Tell us what you are playing in or running right now!
3 years ago by TripHammer to c/rpg
What systems and/or campaigns are you currently actually playing? I spend so much time thinking about new systems and reading old ones, and I sometimes forget that playing is actually a part of things.
So, what are you actually playing right now?
I am currently running Curse of Strahd for two of my adult kids and two of their friends.
I am about to start a Mouseguard-like campaign in FUDGE, with my wife and all of my adult kids.
I've never heard of Savage Worlds or Swords & Wizardry. What are they like?
Savage Worlds has fast, brutal combat that instead of feeling balanced always feels risky. This is counterbalanced by the players having "bennies", which are basically poker chips they can cash in for a re-roll of basically any roll, to tank ("soak") some damage after an attack hits them but before damage is resolved, change a small story detail at the GM's discretion, restore power points (basically mana for spellcasters).
At its best it feels like a pulpy, campy action system. The rule-set is generic and there's over a hundred setting books in various genres. IMO it's definitely worth checking out.
I'm running it for a multiverse-spanning multi-genre game. It's a ton of fun so far.
Good ol 3.5. Homebrew piratey setting. Getting towards the end of this campaign, which is exciting. I'm pretty slow to put games together, this is only my 3rd major campaign in more than a decade of DMing, and only the second time I'll actually bring it all the way to the conclusion (if I didn't just jinx it)
I've been in a bit of a break from running 5e DnD and have been blitzing through some other RPGs mostly as one shots to keep things fresh, honestly they've all been great in their own way:
Ooou, how are you liking BSH? I finally received my copy and I've been itching to try it.
On paper, it seems to hit my subjective nail on the head for heroic, yet still mortal characters. Also the magic systems are really neat. I love how uncontrollable they seem. Magic should be scary, even for the wielder.
I have doubts about the perks, though.. There aren't that many, and I'm concerned about characters feeling very samey by top level.
Yeah its a really nice system, combat has a nice flow to it and characters can feel pretty fragile, but also appropriately strong, we'll see with time how the progression holds up but it's been really fun so far, it really catches that Moorcock Sword and Sorcery Itch 👌
Masks - I currently did a session zero for this game this weekend, and will be doing the first session next tuesday. I've played Masks a bunch before, and having seen Across the Spiderverse twice recently I'm really looking forward to it.
Pathfinder 2e - currently playing through Abomination Vaults on my Sunday livestreamed variety game group. I think one player isn't enjoying it so much as he enjoys playing unusual characters more than the tactical combat itself, but I think everyone else is enjoying it.
SWN Revised: After two previous SWN campaigns, this one is a bit different. Instead of starting off as a free crew with a ship, the PCs are a part of a faction that's half mercenary company half adventurer's guild, that focuses on mech combat. So I made some systems for them to work their way up the ranks of the faction, a variation of the faction turn that represents different crews within their faction vying for control and influence, and a reputation system that unlocks more purchase options over time as missions are complete.
Our game right now is just a normal Masks game, but after the first Spiderverse movie a friend and I collaborated on a multi-table convention oneshot where each table was its own universe.
It should be noted that a lot of the ordinary Masks setup relationships will take a back door to the plot and events, as with a oneshot in general and even moreso with switching tables/universes things like Influence and relationships will take a bit of a back door to the action itself.
Running a D&D5e game. Possibly the last one I ever run. It's a blast though, and the players are amazing. The MCDM Flee, Mortals! book is really helping make it interesting to run.
I'm getting ready to start an Iron Kingdoms Savage Worlds game. It's a one-shot, but if they like it, we'll continue it into a campaign.
I'm also possibly going to be starting a Pathfinder 2e game soon. I've ran it a bit, but I still don't feel like I know it very well, so I'm going to run the Beginner Box (possibly lead into Abomination Vaults) on Foundry. It's a weird experience feeling like a newb again, since I haven't really felt that way in decades. Most games just aren't that challenging to master.
