#tabletop gaming

[fanonical]

spin this wheel to get a random d&d class. you are instantly transported into the d&d world and have to live as that class

how fucked are you

very. i am very fucked

this is not gonna be easy, but i can do it

literally fine

might be a challenge at first, but not hard

FUCK YEAH I PREFER THIS

Voting ended onJan 28, 2025

[anim-ttrpgs]

The more I think on it, and I know this greatly differs from what people have come to expect in recent years, but to me a TTRPG with no adventure modules is like booting up a video game and finding out the devs didn’t make any levels. Like I wanted to play this but I guess we’ll have to wait until someone in the group, who may have never played the game before, spends a not-insignificant amount of their free time in the level-editor throwing something together for us to play.

[bogleech]

(Updated 01/11/2026) MORTASHEEN, an original tabletop roleplaying world, is available to the public after over a decade of development

DIGITAL & PHYSICAL COPIES: KO-FI PHYSICAL COPIES ONLY: ETSY DIGITAL ONLY: ITCH.IO

More about this book and this game:

History of the project here

A condensed guide to the setting itself here

Expanding and co-managing a new tabletop gaming "brand" out of this setting is MY SOLE CAREER PROSPECT and potentially my entire new livelihood for the foreseeable future. This is literally now more than half my life's work.

If you can't afford such a LARGE AND CONTENT DENSE new gaming book (a fair chunk of the price is only the raw printing cost!) you can help me survive and get this life-consuming project off to a good start by signal boosting and spreading the word.

Miscellaneous Book Information:

Mortasheen is a monster-collecting setting I've developed for over twenty years, it has been in development as a tabletop roleplaying game for over fifteen years, and I have spent more than the last five years laboring on this first book alone. Credit to Morgan Mullins for the gameplay system, @gutsygills for every single playable monster build, rules expansion, testing and enormous amounts of other editing work.

Featuring guest artists including @biomechanicalmush, @sabedilemon, @iguanamouth and more

Softcover $60, Hardcover $70-80 (more on etsy to offset their fees) digital pdf download $40 so we have enough to split with the gameplay devs. Books may take 6 to 8 weeks or more to arrive after purchase, due to slow printing/shipping times and the amount of work I have to do on my end to pack them up and mail them out!

Backers of the original kickstarter are still receiving books as books finish printing and shipping to me (again, slow process!)

8 x 11'', 350 pages. Includes all rules and mechanics for running a campaign or playing in one, player biotypes, NPC's, locations, gadgets, lairs, setting culture, ecology, unique original battle system, story hooks, a secret antagonist faction for more epic life-or-death adventures and a modular ability system for modifying and creating any conceivable monster, object or phenomenon. All 177 monsters in the bestiary include detailed biology and characterization.

Free online-only playable bonus monster builds available on the front page of bogleech.com or at the bogleech.com/mortabook link, also all assembled by @gutsygills

[maximumzombiecreator]

It's often remarked how D&D 5e's play culture has this sort of disinterest bordering on contempt for actually knowing the rules, often even extending to the DM themselves. I've seen a lot of different ideas for why this is, but one reason I rarely see discussed is that actually, a lot of 5e's rules are not meant to be used.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

You should have contempt for some of the rules as written. The designers did.

[charlesoberonn]

Warlock: Can I get some privacy for a minute? I gotta perform an exclusive ritual for my patrons.

Paladin: Patrons, plural? How many patron deities do you have?

Warlock: Let me check...

Paladin: You don't know???

Warlock: ...894 patrons as of right now. 30 new ones in the last month, nice.

Paladin: I didn't know that many gods even existed!

Warlock: Yeah, but most of them are on the basic spell tier, so it's not all that much.

[trve-grimdark]

Peter Cushing with his toy soldiers

[herecomesthementalmeltdown]

life goals