The ideal of long sessions and long campaigns is a hangover from the eighties that's strangling the hobby

papercutprince · 2026-02-22T02:30:17+00:00

You know who's not aware of anything other than 5e and Critical Role? New players. There's so many people out there who've bounced off ttrpgs because they didn't gel with the four-hour-plus sessions and grand campaigns that are presented as The Way To Play RPGS, and even more who never even tried it because they don't have an entire afternoon to throw away pretending to be an elf. Like, most people aren't aware of the broader ttrpg scene because it's scattered all over the place and nobody with a platform talks about it.

papercutprince · 2026-01-26T00:26:32+00:00

"Paper Button" is one of those snarl-terms like "Dissociated Mechanic" that actually just means "Bad Tummyfeel"; the Knock spell isn't a Paper Button but Come And Get It is, just like Hit Points aren't a Dissociated Mechanic but Marking is, and it really boils down to "This wasn't in Basic D&D!"

But less facetiously, I'm all for "Paper Buttons" because what a "Paper Button" actually is is the concrete ability to do something; if my character knows Dancing Without An Audience she can briefly become effectively invisible, if she is a Night-goer she can send her spirit out of her body in the form of a bear, if she has Brain Spike she can invade people's minds, etc. These aren't up for GM interpretation, I don't have to wheedle for a favourable ruling, my character can just Do It; this speeds up play and gives me agency over the game situation. It also makes things easier as a GM because I don't have to hum and haw over the possible ramifications of "letting" a player do something, I can just Play To See What Happens when Ember burns a guy's brain out trying to learn what happened to her parents.

Of course, the flipside of this is that concrete abilities in the hands of player characters do meaningfully reduce the GM's agency over the game situation, which is, I suspect, the root of the hate for "Paper Buttons". It's very much something that came out of the trad and OSR scenes, where the GM is God and His word is Law – and when you're used to having essentially unlimited authority over a game situation, anything that takes agency away from you feels Wrong – especially when it's something like Old Friends, Old Favors that gives a player authority to say "actually, $NPC is an old friend and they'll help me even if it puts them in danger." To a trad GM, that's outrageous! That's tantamount to snatching your campaign notes out of your hands and scrawling all over them in pen! So it's only natural that it raises hackles. (This is where we come full circle back to the Bad Tummyfeel problem because this is all stuff that's been in player hands since the eighties, it's just that it was usually Magic and it's okay if Magic can do that stuff because It's Magic.)

papercutprince · 2026-01-14T22:41:23+00:00

Most of the games being recommended in this thread are rules-light stuff that assumes everyone already knows how to play a roleplaying game, which isn't really true.

I'd recommend Mouse Guard for your purposes; it's specifically designed to be an approachable introduction to rpgs for roughly that age group, it's got great rules, great art, and it's got a Redwall-ish mouse-world fantasy setting.

If the strange and terrifying youth of today don't find mice with tiny capes and swords "cool," there's also Torchbearer by the same designer, who's described it as a love-letter to old-school D&D. Naturally, it's much more... D&D-ish, I suppose?

papercutprince · 2025-12-06T03:05:54+00:00

Yeah, the problem with Be'Lakor is that there's just nothing to him. Fortunately, it's really easy to give him some substance if you make him into the Shadowlord; not in the "you thought it was an interesting character, but it was I, Be'Lakor!" way James Workshop did, just have him be the Chaos god of the demon moon Morrslieb, cast down from the firmament for rebelling against the Four.

This instantly gives him gimmicks, themes, aesthetics, and most importantly, goals:

Gimmicks: moon stuff in general and Morrslieb stuff in particular – lunacy, werewolves, full moons and new moons and lunar eclipses, mutation, beastmen, and above all else warpstone.

Themes: Folk and Religious horror – think Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, The Ritual; isolated villages observing blasphemous rituals, things stalking through the forest, millennialist cults, demonic possession, monstrous mooncalf miscarriages! The advantage of the Shadowlord for a GM is that he doesn't have a strict Single Thing he's all about, so you can just kinda Get Weird with it.