Been running a ton of solo 5E stuff with the wife. It allows us the option of a quiet night in without sitting in front of the TV.
1on1 roleplaying has been a staple of my marriage since almost the very beginning! I cannot recommend it more to happy roleplaying couples, it's a fantastic group activity. The wife and I swap back and forth who is doing the DMing.
I also get to playtest new game systems during these games. We've done first played FFG's Star Wars, PF2e, and Worlds Without Number in a 1on1 context before doing anything at a larger table.
A year-long 5e campaign that is likely going to wrap in a few months when I run out of ideas and the players get too high level. After that, one of the players (a massive Elder Scrolls fan) has talked about possibly running a thing with the unofficial Elder Scrolls 5e supplement.
A Star Wars: Edge of the Empire game that has been going on since January. It will also likely wrap within a few months, mostly because our group isn't a great fit for it. After that, I'm not sure. Maybe we'll do pathfinder, maybe we'll do DSA (because one of our german friends really likes it), or maybe we'll do something completely different.
Curse of Strahd is the 5e module I've wanted to try the most over the years, and Mouseguard is one of the more interesting systems I've gotten a taste of from one-shots. I kinda wish I was part of OP's family right now, NGL.
Curse of Strahd is truly fantastic as a setting and basic ideas but the module itself is a piece of crap.
Hammering it into shape, making sense of it, and making it all hang together has been a craptonne of work, and I've used loads of 3rd party stuff. The Curse of Strahd subreddit is AMAZING for that.
It's truly a pile of hot garbage RAW, but I'm having the time of my life customizing and making it mine.
I'm a fan of the 3rd party campaign module Odyssey of the Dragonlords and it's hilarious how much this is the consensus on the dedicated Discord community for that adventure. Everyone loves the bones of the module, but everyone also agrees it needs a lot of love and polish.
@dwgill @TripHammer we dropped it. Our GM had a hard time filling all the gaps in this adventure and it was a pain to watch. Good ideas but our consense was it is poorly executed.
We hoped for more and were hyped. Glad you have a blast with it!
I mean I don't want to give the impression I ran it with any great success myself. I gave it a shot but scheduling doomed that campaign. I was just sharing the impression that I got from the discord when I was lurking at the time. Plenty of gaps to compensate for, though, no doubt.
I'm playing through Rise of the Runelord with my wife and some friends. Its a pathfinder 1e campaign that our DM has converted to 2e.
I want to run my own 2e campaign and was thinking about picking up a shorter pre made campaign to run, I just have to take the time to read through them and pick one
I am running:
A 4th edition D&D game for a group of 5 people
A 4th edition D&D game for one person who is running multiple characters.
A bunch of one-off Pathfinder 2E games for a group of people (basically whoever is available on a given evening)
I'm running Burning Wheel. The group are wizards on the cusp of the fabled third age of magic. I'm using the Trilemma Adventures as well as the setting from the book. I've got seven players so I'm just over the stressful threshold.
It's absolutely awesome.
I have no familiarity with Burning Wheel but everyone I know who's ever played it seems to consider it one of their favorites. I always got the impression it's quite mechanically sophisticated without being altogether combat focused, which is a bit unique among ttrpgs in my experience.
Currently playing a harengon rogue in a Wild Behind the Witchlight 5E game. I'm way more excited about the Savage Worlds game I'm running, which is an isekai-style game where the PCs were transported to a strange fantasy world with new and amazing powers.
I've wanted to run an isekai-style game for a long time. I feel like so few isekai stories properly explore the implications of being transported to a fantasy world with real-world knowledge.
I have three games running at the moment. I'll post them in order of how novel they are.
I run this when there aren't enough people put together for my primary game. I like it, but I think the default setting suffers from Warhammer40k grimdark blandness. There should be more in the book that talks about how to pepper in beautiful moments, and things that the players want to protect and strive for.
Then again, BitD assumes that players want to dispose of their characters, and have them become traumatized in a way that I feel is a poor representation of mental health, but an accurate depiction of toxic genre tropes.
