u/Bubbly_Recipe_4712

Basically I'm making a Toreador whose concept is being a singer/dancer etc, but she has a dark side of entering an artistic trance when she's in a massacre situation while listening to music and goes around dismembering, cutting, killing mortals and members etc.

I originally wanted to make her a descendant of Helena simply because I wanted to have a nightclub and wanted that extra layer of "look how innocent she is" since the character is already going to be very dazzling and naive, so it would be 5 extra dice to pretend "it wasn't me" and that would be fun. However, being a descendant of Helena I have no way of having a melee weapon that works against vampires, and I understand that lore-wise Volgirre is Helena's childe, but my previous character was a Tzimisce so I didn't want to repeat that. But if it's the only path, oh well, I'll make that "sacrifice" (Vicissitude is my favorite discipline, I just didn't want to repeat it) a have 66 points of xp to spend during character creation btw

Basicamente eu queria tentar grupos novos, pessoas novas, porque depois de narrar por 4 anos para um mesmo grupo sobre um mesmo gênero (Mundo das Trevas) eu queria voltar e testar outros sistemas e tal. Aí um grupo me achou, trocamos ideia e tal, muito massa, até eu descobrir que se tratavam de 7 cabeças e não 5 como imaginei inicialmente. Não que isso tenha me assombrado, eu já joguei na adolescência uma campanha de D&D 3.5, uma campanha longa inteira com 11 players, e deu certo pelo poder da amizade (eu não era o mestre então não sei os horrores que o mestre pode ter passado kkkkk). E uma de D&D que eu narrei tinha só 7 (completos aleatórios e gente de fone ruim e tal, nossa, foi um inferno) e eu quis me matar na terceira sessão, tanto que a campanha acabou ali. Desde então as mesas ficaram com no máximo 5 pessoas. Recentemente teve uma de 6 de Lobisomem: o Apocalipse, mas essa deu errado por briga interna entre o grupo mesmo.

Queria perguntar se vocês acham que dá para encarar essa empreitada ou se é masoquismo e eu devia procurar outro grupo menor kkk. (Um disclaimer: eu já disse que não narrerei nada muito crunchy, justamente porque são 7 pessoas, então no lugar de D&D eu estou preferindo Nimble, de genérico o Cypher, CAIN, por aí vai.)

So I kind of accidentally found a group to play with at my local game store and it's a really good one but it has 7 people. Look, I've played in a group of 11 before but the only time I GMed for a group of 6 or more it was kind of rough because I felt like I couldn't give each player the spotlight they needed. Anyway I'm more experienced now and I think I can handle it, the problem is I need systems that give me more agility at the table so I'm not choking on mechanics. I'm planning to run a CAIN one shot to "feel out the group" since it's a fast system I'm comfortable tweaking and adjusting. For medieval fantasy I thought about Nimble and even considered Daggerheart, although in my own experience Daggerheart isn't exactly fast. Anyway I'd love tips and recommendations on how to handle large groups and which systems run well for groups bigger than usual.

I was thinking here after talking with one of my oldest players and we figured that maybe it's possible to run a Bloodborne-esque campaign that I've been wanting to run since 2021 and never found a minimally decent system that fulfilled the specific checklist I had.

To summarize: beyond some extra things in the monsters that they'll have (like the extra features from Age Umbra), the players won't be common people but rather will have undergone a process to become more than just commoners. This is mostly to justify why they can resist attacks and things that regular people simply can't.

Beyond that, I'm thinking of dividing the domains, and by extension the classes, into Beast Domains and Insight Domains. I won't use Bloodborne names but it's just so you guys have an idea of the correlation. Insight Domains would be any more arcane or magical domain, like Sage, Arcana, Codex and so on. They represent enlightenment of the cosmos and the ancients, and by extension the fact that your character is leaning towards alien and tentacular thoughts. The more Insight Domains you have, the stranger you are and keep getting. This would work almost like a humanity track, similar to Vampire, with a GM moves table attached to it. The central idea being: the stronger you are, the stranger you get.

