ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]

Also applies to skittermanders

If there are specific genres you enjoy it’s worth searching for podcasts that are of that genre - the 3 key parts of a ttrpg are that a group of people gather to create the experience (the tabletop), that there are some form of rules to structure their interaction (the game), and that you play a role - any role. It’s not just knights and wizards or space knights and space wizards, it’s hardboiled film noir detectives, little old ladies investigating murders, 13th century peasants dying of dysentery, or even yourself performing real life actions as part of a role, so if there’s any particular type of story you’re interested in someone has made it into a ttrpg and someone else has recorded a podcast of it being played.

These come with the disclaimer that I have a strong dislike for D&D and its publisher specifically, so all of these are using different rules to D&D, but they should give you a broad swathe of options/experiences:

• The Danger Club - Very silly and chaotic group of out of work actors playing Pathfinder (the closest system to D&D)
• Find the Path - Very mechanics focused and story driven group of STEM types playing Pathfinder (so exact opposite of TDC)
• Time for Chaos/Get in the Trunk - spin offs from The Glass Cannon Podcast, professional podcasters play Call of Cthulhu (TfC), a game styled after 1920’s pulp and lovecraftian horror, and it’s more modern incarnation Delta Green (GitT), a game styled on more modern sci-horror like The X-Files or The Thing
• Wrath and Glory by Narrative Declaration - Youtube content creators playing a Warhammer 40k campaign, which can also be watched on youtube to see the Virtual Tabletop they play through.
• Friends at the Table - Very worldbuilding focused group that start on Dungeon World, a more narrative focused fantasy ttrpg, but soon spread to a bunch of other systems as the story goes on.

I don’t know of anything quite like Harmonquest - DM doing all the mechanical work while actors improv, accompanied by animation of events - your best bet would be Critical Role for actor improv, or looking for ttrpg podcasts to listen to an actual play - a more realistic example of what playing with other people ends up being like.

Honestly that sounds about right for WFRP. Shouldnt take too many sessions for the dice to do similar to a player instead.

Disengage, we already have a thread for this.

Going into unrelated discussions and replying with the content of different threads does not support your claim you aren’t astroturfing, otherwise why would you be trying to harrass me on irrelevent parts of the platform?

The name “Perfidious Albion” is more than 800 years old. You should not be surprised by our bullshit.

The unnamed Galtian gnome merchant who exists as an excuse for me to use an outrageous mockery of a french accent is just one of a group of unnamed Galtian gnomes who escaped slavery while it was under Chelaxian rule and adopted a range nomadic lifestyles.

Admittedly the backstory just an excuse for me to continue using an outrageous mockery of a french accent in future camapigns that don’t take place in the current town.

As much as I enjoyed PF1e’s We Be Goblins, I think I had slightly more fun running PF2e’s Little Trouble in Big Absalom. There’s something about the whimsicality of it all that lets the players act like maniacs without disrupting anything too much.

Two that I found very easy to understand just from the battle maps were the Emerald Spire and the Abomination Vaults, as both have a central recurring feature to orient yourself by - the titular spire and the Gauntlight’s beam. It makes them a lot less sprawling than many classic megadungeons, but also lets me and the players easily work out how everything connects just by comparing its position to the central feature.

the PCs intended to meet in a tavern

Ah, I guess it’s a tenses in english thing then - for stuff like “intend”, we use past participle ("intended) to indicate that something was, but is no longer planned to take place, and the present participle for things that still are planned to take place.

Ok, it’s your game and all that, but your op says you want to change plans, so I responded to that.

Do you mean that as in identifying how each individual fits into the team, or establishing them as a single unit who works together? It’s important to remember that you don’t need to cover every moment of each character’s life - the session is there to introduce the players to each other’s characters, so the individual interactions of the characters meeting can happen off screen as long as the opening session established who they each are properly.

