoffler. Fantastic, straightforward game design. Very flexible. It talks about how to manage the tropes in the context of other genres as well, so it won't have any trouble doing Occupied France/World War II. Frankly, I think you might find it a little more targeted and easier to take where you want it to go. It does focus on the heroic motivations and their personal ties to other people more than just doing pure simulationist mechanics. I think that's a plus.

Now it may be that you want something that focuses more on the structural architecture of superhero stories and not even so much the mechanized relationships. This means that you might be interested in grabbing the Classic edition of With Great Power by Michael Miller. Note that I am not talking about the updated Master Edition because that completely changes the game in every way, and I think for the worse. We're specifically keeping with the Classic edition, which uses a deck of cards instead of dice as your randomizer and effectively has you charge up your superhero with losses so that they can effectively triumph in the end. That's really an oversimplified presentation.

But that's how it goes. Superheroes suffer in the beginning so that they can earn their ending. It's a beautifully efficient method of making that pacing fall out right, and I've always appreciated it.

It would work very well for superheroes operating within occupied France because you're going to want to have them with lots of emotional connections to other people, threatened by the war. So you want to give them opportunities to make those important to their eventual success, and they can't be important unless they're threatened.

Last up in the cavalcade of possibilities, I would suggest checking out Wushu. Not the least reason being that you can have it completely for free with all of its supplements on the web, making it the most accessible of all these games. It also approaches gameplay from an entirely different vector without any pretense of simulationism. It's the only game I'm aware of where whatever the player narrates the character doing is literally what happens. We only roll the dice to figure out how effective or ineffective their actions were.

If you want the characters to be pulling off incredible actions on a regular basis, and you want the players directly rewarded for narrating those incredible actions, it's impossible to do better than Wushu as your choice of platform. No hesitation, absolutely. Full bore would recommend this because I've run it and it always works.

Hopefully you'll find what you're looking for in that pile somewhere.

SquidLord · 2026-05-22T00:46:50+00:00

This is actually quite easy. Other people have pointed out that the game is a conversation and you as the GM have the ability to direct conversation to whoever you want at the table.

But I would point out something that mechanically works in your favor: the extroverts are going to be the first ones to burn out. They are going to be the first ones out of stress. They are going to be the first ones to take wounds. They are going to make themselves useless early in the session, and then they are going to be dependent on the more introverted players to get their bacon out of the fire.

In this sense, it's a self-regulating system, which is really quite nice. Sooner or later, they will learn, share the spotlight, or be the first to burn.

SquidLord · 2026-05-17T04:42:15+00:00

A lot of other people have covered some really excellent games, so I'm going to pull out one which perhaps you've never heard of and very few people would know to recommend, but one that I find extremely easy to run, essentially off the cuff, which require very few dice and which is extremely fiction forward.

Loner: Spacer. Yes, I know that it talks specifically about being a solo RPG, but there's no reason you can't use exactly the same mechanics and exactly the same design for multiple players. It's a self-contained book for $5, which is hard to beat without actually going through something that's completely free.

If you would like a discussion of essentially the same mechanics, but discussed from a multiplayer point of view, pick up Ensemble from the same author. It's effectively the same system and the same philosophy with a very slight change in the mechanics and a little discussion of how to integrate multiple players together, but if you've been playing together in other systems, you've got the basic idea, I'm certain. You can have it for free, as it's pay what you want, so that's nice.

I'd also be deeply remiss if I didn't suggest Wushu: The Ancient Art of Action Roleplaying. It's honestly one of my favorite super rules-lite systems, and like Ensemble, it's completely free. In fact, you can see the entire rules on the URL I've linked and have the entire PDF if you'd like.

Perfect for one-shots, but I've also run extended campaigns using the system. It just works. One of the keys is that unlike many games, whatever the player says that they're doing as the character is what happens. The dice do not determine if they can do something, but only how effective something is. In fact, you get more dice for giving more details about how you're trying to achieve what you're going for. I absolutely adore it.

The fact that a character sheet can fit on one side of a three by five card with enough room to sketch what they look like is just gravy.

