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.

  • KurtDunniehue@ttrpg.networkEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I have three games running at the moment. I’ll post them in order of how novel they are.

    Blades in the Dark (BitD)

    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.

    Pathfinder 2nd Edition (PF2e)

    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…

    Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition (D&D5e)

    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.