A community about Pen and Paper roleplaying games.
Hello Worlds!
I thought it is time Imzy got a Pen and Paper RPG community! Everybody who enjoys the hobby is welcome!
What worlds do you like to visit with your friends on a long evening? Are you a classic D&D player? More an afficionado of the lovecraftian Horror of Call of Cthulhu? Cyberpunky Shadowrun? Do you enjoy White Wolf's urban fantasy verse ? Or have you developed your own system, that suits you best?




I've played several editions of DnD, some White Wolf stuff, and a couple of Call of Cthulhu games. My current group does a total homebrew thing. Someone volunteers to DM and offers up their idea, we come up with some very basic stats and skills, and then we just go. We mostly use a d20 - the DM knows about how hard something should be and approximates from there. Sometimes we do one-shots, sometimes a campaign takes hold.
The one we've been doing for a few months now is a pretty basic medieval fantasy type world, but all the PCs are magic users of one type or another. The guy running the game is definitely the best DM I've ever played with, he's just got such a knack for story and action, and keeping the balance between freedom and nudging things along.
It's an amazing experience, when you have a really good GM. With CAll of Cthulhu we usually try to create a really dense atmosphere. Playing by gaslight, with atmospheric music in the background and with small artifacts from the campaign, so that the players have something to feel and touch while investigating.
We once played Horror in the Orient Express with two GMs so that the group could even split and come together again. One of the players wrote a diary for his character and I still love to read it.
Hey, cool! I've been gaming since the 1980s, so I've tried a lot of the systems (D&D, V&V, Marvel Superheroes, Rolemaster, Shadowrun, 1st and 2nd ed White Wolf Vampire/Werewolf/Mage, GURPS, Chill, Call of Cthulhu, Champions, etc.), but about 10 years ago, I stopped buying game systems (the last one I bought was Blue Rose) and went entirely homebrewed. Nowadays, my gaming group is very loosey-goosey roleplay-heavy with some randomization happening with Tarot decks. I miss my dice sometimes, and therefore may run a one-off first edition D&D game in the near future, but my gamers are mostly theatrical LARPers, so improvisational gameplay works well.
Welcome! Oh, that sounds very exciting! I also did some Larping back in the day. Mostly Vampires as we had a group in town that was meeting regularly. I think I probably learned how politics really work in that group.
It's cool that you have a group where the role playing heavy gaming works at the table too. I sometimes play call of Cthulhu with a group comprised mostly of actors and it's amazing. We usually play plot and interaction heavy adventures with little fighting and I love it.
I also really like the idea with the Taroth cards as random element. I once played a steampunk game called Castle Falkenstein, where a normal set of playing cards was used instead of dice. You had your cards and when you wanted to do something you could add a card to your value (if you had the required colour). It was quite an interesting gameplay experience. Does the Taroth system you use work similarly?
We basically use it for combat initiative and interaction, and for people doing magic. We often just go by numbers (Ace beats numbers, Court cards beat Ace, Trumps beat Courts, Trumps by numbers), but sometimes, we go by symbolism of the cards -- I'm an amateur Tarot reader, and my co-GM is quite experienced, so we'll sometimes look at cards for their significance. Like, if a player pulls the Ten of Swords (a weirdly common occurrence), if there's a chance for betrayal in the scene, it would get foregrounded.
Our decks are peculiarly cinematic. We had one huge combat (where the players were getting their tails kicked) that ended with one character making a desperate stab for the villain, drawing Justice, and killing him outright, even though he wasn't hurt at all. The villain, however, drew The Devil, I think, and managed to stab the character with a cursed blade that killed her over the next several hours while the remaining characters tried to find a cure. It was incredibly appropriate and memorable.
We also had one instance where a character was trapped in a space with no oxygen (within a transparent force field), and the other character decided to try to BS some magic to open a wormhole through space from her own lungs to his. She pulled exactly the same card my co-GM did, in practically the only way we could see it working, and thereby saved him.
Wow, that sounds very intriguing! I think Taroth cards are perfect for this and their symbolism adds so much to the game.
There is a german roleplaying game "Das Schwarze Auge" wher there is a sort of ingame Taroth game, called Inrah. They did an actual set of cards a while ago and it's really neat, since it also uses a lot symbols (the gods ans supernatural creatures) from the game world. I love to use it as a GM, for example to determine their encounters on travels.
I also once had a player who was playing a sort of prophet, who was reading the future in the cards. So when he was trying to see to the future, I ordered the cards for her, so that she could get an abstract glimpse at what was to come in the adventure. Sometimes she was spot on, and sometimes she was so convinced by a completly wrong interpretation of a card, that it lead to enoprmous paranoia and hijinks.
Our players ALSO have been using Tarot readings in-game to get information about the plot. The cards have been terrifyingly accurate and easy for my co-GM to work readings in.
As a silly thing, we also created the "Internet Fortuneteller" -- essentially, the characters are running around in the Imaginary World, the top layer of which is the Internet, so when they pop into the local Imaginary manifestation of their real-world anime/manga shop, they get tokens to use the old fortuneteller machine at the back. They ask a question, drop in the token, and draw a card from the GM deck. And then the corresponding video on our almost entirely random list of videos (which we continually refresh) pops up and the characters are in the middle of it. Sometimes, the Fortuneteller is ridiculously accurate (the evil organization in the game got the nickname "Organization Total Eclipse of the Heart" this way), and sometimes, it trolls the heck out of the players. Hilarity ensues.
When the game ends, we're going to have a dinner party called "An Evening With The Internet Fortuneteller" and just do real-life "fortunes" for the heck of it. :)
Cool! While I almost never played any, I once loved reading their books. Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Forgotten Realms.
Even stranger, I enjoy the RPG sourcebooks more than the genre's novels. For example, I enjoyed Shadowrun sourcebooks more than any cyberpunk novel I read.
BTW, I remember once sitting in a bus and watching a family play an RPG with just words. To pass the time.
Yay, the first person posting in this comm!! Welcome!
Yes, these days, when I have a steady job and a little kid I don't get to play nearly as often as I'd like to, ans sometimes I read the sourcebooks just for fun. Shadowrun has brilliant worldbuilding and I really like how they are evolving the world on and on.
Call of Cthulhu is probably the love of my roleplaying life. The German developers are extremely prolific and they did some excellent extended translations of campaings like the Orient Express and also wrote tons of cool original adventures. Also Cthulhu is the perfect game for one offs in totally strange settings. I once GMed an adventure were everybody is part of some weirdo cursed family living on a small island. Each character was more horrible than the next and the players really loved that.
I never really played in the Forgotten Realms setting but I read lots of tie in novels, like R.A. Salvatores Drizzt series.
Cool family on the bus. I kinda can't wait until we can get the little one into gaming. :)