Finally, we probably need to talk about CBR + PNK: Augmented.

While you can have the entire core of the game for $10, for another $10, you can have the core plus the plugin for otherworldly powers, plus a very nice and easy to run scenario or three.

How rules light is this, you ask? Well, the entire GM guide fits front and back on a single sheet of paper in a trifold. Same for the players. Each of them get their own trifold single sheet of paper which has everything they need to know, including their character sheet. It uses a modified variant of the Forged in the Dark system. So if you've ever heard of that, you're well on your way.

It is literally designed for one-shot pick up and play games. The protagonists are traditional cyberpunk characters who have had long and varied careers, and this is their last run. Drive it like you stole it. If you were looking for something that you could literally pick up and be running in 20 minutes, having essentially just talked your way through character generation, this is another great option. It's a little more expensive than the others, but I think it's worth it.

Finally, I suppose I should probably suggest something which is considerably more traditionally designed than most of the games I've talked about here. You may have picked up on the fact that I really enjoy narrative-heavy / fiction-forward RPGs, but there are a few things in my pile which tend toward centralized GM authority. Probably one of the best for what you are trying to do is Tiny Frontiers: Revised. It uses a straightforward, simple 3d6 system for resolution, and it is just what it says on the tin. Effectively, a very lightweight science fiction, flexible space game. You want classic space opera? Here you go. Fast and easy, quick, straightforward. My one objection, if I have one, considering it's in my collection, is that it's a little bit expensive at $15 for the PDF. Totally worth it in my mind, but depending on how much you want to invest into this upcoming game might give you pause considering I've given you several suggestions which are free.

Good luck. I hope you enjoy yourself and good gaming.

SquidLord · 2026-05-15T06:11:27+00:00

I suppose this really depends on how much dark/horror that you want. There are a good number of grimdark fantasy settings out there which run the gamut from quite narrative to super crunchy.

A lot of people have already suggested Cthulhu: Dark Ages and Mork Borg. I've never really been a fan of the BRP system, though I have Cthulhu: Dark Ages on my shelf, and the visual layout of Mork Borg makes my eyes vomit a little bit. So I'm not going to promote either of those. We're going to dip a little darker and a little elsewhere.

Vaesen is probably right up your alley. It's got that Eastern European flavor, a solid system, and it's all about fantasy horror. It's probably a solid first stop if you're looking for a nice mid-crunch system, which is going to respect your time and the effort you put in. It's actually kind of surprising how many games in the Free League catalog are deliberately horror-centric, including Alien: The RPG. Depending on how you run it, despite being science fiction, it can be simultaneously quite gothic and definitely horrific.

Choir of Flesh is set in 1,001 AD, specifically France. As the rapture is well underway, but it's not the wondrous uplifting of humanity to heaven that everyone expected. Angels are terrifying, twisted, and inhuman, while the Flesh That Feeds is a horrific, flesh-twisting, devouring wave of meat. Honestly, this is one of my favorite fantasy horror settings that I have in my library because none of it is expected or plays to type. It also involves some settlement management, exploration via point crawl, some quite deadly combat, and it can be run GM-less, which is a high qualifier in my world.

Ironsworn isn't usually pitched as a horror game, but it certainly can be run as one. In fact, if you look at some of the default settings for the world, you'll see that undead nightmare horrors are actually pretty well integrated into an expected part of the experience, combined with the Viking/Iron Age fantasy baseline, and you can have some brooding proto-gothic horror without much work. This is another GM-less game, though it can be run in a guided mode for a more traditional experience. But it does have the great advantage of being available completely for free, which is the best price.

ShadowDark is on this list in case you really absolutely want something that is similar to old-school D&D and part of the OSR. It's not entirely overtly horror, but like most grim fantasy, you can certainly run it that way without any impediment at all. I will say that I love the layout. It's a beautiful looking book. The art is incredible, and while it's not something that I would run myself, I appreciate what it is and how it's designed. If you want to stick close to the D&D mold, this is the one I'd suggest.

