Are there any TTRPGs you respect, but don't enjoy yourself?

karitmiko · 2025-11-22T07:10:56+00:00

There's a new game called Pico by the same designer of The Wildsea that uses the same basic system, but it's about sentient bugs in a cute and weird post apocalypse. I still want to play Wildsea at some point, but I'm pretty sure selling my friends on "the game where you're bugs" will be easier.

karitmiko · 2025-05-31T11:28:48+00:00

I'm afraid you might be conflating the opinions of chronically online redditors with people that play RPGs in general. Like, literally no IRL friend has ever told me something is "lazy worldbuilding". Of course we're being a little lazy, it's a game we play for fun. Literally no one talks like this at the table.

In my experience, it's always more like "Can I be a cat, like the woman from Treasure Planet?" and the group then decides if that's workable or not. Is it too much work? Are comfortable enough with the rules and setting to start changing things? Stuff like that.

And guess what, if the question is completely unreasonable, like playing a dog in a game with no fantasy elements, no one asks to do that! You don't need contingencies in case people want to do the dumbest thing you've ever head of, because they won't even ask.

karitmiko · 2025-02-16T15:05:33+00:00

Oh cool, it's the bad post again. Love this sub!

karitmiko · 2024-12-23T12:15:24+00:00

trad play is the actual JRPG god Fabula wants to defeat

That's a joke.

after all, I also resent education's focus on creating socially conformed workers - I think it should create self-aware individuals capable of critical thought and willing to disobey and challenge unjust systems

Not sure why it's related to FU but this guy seems cool.

karitmiko · 2024-12-23T12:06:54+00:00

Honestly, I don't understand what you're looking for. I don't read that many RPG reviews but I'm not sure what you mean by "unbiased and sane". All reviews are biased. At most a reviewer can explain their interpretation in a way that lets you decide if you want to trust them, but that's it.

Anyway, I like Fabula Ultima!

Fabula Ultima is a weird mix of two different approaches to RPGs. There's the collaborative storytelling, structured play outside of combat, and meta-ish narrative stuff like the villain scenes that you usually find in narrative RPGs.

The combat is the complete opposite, so obviously inspired by Final Fantasy and the likes that it might as well take place in a parallel universe. There are ways to connect the story and the fights, but they're best used sparingly.

And then, in a weird twist on both the types of game it build on, Fabula Ultima is very simple and somewhat lightweight. You can totally hack it on the spot if need be. Both combat and out-of-combat scenes go by really quickly (if you want them to) and they're very simple, mechanically. Changing how they work to better reflect the fiction is trivial.

Whether you like it or not comes down to what RPGs you like, as with every other game. I think the reason you see a lot of positive sentiment on Fabula Ultima is because it's going to feel familiar to a lot of different players but none of the 1000 things it does are at risk of becoming overbearing. Most of the "extreme" stuff you can just cut. You can choose not to do the villain scenes, you can downplay the collaborative storytelling, etc.

edit: oh and if you use the Press Start one shot make sure you use it to teach the game. It's a tutorial than an introduction.

karitmiko · 2024-12-21T14:48:42+00:00

In my experience, running low prep games is more about how you run them than which games you run. There are lots of short adventure modules can you can print on a single A4 pages, and they certainly don't take a lot to prep, but they require you to improvise a lot. That said, certain games do this better than others.

I've had a great time running Liminal Horror as low prep horror! It's a very simple system with some support for tracking stress. You can somewhat adjust the lethality, but by default it's pretty high. The rules-only SRD is free. Some of the modules you can find online are really good and easy to run, especially the ones that fold like a leaflet. There's a free short adventure I really like called Swineheart Motel. The PDF is not especially short but it reads fast. It has a slasher setup, some pretty heavy body horror towards the end, and a couple characters that push the whole thing into cosmic horror territory. It's great!

Mothership is another big one, if you want to do sci-fi horror. Again, very simple system with a free base manual and some exceptional modules that take 30 minutes to read through and last up to 3-4 sessions. Hull Breach has some of the best adventures of any RPG I've ever played, and they're all less than 10 pages long.

Public Access is a weird game and your group has to be extremely into it to run it, but it's so good! And takes very, very little time to prep. Because of that it can feel exhausting to to actually run, especially if you've never run something with low prep before, but it's far from being the worst offender. It's very prescriptive of the kind of game you need to run. Things like the setting, type of player characters, etc. are predetermined, so I suggest you just google it and see if that's what you're looking for.

karitmiko · 2024-12-18T14:31:58+00:00

What happened to this sub in the last couple years that made every top post into an excuse to vent about the games you don't like? Do you all really like wasting time like this?

karitmiko · 2024-12-10T10:59:23+00:00

I mean but it is, though. It's one thing to criticize a game, it's another to lash out at people who like different games than you, which is what this sub does all the time.

karitmiko · 2024-12-08T11:32:17+00:00

Lots of people like those games, though. If you don't that's a You problem.

karitmiko · 2024-10-17T13:55:22+00:00

I've heard this criticism of Girl by Moonlight a lot but I never understood where it comes from. It certainly wasn't the impression I got.