The physical domains, Blade, Bone and Valor, work in the opposite direction. It's you giving in to the beast, a wilder side, your character getting more or less hairy, scaly, whatever it varies. However, beyond the disadvantages, each threshold on both the Beast and Insight sides will come with little perks that characters unlock upon reaching them.

For classes that share both Insight and Beast Domains, they cancel each other out one to one, so gish classes tend to be the most "human" of the bunch.

I still have to think more about it but this is pretty much the rough draft of what I had in mind. The idea isn't to be extra lethally punishing but rather Bloodborne-like, where despite the difficulties a hunter is still absurdly strong, even though they still get knocked around by the beasts they hunt every now and then.

Happy to hear opinions and advice.

So to start, I had my stumbles with Werewolf the Apocalypse. It was the first RPG system I ever played in my life and while I loved the experience of playing tabletop RPG and the World of Darkness in general, I had some issues with the lore and mainly the fact that my 12 year old self never really understood the Umbra, spirits, and all that side of things. That ended up meaning I never ran that edition and had several points I just did not care about when playing. So setting aside the whole spiritual side, what I actually loved was playing the furious three meter tall monster that tore everything apart and was both a victim and a user of its own rage.

Anyway, I stayed away from Werewolf for a long time. I went to play Vampire, I went to play Hunter, I went to play Mage (which I have the same problem of difficulty running but that is not what this post is about), and those were much simpler to understand. For a long time I stayed away from Werewolf. I ignored the W20 launch and was much happier when V5 came out. Even though it removed and changed a lot of things I loved from V3, it was a much easier system to play and run, and I would take the trade off of losing Vicissitude as its own discipline for a simpler and more agile system.

So when I got my hands on W5 I was pretty satisfied. The system was much simpler, the Umbra and spirits were better explained, no more Umbral Realm X Y Z, no more tribal homelands, basically my 12 year old self would have loved W5 and never looked back.

But then I got the idea of reading about the older editions and in the middle of all the mess there were some really cool things. The tribe identity was better developed and the connections to their respective indigenous peoples was interesting (sure it created restrictions like with the Wendigo but it was a cool thing). Having that extra layer of customization from whether you were Lupus, Homid or Metis was really great. The hierarchy was better explained through the Garou ranks and even though I hated tracking Renown and the headache it sometimes caused, it made sense given the tribal lifestyle the Garou lived.

All of this brings me to: as an adult I actually prefer the tone, the system, etc that W5 brings to the table, but oh my god I think they cut and changed way too much for the worse. I think the fall of the Get of Fenris was a mistake. I think the identity change of the Fianna (now the Hart Wardens) was a massive mistake, they became a really bland tribe in W5. I am not sure I prefer this deconstruction of the Renown/hierarchy system that existed in W3 being replaced by "you can just buy Renown with XP" but anyway.

Before anyone asks, yes I tried W20 and it was a really bad experience, a lot of it because the system is very problematic to begin with (add to that the fact that I am not a native English speaker and W20 was never translated. I can still follow along but my friends cannot, and W5 was localized). But at the same time I want to bring things from W20/W3 into W5, bring the Get of Fenris back, give the Fianna their identity again, and so on.

What I do not know is whether that is actually doable or if it is kind of a delusion of dreaming about a W5 that never existed (yes I am talking about that James one).

Anyway, this is a vent combined with a request for advice.

I'm planning to run a one-shot for each WoD splat I know for begginers/newbies in wod (the only ones I haven't played are Mummy and Changeling), and I wanted to start with Demon because it's my absolute favorite by a long shot. But I'm having a hard time coming up with an evocative pitch.

I was thinking something with a vibe similar to Resident Evil 4, like a village being corrupted by an Earthbound, slowly driving everyone mad. But I'm not sure if that would make for a good pitch.

