Sunspot

I'm the forever GM, but my players also insist I play a PC in the party, so I kinda still get to play. I think they know otherwise I'd never be a player. LOL

I left my teens a long time ago, but I'm still constantly asked how high school is going for me. There is plenty of risk for an adult with this. Some of us just look like kids forever. 😬

About to start a new gm-less co-op campaign with the spouse. It takes place in a setting we've been building for years. Basically a gothic horror/steampunk world where the goddess of the sun and healing has died, so there's no sun and healing/resurrections don't work as expected. As a result of all the failed resurrections, there's all sorts of phantoms and abominations roaming the darkness in between the remaining cities. So lots of tension and horror, our favorite thematic elements.

Let's see...

• Black Star. This is a new game, so not too many people are aware of it. I'd consider this a rules light Star Wars game.
• White Star. Despite the similar names, it's made by different people than Black Star and the mechanics are wildly different. However, I'd also say this is Star Wars-esque sci-fi.

There are also a couple Savage Worlds sci-fi settings that look neat, like Titan Effect and Interface Zero. I feel like I'm missing a big sci-fi game I really want to play, but I can't think of it off the top of my head.

Kobold Press is making their own 5e compatible game, if you've invested heavily in 5e adventures/3rd party products. It's called Tales of the Valiant and looks to be pretty interesting. I'm a Pathfinder 2e player/gm myself, but I backed Tales of the Valiant on Kickstarter just because it looks neat.

Oh geez. Where do I start?

• Legend of the Five Rings. It's hard to find people to play it, let alone people willing to invest time reading the lore.
• The One Ring 2E. This one I can play in Strider mode, but I'd love to play with a Fellowship.
• Esoteric Enterprises. Nobody seems interested in playing this one.
• Ironsworn and Starforged in co-op mode. These two are amazing for co-op, but again, little interest from others.

I've got hundreds of others, but these are the ones I think about most.

I work an outdoor job in another hot state. We typically take a water and shade break every forty-five minutes or so for about fifteen minutes. Not having those breaks, especially when we're in head to toe PPE, would kill most of us and we're used to it.

I was using Sync for years and years. This month, I deleted all my Reddit accounts. That was a well polished app and I'll definitely miss it, but I'm not really missing Reddit itself.

Huh. I think you've got an excellent point there. Maybe barbarian would work better for this concept than druid. I haven't played a barbarian yet so I completely forgot animal instinct was a thing!

There are alternatives to Mythic, but what I like is that it can give you plot twists in the form of scene interruptions (where your next scene is a different scene than what you expect. You thought you were sneaking into the castle dungeon, but instead you find yourself in the guard room!) or scene alterations (where the scene is what you thought, but there's something a little different than what you thought. Maybe you get into that castle dungeon, but there's a prisoner you didn't expect or there's a guard dog on alert instead of just a sleepy guard, etc.). It helps keep things a little random, even if you have an idea of where you want the story to go.

I actually use Mythic when I'm running games with a full party, too. When my players stump me, I can quickly ask Mythic a question or use its descriptions to figure out what comes next.

I was thinking about something similar yesterday. On Reddit, I was part of a number of religious trauma/ex-Christian groups. I was always uncomfortable posting in a place like Reddit, but reading others' posts was greatly comforting to me.

I'm not sure how similar CPTSD and religious trauma are, but I'd be interested in a community like you mentioned to learn more about it.

Thank you for the link! I'll read through that during my lunch break.

Co-op gaming has been a blast! We use Mythic GME 2nd Edition to flesh out situations, decisions, NPCs, locations, plotlines, etc. We also use tarot cards to quickly flesh out NPCs that might be more important to the plot (basically draw three cards and those are the NPCs background and motivations). We use things like PF2 Easy Tool and one of the encounter generator tools for combat.

It's a rules heavy game for this kind of play, but we both know the rules well enough that it isn't so bad. And it helps us practice the more obscure rules. We aren't afraid to take a minute to read up on rules like you might be in a group setting. There's a lot of conversation between us that I don't see in my group games.

We're also both in it for the story and creativity, so it doesn't bother us when we do secret checks out in the open. We'll still play our characters as if they have no idea they failed, often times the failure is more fun anyways!