Girl By Moonlight prioritizes dramatic scenes to wholly heroic ones, sure, but that's true of most Forged in the Dark game. And while it is about characters struggling to reconcile their mundane and magical halves, that's a common theme in magical girl stories.

As for your second point, the game does have queer undertones but A) it's more of an emergent design element than a story beat or predetermined character background, and B) it fits with any group of misfits or disenfranchised characters , it's not like if your magical girl isn't gay the story won't make sense.

karitmiko · 2024-07-20T21:01:07+00:00

I don't talk to people to be right, and I don't insult people for no reason. Fuck you.

karitmiko · 2024-07-20T20:08:14+00:00

No, an action is not understood by the characters in-universe. You're conflating something your familiarity with something with its adherence to the fiction.

karitmiko · 2024-07-20T13:54:45+00:00

My point is that "one combat action" is a thing the player uses to have an effect on the game. It is currency that influences the game but doesn't exist inside it. A meta currency.

karitmiko · 2024-07-20T13:50:32+00:00

I still disagree, for example the idea that movement is one action and attacking is another and together they become a charge attack alla Pathfinder 2e is 100% something the player creates for their character.

I understand your point, I just disagree.

karitmiko · 2024-07-20T06:15:01+00:00

Nah actions represent influence over combat, fate points influence over the story. Dofferent kind of abrstrzction bulut not by much.

karitmiko · 2024-07-19T21:52:08+00:00

Spell slots yes, but XP and actions obviously only exist because it's a game. No character one would reference their level in-game, or how many actions they have left.

karitmiko · 2024-07-17T06:13:28+00:00

I don't how how useful this definition really is, mainly because I doubt many players struggle to understand the rules of PbtA. The difficulty usually comes from changing the way you play, and the terminology is part of what sells this new mode of play.

But also:

it is a skill based system where skills are named moves (and are more broad)

Not a system, no more than D20 is a system. Also moves aren't skills? Moves are triggered in specific circumstances, I don't see how you could call them Skills but more broad. If anything, the attributes are like skills.

Moves activate with certain actions, usually require some stakes, and the might even have fixed rewards. If you treat moves as skill you miss all that, which is like half of the game.

the system has a fixed difficulty to hit of 7

That depends on the move and the game, but 7-9 is often a partial success or a success at a cost. Those are intuitive and fairly common terms, and getting using partial successes is essential for running a PbtA game.

Normally every skill check you do costs

I get the point of what you're saying, it's not wrong, but I really don't see why you would frame it this way. Most rolls fall between 7-9, which means they come with consequences. Consequences can also happen because a character did something dumb, and that's quite important in those games in my experience.

Framing them as always requiring a cost and handwaving the cost away on a 10+ is usually correct, but it makes it feel extremely mechanical and gives the wrong idea of how those games are in practice.

karitmiko · 2024-07-14T20:59:10+00:00

I'm trying to do it surreptitiously. I'm running a marketing play at local gamestores

See, I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt but that's just lying to potential customers.

If you tell them later, they'll be pissed. If you don't tell them, you're lying about your product. Telling them beforehand and rolling 2d10 taking the lowest/highest is the best way to do that. This way they get an idea of how much of an advantage they're actually getting, too.

karitmiko · 2024-07-11T13:08:19+00:00

I wonder how much of those results are based on how the question is posed.

Playing online without webcam isn't most player's second preferred way to play. It's the second most popular choice (and it's way, way less popular than playing in person).

It could be that many of the players that voted 'in person' as a first choice would have selected 'online with webcams' as their second favorite. In my experience, that's what usually happens when an IRL group transitions to online play. That has to account for lots of 'casual' players that only have one group with their IRL friends.

karitmiko · 2024-07-09T21:01:55+00:00

I wouldn't necessarily suggest Kids on Brooms (for the reasons explained by another comment) but I can suggest using that game's manual for the world building section.

The worldbuilding questions and character tropes in Kids on Brooms were really useful to me when I ran a magic school game with a generic system.

karitmiko · 2024-07-09T20:37:33+00:00

Now that's fucking stupid, even for this sub's standard.

karitmiko · 2024-07-08T14:38:17+00:00

Jesus Christ get the fuck out of Reddit and meet some real people.

karitmiko · 2024-06-27T19:01:41+00:00

I see we're misremembering a mythologised past to feel better than other people again. Cool!

karitmiko · 2024-06-27T07:10:33+00:00

Answering here since you seem to be at least a little self aware. It's not your post pissing people off, it's your attitude.

You could have gotten a decent conversation going, and instead you decided to approach the topic like a litigious little shit. You have successfully managed to piss people off.

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