I managed to put together one-shots for Werewolf pretty easily, Vampire and Mage were a bit trickier but came together fine. Demon though is giving me a really hard time.(And before anyone asks, yes I'm using pregens. I made one for each House, each leaning into the stereotype of their thing.)

I absolutely love playing this game. It's my eternal go-to for medieval fantasy. But my god, it's a system where I always feel a deep discomfort when I'm in the GM seat, and I've been trying to get over that fear for about two years now.

I've run a few short adventures and one-shots over the years, but things like:

- Setting DCs on the fly

- Homebrewing or tweaking existing content

- Adjusting encounter balance Without treating the encounter budget table like a sacred bible (even though it's incredible I love loosening it up sometimes, but I always tread very carefully because I know that one extra monster can turn something that was supposed to be hard into something extreme, near-TPK territory)"

- Adding an NPC ally alongside the players

- Any "unorthodox" way of running PF2e

I definitely don't enjoy stopping the game to go look something up on Archives of Nethys (even though the tool is fantastic), because I feel like it kills the table's momentum and atmosphere. And that's just one of several issues I run into when GMing PF2e that never come up when I try to run other games, because simpler systems make me feel way more comfortable improvising, modifying, and going off-script.

I'm currently planning to run a session with the Beginner Box to see if that helps chip away at this fear, but if anyone has tips on how to get more comfortable GMing PF2e, especially around improvisation and "breaking the rules", I'd really appreciate it.

Well, I ended up deleting, somewhat accidentally and somewhat impulsively, my previous post about my terrible experience with Daggerheart, but I'll recount it here with updates, giving a bit more context and including my 3 newest experiences with the system: one as a player, one as GM for the beginner adventure, and another for a high-level one-shot I run occasionally that I call "The Demon of Eleum Loyce" (before anyone asks, yes, it's a Dark Souls 2 reference).

The First Experience

Getting back to the original topic, I think it'll be clearer if I explain the whole thing from the start. I gathered one of my oldest groups and was still wrapping up presenting PF2e to them (it was a group I had previously only run COS and WOD line games for). 3 of the 5 players didn't show up, and with only 2 I had a semi-ready story for a first one-shot I'd put together to test the system. The adventure's outline would use the Age of Umbra campaign frame as a very loose base just to "set the tone." The idea was: a short RP introduction in the city they were in, I'd use an environment card for the travel sequence arriving at an abandoned dwarven fortress, they'd do a small dungeon crawl, fight a boss at the end, and it would wrap up with them leaving the mountain, if all went well. The first part was pure RP so nothing to note, the second I liked how environment cards work, and the third is where the problems I pointed out most in the original post were.

What they did was a dungeon crawl. There was a small encounter against a bat swarm and they found an NPC who was a Clank styled after Codsworth, who had been doing tasks and cleaning the place even after more than 400 years of the fortress being abandoned. My big mistake was going in with a "roll as little as possible" mindset. I actually avoided rolls for things I thought would be logical for them to succeed at, largely because here I'll make a mea culpa: I read the book too fast. I made assumptions based on "I've been GMing medieval fantasy for 10 years, I've read narrative-leaning systems before, I can handle this," so I only read the parts that interested me beyond the core mechanics, and I had read the book that way about 2 weeks before the incident. Since I was in a rush I didn't reread enough at the time of the session itself. That was a grotesque mistake, I admit it, but in the indefensible defense of that incorrect behavior, I've done this a few times before and Daggerheart is the first one where doing it goes very wrong.

Anyway, so I demanded few rolls, I avoided asking for rolls for anything that wasn't traps or the combat itself. The players reached the end with little fear and they had little hope, and here lies one of the main errors: I wasn't returning the turn to myself when they failed or doing the back and forth correctly, which was a consequence of not having read the book more carefully. But beyond that, yes, there were far more critical successes than usual, and that frequent crit thing caused a terrible first impression, understandable given all the context and those 5 crits they rolled. (Fun fact: across the other 3 experiences combined they rolled about 2 crits total, so it was really just bad beginner's luck.) Beyond the rules errors, the 5 crits, and the lack of Fear, I think wanting too much control over everything and trying to run it in a dungeon crawl style hurt that first experience. So anyway, it was a disaster.

