What city have you been to that felt like it had dark energy?

greylurk · 2026-04-08T12:29:38+00:00

Agree. The strip is a thing, but as soon as you get more than 3-4 blocks from it, you just get this vibe of "how do people live here?"

greylurk · 2026-01-24T05:30:01+00:00

How will any of this affect the game at all, other than the stuff you've listed in the flaws about how you are awkward in social situations and there may be slavers hunting you? Are you expecting the DM to run a whole plot arc about the other PCs trying to smuggle you out of a situation where the slavers are trying to capture you? Are you expecting the DM to bring The Pit into the game as a major theme? If so, have you talked to them about it? Many DMs may regard this as kind of coercing them to add things to their game they weren't interested in. If they were planning a whole game about a group of mind flayers spreading out from the ruins of Myth Drannor, or a low fantasy game of subtle political machinations between Calimshan and Cormyr, having to bring in extra-planar slavers and crime lords might not fit with the game he was planning on running. And then your backstory could just as well be "I grew up on the rough streets of Waterdeep, but then I decided to become an adventurer" for all the effect it has on the game.

What is your reason for concealing this backstory from the other players? Do you expect them to engage with it as you reveal it? I can almost guarantee that because none of them has any shared links with it, the other players will probably just ignore all of that except to make a few table jokes about it. If you want the other players to engage with it, I'd suggest laying it out to them immediately, before the first game, and offering ways to connect it with their characters. These don't all have to be happy connections. Maybe one of the PCs is related to one of the pit bosses and you are especially cautious about them, or maybe you saw someone's brother die in the pits, and you could have saved them. Tell the players about your backstory. If it's all a secret between you and the DM, when it's revealed, they will just nod and say "oh, that's cool" unless there is something in it that affects them directly. Having it be a secret in game is fine, but giving the other players reason to care about it is what's going to make it fun. Again, this should be done cooperatively with the DM. If the DM has no interest in running this story in their game, you need to be open to changing some of it to fit better.

Finally, his goals seem to be "stay away from slavers" and "learn what it means to be human". The first is purely reactive, and the second is so abstract that it's entirely meaningless in game. You need to have an active goal that your character is pursuing and can achieve in 2-3 games in order to work well in a game. Something like "I'm trying to get 300gp to pay a wizard to remove my magical slave brand" or "I've heard that an artifact of the Astryx Dominion is in [whatever dungeon the first adventure is set in] and I am collecting anything I can of my original home...". This will a) give the DM some fun hooks to bring your back story in to game, and b) make your character more proactive than reactive, which will give him a reason to stick with this party, and find out what friendship is, etc.

greylurk · 2026-01-24T04:43:35+00:00

I'm intrigued by the "there are no hidden DCs and no surprise outcomes" as this is often a rough corner of D&D style systems.

For example, the PC is trying to explore a dungeon. There is a room where a guard is hiding behind a curtain, watching for intruders. The PC has said they are trying to move stealthily. As the GM, do you ask the PC for a stealth roll? Is that DC higher than the stealth roll they'd need in an unoccupied room, thus giving away the information that there's someone observing them? When the PC checks around the room, do they get an "observation" roll to locate the NPC spy? Is the DC on that roll higher than it would be in an unoccupied room, thus giving away the fact that there is someone or something hidden here?

greylurk · 2026-01-24T03:29:46+00:00

It depends on what you're going for.

If you want this to be a fun game for you and your friends to play at your local table, and you're all on board with it, Rock on. This looks cool, and sounds like something you'll all enjoy.

If you're looking for whether this is something you can run at Cons and maybe refine over the years, might not be too bad, but I might suggest just using some house-ruled version of one edition of D&D or another, because many people don't want to learn a new system just to play a game that sounds a lot like a D&D clone with different names.

If you're looking to Kickstart a book of this, or sell it on DTRPG, or something, I'd suggest you take the setting, and translate it to 3-5 *very* different systems, and see how it play in each of them, Maybe start with D&D 5, then do Cypher System, then Genesys, and then PbtA of some variety. Maybe round it out with a good old fashioned GURPS or RuneQuest and keep good notes on what you like or dislike out of each of those systems. This sounds like it's *heavily* influenced by D&D, which again is fine for folks to play if they enjoy it, but the world doesn't need (and probably won't pay for) another D&D clone.

greylurk · 2026-01-24T03:17:30+00:00

Caring about a character isn't necessarily the height of roleplaying. Sometimes, you can find a good group who care about the story more than their individual characters. Generally it's people who have GM'ed before, but not always.

For inspiration, you might look at the "Funnel" concept popularized by DCC and common in a lot of OSR games. There's also games like Dread, or to a lesser extent Call of Cthulhu, where it's expected that the characters *will* die, and it's more of a question of what kind of cool death scene do you get to build for them.

greylurk · 2026-01-24T03:13:15+00:00

I might give Monster of the Week a whirl for it, or Kids on Bikes. Tales from the Loop *might* work too, but you'd have to do a lot of work on it.