PF2e is a smaller game I play with only a few dedicated players. I find that players that do not want to spend a lot of time creating characters and learning the intricacies of the system do not retain interest. Those are absolutely the cost of entry for players. I also find the game is at times slightly easier, but for the most part as difficult to run as 5e, and that most people who say that PF2e fixes everything that D&D5e does poorly was attempting to play 5e like 3.5e, instead of leaning into Rulings-not-rules. Of course the DMG doesn't exactly lay out the Rulings-Not-Rules attitude clearly...
This is the game that has been going on for over a decade, porting in from 4th edition.
My most recently started campaign is a fully homebrewed world, based around a rewrite of elven history that puts the axis between high, drow, and wood elves into a spectrum of spiritualism and materialism, with high elves wanting to ascend above the physical world, Drow wanting to help the mortal races (and get mad rich yo), and Wood Elves shooting the moon on the material world and finding spiritualism in nature.
As systems go, I think it is the easiest game for players to pick up and participate in, and that is asks as little of players as possible. It also is not the easiest system for new DMs to get a handle of, although I am hopeful that OneD&D will be fixing most of those issues with a rewrite of the DMG and the various fixes that I think will be making CR a much more useful tool.
SW Edge is great, but it really needs the right kind of group to work. It feels like it requires so much creativity compared to other systems.
I really dislike the Genesys System. Dice are too fiddly and swingy, and it's hard for me to gauge my odds based on the dice pools. But it's a fun campaign overall so I tolerate it. I'd much rather play a Star Wars game in most any other system (except Starfinder, terrible for other reasons IMO).
@TripHammer
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A bit of a summer hiatus now but by autumn I'll be back to running Stars Without Numbers. First time running a sandbox style game that really works for me, so many planets and places to visit
If you haven't encountered it already Sectors Without Numbers (https://sectorswithoutnumber.com/) is a great sector generator and management tool.
I'm playing in a Cyberpunk RED campaign and one of my groups just wrapped up a Numenera mini-campaign. Next month, the Numenera campaign will be replaced with a Kobold Press-heavy 5e campaign.
It's on a bit of a hiatus as the moment, but I've been running Mork Borg.
I'm playing in a Curse of Strahd game right now. I had actually bought the module some months ago and it's sheer luck that I didn't get around to reading it before my Sunday GM decided to run it. All I know is it has a big reputation as a celebrated module, so we'll see 🤷
I'm also running a D&D 5e game set in my own homebrew setting & story. I'm basically trying to cram as much occult mystery, political intrigue, and high society manners and drama as I can into it, but I'm leaving myself open to the prospect D&D simply might not be cut out as a system for what I'm interested in. So I might be forced to transition to something else eventually, but so far so good for the most part. I've had more than a few sessions already without any combat, and I know I'm a bit over the skis of the rules at that point, but players seem to be enjoying it; and ChatGPT has been a godsend with helping me patch together loose plot threads and brainstorm explanations such as e.g. why there's a dungeon full of gelatinous cubes beneath the count's country estate.
I'm playing in a 5e Beyond the Witchlight campaign, and running a Tiny Taverns game on nights when we have missing players. It's been working out really well for us, because we're all invested enough in the BtW game that we don't want to run when we have missing players, and Tiny Taverns is episodic by design.
It's cool to have an episodic backup. We just don't play when someone can't make it. It would be nice to still get together and have a game.
It's something we only started fairly recently, so we're not certain yet whether it'll work out long term. Before we started it we'd also just not play, but we'd try to still have as many players over as possible so we could hang out and maybe watch a movie
Getting ready to start up a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign here soon. Assembling the group for it now and so far I've got some good people. We are just waiting for the shop I work at to open up their private game room so we can use that. Not a fan of running games in a shops open game room will anybody can just walk up and interrupt us.
Been playing D&D 5e for years, currently corralling my group into a transition to GURPS 4e. Technically not playing it yet, but characters are being built and the pre-session 0 conversations have been had.
