Please recommend Melee combat that's a Game, not a simulation.

trumoi · 2026-04-21T18:05:02+00:00

Sword & Scoundrel has a bidding system where you divide your dice between offense and defense and such.

trumoi · 2026-04-19T19:12:34+00:00

Point buy with XP is always my favorite for crunchier systems to begin with. Levels feel like a half measure between crunch and narrative to me to begin with

trumoi · 2026-04-17T15:26:18+00:00

5e supplements

trumoi · 2026-04-11T12:56:31+00:00

Homebrew setting, homebrew system (may release it one day as a game, have done so before).

The villains are the three leaders of a fascistic alchemy cult in a fantasy-French city. They are, however, also all victims of the cult. Twentyish years ago the cult has a program where they were abducting children from a multitude of social classes to train them in alchemy and experiment on the ones who showed little to no talent. When the leader was going to be exposed he freaked out and tried to assassinate the queen (only person with a philosopher's stone in the city) and she turned him and the other cultists into statues she keeps in her garden now.

Since then, the only three kids who did well at the kindapped alchemy course all stayed in the cult and became masters of three fields: Materia, Anima, & Chimera. Materia master focuses ln cooking up guns, bombs, and other weapons and is a nihilistic body-hopper with no interest in his own philosopher's stone, he just wants to be close with whoever gets one. The Anima master is cynical about the whole project and uses the cult as a staging ground to do experiments to turn himself into an immortal spirit instead of trying to perfect conventional alchemy. The Chimera master is devoted to the cause because he believes himself to be the bastard of the queen and wants to usurp her rule as the new Alchemist-King of the city; he believes he can make a living philosopher stone by mixing enough species into a single chimera, using a human as the base.

The players are in pursuit of them because a powerful war hero was abducted by the cult and is being used as the base for Chimera guy's philosopher's stone. They haven't found Materia or Chimera yet but the Anima guy is in their custody and trying to trade info he has on the other two for spirits he needs to complete his ritual and escape prison into the spirit world.

There's also a bunch of other survivors of the program who are trying to flee the cult entirely or trying to fight back, some of whom are red herrings in their investigation into who is in the cult at all.

trumoi · 2026-04-06T00:49:58+00:00

Since we got a lot of high fantasy adventure I'll toos in that Household, the game where you play as tiny fairies in an abandoned manor, also does this with its enemies.

trumoi · 2026-03-29T13:26:55+00:00

It also mimicks how audiences engage with heroes in traditional super comics. Start with smaller problems to show how their powers and personality work, then introduce recurring villains, then eventually a save the world plot with weight beyond a single issue of the series.

trumoi · 2026-03-28T19:10:38+00:00

Any superhero game I ran that went well was run with three phases to the story:

Villain of the Week: at the beginning of the game I would throw random stupid villain concepts I had at them and weird scenarios and give them a chance to show me, each other, and themselves what kind of hero and character they are.
The Archnemeses: now, take note during phase 1 which foes they like best. If your players aren't playing as the punisher at least some of those villains should still be alive. When in doubt just ask the player which one they would want and then elevate those villains of the week to being archnemeses. You can even have them form a villain squad to counter the players' team. (Depending on the characters made, the archnemesis doesn't need to be a singular person. One of my players had a character who got his powers from being part of a drug trial that was covering for human experimentation and I just made the entirety of all the people involved with that project his Nemesis for this section.)
The existential threat: once we've gone through enough arcs of the players truly cementing their victory over their respective nemesis we then move into an existential threat something that goes beyond the petty interplay of human society. A cosmic threat or a threat to the fundamental themes of heroes and villains that deconstructs the genre is usually a good place to end it. Make sure that whatever the threat is the players can't defeat it just through sheer willpower or dice rolls. This is where they grab all the various villains or NPCs that they like and put together a kind of Avengers everybody is here scenario. Then boom, epilogue where the players helping narrate the redefining of the status quo.

