Has anyone here run 10 Candles? I've hear so much about it, and decided to take the plunge as a spooky season kick off on the first Friday of October. I've never run an RPG where people know off the top that they will all die. If you ran it did you have an music or sounds effects?

Many of my players are struggling with meaningful failure of their goals, in the form of repeatability. - Kill my first undead - Steal 5 items - Find a lead about where my mentor went - Use runemagic to protect an innocent - Craft/upgrade a weapon in the party I feel like the root cause is no "why" or "stakes" attached. I don't want failure to mean my players are sad and repeat attempting the same goal over again. I'm trying to come up with some actionable guidance to give these players. Maybe attaching these goals to an ongoing conflict, either in the world or internally with the character would help? - Kill my first undead: So I can be inducted into the Order of Kellos - Steal 5 items: To pay off a debt I imminently owe - Find a lead about where my mentor went: because I need their wisdom to stop the blight - Use runemagic to protect an innocent: (from the undead plague) because if I don't, the undead army will grow - Craft/upgrade a weapon in the party: to prove my craftsmanship worthy and secure my entry to Grayhaven Am I being too hard? Would the suggestion to tie these goals to ongoing conflicts help you if you were in their shoes? Do you have any other recommendations for these goals?

If you've been around you probably have seen me talk about the wild amount of games that I have played. I am wondering what rule or tool did you steal from an RPG that you use or want to use going forward? I played Bunkers and Badassses this year and I love the badass moves. For a more cinematic game, you can let players completely break action economy once per session, and you just give it a particularly high dc to do so. Other players can kick in their use to lower the DC if the fictional positioning supports it. For example you can do multiple actions in the same Action but need to balance not only the difficultly to generate the DC but also how many actions it would normally take.

While my players have been focusing on the "plot" (their goals), I have been focusing on improving the narrative of many common components. For combat, I am collecting a number of tools for my GM screen. Using much inspiration from Them's FIghtin' Words, I came up with 8 descriptive senses for combat: - Hear - Smell - Taste - Armor (visual) - Motion (visual) - Nasty (evokes multiple core senses) - Touch - Pain (touch) Having a hard time with smell and taste for physical weapons/damge, though!

Is anyone interested or already familiar with games like Apocalypse World or derivations from it (Powered by the Apocalypse/PbtA)? I come from a background of more traditional TTRPGs but in the last few years I’ve shifted over to these sorts of systems and games, for various reasons. I also like what games like Fate were trying to do, although for my taste, the mechanics and systems of Fate feel like they still come first. Whereas “Story” or “Narrative-focused” games seem to emphasize the importance of the shared fiction and the characters over the “game” aspects of play. I think they’re a natural fit for groups who prefer more proactive campaigns, but I wondered how other people here feel? I mean, it seems like Forged in the Dark (a la Blades) was a big impetus for the epiphany toward more proactive campaign structures, and FitD games are often considered related if not in the same bucket as PbtA. OSR games are adjacent and related but these are kind of different.