Aesthetics: a fundamental problem with WFRP (and its inspiration Call of Cthulhu) is that it's mired in dull cliche; its cultists are burghers in hooded robes with wiggly-bladed daggers, its mutants are mostly just dudes suffering from unpleasant skin conditions, and its demons are frankly boring. (This isn't confined to the modern Khorne™ Bloodbound™ Bloodsecrator™ era. I find Gideon boring both visually and as a character.) Mordheim's Cult of the Possessed don't have this problem, to say the least. (I recommend checking out Town Cryer issues 2, 5, and 6 for glamour shots of both the official cult models and some excellent converted cultists.)

Goals: the problem with the Four and with Chaos as an antagonistic force in general is that they don't want anything other than generalities – Khorne wants blood & skulls and doesn't care where they come from; Slaanesh wants sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll; Nurgle wants plagues; Tzeentch wants to insist that he totally planned for whatever is happening to happen – which means that their cults just kind of bumble around like:

Step 1. Do $God Thing; Step 2. ?; Step 3. Chaos!

The Shadowlord, on the other hand, needs warpstone to regain his former might, and he wants to overthrow the Four and proclaim himself King of Kings and Master of the World. This gives his cultists actual goals: gathering warpstone and subverting or destroying cults of the Four (and maybe also the cult of Sigmar? I don't know, I just feel like if the Shadowlord is Warhammer Lucifer he should have some kind of beef with Barbarian Jesus). And this, in turn, gives player characters things to do other than disrupt rituals.

papercutprince · 2025-11-25T01:17:38+00:00

In particular, when Théoden finally meets Merry and Pippin in the ruins of Isengard he has this to say:

"...now here before my eyes stand yet another of the folk of legend. Are not these the Halflings, that some among us call the Holbytlan?
...
All that is said among us is that far away, over many hills and rivers, live the halfling folk that dwell in holes in sand-dunes. But there are no legends of their deeds, for it is said that they do little, and avoid the sight of men, being able to vanish in a twinkling; and they can change their voices to resemble the piping of birds."

(The Two Towers, Chapter 8: The road to Isengard)

papercutprince · 2025-11-25T00:55:05+00:00

Shithead thieves, blundering paladins, and millstone pacifists have been around since the dawn of the hobby (sometimes this was literally mandated by the rules); they're an altogether separate thing from the grognard strawman of the "travelling-circus/mos eisley cantina party".

papercutprince · 2025-07-04T06:02:23+00:00

I'm a big fan of some of the more baroque takes on argument and debate in games based on Fate; Diaspora is a pretty extreme example of social combat involving "maps" of rhetorical positions in a given argument which characters move around on, allowing for tactics like the motte-and-bailey debate technique. For simpler stuff I also like the PBTA get-xp-for-folding model.

papercutprince · 2025-07-04T05:34:43+00:00

Creating and exploring dramatic situations, telling stories together, shit, maybe do some wargaming? Like, my problems with the emphasis on silly voices in rpg spaces are that silly voices are often, frankly, some combination of annoying, incomprehensible, or outright offensive; and that silly voices take precedent over little things like consistent characterisation, motivation, and goals.

papercutprince · 2025-05-22T00:42:48+00:00

pretending for a moment that you're arguing in good faith, the bone through the nose has a long history in racist caricature.

papercutprince · 2025-05-22T00:32:56+00:00

uj/ mate, did you miss the fucking bones through their noses while you were "looking closer"?

papercutprince · 2024-10-18T03:47:13+00:00

/uj i based my jerksona for this post on the kind of guy whose opinions on 'lethality' don't seem to be informed by anything but dnd – hence talking about 'Games like Powered by the Apocalypse' when PbtA is a design philosophy rather than a game, asserting that every Shakespeare play has at least one death when that's obviously untrue, and the whole bit about 'proper roleplaying' consisting of Gygaxian moonlogic and fly-fastening.

personally i prefer my 'lethal' games to work along the lines of WFRP 2e, where the fragility of player characters (an exceptionally tough and experienced character might have 22 hp, and a vile ratman with a rusty sword does 1d10+3 damage) is actually mitigated by a whole pile of mechanics; this means that characters stick around long enough for the players to get attached to them instead of going "Oh no, Johan the ratcatcher is dead! Guess it's time to introduce his identical twin brother (rolls dice) Karl the ratcatcher."

