#actual play

[worldsbeyondpod]

📢 BEING SMART WILL NOT SAVE YOU!!!! 📢

This fireside is exclusive to Patreon subscribers, so join us by the fireside: https://www.patreon.com/posts/102427711

#the wizard the witch and the wild one #worlds beyond number #aabria iyengar #lou wilson #ttrpg podcast #podcast #brennan lee mulligan #ttrpg #actual play #erika ishii

[jamphibiann]

I imagine Rowan rolling well on a perception check followed immediately by “how many hp do you guys have? :3” to be as if Rowan finally opens her eyes wide and I promptly poke her in both of them simultaneously.

#cantripped #dnd #dnd podcast #cantripped podcast #actual play

[zoomclown]

doodled a little Dungeons and Daddies tat on my arm. It's making me feel happy :)

#ron stampler #Dungeons and daddies #Dungeons and daddies season 1 #Podcasts #actual play #this podcast is so good #It helped me out of a depressive episode #dndads #Dungeons and dragons

[austinramsaygames]

Inspired by recent discussions of an Actual Play.

EDIT March 22: I can't believe I have to do this. *sigh*

I have played LOTS of games other than D&D. I GMed a podcast for 6 years that was literally about playing obscure games.

TTRPGs that don't use dice (or any randomizer) are still TTRPGs and great fun.

The "win condition" of a TTRPG is having fun with your friends (this can include stories that end with everyone crying).

I believe that there are three parties that have input on the story: the players, the GM, and the dice. Obviously this changes if you're playing a game that gets rid of 1 or 2 of those elements. This includes games that aren't D&D.

If a certain dice result would be uninteresting enough that you'd want to discard it entirely, you must ask why you would roll in the first place. This is the same for whether that would be success OR failure.

Finally, check out my Itch store.

EDIT April 3: I'm muting this now. Too many notifications explaining the stuff I put in the first edit to me like I'm an idiot. God, Tumblr really can't handle a joke.

#ttrpg #indie ttrpg #actual play #actual play podcast #shitpost

[respectissexy]

In case you missed it, Dropout.tv, Critical Role and Dungeons and Daddies all donated food trucks to a DnD themed WGA picket event.

#dimension 20 #dropout.tv #critical role #dungeons and daddies #sam reich #matt mercer #wga strike #wga picket line #wga solidarity #actual play #dungeons and dragons

[worldsbeyondmoments]

Erika: If Brennan does fae time bullshit to me, I will LOSE MY MIND.

Brennan: I have one hundred generations of Irish ancestors going,

“Do it to ‘em lad! Fuck with time stuff! We love it!”

The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One

Children’s Adventure Episode 3

#worlds beyond number #brennan lee mulligan #the wizard the witch and the wild one #wbn pod #actual play #erika ishii #wbn #wbn: www #lou wilson #aabria iyengar

[easays]

burrow’s end is doing something really important and making space for grief and generational trauma in ways that are breathtaking. but I especially want to harp on Izzy and Brennan — honestly, especially Izzy.

children perceive far more than we understand, and her giving voice to the fact that parental decisions have consequences for their children (“I’m mad at Dad for Dad going away”) is so, so crucial.

And then Brennan going the “no one needs to be mad. If you’re feeling mad, don’t” plants those seeds of how the most loving parents can insist on managing your emotions instead of feeling their own.

fuck, this season is good.

#dimension 20 #dimension twenty #actual play #brennan lee mulligan #aabria iyengar #burrows end #izzy roland #siobhan thompson #rashawn scott #jasper william cartwright #erika ishii

[yeehawpim]

a comic about my experience with this supercut of Brennan Lee Mulligan on LA By Night

#original comic #la by night #vampire the masquerade #adrian clairmont #brennan lee mulligan #artists on tumblr #villains #ttrpg #actual play #comic #my art #my comic

[dumpster-fire-sapphic-failgirl]

Worlds Beyond Number is wild because Brennan Lee Mulligan uses every ounce of his philosophic and empathetic learnings to create the most heartrending situations and scenes

Then, like an emotional devastation katamari, this fucker picks up THREE whole ass other people like him. Lou Wilson, who will make you cry while you’re in the middle of laughing. Aabria Iyengar, who is a fucking genius and dives full ass into her character’s flaws because your heart will die of a thousand cuts when it all hits. And Erika Ishii. At first blush, a bit of a clown, albeit a sultry one when they want to be. More than happy to play the fool. Lets you underestimate them, so you let them get close, and when you realize how deep you’re in it’s too late

So these FOUR chucklefucks, these four geniuses of humor and tragedy, hire a fucking Maestro of Sound Design in Taylor Moore to produce their home game. And everything is tighter. And even more immersive. And heartwrenching and hilarious and cozy and creepy.

