/a/ — Type-A

I have only played like, two games that ever got off the floor — one died because I wouldn't date the DM and one died because we all moved-away from eachother.

I really like making unusual character ideas in Pathfinder 1E. The last thing I played was DND 5E and it was okay — I felt like I did not have a lot of 'artistic freedom' to make exactly what I wanted, but I had a fun party (until I did not.)

I'm sort of an idea girl with this kind of stuff — I have a lot of junk I've done that worked well, and I have some interesting ideas that I penned down and never used, but I don't know if you wanna hear about that!

When I lived in Kanegawa, my friend Jesse had put together a table. Jesse hated worldbuilding because they were a perfectionist and felt jaded when they cared about part of the world and the party clearly didn't — so they cooked up this system wherein they neatly divided a deck of card between the players as a sort of pre-game thing, and informed us all developments would cost one card.

Jesse split worldbuilding into three time periods — Premordial, Historical, and Recent history.

In the Premordial stuff, we could turn in cards to create whole landfeatures and put stuff on maps. We could also create cities and put species into play and these would be understood to be "Old".

In the Historical Era, we were not able to place land-features. We could create natural disasters that were effectively modifying them though. We could add more species into play, and more cities, as well as religious movements and stuff. People could establish militaries and go to war (Jesse just did a dice roll on any military encounter and the person with the bigger army rolled twice and took the higher number). Trade routes. Alliances. He let us expand cities into like, metropolises and such. Lots of empire building and natural disaster and trade in this era.

In the "Recent History" era all we could do was political and societal stuff — recent scientific developments, religious movements, political assassinations, treaties... that sort of thing.

By the time it was all done, we had a homebrew setting full of only stuff people cared about, and it had a rich history because aggressive players were basically playing Risk with the DM during the worldbuilding session while everyone else was sort of playing Harvest Moon and making perfect little settlements with complex relationships to eachother.

We knew what the politics and culture was like because we built is collaboratively.

I thought it was a really good, low-effort way to world-build and keep everyone invested without draining the DM.

a lot of my irls have gotten little fatigued of 5e recently so we've been trying other games. We've been trying stuff out through one shots when possible.

Maid RPG is really cute and pretty easy to get up and running. I mostly like the character creation in this, its straightforward and quick. The amount of prep you need to do for this is pretty minimal for a basic session.

Call of Cthulhu uses percent dice which I hadn't tried before. It takes a lot more time to get a character together compared to Maid RPG but once you get the hang of it I think it's pretty intuitive.

I've heard a lot of good things about ryuutama but i haven't tried it yet.

I think even simple changes to 5e mechanics can feel really refreshing though, which is why I enjoyed these others during the one shots I've played so far.

>>3mqxxoa72gh25
i went thru a dnd phase and homebrewed but didn't like dnd mechanics - so I moved over to solo ttrpg with easier/simpler rules / dice - and that sorta carried me when I had the itch - at first I was using a variant on the caltrop system - last time I was dicing and headspacing was mostly not really caring for strong rules so much but using playing cards and improvisation - just whatever got me into the headspace and would journal it - not track hp. etc.

I ran Mausritter last month as a oneshot for my group of 5e-heads as a substitute to our regular weekly game. The game's rules were free and they had fun looking printouts.

Our DM was exhausted and we were missing a few players so it was pared down from 8 to a merciful 5 players (excluding myself).

I ran a slightly modified/slightly improvised session of Honey in the Rafters and began with random character generation per player. There's still a d20 for skill checks, but it's a roll-under system so I felt like I was feeding these players non-Dnd gameplay under a slice of cheese. Call of Cthulhu is the next step of the master plan...

A couple players brought premade 5e character sheets (don't recall what level) in anticipation, but any dejection was soothed by the allure of random item tables and offputting traits rolled for their respective mice. We ended up with a group including trash-picking mice and violent mice and pampered royal sibling-mice.

I haven't ran anything in several years, but it was fun to shake the rust off and figure out how tabletop works with different players. The module's random encounter tables and some amateur voicework were enough to set the stage and lead to a decently-realized cast of NPCs and crossed interests. Every few moments I'd remind the players they were mice, as if they didn't have little self-drawn mice on their sheets, by playing with the sense of scale and environment or straight up just telling them.

All in all it felt like a success, but I still want to run the weirder (read: further from 5e) stuff I've read like Troika! or Ryuutama. Not sure if I'll run something like Lancer unless half the group's gone again and the remainder feels like playing a tactics RPG.

>>3mr3f64xua52m
That whole process reminds me of a game called Downfall that an internet acquaintance ran a few times. Loved that system. I'd like to try and hack together something similar to what you described, it sounds great for a larger group.

Does anyone have any experience with "Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine"?

I have always been a little curious about it — It seems very concerned with characters gaining levels for being played true to their artist's intention for storytelling to level-up in lieu of conventional leveling. Very story-driven.

I also remember the permissable powers afforded to a character being immense and fascinating, but everyone starts out as bad with it so it doesn't matter. Someone showed me the entry for "Character who Turns Into a Kaiju" and at level one it was like, "You got really big and transformed. Your body feels alien and everyone around you is inconvenienced by your new size" which I thought was kind of neat...