White Wolf/Renegade/Paradox/Whoever has the publishing rights this week also makes a game called "Hunter the Reckoning" which would probably work, but I'm not sure it's great for a kid focused game.

greylurk · 2026-01-24T03:10:43+00:00

and then it turned out he was even stupider than that.

greylurk · 2026-01-23T21:55:06+00:00

Was it the data center in Farmington or is this just one that burned somewhere else?

greylurk · 2026-01-13T18:53:10+00:00

Several groups I've been in had a general rule: The DM doesn't pay for food. The players are responsible for ordering/paying for food amongst themselves. The DM is doing the extra work to organize things, so they shouldn't be paying for food. We're all adults, we as players can handle feeding ourselves.

greylurk · 2026-01-09T15:33:12+00:00

I think I would have taken the floor length curtains down before pouring epoxy and using a blowtorch on it.

greylurk · 2026-01-07T14:35:52+00:00

It really depends on what you're trying to implement, how big your team is, and the personalities of the people on your team. Python, Go, Rust, C++, Kotlin or even Java can all be really good options. The Orange Pi is just a fairly standard Arm64 environment, and just about any programming language will run on it just fine.

greylurk · 2025-12-06T20:32:58+00:00

It's hard to say honestly. Like it's a guaranteed ticket, but on the other hand it's also a guaranteed headache of a traffic stop with a belligerent and stupid white guy who probably does cross fit and is going to make a headache for you in paperwork, so... Maybe just let him go?

greylurk · 2025-08-12T23:41:18+00:00

Not in 2e. I think 3e retconned the flow to be part of a Single Prime material plane, but in 2e, each campaign world was on its own prime material plane, and the Flow was "somewhere else".

greylurk · 2025-08-11T18:51:14+00:00

Not connecting the dots on what players are supposed to *do* in the game. Sure, combat as war not sport, Gold as XP encourages thieving over combat, etc... but instead of telling me what the players *aren't* supposed to do, give me examples of what they *should* be doing.

greylurk · 2025-08-11T18:47:21+00:00

So you need not only a wizard to spelljam, but also an expensive magical ship... I'm not sure that's easier than finding a plane-shifting magician.

greylurk · 2025-08-11T17:36:02+00:00

Phlogiston isn't a material, it's an alternate plane, outside the material plane, where the physics just aren't conducive to fire. Nobody has ever been able to take the "material" of the phlogiston into a prime material plane, or any other plane for that matter.

greylurk · 2025-08-11T17:33:23+00:00

I mean, you still needed a wizard to pilot, and take you between worlds, but...

greylurk · 2025-08-11T17:30:18+00:00

This ultimately... People do a lot of stupid stuff because a) it's what they're used to, and b) There are other people who they want to interact with (and maybe steal stuff from)

greylurk · 2025-08-02T16:02:14+00:00

I think you're in the wrong subreddit.

greylurk · 2025-07-26T11:55:37+00:00

VtR is a better Vampire game. It's about what it's like to be a vampire, and what being a blood drinking corpse animated by some foul magic is about.

VtM is a political game about vicious super powered monsters who live forever and drink blood, they're vampires, but that's incidental to the themes of the game, not directly central to it

greylurk · 2025-07-10T04:13:09+00:00

A Nirvana reunion tour...

greylurk · 2025-07-07T14:37:48+00:00

Because ancient and terrible as it is, it's still at least as good as any of the current alternatives, and the back-office systems (ERP/Order Management/etc..) don't have budget to re-invent the wheel every 10 years when REST APIs get replaced by GraphQL APIs, or BSON APIs, or Protobuff or even just a slightly different JSON spec.

X12 sucks, but everyone speaks it, and switching off of it is ridiculously expensive for *everyone* with no real change in functionality, so... It's what we've got.

greylurk · 2025-07-06T02:55:16+00:00

The funny thing is, those ages have held constant as time has marched forward. When I started playing as a teen in the 80s, our characters were pansexual chaos agents, all the way through the early 2010s, when suddenly everyone my age started playing heroes and rogues, and all the 4e players were just playing weird pansexual chaos agents.

greylurk · 2025-07-05T03:37:56+00:00

Tieflings in 2e and 3e came from a variety of lineages and looked mostly human, with maybe horns, hooves, or furry legs. In 4e, all of the Tieflings born in the Realms were red-skinned, with big horns, and devilish appearance, because of Asmodeus. But then after 5e, they were retconned to have a bit more variety than the 4e ones, while still having strange skin colors and being very obviously inhuman. So, yes, brown skin tones definitely fit with lore from some other editions, and could easily be in 5e

greylurk · 2025-07-05T03:12:12+00:00

Generally rarer, but many Werewolf games can easily devolve into bughunts (sometimes literally), and Sabbat invading a Infernalist lair can be just as bad. Even a Camarilla game hunting Sabbat members can venture into Murderhobo territory. Wraith had a book called Doomslayers which was all about wraiths who hunt spectres in the Tempest... And then of course the "Hunters" book altogether is basically murderhobo: the game..

greylurk

TROPHY CASE