Anyway, this team of FIVE people decide that they’re going to make one of the best podcasts currently airing and it’s only nine episodes in.

#worlds beyond number #brennan lee mulligan #erika ishii #aabria iyengar #lou wilson #taylor moore #wbn #wbn pod #wbn: www #podcast #actual play #narrative play #how many times will you fuckers break my heart while I cheer you for it #seriously it is so good and you should be listening #i relate the most to Ame but Suvi my beloved you can do no wrong even when you do very wrong

[anim-ttrpgs]

Help Save the World of TTRPGs and Their Creators.

Okay I’m being a little dramatic, but at the same time I’m pretty serious. This is a call to action, and the livelihoods of myself and lots of other people, many of them (like myself) disabled, are depending on it. This is a post about why, what you can do about it, and (perhaps least often answered) how.

This post is actually an accompaniment to another discussion by someone else. If you don’t want to listen to a 90-minute in-depth discussion of much of what I’m about to tell you, you can just keep reading. Otherwise, click here or here and listen to this either before or after you read this post. (They’re the same thing, just different sources.)

If you have ever made or reblogged posts urging people to switch from Google Chrome to Firefox, you should be willing to at least give a try to other TTRPGs besides D&D5e for much the same principle reasons. I’m not telling you you have to hate D&D5e, and I’m not telling you you have to quit D&D5e, I’m just asking you to try some other games. If you don’t like them, and you really want to go back to D&D5e, then go back to D&D5e. But how can you really know you won’t like other games if you have literally never tried them? This post is a post about why and how to try them. If you’re thinking right now that you don’t want to try them, I urge you to look below to see if any of your reasons for not wanting to try them are covered there. Because the monopoly that WotC’s D&D5e has on TTRPGs as a whole is bad for me as a game designer, and it’s bad for you as a game player. It’s even bad for you if you like D&D5e. A fuller discussion of the why and how this is the case can be found in the links above, but it isn’t fully necessary for understanding this post, it’ll just give you a better perspective on it.

If you’re a D&D5e player, I’m sure at some point or another, you’ve been told “play a different game”, and it must get frustrating without the context of why and how. This post is here to give you the why and how.

[The following paragraph has been edited because the original wording made it sound like we think all weird TTRPGs suck.]

Before that though, one more thing to get out of the way. I'm going to level with you. There’s a lot of weird games out there.

You are gonna see a lot of weird TTRPGs when you take the plunge. Many of them try to completely reinvent what a TTRPG even is, and some fail spectacularly, others really do even up doing something very interesting even if they don't end up being what a core TTRPG player wants. But not every indie RPG is a Bladefish, lots and lots of them are more 'traditional' and will feel very familiar to you, I promise. (And you might even find that you like the weird experimental bladefish type ones, these are usually ideal for one-session plays when your usual group can't play your usual game for any reason.)

You're also going to probably see a lot of very bad games, and man have I got some stories of very bad games, but for now I'm just saying to make sure you read the reviews, or go through curators (several of which will be listed below), before you buy.

Now that that is out of the way, I’m going to go down a list of concerns you may have for why not, and then explain the how.

“I don’t want to learn a whole new set of rules after I already spent so much time learning D&D5e.”

Learning a new set of rules is not going to be as hard as you think. Most other TTRPGs aren’t like that. D&D5e is far on the high end of the scale for TTRPGs being hard and time-consuming to learn and play. If you’ve only played D&D5e, it might trick you into thinking that learning any TTRPG is an overwhelmingly time-consuming task, but this is really mostly a D&D5e problem, not a TTRPG problem as a whole.

“D&D5e has all of these extra online tools to help you play it.”

So what? People have been playing TTRPGs without the help of computers for 50 years. To play a well-designed TTRPG you won’t need a computer. Yes, even if you're bad at math. There are some TTRPGs out there that barely even use math.

“I’m too invested in the narrative and characters of my group’s current ongoing D&D5e campaign to switch to something else.”

There are other games, with better design made by better people for less money, that are the same kind of game as D&D5e, that your current characters, lore, and plot will fit right into and do it better. And no, it's not just Pathfinder, there's others.

“I can’t afford to play another TTRPG.”

You probably can. If you’ve only played D&D5e, you might have been made to think that TTRPGs are a very expensive hobby. They aren’t. D&D5e is actually uniquely expensive, costing more than 3x more than the next most expensive TTRPG I can think of right now. Even on the more expensive end, other TTRPG books will cost you no more than $60, most will cost you less than $20, and a whole lot of them are just free. If you somehow still can’t afford another TTRPG, come to the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book club mentioned below, nominate the game, and if it wins the vote we will straight up buy it for you.

(By the way, if you had any of the above concerns about trying other games besides D&D5e, that really makes it sound like you are in a textbook abusive relationship with D&D5e. This is how abusers control their partners, and how empires control their citizens, by teaching you to think that nothing could ever get any better, and even though they treat you bad, the Other will treat you even worse.)

