Hey everyone,

Growing up, I loved playing board games with friends and family—it was a big part of my life. Now, I’ve moved away, and my girlfriend and some of her family (who live with us) have zero interest in board games.

I’ve tried classics like Catan, Ticket to Ride, and Codenames, but they’re not into them at all. I’m really craving some board game time, so I’m thinking about branching out to more approachable games.

Does anyone have suggestions for games that are fun and easy to ease non-gamers into without scaring them off? Or maybe I’m just not starting with the right type of games? Any advice is appreciated, thanks!

After many years of Roll20 D&D campaigns, we have whittled the process down to the bare essentials: there are only three of us now, with one DM and two players running two characters each. Having completed many of the classic modules of our youth, we are now tackling an extension to the Mines of Phandelver - Shattered Obelisk. Because this is golden age D&D from when we were teens, we chose a classic lineup. My friend is playing a half orc fighter and wood elf rogue, while I'm playing the dwarven cleric and high elf wizard.

What is new for us this time is that the DM is brand new to the position. He's been a player forever but has never had the time to run a campaign. These pre-packaged modules make things quite easy though so we're delighted to finally get the forever player behind the screen so that the two normal DMs can really play this team to its potential. It's been a blast.

But what I realized yesterday is how different his style is, and that's what I'd like to discuss here. I come from a theater and Hollywood background as a screenwriter/playwright and character actor. I also have a ton of improv comedy experience. I'll throw out a number of story elements or NPCs and just cut loose, completely fine with where the dice and the player decisions take me. Our other usual DM is also a Hollywood guy, but he's a producer. So for him it's all about marshaling the resources, optimizing the setting, and conducting the grand scenario. He cuts right through all my roleplaying to get to the tactical play as soon as possible.

Well our new DM is a senior medical doctor at a teaching hospital. I just realized as we played last night that he isn't narrative in the slightest because he is presenting each of the scenarios or NPCs as if he's on his rounds with a knot of junior doctors, giving them a brief outline or quick synopsis of each patient's condition before moving on to the next. It's such a different way of approaching this kind of data that it took me a few months of this before I realized what he was doing. All of us are trained to our own methods, that's for sure.

How do you and your tables present information and move the game forward? I fear that the success of Critical Role, etc. has given too many newer players the idea that there is only one way to conduct these kinds of games and I'd like to hear of more original approaches.

With Christmas around the corner I'm wondering if anyone has tabletop/card games they enjoy that are quick to play (in my mind less than 30 minutes). I enjoy longer games like Betrayal at House on the Hill immensely, but I'd like to add some games to my collection that are fun and light hearted, easy to learn, and idealy travel easy. I often play games with family over the holidays and want some that aren't as intimidating for my parents and older relatives to pick up and try. I often played with at least 2 other people, but I've been looking for fun 2 player games as well.

Can you please share what the gameplay is like and what you enjoy about playing it? Thanks all!

The World Chess Championship started today between reigning champion, China's Ding Liren (2728 Elo, 32 y/o) and India's young prodigy Gukesh D. (2783 Elo, 18 y/o). It's taking place in Singapore with games starting at 5PM local time (10AM CET, 4AM EST). Commentated coverage can be found at Chess.com or FIDE as well as numerous smaller channels.

Coming into the match, Ding is far more experienced, but has been displaying terrible form since becoming World Champion. Meanwhile Gukesh has looked far stronger and has the chance to become the youngest World Champion ever, beating out the likes of Magnus Carlsen and Garry Kasparov by several years. Former World Champion Magnus Carlsen is still ranked as the #1 player in the world, but has declined to participate, just like last year.

The match is 14 games from November 23 to December 13, with potential rapid chess tiebreaks if the score is even after 14 games. The players will have a rest day after every 3 game days.

The game is AD&D 1e. I'm happy to discuss any mechanics behind the report if anyone asks.