The Second Experience

The second experience was as a player and it was really good. The GM, who I actually found here on the subreddit, was excellent and is the one who gave me the push to want to run it myself. Whether by fate or not, I caught a flu that put me on medical leave from college with nothing to do, so I properly finished reading the Daggerheart book this time and gathered players for 2 experiences: one where I'd run the introductory adventure and another where I'd run "The Demon of Eleum Loyce." Surprising absolutely zero people, yes, both were good experiences, though new criticisms emerged from them.

First, combat in my experience is about as slow as D&D or Pathfinder 2e. Maybe I'd say it's a tiny bit faster and better at keeping players engaged, but the roll cycle itself is fairly similar. Beyond that, one thing I noticed and one of the players also pointed out is the lack of options on the player side. Some classes feel too similar to each other to their own detriment and you have few options for customization or unique gimmicks. In his words: "Ranger is 50% Druid, so if I focus on the Sage domain my cards will be the same as the Druid's, and if I play Warrior I get the other half. I'd maybe prefer each class to have an exclusive domain. I think after a while everything starts to feel a bit repetitive, I don't know, that's the impression I get." And I had the same impression that there might just be too few cards. Fortunately that's something that'll get fixed over time with new releases I imagine, and coming from a player who plays and loves PF2e, it's natural to feel a bit grumpy about the lack of options.

Final Verdict

I think it's a system that certainly won't be for everyone, and it's far from being a D&D-like or even a D&D killer. They play in similar but very different spaces. In the end it's a system I plan to try again only when Hope and Fear releases. It's a good system, I understand why people like it, but it wasn't enough for me to make the transition from PF2e, which remains my medieval system of choice. But beyond that I genuinely recommend that even those who won't end up playing it read Daggerheart if they get the chance. It has a lot of very valuable advice for both experienced and new GMs and is overall a very different approach from what other GMs are used to. I believe that with new book releases and the game itself maturing it could become a good option on the "menu." For now it still feels a little raw to me.

If you're unsure whether you'll like Daggerheart, I recommend playing or running at least the introductory adventure and seeing if it's your thing. It's very hard to predict with comparisons like "if you like Genesys or Fate you'll like Daggerheart," because it's kind of its own thing and it may just not resonate with everyone. A lot of the people I ran it for didn't enjoy it.

Anyway, here's an updated account and I'm sorry for deleting the original post.

I was discussing this topic with a friend and it's impressive how few systems we've read through or played seem to actually support boss fights well, even though they're so common at tables and something our group loves.

dnd5e tries to fix it with duct tape through legendary actions, but it's duct tape at the end of the day. Pathfinder 2e by default would struggle a lot, it suffers a little less when you bring hazards into the mix, but then I'm not sure you can really call it a solo encounter anymore. Daggerheart I haven't GMed "the right way" yet, though I had a positive first impression playing it as a player (after a pretty rough one GMing it somewhat blind), but it seems to have a problem with lethality and threat, which might make Daggerheart just not my style. Nimble seems good on paper, not sure in practice, attacks after every player turn sounds cool but the players will still deal more damage on average because, well, 12 actions vs 4. And at most I see Draw Steel being interesting, but I have issues with the whole "4e package" that Draw Steel brings, though it might be the closest I've seen to getting it right, at least in the "heroic fantasy" space.

I mentioned these but there might be others.

Now a question comes up: I'm not a game designer, though I've studied the topic a bit as a hobby. Why is this so hard to get right? A lot of RPGs seem to do "everything right" and then stumble hard on this specific aspect, which to me in 2026 has already become a standard that I see very commonly at tables.

Surprisingly, the best system we've found for this is CAIN, which is far from having combat as its focus and yet it's the most balanced within its own premise.