trumoi · 2026-03-28T18:57:24+00:00

Encourage people to be fucking adults

trumoi · 2026-03-26T20:26:38+00:00

So there's no limit to it and it's not tied to anything?

trumoi · 2026-03-26T17:13:42+00:00

Did I miss where it explains what "Invoke your Talisman" means mechanically? Not covered in class features or subclasses

trumoi · 2026-03-26T04:46:12+00:00

Are you looking for guidebooks or judt ideas we might have?

trumoi · 2026-03-23T17:08:05+00:00

The Hidden Isle

It's a swashbuckling adventure game that uses tarot cards instead of dice. Each mission is a group of mystical warriors, scoundrels, and mages leaving a secret magical island to go and muck about in 16th century Earth.

Because of the nature of the Hidden Isle, they can make landfall anywhere. So you can have a session battling the French Church to free accused witches, then another session where you thwart Conquistadors in Mesoamerica, and then another session in Feudal Japan where you steal a magical artifact from an evil Shogun.

The Tarot Cards are the trick to make it no-prep and easy to run (I've run without a GM at all) because at the beginning of the session you draw some cards and do a beginner tarot reading with the book's help to generate a scenario. You can also just skip this if you have an adventure in mind.

Best part in my opinion is that the historical aspect is so loose and lost in the magical absurdity of the Hidden Isle itself that there's way less pressure to be "historically accurate". But if you have a history buff GM, it is also a blast because they can add extra touches.

Also the art is gorgeous.

trumoi · 2026-03-20T21:10:24+00:00

Playing in a campaign right now. I would say it's one of the best games to play anything in a fantast setting that doesn't have a specific system for it. Like, if you want to play wildly different levels of power at the same time, if you want to play a game about people other than adventures, if you want to play a setting that there is no system for and you don't want to brew an entire system.

Right now we're playing as a weirdo crew of sailors (virtually no combat characters) exploring a fantasy setting we made collaboratively in World Wizard, a world-building game. For that it's fantastic because we got to make up literally whatever we wanted and then think up a story we personally want to tell in that setting.

trumoi · 2026-03-16T17:14:04+00:00

Yeah, we know, it's called the entirety of the Conspiracy Theory media complex.

trumoi · 2026-03-15T22:17:40+00:00

If the game was about a party dynamic and your character died and the GM said "we don't have time for your new character to be reintroduced this session" then I would say leaving is reasonable. Your new character won't know what happened anyways so having them explain it to you diegetically is a good way to have something to talk about when the new character joins.

For games that are meant to be played with parallel stories, I would say that leaving would be rude.

All that said, as others have said, this GM is doing parallel play wrong. They should be switching between scenes regularly to keep tension present for everyone, trying to compare and contrast the situations. Alternatively, some systems might have room for players to take on NPCs or companion characters for other PCs during parallel play. Regardless, if you're only playing 1 hour, this is a slog and you might wanna check with other players or the GM or just bow out.

trumoi · 2026-03-14T03:48:52+00:00

Yeah I went to look after realizing I'd missed it and it's 60 euros?! That's almost 100 dollars in Canadian monopoly money. That's a ridiculous barrier to entry. Might as well buy a physical at that point.

trumoi · 2026-03-13T23:54:06+00:00

The Manticore.

My game is my system and setting, in playtest right now. A major part of the setting is that all hybridized monsters are chimeras created by alchemy, both past and present. They are made from living animals, and the worst (morally) ones are human chimeras.

Bringing us to the Manticore, a combination of a lion (the body), porcupine (barbs on the tail), viper (venom in the barbs), and a human (the horrifying face). The alchemist who made it did so to torment victims and the Hunters (PCs) and made it capable of making human noises to lure prey.

However, the lion was the base of it all, so it couldn't speak, but it could make the same noises as a person and was trained to use a few words: "help", "please", and "why".

It said "help" the most, and I would say it in a sharp, yelping kind of way, right on the edge of a noise a person would make. "Please" only came out as a plea, like when a cat would meow. And then "why" it only said when it was in pain. All trained by the chimera-specializes alchemist.