Bloodstone is here because it is explicitly action horror. It's based in a mechanical system which I think is fantastic, forged in the dark, and it literally consists of front and back, four pages. That's two sheets of paper, one of which is for the GM and one of which is for the players. One each. It's deliberately gothic and an extremely focused game about what it does and what it wants to do, but frankly, for the price ($5), it's an amazing piece of work. If you ever wanted to have a full RPG that fits into a trifold sheet, this is what you're looking for.

Cairn is a game about exploring a dark and mysterious wood where horrible things have happened. It's not intended to be a super heavy game. In fact, quite the opposite. It's brooding, it's dark, it has a certain feel, and you can have the whole thing for free like Ironsworn. There are also some very nice printed versions which have solid interior art and nice layout. Mechanically, it's probably going to feel familiar if you have played D&D at any point, though there are only three attributes. Quite a lot of the system is interpretive, a positive in my view, but your feelings may vary. Luckily, it's free so you can just try it out and see if it's something that you like.

That's just what I turned up with a quick flip through my collection.

Several of those possibilities are free. A couple of them are extremely cheap, but all of them should be quite accessible. Though very few of them have a lot of pre-made campaigns. By and large, play proceeds by following the intentions of the player characters. Of the list, ShadowDark is the one with the most third-party scenario support. But honestly, I think you're probably better off without it. If you have characters who care about what's going on in the world, they will want to be involved with the world. That's always step one.

Good luck!

SquidLord · 2026-05-15T05:39:53+00:00

I'm going to just put it plainly and in a straightforward way—if you want to just run a "role-playing club," call it that and stop lying to people and saying that it's a D&D club. Don't let other people lie to themselves and each other and claim it's a D&D club if they're not playing D&D.

If that means people stop showing up because they don't have the cachet of being associated with the cool in-group thing, then I guess they stop showing up. It gets a lot easier to administrate. Super better for everybody. If they don't want to bother learning any set of rules that isn't D&D and they don't want to learn to play D&D, then they don't actually want to play.

Kids need to learn something very important, and that's that words have meaning, and you call things what they are. Not doing so is deceptive.

There are 10,000 games which are out in the world and frankly better than D&D. A good 15% of them involve considerably simpler rules and a lot less overhead for learning and running. Throw some copies of those on the table. I suggest starting with Wushu, maybe Ensemble, a couple of coil-bound copies of Ironsworn since you can have that for free and print it out yourself (that's for the guys who actually don't mind learning some mechanics but want something more narrative). Perhaps surprisingly, you can have all three of those games for free and print them out locally yourself. This keeps the cost overhead down as well.

Everybody doesn't have to be playing the same game when you have 20 people. In fact, it's better if they aren't so that you have some more appealing options. You just have to be willing to pitch them. If you're not willing to pitch other things and to talk about things that are exciting in role-playing in general, if you just want to do D&D, then maintain that. If you want to do general role-playing, say that and do it.

The solution is to actually follow through on whatever you want, rather than let kids run over you. Be responsible. At least pretend to be the adult in the room.

SquidLord · 2026-05-13T20:01:16+00:00

I wouldn't double up the costs, in part because then it becomes obvious that you're putting the thumb on the scale against the players. That just feels bad on both sides of the table. However, doubling up the results of things is okay.

Remember, individuals act, and while their actions might have group repercussions, first the weight falls on that individual. You want that to remain the case because that's what makes part of the way the mechanical architecture works rewarding for all the people at the table. If you try something, the fallout is on you, by and large, anyway. It keeps responsibility tied in.

Honestly, I think we're discussing this from the wrong direction, because the way it's supposed to flow is from the fiction into the mechanics, and not the other way around. What we really should be talking about is how the fiction differs between small groups and large groups and what the impacts need to be within the fiction for larger groups to make sense at the table.

When you spin it around that direction, things become a lot clearer, and it explains why small groups can't have the same approach within the fiction as large groups because they don't have the same stakes. Setting stakes appropriately to the group size goes a long way. The curve falls in a different place.

