In my experience my players are excited about the rules and how their characters work - but not all of them learn well from “just reading the rules”, like it literally does not stick. Just telling them to read the rules isn’t going to do anything but make them feel shitty about the game.

Talk to your players about how to help them remember or have easy access to these rules. Make sure you don’t get too accusatory, you do want to play with these people after all.

I would never see it as a replacement, but if you are having a lot of fun with it, why does it matter? Do what brings you joy.

The social aspect for me is WAY too big a part of RPGs in general. LLMs don’t fulfill that at all for me. It is just a robot that knows what words goes in what order, there is no back an forth or creative creation between people with different life experiences or ideas of what “cool” or “interesting” is. Getting to chat with my friends and share in their creative space is so awesome. I am an online only player these days because it is the only way I can find time and connect with friends across borders - I don’t feel online detracts from the experience, sure it is different than in person, but once you have a good group it’s just a good time with friends.

Personally I have used LLMs as part of my GM prep. Mostly just to fill in things I don’t really care about (like a minor detail of colours of unimportant objects a module left out) or to bounce ideas off, and to do a BUNCH of text formatting for me. It is a great tool to kickstart the process but I find I always have to sit down and actually do the work myself in the end.

I can see how being alone in a new place where you don’t speak the language can very easily lead to an over reliance on good LLMs to take up some of that social space you might be used to. ChatGPT is an amazing thing, but we need to be aware for how and why we use it. Our monkey brains are easy to trick.

Trying to turn everything in a -punk genre got exhausting over a decade ago. Anything being “The future of tabletop role-play” is also just stupid hyperbole. It’s like saying “The future of movies is superhero action”. TTRPGs is a medium just like any other, we can have more than one genre and they can develop side by side without any single one having to “be the future of the medium”.

However, this is kinda something I am a bit in to, but not as a full genre. What I really like is playing the character who fights the grimdark with hope and compassion - it’s my default character archetype for Warhammer 40k games, it is my current Apocalypse World character, it is probably going to be some of my future characters as well. When everyone is trying to solve their problems with violence, being the one person who try to solve it with cooperation and compassion is so much fun and can really drive story. I think hope or optimism about the future is important parts to include in our campaigns and games but I find turning it in to a whole genre that only does that one thing can make it both too much and uninteresting.

It’s… Good fun? Solid reviews and well thought out opinions. I don’t always 100% agree with him. I enjoy all the goofs in between, and having “the gang” available for some (if exaggerated) examples is very helpful when trying to make a point, and Jack is a good tool to break up the monotony of just one person talking.

I’ve recommended his videos on various occasions so, I guess I think it is good.

One of the rare channels on YT where I have actually “rung the bell”.

It’s like, impossible to pick a favourite. It is usually what I am running/playing at the moment which right now is Shadow of the Demon Lord, that game is doing so much for me, I am having a blast running it and my players is having a great time playing it. I am in a Apocalypse World game too and that is great - of games I am not currently playing Stars Without Number is like high on my list, but Alien RPG is great too, Call of Cthulhu is very good too, and damn if I could ever get to play in a Burning Wheel game run by and with friends I trust that would be high on my list too.

There is like 10 other games that are up there for me too, I can’t pick just one favourite, things are just so different and interesting that I don’t really wanna just pick one.

The tabletop roleplaying game feels like the perfect landscape for romance and sex stories to thrive within - especially when it comes to more modern TRPGs, where the goal is often to develop bonds between characters rather than win battles. I wish the article would actually go more in to depth what it exactly is about TTRPGs that make them “the perfect landscape” for romance and sex stories. The author just states it as a truth to accept rather than ever talk about it.

I’d also challenge the idea that modern TTRPGs are not about winning battles. D&D is still by a mile the most popular game, followed by the likes of Call of Cthulhu that focuses on solving mysteries and overcoming the mythos, with Paizo games following behind being, at their core, about the same stuff as D&D. You can say what you want, but the modern TTRPG audience is still all about that winning battles game.

So funny thing, owning a bunch of the itch.io bundles from the last few years, there are plenty of games out there about relationships, romance, and sex… But they are not easy to find because, well, that is not what the majority of our current crowd wants. It’s not that romance and sex is under-served, it is that there is a very small audience for it in the RPG sphere.

I think if you are in to this kind of content that is great for you but understand that it is something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable even to engage with in private by themselves… Bringing it to a table of friends in an environment where the writing is very often in first person. That is a big barrier to break.

I’d actually strongly disagree with the assumption that “The tabletop roleplaying game feels like the perfect landscape for romance and sex stories to thrive within” - I think these kind of games, backed up by having read some of the romance games from the bundles, actually move away from the classic TTRPG space and in to some new, cool, experimental spaces, but not in the classic sense of “sit around a table and play characters and tell a story together”.

Trying to sell a TTRPG about sex and romance is also going to be a hurdle to overcome. It is a hard thing to put in a hobby store on the front of a webpage in a hobby that is often sold alongside board games, minifigures, and pokemon cards.

Honestly this feels a bit like the classic “Why aren’t other people taking their time and effort to make the thing I specifically want, even if the thing I want is super niche and won’t make money”. What is the old adage? If the game doesn’t exist, you are now on the hook to make it?

I dunno, this is just some very messy immediate thoughts on the thing.