The party:

• Iskandar, human Magic-User 7
• Jurgen, human Ranger 6
• DeBeaux, half-orc Cleric 1 / Fighter 1 / Assassin 1
• Bite, half-orc Fighter 1
• Rowan, human Magic-User 6
  • Henchman Freya, human Fighter 4
  • Henchman Rikka, human Fighter 4
• Vortigern, dwarf Fighter 6 / Thief 6
  • Henchman Ingrid, human Ranger 4
  • Henchman Runa, human Magic-User 4

The location: an underwater facility inhabited by aquatic elves who are currently suffering from a wasting disease of the mind that's been spreading amongst them. Those affected have been forcibly sent to the lower levels. A faerie elf (C6/F6/MU9) named Alfred has enlisted the party's assistance.

The plan this evening was to delve into the third floor of this facility. They left the safety of the first floor and quickly navigated through the second, back to the lift that would take them down to the third.

The party wanders through the halls, checking each of the iron doors for traps before attempting to pry them open. During one such attempt, a few dozen elves (and then some), horribly mutated into beings with sightless orbs but exceptional hearing, approaches from behind. The party was not caught unawares, and one fireball from Rowan later, they finish up with the door and loot the bodies of any loose coin. It's noted that many of the coins were destroyed in the blast.

They make their way through a kitchen and eventually come across a dead-end hallway with seemingly no purpose. Before they can do much with that information, another group of a couple dozen mutant elves shows up, but the party catches them by surprise and manages to shock & awe in a way that led to the mutant elves fleeing.

A few members of the party spread out to start checking the walls, and Rikka stumbles through one of the walls with a shout. An illusory wall hid a room with an elven corpse in full battle gear and another lift to a fourth floor. Rowan begins unstrapping the armor from the corpse and then he stops, now unresponsive and non-verbal. Seeing his ally struck with a feeblemind curse, Jurgen does the most sensible thing and tries to loot the sword off the corpse, falling prey to the same curse.

Iskandar borrows some rope and creates a leash for his allies, leading them along. The party decides they should leave and see if Alfred can fix this. He can, and does, for a total sum of 5200 gold. During this, Vortigern's player began feeling unwell and stepped away for the evening.

The party goes back down and decides to try a different direction, bringing them to a hallway filled with razor wire, thickly enough that passage would be both slow and painful. After some discussion, Iskandar uses levitate on himself and creates a tightrope above the wire, along the wall, utilizing some rope and door spikes.

They follow the hall to another couple of doors, one straight ahead and one to their left. Their attentions turns to the left one, which has been locked from this side and welded shut. DeBeaux unlatches the door as Bite moves forward to force it open with his exceptionally high strength. The party moves into the room, seeing a number of effigies fashioned from elven flesh placed around a bone ramp that ends at an altar with a large marble bowl resting on it. Iskandar approaches and sees text inscribed in Elvish within the bowl, so he casts comprehend languages and runs his hands along it. 'The rowan wand lies in blood'.

Unsure of how to proceed with that, he steps away as Rowan approaches, dagger in hand. Rowan cuts across his palm and bleeds into the bowl, at which point an unseen force pulls his hand within, drawing yet more and more of his essence into it, the blood forming and solidifying into a wand. Upon inspection, it has inscribed 'fir-aga' on the bottom.

The party moves into another room through a stuck iron door and sees a big cylinder of glass holding a mass of slime, vegetation, and refuse. Laid around said cylinder is a small hoard; silver, jewelry, scroll cases. Iskandar rushes forth to the scroll cases, Jurgen and Bite close behind, which angers the shambling mound in its glass container. Breaking forth from its cage, the shambling mound strikes at the lot of them, landing hits on Rikka and Bite. Many attacks fly towards it as Iskandar carefully backs away from the creature, and Bite is struck by one of its limbs, going down with broken ribs. Iskandar follows up with a magic missile, which is sufficient to kill the creature. Jurgen applies healing to Bite via a potion of light healing, the party gathers all the loot they've found, and then they all leave for the first floor.