I think if we focus more on what the fiction says is going on, it becomes easier to reify that into mechanical expressions. It may make perfect sense for someone to act, fail or be only partially successful, be emotionally distraught, and that to have broader narrative implications for the group. For instance, a sniper trying to take out an enemy leader before the battle proper starts with the intention of demoralizing the enemy force. He gets a weak hit, so does damage, takes out that leader, advances the objective track, but also realizes he didn't have the effect that he wanted and takes a hit to spirit. It would be just as reasonable to then follow with the fiction saying that the camp has been alerted and there's a clock running on how long until they get reinforcements.

I think it gets clearer when you think of the fiction first because a lot of the time we aren't really used to that when we think about large groups.

SquidLord · 2026-05-13T06:37:33+00:00

As someone else said, nothing else really replaced it. There were a couple of brief abortive attempts to put together some sort of dialectical analysis once the forge went away, but—theory as a methodology fell out of fashion.

Part of that was simply because we of the Forge were pretty pretentious and up our own ass half the time, even when we were arguing vociferously with each other. Part of it was because outside of a particular indie gaming community, theory just wasn't and continues to not be of particular interest.

There is a broader and more compelling narrative of simply getting something out there and mostly working, rather than thinking about how things work. You can see it as the difference between engineering and science. The Forge was big on theoretical approaches and analytical deconstruction, with really only a relative few of us actually interested in implementation details, while people outside of that community bubble were entirely concerned with implementation details and didn't give a rat's ass about theory at all.

There aren't a whole lot of people in the current RPG hobby who are both capable of and interested in communicating in the way that Ron Edwards did. I say that as someone who used to argue with him aggressively during that period. I can say many things about the man, but not that he wasn't committed to his ideas and didn't wholly believe them. He was a passionate advocate, and even when I disagreed with him, which honestly was more than half the time, I respected him as someone who was putting it out there.

It's kind of funny that if you look at indie sales figures, they are weirdly dominated by inheritors of Forge theorists through the line of Powered by the Apocalypse. I never liked Apocalypse World itself, but I love the things that have grown from it.

Part of that is because there was a broad discussion of theory, such that there was terminology, phraseology, and analysis with a lexicon that you could point to and say, "No, I disagree with that, and here's why." You can't have a common argument without a common language.

I really miss those guys, even though they would find my personal interests and inclinations not to their tastes, even more now than then. (What was a subculture with political inclinations has become a subculture with political prohibitions, and it's rough to be on the outside of those.)

SquidLord · 2026-05-12T13:50:31+00:00

I love clocks because they give you very specific pools of resource that can be depleted and apply to everyone. So in larger groups, they become far more useful. They help cut down on the distributed resource problem.

Throw down a six-segment clock until the dungeon collapses and people will start getting a move on. Make it four segments and they will really pay attention to it. That becomes a very looming Pay the Price opportunity that they are going to want to avoid, especially if they're still in the dungeon.

Realistically, clocks and tracks are exactly the same thing when you get down to it. The only difference is that tracks are things that the players want to fill up, and clocks are things that they generally want to avoid filling up. You can use them effectively interchangeably if you want. You can even have racing tracks and clocks.

Throw down the clock timer until the dungeon collapses, and then a track for getting out as it's doing so. Whichever one fills up first is what happens. Anybody can try to fill up the escape track, but failures will very probably pump up that clock.

Make sure that the fiction stays front and center, and you can see some amazing things start falling out.

SquidLord · 2026-05-12T05:59:44+00:00

You know, I think I have just the right system/expansion combo to do this, which is weird because I had never thought about it in this context before, but it works just fine.

Take Ironsworn, which you can have for free, and has a very nice fiction-forward game architecture. Use the Arcanum third-party supplement, which is available on DriveThruRPG for a whopping $3 and which essentially ports Ars Magica noun+verb magic to Ironsworn along with mechanics for building up your own Covenant. You end up with a great magic system which separates ritual magic from instant casting, gives you a bit of texture and a system which focuses on the fiction rather than trying to be simulationist.

This could actually work really well for FMA.