“If I don’t play D&D5e, which TTRPG should I play?”

That’s a pretty limited question to be asking, because there will be no one TTRPG for everything. And no, D&D5e is not the one TTRPG for everything, Hasbro’s marketing team is just lying to you. (Pathfinder and PbtA are not the one system for everything either!) Do you only play one video game or only watch one movie or only read one book? When you finish watching an action movie like Mad Max, and then you want to watch a horror movie, do you just rewind Mad Max and watch it over again but this time you act scared the whole time? No, you watch a different movie. I’m asking you to give the artistic medium of TTRPGs the same respect you would give movies.

“I want to play something besides D&D5e, but my friends won’t play anything else!”

I have several answers to this.

Try showing them this post.

If that doesn’t work: Make them. Put your foot down. This works especially well if you are the DM. Tell them you won’t run another session of D&D5e until they agree to give what you want to do at least one try instead of always doing only what they want to do. This is, like, playing 101. We learned this in kindergarten. If your friend really wants to play something else, you should give their game a try, or you’re not really being a very good friend.

If that doesn’t work, find another group. This doesn’t even mean that you have to leave your existing group. A good place to start would be the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club which will be mentioned and linked below. You can also go to the subreddit of any game you’re interested in and probably meet people there who have the same problem you do and want to put together a group to play something other than D&D5e. You might get along great with these people, you might not, but you won’t know until you try. Just make sure to have a robust “session zero” so everyone is on the same page. This is a good practice for any group but it is especially important for a group made of players you’ve just met.

“I only watch actual plays.”

Then watch actual plays of games that aren’t D&D5e. These podcasts struggle for the same reasons that indie RPGs struggle, because of the brand recognition and brand loyalty D&D5e has, despite their merit. I don’t watch actual plays, or else I would be able to list more of them. So, anyone who does watch actual plays, please help me out by commenting on this post with some non-D&D5e actual plays you like. And please do me a favor and don’t list actual plays that only play one non-D&D5e system, list ones that go through a variety of systems. The first one I can think of is Tiny Table.

“I can just homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e.”

Even though I want to, I’m not going to try and argue that you can’t actually homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e. Instead, I’m going to ask you why you’re buying two $50 rulebooks just to throw away half the pages. In most other good RPGs, you don’t need to change the rules to make them fun, they’re fun right out the box.

“But homebrewing D&D5e into any kind of game is fun! You can homebrew anything out of D&D5e!”

Firstly, I promise that this is not unique to D&D5e. Secondly, then you would probably have more fun homebrewing a system that gives you a better starting point for reaching your goal. Also, what if I told you that there are entire RPG systems out there that are made just for this? There are RPG systems that were designed for the purpose of being a toolbox and set of materials for you to work with to make exactly the game you want to make. Some examples are GURPS, Savage Worlds, Basic RolePlaying, Caltrop Core, and (as much as I loathe it) PbtA.

“I’m not supporting WotC’s monopoly because I pirate all the D&D5e books.”

Then you’re still not supporting the smaller developers that this monopoly is crushing, either.

Now, here’s the how. Because I promise you, there’s not just one, but probably a dozen other RPGs out there that will scratch your exact itch.

Here’s how to find them. This won’t be a comprehensive list because I’ve already been typing this for like 3 hours already. Those reading this, please go ahead and comment more to help fill out the list.

First, I’m gonna plug one of my own major projects, because it’s my post. The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club. It’s a discord server that treats playing TTRPGs like a book club, with the goal of introducing members to a wide variety of games other than D&D5e. RPGs are nominated by members, then we hold a vote to decide what to read and play for a short campaign, then we repeat. There is no financial, time, or schedule investment required to join this book club, I promise it is very schedule-friendly, because we assign people to different groups based of schedule compatibility. You don’t have to play each campaign, or any campaign, you can just read along and participate in discussion that way. And if you can’t afford to buy the rulebook we’re going to be reading, we will make sure you get a PDF of it for free. That is how committed we are to getting non-D&D5e RPGs into people’s hands. Here is an invite link.

Next, there are quite a few tumblr blogs you can follow to get recommendations shown to you frequently.

@indierpgnewsletter

@indie-ttrpg-of-the-day

@theresattrpgforthat

@haveyouplayedthisttrpg

@indiepressrevolution

Plenty of podcasts, journalists, and youtubers out there do in-depth discussions of different systems regularly, a couple I can think of off the top of my head are:

Storyteller Conclave (I’m actually going to be interviewed live on this show on April 10th!)

Seth Skorkowsky

Questing Beast

The Gaming Table

Rascal News

Lastly, you can just go looking. Browse r/rpg, drivethrurpg.com, indie press revolution, and itch.io.