Just finished up A Keep on the Borderlands campaign running in White Box FMAG, real old school!
Playing Star Trek Adventures right now, with my brother GMing. He absolutely loves the game, and this is our third campaign. Love the game, but holy smokes the main book is badly organized.
Once that's done, it's my turn to GM, and my daughter wants a magic school game, so we're going to do Kids on Brooms.
wrapping up the Agents of Edgewatch adventure path in pf2e, and rebooting a homegame in pf1e.
AoE has been a fun multi-year-long adventure, though I think after playing through two of these fully and a few shorter term adventures, I think i'm good on longform pre-published stuff. They're high quality, but there's an implicit understanding that it's a pre-built game on rails (whether or not that's true) that I can't quite shake. That changes the way I approach the game in a way that plays against the strengths of TTRPGs.
The homegame is just straightforward "there's a village, go explore it and get quests" sort of game, which isn't all that elaborate, but i'm a big fan of all the same. I'll be playing a Medium, a class that required proper research to be able to get into a state where it's good in all 6 of its modes of play. It's not the best class, but it's one I've become enthralled with. One thing i'm really excited for is the built-in character arcs with mechanical consequences. You can collect up to 6 "Legendary spirits", which are like subclasses for each of your 6 spirits, but you have to go on a quest for each, and picking one will lock you out of others. Over the course of play - not levelling up - You might become an ambitious warlord, a sinister body-snatcher, a champion of the wild, or reject all of those new powers to remain closer to your true self.
Running a Blades in the Dark game those playdates where the GM isn't available. A buch of small heists with little to no overarching development. I mean we play a few sessions every three months or so. It is the filler game.
Planning to do some one-shots of Panic! at the Dojo after hearing about it. With no character advancement (so I've heard) it sound like a great one-shot system. The dicerolling sounds fun and I do enjoy the easy access of Jackie Chan movies.
Working on (probably) an Ironsworn: Starforged: Sundered Isles set a couple of centuries after the catastrophic fall of the Eternal Empire. In short the last Eternal Emperor, the personification of the Red Moon goddess, tried to usurp the power of the Red Moon causing it to fall in the event known as the Moonfall shattering the central bureaucracy of the empire. And with that gone the empire fell apart within a generation. The immediate story draws inspiration from the Saga of Hervor and Heidrek (Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks). Especially the part of Hervor travelling to where her father and uncles were slain in a failed holmgång, reclaiming the sword Tyrfing and getting her aett cursed. And now that curse is upon the aett. Will hopefully be some good stuff.
Playing a tesmpest cleric in a DnD5e campaign where a demon-goblin horde is ravaging the land. The demon lord is Azeroth and is cold themed so plenty of Warcraft and the Frozen Throne memeing. Begun leaning a bit towards the surfer boy wanting to do good stuff and have transformed him into a smite first ask questions later kind of guy. And a if you are not fully with us against the horde of chaos you are against us. He is becoming a fanatic. Great suff.
Also in a Burning Wheel campaign where a play an engineer just wanting to do her day job, get reestablished in the city and possibly reconnect with her estranged daughter. Currently very stressed and very tired. The character doesn't want to do "adventuring" stuff but me the player make sure she get into the action. Love playing the mom of the group.
A 3rd edition in person campaign complete with mountain dew and pizza pockets in a half renovated small town railroad shack. 7 people of all ages. That's Moekin's Magnificent Seven, baby.
Currently playing:
Weird Frontiers game every secondish week.
DnD5 game every secondish week or month. We have a slow pace and probably wont finish the modue, but it´s fun.
Running: 13th age, getting ready to start a full campaign now that my introductory fewshot with another group draws to a close. I want to lift the story of tharizdun and the gem-prison loosely for this campaign, but not the greyhawk setting. I´m interested to see how it meshes with the icon system!