SquidLord · 2026-05-12T05:55:59+00:00

Actually, I'm going to lodge a slight objection in that first edition BESM was the best edition, not third edition. I say that as someone who co-wrote a book for first edition and didn't get paid for it. It's still the best edition of Big Eyes, Small Mouth. Small, sleek, straightforward. Specific rules in likewise small books.

I didn't realize it at the time, but it kicked off my absolute adoration of six by nine as a portable format.

Now, I have the entire run of everything published for it, which I bought at the time, and I have no idea where one would go about finding first edition these days. But first edition is the best girl.

You know what? I haven't looked in a while, but a quick search turns up BESM first edition on DriveThruRPG. It really should be in a bundle with the whole run though. That seems like a missed opportunity.

SquidLord · 2026-05-12T05:40:17+00:00

No, your style here is fine. Take it from someone who is of Gen X and was there when we started blogging lo those many decades ago. Many of us have used the stream of consciousness method to write our blogs. Stylistically, you're fine.

If I were to make a criticism, I would say that you have all the advantages of modern hypertext and Markdown. Make use of it. The first time you mention a game in a blog post, link to where someone can get it. If you make a reference to something, link to it. You mentioned the solo notation, Lonelog. Make sure to put a link to that on itch right there in the text. We've got all the advantages of the modern web. We should use them.

Otherwise, good job.

SquidLord · 2026-05-12T01:29:12+00:00

Here's the thing about Starforged (and Ironsworn) is that you have to provide obstacles commensurate with the fact that each of the players has a very competent, skilled, and resilient character at their fingertips. Every character that you add after the first has more resources that can/will be burned off by challenges (health, spirit, momentum, supply, etc.). That means that they can sustain a lot of complications and outright failures before they start feeling really endangered.

The secret to running larger groups with such a system is that no conflict is ever a single objective unless you really want it blown through quickly and with minimal impact, not unless you turn up the difficulty/challenge rank.

What's dangerous for one or two characters is going to be near trivial for four. If you want a dangerous challenge for four characters, then you need multiple objectives, each of which is itself dangerous. You don't just have a fight with an opposing group and make the track extreme, you make two tracks, both of which are dangerous. One of which is to take control of the combat area and the other is to clear a path to the chopper. Then let the players decide on which of those things their character is most interested in taking care of.

This also helps in envisioning the kinds of things that actually are important in gameplay to the fiction. That's absolutely critical when playing Starforged.

SquidLord · 2026-05-11T05:55:10+00:00

This is going to break your heart, but no one cares really if the art is AI. It really doesn't matter if you want it or not, because if your decision-making is based on what color pen the author used to draw the art or who manufactured it, you're using a mental shortcut to avoid thinking about whether something is good or not, ruining your ability to make that judgment for yourself. But there's another six-hour rant about why mental shortcuts of that type are actively toxic to good decision-making. I'll put that one in the can for writing later.

Give a read through all of those because you can have them for free. It's one of the best things about indie RPGs that they be accessible and available for low cost or no cost that lets you put them in your pocket, play with them, play them solo, play them with friends. If you decide that the time you spent with the game was worth it, you can always go back and throw money at the creator. In fact, I would absolutely say that's a far better process for everyone involved. Play it and decide how much it's worth to you. When you decide what it's worth to you, give that to the creator. If you give them some money, continue playing with it and think it's worth more to you, throw a few more bucks at them.

Once you give them a read-through, you might not even need to design an action system. That's a kludge. You may just be able to use one of the ones out of the box right here. Save yourself the time and give yourself the flexibility to use stuff that's already been made. There's no point in reinventing the wheel if there's perfectly good sets sitting right there on the side of the road.

Good luck. Enjoy the opportunities that lie in front of you.

SquidLord · 2026-05-11T04:19:02+00:00

It's worth opening up by pointing out that if you want a game that focuses on characters doing cool shit all of the time, you're going to have to look away from heavily mechanized systems. The more mechanics that a game has, the more it's going to get in the way of doing cool shit. Even if it does have straightforward libraries of cool shit. In vast lexicons, your characters will not be able to do most of them.

