Had a great time today running a one-shot using the one-sheet 2400 BC: DUNES & DENIZENS rules! We took about 30-35 minutes creating characters and running through the basic rules, and another 5-8 minutes whipping up some character art and tokens in DALL-E 3 to use in our Owlbear VTT.
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I enjoy trying out new games, but I’ve also found that ‘mastering’ a game system often takes many sessions of running those rules. These days, I’m usually more comfortable converting an existing IP over to a game system I like and have mastered, rather than learning yet another rule system from scratch each time I run games in a new setting. Conversion does time some time, but so does learning a new system!
Anyway, with that background, here are my favorite game systems and some notes.
In a traditional dating back nine years, I like to inventory the ‘games I’m itching to run someday’. Interesting how things evolve: see my posts in early 2023, early 2022, late 2020, early 2020, early 2019, 2017, 2016 and 2014 of things I was itching to run in prior years.
The big change this year is that I recently (for the first time ever!) came up with a list of my favorite game engines to use for campaigns I run. With a couple of exceptions (The One Ring and Pendragon) where there’s an amazing campaign tied to a particular ruleset, I will, for the most part, target to run my favorite systems, which at the moment are story games (Fate, QuestWorlds, and Kids on Brooms), D&D (BX D&D and D&D 5e), and d100 (either Chaosium’s BRP or d00Lite).
Key Elements of Successful Play-by-Post
I was having a discussion with some fellow players in a Play-by-Post (PbP) game I’m in about what makes a PbP game work well (or not). So I thought I’d document my ideas on that here.
Having a good GM is key. If a GM doesn’t keep up with their posting rate and doesn’t keep the action moving, it can be a slog, and people will drop out due to boredom. So key ingredient #1 is having a good GM. If you play for a bit on on a given platform like GamersPlane.com you’ll eventually get to know several of the GMs and then be able to say ‘Oh, I want to get in that game because that person is a great GM!’
I am kicking off an Eberron D&D campaign that will have a Noir feel. The characters will all be Inquisitives working for a detective agency. I want each character to have a secret of ‘scar’, some sort of dramatic element in their past that can drive adventures. Secrets can either be truly secret (the other players don’t know about them), or just secret to the PCs (so the other players know about the secret even if their characters don’t).
With all that in mind, here are 20 secrets and scars for Eberron characters to spark your imagination.
Dicehaven Podcast
Dicehaven is an actual play podcast featuring various tabletop RPGs. We’re currently playing Imperium using the Traveller RPG (Mongoose 2nd Edition).
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About Us
Hello and welcome to Dicehaven! We are a game club in the DFW area who play tabletop roleplaying games. Check out our RPG podcast and our musings and resources on roleplaying.
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