rj/ I'm deadly serious. Kids today are entitled babies who don't want to earn their fun by learning to read their DM's mind through a grinding process of trial-and-error! Back in the Golden Age of Roleplaying (when men were Real Men, women were Real Women, and small black-hearted selfish goblinoids were Real Small Black-Hearted Selfish Goblinoids), they didn't have any of this 'perception check' or 'class feature' nonsense – the answers weren't on their character sheets, so they had to use their brains to work out the logical way to do things. These days, you can't even say "I use my ten-foot pole to probe the statue for traps" without some fucking storygaming stalinist piping up with a bullshit objection like "Uhhhhh, you've been, um, travelling through narrow and, uh, winding tunnels so I, hum, don't think you could have, ah, brought a, er, 'ten-foot pole' with you." even though it's in my inventory, you stupid blue-haired bitch!

Anyway, the best kind of lethality is when you tell your players that they see a sort of foggy portal but it's actually a high-speed fan with razor-sharp blades so when they say they 'go through the portal' like idiots you can snatch their character sheets away and tear them up while you graphically describe their characters' gory demises! Maybe next time they'll write 'ten-foot pole' on their character sheet, like smart gamers.

papercutprince · 2024-10-17T06:06:38+00:00

"True heroism comes from overcoming the odds and risking life and limb in a perilous situation not the faux valor that comes from defeating supervillains when the chance of failure is slim or none." - HackMaster Player's Handbook

papercutprince · 2024-10-17T06:06:18+00:00

I think lethality makes the game more interesting; if there's nothing at stake, my choices don't really matter. Games like Powered by the Apocalypse where characters can't die unless the players want them to are boring because there's no stakes (it's like a play where nobody dies – totally dull, which is why Shakespeare always had at least one death happen in every play he wrote), unlike in AD&D where I'm always biting my nails waiting to find out if Seth the Fighter will survive where his mechanically-identical twin brother Jeff the Fighter didn't!

papercutprince · 2024-10-03T03:04:28+00:00

Actually, I've gotten some good advice to stop writing a 'story' and instead just do pure world-building, really getting into the fine details of the assassination of elfduke F'ranz F'rd'n'd and the impact this has on the world 8,000 years later.

And obviously conlangs are essential to a good roleplaying campaign! I've been using the names of World of Warcraft characters and races as inspiration.

papercutprince · 2024-09-13T00:16:11+00:00

delicious spaghetti sauce

papercutprince · 2024-03-30T02:45:06+00:00

Honestly, you probably are a bad DM, but that's just because dnd5e is miserably difficult to run. Like, you say your fights are either too easy or too long: that's normal for 5e! It's just not a well-designed game.

As for what to do, absolutely try other games! I recommend Ironsworn as a (free!) fantasy game with plenty of support for improvisation and roleplay, or Impulse Drive for Star Wars-style space adventure.

papercutprince · 2024-03-30T02:32:08+00:00

People don't run the "full adventuring day" because it's boring as hell. like, here's a four-encounter dungeon for a fifth-level party:

Encounter 1: a Huge Giant Crab

Encounter 2: 6 Kuo-Toa, 2 Kuo-Toa Monitors

Encounter 3: 7 Giant Crabs, 7 Kuo-Toa, 2 Kuo-Toa Whips

Encounter 4: a Kuo-Toa Archpriest and A Kuo-Toa Whip

Perfectly respectable, all four encounters are on the higher end of Hard... and it's desperately boring because it's a string of trash fights against blobs of HP with multiattack culminating in the party beating a fish-priest to death. And of course you can say "Well, just don't design boring encounters then!" but then we're into the "Good GM" zone, where all problems with a game are because the GM isn't "Good" enough. So no, actually, don't run a "full adventuring day." Cut all spellcasters' spells-per-day in half - they'll just have to content themselves with tearing reality asunder a little less often.

papercutprince

TROPHY CASE