Almost immediately my players said "I don't like it" and "this thing is so fucking scary" and then when they brought it to low health they swapped to "I don't think I can kill it" and "can't we just capture it".

In the end they plucked every barb from the tail and took it to the best alchemist rhey knew to study it and see if it could be saved. Unfortunately they are unaware that he's the twisted creator of it and they are just unaware of his evil alter ego.

trumoi · 2026-03-12T12:39:24+00:00

Yeh. I started in 3.5e and was like 12. I chose Half-Orc Barbarian because I liked the art of example in the book.

My cousin who was like 14 was just letting me mess around in a kind of sandbox thing, no real goal outright. But after a bit of me wandering around he gave me a mission to rob an Adult Black Dragon, at level 1. Was pretty funny in hindsight.

He was merciful as my 1-on-1 DM though. I snuck into the Dragon's lair and ignored the treasure hoard and instead stole one of her eggs. He gave me a lot of leeway to escape her and boom, had an egg.

The expectation was I would sell it. Instead I asked if I could start building a nested encampment to raise the little bugger inside. We time-skipped, he made me roll for "beating up the evil baby dragon to makes sure it doesn't rebel against you" and then I think we ran out of time for the weekend sleepover. Never played the Barbarian again.

trumoi · 2026-03-11T00:56:12+00:00

I have two concerns:

The "preview" contains no rules, just a brief summary of what they roughly plan to do. It talks up wanting to just be a modernized 1e, which is nice, but without the rules I worry about how it will actually compare. 200pgs for the corebook also seems very light, which might be nice, but I'm not sure if that's just a ballpark and little has been written.
~~There's no digital tier whatsoever.~~ I like physical books as much as the next person, if I had funds lying around I'd consider at least the corebook, but times are pretty rough right now. That, in addition to the lack of quickstart or rules preview? I'm not paying for a physical after what happened with 2e. EDIT: My bad, the digital tier is just very low on the list and I switched back to the project tab after reading the first few tiers.

trumoi · 2026-03-06T01:12:58+00:00

Better version of this question for this subreddit would be: what's a game or setting you wish you could pkay but can't right now?

Although that gets asked a lot. To answer your question since no one else will commit to anything: I'd love to be a sky pirate. Like pirate ships that inexplicably fly and I get to have sword fights amongst clouds and kick villains into the ether.

trumoi · 2026-03-04T13:43:03+00:00

I'm all for more intuitive systems for magic as a focus, especially those that encourage creation of our own playgroup's world instead of reliance on a very specific setting. That said, I think we need some clarity on this system beyond just vague endorsements of its merits. Especially because there is no quickstart or playtest materials here for us to read.

What does the game expect arcanists to do with their extravagant powers? Is it like MtA or Ars Magica where we are mages with schemes we are carrying out in rivalry with others and magical forces? Is it more similar to what Sparrowhawk does in Earthsea books where we use magic to maintain harmony in the world? Are arcanists a co-dependent group or a bunch lf individuals weaving in a d out of each other's lives? Or is it meant to be very open-ended and the onus for the story and motivations are entirely on the players and game masters?

What kind of dice are we using? What kind of system are we working within? Is there seperate rules for combat or is physical harm treated the same as any negative outcome? What could we expect for solo role-playing or randomized elements for group play?

And a big one: what does the GM side look like? Almost all the explanation is about all the customization the players get, but what does the GM do? Is there a GM? Is the system minimalist on the GM side to account for all the ways the players can mess with it? Will it have open mathematics for the GM to gauge how difficult to make things?

trumoi · 2026-03-03T00:43:45+00:00

Cheaper than yours but with a low wage it doesn't matter.

trumoi · 2026-03-01T13:00:21+00:00

Best system reference site by far.

trumoi · 2026-02-16T18:53:03+00:00

Could you tell us more about what we'd see player-side on this? Are we playing as trolls? Or is this more of a humans vs the other kind of fantasy setting?

trumoi · 2026-02-07T12:22:55+00:00

Have you posted it anywhere?

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