Now, if you really want to support me and my team specifically Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, our debut TTRPG, is going to launch on Kickstarter on April 10th and we need all the help we can get. Set a reminder from the Kickstarter page through this link.

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, there’s plenty of ways to get one!

Subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

Donate to our ko-fi and send us an email with proof that you did, and we’ll email you back with the full Eureka prerelease package with the most updated version at the time of responding! (The email address can be found if you scroll down to the bottom of our website.)

We also have merchanise.

#dnd #dnd5e #dnd 5e homebrew #dungeons and dragons #d&d #d&d 5e #dungeons and dragons 5e #dnd 5e #5e #homebrew #dungeons & dragons #critical role #crit role #dimension 20 #actual play #matt mercer #wizards of the coast #wotc #hasbro #ttrpgs #ttrpg #ttrpg community #ttrpg tumblr #tabletop #roleplay #roleplaying #roleplaying games #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop role playing game #fantasy rpg

[slayerchick303]

I'm not a parent, but I found this relatable as someone with 13 nieces, nephews, and niblings.

#you can only go so far #viola's “oh no” is so freakin' funny #mommy gave up a long time ago #burrows end #dimension 20 burrows end #d20 burrows end #dimension 20 #d20 #brennan lee mulligan #rashawn scott #siobhan thompson #izzy roland #erika ishii #dropout tv #dropout #dnd #dungeons and dragons #actual play #d and d

[worldsbeyondpod]

We're just ONE WEEKEND AWAY from the premiere of Arc 3! And OF COURSE we have some new Arc art to share with you all, once again lovingly brought to life by Lorena Lammer.

How many new details can you spot in each photo?

Also some MAJORLY exciting news: we're coming in on breaking 30k Patreon subscribers, AHOOHOO! Thank you all SO MUCH for your continued support, we are so beyond honored to be able to share this world and these stories with you.

If we hit that milestone before Tuesday, we'll share an exclusive sneak preview of the Arc 3 premiere with y'all on Patreon!

GET EXCITED!!!

You can find Lorena and her work here:

Instagram

Twitter

#worlds beyond number #the wizard the witch and the wild one #aabria iyengar #lou wilson #ttrpg #brennan lee mulligan #podcast #ttrpg podcast #actual play #erika ishii

[malinkymax]

me saying my little goodnight prayers tonight expressing thanks for the benevolent gifts the actual play gods graced us with today:

#dropout #dimension 20 #d20 #d20 fantasy high #fantasy high junior year #fantasy high dimension 20 #fantasy high #brennan lee mulligan #erika ishii #actual play #ttrpg #ally beardsley #lou wilson #brian murphy #emily axford #siobhan thompson #zac oyama

[blumineck]

DO YOU PLAY DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS?

Sincerely, ADHD Anon

I do! In fact I'll playing tonight, at 7.30 CST, over here, (and generally every Tuesday when we can get the party together!)

And if you missed the earlier episodes, you can catch them here.

I've gone non-standard with my build for this one, and I'm having fun running around as a chaotic DEX barbarian.

(This is my late night streaming face from the last game)

#dungeons and dragons #dnd #actual play #gaming

[oliviridian]

You know the old saying, ‘those thrown in pits will build ladders.’ For years, I believed that whoever wrote that never climbed a day in their life. After all, what pit has the material–the wood, the nails, the hammers–needed to build a ladder? Who, tossed aside by the more powerful, could find the will to build handholds and rungs from nothing at all? How does anyone, I wondered, escape the depth? But I realized something I had not considered. The powerful are frugal and it is costly to dig a new pit for each person you wish to bury. The weak, the downtrodden, the dismissed, the disfigured, the doomed. We are all neighbors. And we are too, the wood, the nails, the hammers, needed to build ladders. Austin Walker, Spring in Hieron

#Hieron #friends at the table #fatt #red jack #spring in hieron #actual play #austin walker

[worldstoforge]

Now that we know Lucy Frostblade’s fate, I am haunted by the moment Fig had with Ivy at the Shrimp Party.

The nonchalantness of Ivy’s reaction. The way her eyebrow raised a quizzical but bemused manner. Maybe she could see through Fig’s disguise but even so… NO surprise? NO double take? Just a cold, calculated “we doing this?” Like what the hell is going on?!

Alexa play “Teenagers” by My Chemical Romance

#ttrpg #actual play #dimension 20 #ttrpg community #d20 fhjy #fhjy #dimension 20 fhjy #fantasy high rules #fantasy high junior year #d20 fantasy high #lucy frostblade #figeroth faeth #ivy embra #dimension 20 fantasy high #dimension twenty #dropout #teenagers scare the living shit out of me #maybe teaching children how to be murder hobos wasn’t such a good idea #rip Lucy you deserved better