Either way, that’s what the cart ride and 3 events are for: you start with the traveller, giving some roleplay as the group establishes who they are, if they trust them enough to travel with them, and get more information from them about the city. People get to present their character’s general demeanour, how chatty or questioning they are, what it is they pay attention to about people.
Next up a fight, where they have to work together to defend the cart/fellow traveller. The group naturally comes together against the threat, with a common goal in mind of defending their stuff. Players get to show off their character’s fighting style and work out how they fit together - who’s in the front and back, what advantages they have in their role etc.
Finally, a skill event letting the players flex their imagination and show off their characters noncombat abilities to each other, whether that’s knowledge checks to recall how to fix a wheel or raw athletics to move a tree aside, while again working together to overcome an obstacle.

By the time you’ve finished you’ve given them ample opportunities to show their character rather than just tell each other about them, establishing the individuals and how they work as a team in the time it takes to reach the city gates.

Honestly I feel “you meet in a tavern” is cliche and uninteresting, but if you must do it give them something to mechanically interact with the NPCs through - a drinking game, some kind of gambling, someone who gets aggressive and has to be face-skilled down from a fight, that sort of thing. First session roleplay is always awkward and needs something to focus around, which taverns aren’t really for.

If they’re immediately leaving for another city there’s not much point in giving them memorable NPCs to interact with though, because they won’t be interacting with them again. Why not start them off already travelling to Ptolus as a group? You can have them travelling with/pick up along the way a memorable NPC from Ptolus, so they arrive with someone already familiar with the city and can point them in the right direction, while setting up a familiar face for the party later when they interact with them again. Throw in fending off a bandit attack and a skill challenge - maybe a wheel breaks on the cart they’re in, or they have to overcome a blockage in the road - and they should arrive at the city just in time for the end of the session, leaving them hanging on a description of the city waiting for next week.

Nonsense, Pathfinder and D&D (not 5e) do horror fine. I mean, obviously, if you just dump the monster in front of them and tell them it’s a scary fight you’re not going to get anywhere, but other games don’t do that either. The horror comes in the build up, the discoveries they make along the way, and the feelings of helplessness they induce.
You can’t fight a small town tradition that’s just a little bit off, or a room full of humanoid bones that are unusually small. Combat has already finished when the party realises the monster they just defeated was only a pawn of something even more sinister. There’s nothing to roll initiative against when the party is discussing what they’ve discovered so far and can’t quite get the pieces to fit together.

Overwhelming personal danger from the monster itself is an incredibly small part of horror, and 5e couldn’t balance a fight to save its life, but 4e and PF2e are extremely built for it. From a skill challenge as “combat” against an enemy that can’t be beaten, to a PL+3 statblock and some hazards for a challenging fight with a high likelihood of killing players without causing a TPK, you can very much tune the difficulty of combat. Even PF1 and 3.x can do a good job at lower levels.

I’m a big proponent of using the right system for the job, but horror is such a broad, circumstances dependent genre that it’s a lot more about using the right horror for the system. There’s plenty of classic horror tropes that Ellen Ripley would shrug off, which is why she faces xenomorphs instead. A warhammer space marine wouldn’t find a zombie apocalypse particularly inconvenient, but trudging through a chaos and xenos infested hulk is still pretty terrifying for them. All horror has to be customised to fit the context.

You can’t change a couple of words and call it prep. It’s bad enough you’re charging money for someone else’s work, put more fucking effort in if you’re just going to be a thief.

Honestly I have a pretty poor opinion of your “prep” in the first place due to its paint by numbers style, but charging actual money for a free adventure someone else wrote is real fucking low.

Abomination Vaults has a mimic encounter where one is pretending to be a door and the other is pretending to be a weapon rack with a nice axe on it. Gets them either way.

You might also want to look into Rotgrind’s Mimouthouse. It’s exactly what it sounds like.

K gov has officially publicly announced that anyone on X who retweets an ongoing protest is a terrorist and they will be arrested. Elon musk is officially a terrorist and the uk gov has repeatedly asked usa to hand him over.

And in france it was many times in the news about a group of friends who were arrested for using Signal. A girl they tried to convince to start using signal called the police and said they are using anonymous communication called Signal and then they were arrested and all their computers taken and forensics went through all the data on their computer and judge said its criminal evidence they have ad blockers on their browser.

Could you provide sources for these, I have never heard such a thing and can’t find anything resembling either story online.