Looking at this, I guess I was hungry for some d20 hahaha. I usually play/run more pbta, but just got done on a monster of the week fewshot
edit: I recommend 13th age to all! It´s a great take on a less mechanical, faster and more "fantasy-avengers-y" style of dnd game with some great mechanics for shared stroytelling and letting players decide stuff. Needs an improvisational group, not good for groups with adversarial relationships/tendency to optimize a lot.
Currently playing as a warforged circle of the moon druid in a 5e campaign. It is a custom built campaign about the invention and development of airship capabilities. It's my first time ever playing an RPG and I've been having a blast with it.
I'm playing in a long running monthly 5e campaign (enjoying my character, even though its kinda out of sync with what the rest of the players want to do...I can roll with it) as well as a new PF2e campaign...one of the adventure paths. First time into PF2E for me, I don't hate it, but I don't love it! Boy is there a lot of looking things up - I've heard PF1E is many times worse on that front? Crazy times...then again I might have loved it at the time it came out (I was on a PNP hiatus for a while), who knows!
Running wise, I'm about to start up/continue-sorta a long running campaign (the last one is on hold in Tier 4/nearing endgame waiting for one player, so we're starting up another a few hundred years in the future) in a homebrew world. Really excited about getting back to DMing and creating!
Ooh who are you playing in Pathfinder? I had a bunch of fun with my mid-level fighter as well as my low-level magus and didn't feel like I had to look too many things up. Granted, we were playing on Foundry which helped expedite a lot of things.
I'm playing a summoner. Given than 5e doesn't have a pure summoner/pet class, and that's kind of "my thing" I had to give it a shot. It's wacky as hell to run keeping track of all the actions and 1->2, 2+1 etc. trades, but I'm finally getting the hang of it. Hard not to get sucked into analysis paralysis land sometimes.
I uh...also took the Beastmaster free archetype so I have 2 pets at all times, not counting potential summoning spells. I haven't sat down and did the math to see if that would even be doable with the action economy...:)
Edit: We are playing in foundry. I honestly don't know if you could pay me to play PF2E on paper. OK, that's a lie, you could absolutely pay me, but I don't know if I'd do it for free!
I'm playing in a 5e campaign using Rime of the Frostmaiden with my long-time dnd group.
I'm running a Mausritter game weekly for my parents and brother, and plan to start an Old-School Essentials open table at my FLGS's rpg night in the near future.
Playing a wood-elf rogue turned nature cleric (developed that way) in a DnD 5e LmoP turning Skt straight up kind of campaign (dm is somewhat railroady). Started a Fairy Wild magic sorcerer in a homebrew campaign which I am not quite sure yet will take off.
Toying with the idea of hosting something myself (basically bundling a lot of the oneshots I used to run on a Westmarches server I played and dmed on last year into a couple of storylines playing in the same setting, hindered by the usual roadblocks of not owning many books, discord server [and 'not condoning piracy'].
Speaking of which, do you guys have some tips on how to start with that?
I am playing in an Apocalypse World game that is a run on from a D&D group I put together and another player has taken up the mantle.
I am running Shadow of the Demon Lord in my own homebrew setting with a some changes to it for a 3 man group.
I've mostly been playing Root, though most of the PCs have been retired and new ones made. That said as a result, I have been through 3 different characters.
How is that system? I haven't heard many people talk about it.
Taking a D&D break, however a group I am not DM'ing are finishing up Strixhaven. Currently I am running Cairn with two groups and also in some final prep stages to playtest something I have been working on.
I am running one group of Cairn using the BFRPG Morgransfort module and another utilizing the Lost Citadel book from Green Ronin Publishing.
Playing in a D&D 5E game, running a Scion campaign heavily inspired by German folktales and folklore.
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Pretty much everything I run these days is based on Savage Worlds. It just works the way I like to run games. I'm currently working on a conversion of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to Savage Worlds and I'm looking to run another test game in about a month. Things have been going pretty well with it!
I do still get around to running a little Swords & Wizardry now and again too.
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