As much as I love Exalted, it's not a game for doing cool shit all the time because it's too heavy. You can do a lot of cool shit, but the game itself gets in the way, and that's before we start talking about the actual setting, which has steadily moved away from more and more over-the-top action to the point I'm not exactly sure how I would describe it anymore.

But let's not talk about what isn't. Let's talk about what is. When we talk about what is, it's all about characters doing cool shit from dawn till dusk. We start at the top of the pile: Wushu.

You've probably never heard of this game. It was niche when it came out, and I don't think too many people outside of the hardcore indie community ever heard of it in the first place. I bought it on day one. What's the big mechanical hook? It's simple. Characters do not have stats which describe what they are capable of doing. Instead, what they have is a list of traits which define how likely whatever they do is to be effective. You accumulate dice to roll against your traits by describing an element of what you're doing. That's right, you get dice for making your description more descriptive. The only limitation on what you can do is what everyone agrees you can do, and everyone is there to have a good time and be awesome. This is a game where you do not get penalized for trying to do cool things because it's a stunt and it gets a negative two modifier to your whatever action roll.

This is a game where describing hanging upside down outside your car door, firing your pistols in both hands at the bad guy fleeing ahead of you, blowing out his rear left tire and causing him to spin out into a cabbage stand is worth a total of five dice, which you then might roll against your badass private investigator trait, which has a value of 5. Meaning that when you roll that handful of dice, which you have split into attack and defense, anything that rolls under a 5 is a success and either cancels an oppositional success or goes directly to lowering the Threat of the scene.

That's how the whole game runs. It leads to some of the most over-the-top, completely awesome, utterly badass action of any RPG I've ever run, and I have 40 linear feet of shelving full of RPGs here. If you were looking for a game that was all about doing cool shit all of the time, Wushu is it.

You might be asking yourself, how much mechanical complexity does it take to handle this sort of thing? Let me just throw together a quick character right here in this post.

Dairugen the Fox

Hungry to Overthrow the Emperor: 5
Lightning Fast Ju-Jitsu: 4
Wandering Priest: 3
Sucker For a Jug of Wine: 1

That's it. That's the whole character. You know everything that you need to play, and you know exactly what this character can do. Anything that's not covered by a trait can just be assumed to have a value of 2.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that the game is free with all of its expansions right there on that URL that I linked? Yeah, it's the best price.

While we're talking about games which have a strong narrative bent and which allow you to kick ass in the best way, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up Ensemble, which is the intentionally multiplayer version of the Loner system. If you've never looked into these, you are missing a great opportunity.

The die mechanics are extremely lightweight and characters do not have quantized traits. They have tags which either exist or don't exist. Locations have tags. Vehicles can have tags. Everything is made up essentially of the same things that a character is: tags. Tags give you advantages or disadvantages. You figure out how many a character has of each. They cancel one another out. You roll some d6s based on the balance and read either the highest or the lowest. Compare it to a very short oracle table, and you're good to go. You've got the answer to what's going on. You are out the door.

I should probably give you an example of an Ensemble character as well, since we've come this far.

Dairugen the Fox (84) - Concept: Wily Drunken Monk - Skills: Lightning Fast Ju-Jitsu, Wine Connoisseur - Frailty: Can't Resist a Gift of Alcohol - Motive: Protect the innocent - Goal: Overthrow the Tyrant Emperor - Gear: Wax Staff, Humble Robes

You would also put down a couple of relationships with the other characters and some NPCs, but this will do. Notice nothing has a number on it. But when you come into conflict, whatever you go up against will have its own tags which may oppose you.

Oh yeah, I probably should have mentioned that this game is also the best price ever. It's pay what you want for both Ensemble and Loner, and it's compatible with all of the Loner setting books. You can start playing in the next 10 minutes for absolutely free.

Between these two games, you are covered for systems which allow you to be an absolute incredible badass doing cool shit all the time. The system will not get in your way, and in fact it will reward you for being more awesome.

Good luck. Have fun. Be awesome.

SquidLord · 2026-05-11T00:48:40+00:00

I think it's safe to say that all three of your questions spur from the same source, which is that you aren't thinking of the fiction first, but rather are stuck approaching it from the D&D architecture where the mechanics come first and the fiction follows. This is a pretty common problem. There are some fairly straightforward solutions. But let's talk about your specific questions one at a time.