Notable magic items found

• ivory goat trio figurines of wondrous power [sold]
• scroll of protection from earth elementals [sold]
• scroll containing three cleric spells [sold]
• wand of fireballs [kept]
• scroll containing seven magic-user spells [kept]
• frostbrand [kept]

Current player-kept map of the third floor.

The game is AD&D 1e. The party:

• Jurgen, human Ranger 6
• Aeliana, elf Fighter 3 / Magic-User 2 / Thief 4
• DeBeaux, half-orc Cleric 1 / Fighter 1 / Assassin 1
• Iskandar, human Magic-User 7
  • Henchman Thorgisl, Fighter 1
• Vortigern, dwarf Fighter 6 / Thief 6
  • Henchman Runa, human Magic-User 4
  • Henchman Ingrid, human Ranger 4
• 6 crossbowmen and 2 infantrymen

The location: an underwater facility inhabited by aquatic elves who are currently suffering from a wasting disease of the mind that's been spreading amongst them. Those affected have been forcibly sent to the lower levels. A faerie elf (C6/F6/MU9) named Alfred has enlisted the party's assistance.

This is not their first foray into the dungeon, but they have their first encounter with the affected elves here. The ten elves are immediately suspicious and eventually attack once they learn the party was sent here by Alfred. One successful sleep and a decent set of rolls later, the remaining three elves flee. The sleeping ones were tied up, and the party attempted an inquiry, but the elves decided a forever-sleep was preferable, though their movements prior to that were oddly jerky.

They wander the halls of this facility, eventually encountering a gelatinous cube, which two magic missiles from Iskandar & Runa took care of.

In one chamber, they solved a puzzle and activated a Shrine (from the TSR Diablo supplement for 2e) that opened town portals back to the safe floor. Through trial, they discovered what these do, but only two (Aeliana's and Iskandar's portals) remained.

The highlight of the evening was the party coming across a set-up they'd seen in another room; two ceremonial masks kept inside a glass case, framed with iron, and watched by nearby metal torches that would loose blasts of arcane energy at any that got too close. Aeliana and Vortigern attempt to disarm the trap. Vortigern succeeds, but Aeliana fails significantly enough to accidentally trigger the trap, forcing a save vs. breath for 15 damage. She fails, and with her maximum HP of 8, she is incinerated on the spot. Luckily, her gear remains. They travel back to the portals activated earlier and send a hobilar in with Aeliana's corpse while the rest of them found their way back up. They petition Alfred for a revival, and he does have a scroll with a couple castings of raise dead on them, and the party can certainly afford the price for it, but he gently reminds them that elves are soulless, requiring more powerful magic to revive than he has access to.

After some discussion, Runa rests a while before casting invisibility on herself and her horse so that she might make a trip to a town some 35 miles out to grab:

• Rowan, a human MU 6
  • Henchman Rikka & Freya, both human Fighter 4

Rowan uses invisibility, 10' radius on everyone relevant and they travel back to the elven city to continue exploring. In doing so, they encounter another set of 15 elves, but dispatch them quickly and decisively due to surprise, though Ingrid took a heavy amount of damage (10 damage to her maximum of 22 HP).

We stop shortly after the group finds the lift to the lower level, whereupon their crossbowmen and hobilars refuse to go any deeper, indicating a dungeon floor of at least DL 4 difficulty.

A while back I asked for some advice about running a haunted Beaver Dam game, and a few people popped up to ask why I wasn't trying out a narrative RPG system instead of using classic DnD.

Well, you got me. After some discussion (particularly about the painful amount of time to conduct a high level fight in 5e), we're going to try out the Dungeon World system instead. I've never run a TTRPG like this, and I'm rapidly working through the rulebook to figure it out. But rules only take you so far, there's a lot of learning that only comes with experience.

So for those of you with experience, I ask you: What do you wish you would have known before running a narrative TTRPG?

