Creating TTRPG actual play podcasts using DnD5e, GURPS, Cypher System, and more.
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Ellie GMs for Beth, Crash, Io, & Jen.
The party begin as Tier 0 Cypher System characters (thanks to some house rules) who are having a perfectly normal evening until everyone disappears and everything else is on fire.
Continue reading “Plus Ultra Ep 01: My World’s On Fire, How About Yours?”
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Crash, Beth, Ellie, Io, and Jen dive into Cypher System with a 1-shot where everyone plays a grandparent on their way to a lunch buffet.
Download this published one-shot here: https://crashthedm.itch.io/the-grand-adventure
Continue reading “One-Shot: The Grand Adventure (Cypher System)”
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Hello and welcome to Crash’s Course, a short form podcast where I share my thoughts and advice on playing and running tabletop role playing games in roughly about 5 minutes.
Today I want to talk a little about rerolling. OK, not every TTRPG requires players to roll anything when creating a character, but whatever. I’m talking about those moments in a longer campaign when one of your players decides they want to try a different character.
There can be a lot of reasons for this.
Perhaps the player decided that after a certain plot development, it didn’t make sense for their character to decide to stick around. This could be because they felt betrayed, because they’d finally found a place that felt like home, or something else entirely.
Perhaps the player felt inspired to create a new character, and didn’t want to have to wait for the next campaign to try it out.
Perhaps they’ve decided that character they made looked neat on paper but they’re just not getting the emotional attachment they wanted or expected.
Perhaps they’re just bored.
And … perhaps the character died in a spectacular fashion.
I’ve had players come to me with all of these reasons and more, and they’re all valid.
Look, TTRPGs are supposed to be fun. If something gets in the way of that fun, that’s a bad implementation, and you should change things. I won’t say I’m the perfect GM, but at this point when designing a campaign I try to also think about how new characters can be added without breaking the established plot.
Yes, even in the all-kobold game where they crash landed on a planet without kobolds. The ship was full of more than just the party, and the escape pods worked for everyone but the NPC captain (R.I.P. Sniv Stonetail). Any new character could just be assumed to be a survivor whose pod landed somewhere else.
There’s mixed schools of thought on what the power level of the new character should be. I’m of the opinion that it should be comparable to the rest of the party (yes, even if the new character didn’t “earn” those levels – the player earned them on another character), so if the rest of the party’s level 3, Joe McNewcharacter should also be level 3. If they’ve acquired a few magic items along the way, I’m likely to allow McNewcharacter to pick something off a list.
In Cypher System it can be a bit trickier, because even if you award XP evenly throughout, players can spend it on long or short term benefits. I have a situation like this that I’ll be resolving on Monday, and in this case some of the players have spent enough XP to get halfway to Tier 2 so I’ll be letting the player of the new character check off two boxes on their character sheet (their choice which) but have them otherwise start with no XP.
In my games, that’s a state that won’t last long.
One last thing: Just because a character’s leaving the active party does not mean they’ve left the campaign setting. One of my favorite things is when the plot provides a reason for that character to make a return, either as an NPC or, better yet, with the original player reprising the role with an appropriately leveled older and wiser PC.
Bonus points if they end up playing the old and new characters at the same time, but try to not force them into a situation where they have to have a too long conversation with themself.
That’s all for this episode, subscribe to just this podcast on Mastodon at is.aaronbsmith.com/@crashscourse or subscribe to all my TTRPG podcasts at is.aaronbsmith.com/@cogwheel.
Music is Deadly Windmills by JAM from modarchive.org, used with permission, as it’s public domain.
This podcast is distributed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.
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MP3 Download: Crash’s Course Ep 12: Rerolling
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Hello and welcome to Crash’s Course, a short form podcast where I share my thoughts and advice on playing and running tabletop role playing games in roughly about 5 minutes.
Well hey, it’s been a while! In my defense, I’ve been sick since December. I’m just getting over bronchitis! I’ve never heard my lungs creak like an old rocking chair before! I will now blame that for any decline in recording quality.
In this episode I’m not talking about the D&D OGL as enough people have done that already. (Sly Flourish, DnD Shorts, & Sherlock Hulmes made good videos about the aftermath, each is a somewhat different take.)
Instead, I’m talking about next steps.
There’s a variety of takes on this topic, but the thing to remember is they don’t have to be mutually exclusive so long as your group has some level of consensus.
Right now my group is looking into GURPS 4e, Pathfinder 2 (SRD), Cypher System (SRD), and also we might try Monster of the Week. But guess what? Like many people, we’re still playing 5e. Yes, we canceled our D&D Beyond subscriptions, but those were never needed to play the game. [Insert ominous foreshadowing music here.]
When we first got together, I had friends emailing me character sheets that were everything from pdf to Word docs to spreadsheets. I looked everything up in books covered with sticky notes, kept track of initiative and enemy HP on scraps of paper, and we all rolled actual, physical dice. Chances are good that you can do the same.
Yes, there’s some organizational benefits that D&D Beyond provided, but many of those can be replicated with a shared Google Drive folder and a few spreadsheets.
OK, maybe you don’t like Google. That’s fair. There’s also Roll20, Foundry VTT, and if you mainly want a usable online map there’s owlbear.rodeo for all your token moving needs. Oh, I love Owlbear Rodeo.
But what about all those other systems? OK, here’s the thing: Switch to a new one if you want. I intend to do so once my current campaigns wrap up, but don’t think of it as a necessity. There’s still groups out there playing 3.5 and 4e who are very happy. (Maybe not 4e, never mind.) You don’t have to dump 5e, particularly if you already have the books. If you don’t, I suspect more used copies will be entering the market soon so you can build up your library without sending more money to WotC. Or maybe go to a 3rd party publisher like Kobold Press. There’s tons of 5e compatible stuff out there.
If you do switch, don’t make it a unilateral decision. If you’re playing as a group, then it is imperative that the members of your group have input about the system or systems you’re considering. Oh, yeah, systems. Pural. There’s no reason you have to limit yourself to just one. I could have a Cypher System game and Mutants and Masterminds game going on alternate Saturdays and have a lot of fun with both.
Before you switch, plan a one-shot or two with any system you’re considering. A game can look good on paper but be convoluted in practice, or vice-versa. Have a debriefing after each session to discuss benefits and drawbacks of how things went. That’s a good idea for any session, rally, but it’s essential if you’re trying something new.
If you like a new rule set enough, you may be tempted to convert a campaign over. Critical Role did this twice, very successfully, starting with 4e, then Pathfinder, before moving eventually to 5e when they started streaming. Again, this should be a group decision. I floated the idea with my group and there were some misgivings as a different system can have a different feel. As much as I love our current campaign setting, I’ll be creating a new one when we move to our next system. (I already have a few ideas.)
With my after school D&D club, that’s another story. We may actually convert to another system, but I’ll be suggesting the move because I think their play styles are better suited towards something like Cypher or FATE (SRD) where players have even more agency in regards to plot points.
That’s all for this episode, subscribe to just this podcast at is.aaronbsmith.com/@crashscourse or all my D&D podcasts at aaronbsmith.com/cogwheel for future episodes.
Music is Deadly Windmills by JAM from modarchive.org, used with permission, as it’s public domain.
This podcast is distributed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.
Follow this series on…
MP3 Download: Crash’s Course Ep 06: Next Steps After the OGL