Anyone round here play Vampire the Masquerade? I'm tossing between that or GURPs, or just biting the bullet and playing D&D for now. The last option is the most realistic way I could end up being a player in an IRL game, I'm not big on online calls.
Is there some way to meet people of particular games other than roaming greasy Discord servers and crossing your fingers?
Nope. In every regard, GMs are rarer than players to the point that finding a D&D game to play in is harder than finding players to join you(especially online). My best suggestion is to run a *short* D&D campaign, then follow it up by hyping up another system that you really enjoy the sound of, and inviting those guys to play with you. Make sure you to make an effort to provide them the resources they need because purchasing TTRPG books fucking sucks as a player(and frankly the only person who needs to own one is the GM for verifying relevant rules and generation tables).
This works especially well if you're the only one at the table who GMs the game.
I absolutely love Mörk Borg, it is by far the most imaginative and interesting TTRPG I've come across at any point in my life. Currently doing my best to make a small supplement for it and man is it hard to match the black metal vibe of the source material. Highly recommended to anyone interested in tabletops beyond the surface level D&D shit.
After finishing that Mörk Borg campaign, I have some opinions on it. Firstly, the core material is exceptionally light on rules to the point that you need supplemental material to make it a game. This, I dealt with by making and distributing a Mörk Borg expanded book with all the pages ripped from the various PDF supplements I used. The other issue is that there's not too much of a way to differentiate "classes". Combat was a lot more interesting, especially if you provide a lot of extra details and things, and have the environment changing as you go and rolling with players doing creative things by rewarding that kind of behaviour. For future games, I'm leaning more towards using "
Whitehack" which provides more rules, but also a lot of reasonable checks and controls for the GM to stop the game grinding to a halt... FOR EXAMPLE: All spells are only spell names with no details on use(and spells cost HP to cast) as a result it encourages the player to say what they want to use the spell for, do something reasonable with it, and the GM to deem how difficult or dangerous that is. It also provides more distinctive differences between attributes. In Mörk Borg, a lot of the work is done by presence(which encapsulates magic, charisma, insight, history, wisdom, intelligence and perception). Strength and Agility were somewhat used, while Toughness in my experience was rarely used. As a result, you effectively had 3 stats that were significant, and modifiers for all tended to be between -2 and +2 for all players so it was a bit meh.
It's absolutely correct what /tg/ says about Mörk Borg, that it leans more towards being an art book. It also has a *fundamental* rule flaw in how they handle Difficult Ratings. Normally you assign a DR to be 14 or 10 or whatever... BUT if you have 2 contradictory pieces of information that sets a DR(Cleaving sword that sets DR to 10, vs a Goblin that has DR 14), it doesn't make sense which takes priority, so this was duct taped, by making default DR 12, and having all changes be DR +2 or DR -4 etc.
Some particular parts of my campaign that were awesome:
- Travelling north they encountered a trapper who invited them to come to his home, then he went about on his way laying traps, one stepped into a bear trap later and had to get his leg chopped off meaning we had a cripple in the party. They passed a terrifying presence at the mouth of a cave, and opted to stay a night at a trapper's house. instead. Later the trapper tried to kill the players- their limbs being suitable material for an abomination "daughter" where he grafted limbs onto in the basement that was sleeping- further stressed out by a creature outside trying to break in. There was a Pale One in the party who rolled a remote controlled eyeball out, that got chomped in the maw of this beast- so they knew it was a credible threat. They then hid and saw the blind daughter leave, getting desecrated by that creature outside. This session was all done by accident and improvised, so I was very pleased when they told me it freaked them out and terrified them since I know TTRPGs tend to struggle with horror due to power creep.
- Pissing off a guy called Des Tiny who wanted a bunch of rings of power- which meant they started running away across boggy lands. Ravens and Crows circled the skies seeking them out, and Nazgül hunted them down, culminating in a fight against 3 of them in an abandoned church. They tried to use fire which didn't affect them, but used one of their blades against them which affected one, dropped a candelabra on one trapping it in a tomb, and tossed the other into some acidic webbing that would try to digest them(couldn't). The formless remains of the cloth tried to smother one of the guys, but he broke free and legged it out. When they got out, they stole the undead horses and bolted away.
- Went into a magic forest, where they found an enchanted river that would send people to sleep. One guy fell asleep in it, but was pulled over by another guy, while white bunny rabbits hopped around. The roads would twist and change, as it was clear the trees were living and malicious, changing the roads and making crossroads and turns confusing. Later turned out the bunny rabbits were spider-bunnies, and spun webs and bit one of them with paralysis(a guy not in the session), and when everything was looking really bad in a Mirkwood sort of way until a Tom Bombadil-sort of guy saved them. He gave them refuge for a night, and then the group went along a river, and was almost enchanted by a Siren- but instead bashed her head in with a rock(chad move). They saw a bunch of folks who hanged themselves in the forest around that area.
I do appreciate my friends for letting me run it for them, since it was the first somewhat long campaign I ran(~6 months), and I had a blast. My preparation techniques changed over time too- at first I over-prepared but nowadays it's mostly theatre of the mind with index cards for pregenerated stuff that I want to use and NPCs, and player information, and tables for generating stuff on the fly. It's also worthwhile noting, I didn't have "mandatory attendance" or "session doesn't run if all players aren't there" for my sessions, we played with whoever showed up for it, so if you didn't show up it was generally accepted bad or weird stuff could happen to you in your absence. There was also no solid narrative demands from me, I just improvised- with the one exception being the "Psalms" or the beats towards the end of the world.
-tier war of words, but rather argument in an attempt to learn and understand, as opposed to dominate and sneer.