When I was in elementary school, I found some Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books at a yardsale. I read through them, brought them to school, and played through a basic campaign with some friends. Since then, I haven't met anyone interested in pen-and-paper RPGs. I still hope that I can one day convince someone to play with me, but I don't even know which system I should try to learn. There are now so many different editions of D&D, in addition to countless alternatives and endless arguments over the merits of each.

Whatever system I decide to learn, I will need to invest time and energy into learning and teaching the game to others, and I'll most likely be the DM, so I'd like to choose one that won't be too difficult for beginners to get into. While I enjoy exploring interesting game mechanics, I think the idea of creating an interactive adventure story or a world to explore with friends is what attracts me the most. The Fate system sounded interesting, but I had a hard time understanding the core rulebook. I've recently read short summaries of several other systems that seem like they could be fun and not too hard to get into, such as Index Card RPG, Shadowdark, Tiny Dungeon, Five Torches Deep, Fantasy AGE, and Creative Card Chaos; but I can't afford to read through each of them and seven editions of D&D to determine which one is most suitable for me.

Does anyone have any advice on how to evaluate my options or a suggestion for a good one to start out with?

Hey ho, so I'm taking over running one of my existing D&D groups. I have a campaign in my pocket that I have run part of before, A dystopian Narnia. If somehow my players meet just the right overlaps of nerd and techness to have ended up here. Leave now .

But it's really a set up for a longer campaign that I hope bridges into more worlds. I have the Narnian World really fleshed out, but if somebody feels particularly passionate and has ideas, please let me know. I can provide any detail folks would like into being asked a tricky question just helps me World build so please go for it.

The general gist is that our adventurers are pulled by a much weakened aslan from faerun or whatever default world we start from into Narnia. There they find it has been a thousand years of winter and rule by The White Witch. I'm familiar enough with the lore that if they decide to leave the country of Narnia or seek out another witch as an ally I have some options. Hopefully they save the day and free Narnia from Christmas-less winter. (I'm leaning hard into all the broad references to mythology in Narnia, Dionysus and the Maenads, the River God

If they do, they will receive a set of the magic rings used in The magician's nephew to allow people to pop between Narnia and the wood between the worlds. Allowing them to hop into other stories that have been similarly messed up.

I am looking for One Big Idea But also some other suggestions

1. The suggestions I'm looking for are other stories from about the same realm of stories that could be similarly messed up, ideas I had included Dinotopia, Wrinkle in Time, The Rats of NIMH, maybe one of the Discworld stories (I feel like half of those characters would be self aware) particularly thinking middle grade books with a dip towards children's or younger YA stuff, particularly fantasy stories, particularly those with some nostalgia for my fellow millennial PCs. I don't want to touch Harry Potter.

2. My idea for the reason why the story went wrong is that someone is rewriting it, possibly due to hating children or hating happy endings or something. I wanted a BBEG but I can't think of one. Umbridge is out for the Harry Potter reasons, but who else would go to the trouble? I am planning on the villain having acquired "magical book mcguffin" (that I also need to figure out) that's letting them do this. I like the idea of a villain who gets a lot of power but uses it in such a petty way, to rewrite children's stories

It'll take a long time to get out of Narnia, we don't play very often, and we may not continue depending on how players feel but as someone who's worked this idea over and over in their head for a while, I would love to get past these things.

Hi DnD friends,

I'm tackling a new DM challenge and could use some guidance. I'm designing a dungeon where humanoid beavers are attempting to awaken a sleeping god. Their efforts get derailed when they offer the god a magical plant that overgrows their entire base, warping the rooms and fusing many surviving beavers into half-plant, half-beaver creatures.

Since our group is relatively new, I've found that combat can be a bit slow. To speed things up and make combat more dynamic, I want to include environmental elements and traps—things like shelves that can be pushed over or a chandelier that can be dropped on enemies. I hope this will make the players feel more impactful when they pull off creative moves.

I plan to design a large building that encourages investigation, puzzle solving, and backtracking. My goal is for the players to get familiar with the map before combat, allowing them to discover useful items or environmental features they can take advantage of when enemies appear.

