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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1635 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 30, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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General TTRPG discussion as well.

Has anyone played a lightweight system like PbtA/FitD? What's your impression?

I regularly play Monster of the Week (a PbtA game that's trying to be X-Files/Buffy/Fringe) as my lightweight TTRPG. Wanna do something RPG-y with some friends but don't want to dive into a whole campaign? Throw together an episode. Someone's going to be out for the next Pathfinder session (as indeed they will be this week)? Run an episode with whoever's there.

I think it works well for less serious stuff where you aren't going to be doing a lot of prep anyway: if you're ad-libbing everything in the moment you don't want to have to write everything down in your lore dictionary for later perusal. But I run a pretty goofy game (the initial episode of the campaign I'm on right now involved them trying to distract a giant cat while waiting for a drug dealer to bring veterinary tranquilizers, which would eventually be shoved up its butt), and it works well. I'm going into my next session with 2 images and like two paragraphs of basic plot, and that's all I'll expect I'll need.

It was my second game after 5e and it taught me a lot about not trying to force everything into dice rolls. In particular 5e DMs really like to turn everything into a persuasion check to get an idea of how well a conversation is going, and it's way better to just run the NPC and only call for a check when that NPC is reaching a difficult decision. If they're, say, interacting with the police and the police is relatively well-aligned with their goals, the whole conversation should probably run without mechanics, unless they're asking to loot the armory or something.

I also have some complaints, most notably that the combat of MOTW sucks as soon as more than one person is involved: it makes a very sensible decision to use a dice roll to resolve the whole combat round and make the enemy do fixed damage to cut down on the back and forth of combat, but as soon as there are two players each wanting to take their turn at fighting the monster you have to reintroduce something like initiative to let them have roughly equal crack at the combat, and unless you're doing a single round this just gets kind of tedious. There are some hacks you can do like setting it up so there is only one round because the monster strikes and runs, but they won't work reliably.

My other complaint is that the official MOTW book really wants to do like a 6-7 episode campaign with an overarching plot, and I don't actually think this works all that well: having to work every episode into a cohesive theme limits your episode ideas a lot, and if you're trying to wrap everything up in one session it can often detract a lot from the episode plot if you have to work the campaign plot in as well. I have a lot more fun running it as almost completely disconnected one-shots with repeating characters. This also means it's easy to repeat the same episodes for different players: the first episode I ever made has been run with 4 different groups, each group handled it totally differently, and each time I took a couple of my favorite NPCs that they caused me to introduce and put them in the script.

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