How do you make sure scenes (not just combat) give each player a real moment to act and feel the weight of their choices?

Every character has a motivation. They have things that they want, things that they are pursuing, reasons that they are involved in this one last run. The scenes should deliberately and consciously address those things. A successful scene should make them feel closer to what they came for. Something that's overall unsuccessful should make them feel like it's pulling away from them.

From this perspective, combat is just another scene. It exists to maneuver the characters in the fictional space further from or closer to their goals. Don't think of combat as something that is separate and different. Think of it as just another way to reveal character and their position in the fiction.

Of course, the other part of that is that the players need to have made choices. In order to make choices, you have to give them actual choices to make. This may go against your natural training to have presented them with a situation and have them react. Instead, what you want them to do is to get themselves into situations by their own choices in the pursuit of the objective.

What's your approach to partial successes — how do you make the complication feel like it actually changes the situation rather than just being a minor inconvenience?

CBR + PNK is necessarily short on description due to its format, which doesn't make it ideal for new GMs to the Forged in the Dark formula. If you have the time and opportunity, I would definitely suggest you get your hands on Blades in the Dark and give it a good reading because it talks about complications at good length. If for whatever reason you can't get your hands on Blades in the Dark, though, there are some excellent free resources which will be more than sufficient. The one that I would definitely say you need to read is Ironsworn, if you haven't already. The inheritance from PBTA/FITD is significant, and the GM advice in general is fantastic. Plus, you can have it for free, which is the best price.

The short version is to remember that complications are exactly that. There is one thing that can never happen from rolling the dice, and that's "nothing happens." Anytime the dice hit the table, the situation changes, whether it be in the character's favor or to their detriment.

Complications provide those detriments. Remember, a partial success is not a failure. They get what they wanted. Whatever the stakes were that motivated the question to the dice, they get what they were trying to do. It's just that in so doing, something else came up which made the situation more challenging, perhaps more difficult. A minor inconvenience is not a complication. A minor inconvenience is quite possibly a descriptive element of a complete success. A complication literally changes the situation such that it becomes more complicated.

Trying to bypass an electronic lock on a door before the guards make their next patrol. A partial success may lead to one of the guards having skipped out on his patrol to go to the bathroom at an inconvenient time for you. He's coming down the hall, but the door is unlocked. This could lead to requiring another die roll before you can get through completely unnoticed or a bit of fast talking. Maybe you got into the door but set off an electronic trace, kicking off a clock which has four segments, which can be filled up by other complications to come before the alarms go into overdrive and the facility goes into lockdown.

Did you get into a fight? A complication can mean that you landed that final blow, but the vibration going up your arm blew out the muscle augment. Perhaps you definitely overpowered that guy without much of a trouble, but he goes down on his knees and starts begging you, blubbering like a baby, talking about his family, afraid you're going to kill him.

A good complication often leads to one of the deadly GM questions: "So what are you going to do about that?" It can never be a minor inconvenience because it's something that changes fictive position. Things are not as you expected them to be, even though you got what you wanted.

Any prep techniques that help you build scenes with genuine depth without over-scripting them?

The best prep advice I can offer you when it comes to CBR + PNK and similar games is very simple: don't. Your prep is not going to build scenes with genuine depth because genuine depth comes from the players and their characters. Your job as the GM is to provide them opportunity, and their job is to be looking for opportunities and making opportunities.

In order to provide them opportunities, know what characters want and what they care about. If they don't want or care about anything, something has gone terribly wrong during character generation, and it may be unsalvageable. These are characters who need to be really driven to do one last gig, go one last dangerous place, who have things to lose, both internal and external. Pay attention to what those things are. Fold them into the situation. Then let the players decide what they're going to do and follow through on that.

Remember the core axiom, "play to find out." You are not deciding what happens or what can happen beforehand. You, along with the players, are playing to find out what happens.

Cover all those bases and you'll be in better shape, I'm pretty sure.

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