Since I've never done anything like this, I'm seeking advice on how to approach the design. Are there common pitfalls I should avoid to keep the building fun? How large should the maps be if I want to run this over 3 sessions, each about 3 hours long? And what types of puzzles would fit well in this environment?

Thanks a ton for your ideas! I’m already feeling like I may be reaching too high, but I’m excited to give it a shot!

I miss playing D&D with a group, but hanging out for 5+ hours at a time every week just doesn't fit into my schedule. However, I was thinking about how some mobile games have handled this - Words with Friends has (had?) a mode where you would get notified when it was your turn, and you could play whenever you had free time. I think there's at least one chess game that operated this way as well.

I can't imagine many human players would appreciate long waits between moves, when D&D is designed to be very immersive. So I'm being realistic and wondering what options there are as a single player.

Baulder's Gate 3 is fun, but I don't expect anything with that level of graphical fidelity. And something I could play on my phone would be ideal (but not a dealbreaker if I can't).

Are there options like this out there, or do I just have to accept that D&D doesn't have a place in my life?

DMs, how do you decide if an NPC dies at 0HP (like a monster) or drops unconscious and starts making death saves (like a PC)? I'm a newish DM (been playing off and on for 10 years but never run a campaign that had legs until now), and our last session ended with the death of a recently-introduced barbarian NPC at the hands of another barbarian NPC. I made some other missteps but the big one seems to be this death - some of the players were shocked that barb #2 had done enough damage to kill barb #1 outright. I just had #1 die because she hit 0HP, and it hadn't really occurred to me that she should have gotten death saves.

Any rules of thumb for how you handle NPC death/dying? Or, if you're a player, how you would expect/like to see it handled? Happy to provide more context if desired.

Thanks!

I absolutely LOVE hearing other's stories from their games. Crazy things happen in game land, and these kinds of tales inspire others to play and experiment as well.

I implore anyone who can think of a better way to phrase the title, please suggest it.

Essentially, I use a self-hosted MediaWiki which is where I write everything, but when I just have an 'idea', I have a private Discord channel that I submit the information to. It can be a picture, or a character idea, or an idea for a scene or a shop or whatever-- I just have a channel where I dump all of my ideas, and then when I have time, I go back through them, iterate, add them to my wiki (making them 'canon'), and then deleting the messages.

I would really like something else to do this, because Discord is obviously not meant for this. Unfortunately, the caveat is that it needs to be useable on mobile, because I'd say 80%+ of my ideas like this happen when I'm not at my computer.

My first thought was to set up and self-host a ticketing system-- something like Znuny, but outside of using Zendesk for work, I don't really know that much about them, and it feels like it might be overkill (on top of not working on mobile, I don't think). It has the benefit of being able to immediately have the data organized, so I can double-check to make sure I'm not repeating character names, or ideas, or anything like that.

So, with that in mind, what all are my options?

This thread is for organizing a group to play Scythe online. Everyone mentioned has either been in my specific thread about Scythe months ago or mentioned it elsewhere. I FINALLY got around to getting the Steam version in addition to the Invaders from Afar dlc since it was a bundle.
I'd love to get a Discord group started so we can all finally play together and ultimately shoot the shit and have some fun.
Also I couldn't figure out how private messaging works which is embarrassing but this is way easier, anyway.
If this gets enough traction in the next couple of days I'll make us a discord group and we can go from there as far as scheduling goes. I'd also be open to other games if the group wants to do so. 🤘
@0d_billie
@guissmo
@Beowulf
@Notcoffeetable
@TreeFiddyFiddy
@ocdbear
@AugustusFerdinand
@TownshipTeleporter
@clerical_terrors
@KapteinB
@Spongey

Discovered Go not too long ago, finding it quite enjoyable.

I know there's plenty of reading material out there, but I'm unaware of what exactly would be worthwhile, especially for someone who's been dabbling around at it for 3 months at most.

Grateful for any and all suggestions!