How was your 2023 RPG season?

We’re still maintaining our weekly gaming session that we’ve been keeping to since Covid first started, it’s like 3 or 4 years now. Our group finished up one GM’s campaign, who then launched into another campaign a bit after that. I ran a one-shot of Mothership merged with the Nemesis boardgame and ended with everyone dying except one character, so that was a success. We played some Savage Worlds Rifts and Dungeon Crawl Classics.

I finished my long running 5e campaign.

I then ran the PF2e beginner box for an almost totally new group, and then ran the same group into the Abomination Vaults. They're up to the third floor now.

I took a small pause on DMing for my 2+ year on-going 5e game starting in December for personal reasons. They just hit tier 3 and didn't have the correct time to prep. I was just wrapping up all of their on-going hooks so some of the background hooks needed to get moved to center stage. So lots of work with no time to work on it. I think I might get to next week when off work.

While I am off from DMing another player took up theDM mantle, so I got be a player on a 5e starwars / spelljammer campaign. We have done a few sessions so far and I really enjoy being a player. I do always keep in the back of head about what I would have differently if I was DMing but I am enjoying it. Also my complaints are small mostly related to asking if the players wanted to do something before doing the obvious next choice.

We did a short Star Wars FFG campaign where I was a player again which was pretty fun. Much easier to run with an online dice roller but obviously more fun in person. It was a pretty fun game and system but just had a few strange things happening. But the choices and character advancement was pretty cool

I might have just found my forever group. I really look forward for our weekly sessions, we write character fiction during the week, I try to get more in character... It's everything it should be. The system is a Traveler based homebrew and isn't my preference but it doesn't even matter much with this group and GM.

I played a couple one shots of Fate and Cortex which were fun, but the groups didn't really click.

I only played 2 and one of them I need to give more attention to.

Baldur's Gate 3, which took like 80% of my entire play time this year.

But I also started Wrath of the Righteous on PS5 but was too burned out by the same gameplay to really give it any time. When I get the itch again, I'm going full bore into it because it is damn good.

No tabletop... My group is scattered to the winds and I haven't found a new one :(

I had my debut as a GM the last 2 months when I was running the pathfinder beginners box for a few friends of mine. l enjoyed it a lot, although it was a little bit stressful, as I'm socially anxious sometimes, but nonetheless a great experience and I'm already looking into the next campaign I want to run. Probably season of ghosts, but I'll ask my players what they think of the setting.

Other than that I play in two other PF2E games and really enjoy my characters, although I could work a bit on speaking in character

I started playing Shadowdark this year. It’s awesome!

I would call it year of the one shots, being a big busy IRL (started improv theatre class last year, pretty great but it's one more evening where I go to bed at midnight letting less room for RPGs) I didn't wanted to commit to a campaign (well, at least not any campaign) so I played/GMed a lot of one shots/micro campaign (the longest was 5 sessions) with may be 20 session over the year

The good surprises were the Borg series(played Ork Borg, bought Cy Borg) , it's actually rule light, efficient, and quite modern, not what I was expecting from an OSR, also played and GMed several 10 candles sessions.

Finally played some D&D 5e, it was like 10 years I hadn't played D&D, still not my cup of tea, but was a fun one shot with a GM doing D&D but different

Pulled back a couple of old games from my shelves just to play a One shot, so fun moment too

Bad year larp wise, not a zero larp year, but just one small game (parlour larp) 40 persons over one night. Many games on my radar got cancelled, feel like many of us were worried about covid restriction leading to cancellation or not actively planning their season

Wrapped up a Torchbearer campaign about this time last year and now a long term player have taken up the mantle and is GMing some Burning Wheel.

Did very little GM-ing. Just some sporadic Blades and a few sessions of Swords of the Serpentine. Like the core of Serpentine but they have added on too many auxiliary systems for me to enjoy it. It doesn't really know what it want to be - light or complex.

Gotten into OSR adventures. Have no liking to the systems but truly love the adventure designs. It is the openness of them that calls to me, an invitation "here is the situation go wild". And they seem so plug-and-playable, and descriptions seldom last longer than a paragraph, and there are tables instead of words, and hooks are listed without fuzz. Am I smitten? Yes!

As the year draws to a close I'm starting up my first campaign in my native Swedish - Drakar och Demoner. Will sound so incredibly geeky to do roleplaying in Swedish. Corny deluxe.

I GMed the second year of our DnD 5e campaign which runs every other week. We went through the official modules Waterdeep Dragonheist and then on to Dungeon of the Mad Mage. We are currently at the final battle of the 4th level of the dungeon. The heroes will be level 8 after the battle. It's just such a nice group and I am happy we manage to play for so long without any major breaks.

In my second group which is every other week alternating with the first one we had the GM drop out after a little over half a year mid campaign. I offered to run Pathfinder 2e for the first time and it went great. The party is level 5 now and close to the end of the small campaign I prepared. Maybe 2 or 3 more sessions to wrap up. I made up the campaign myself but set it in the world of Golarion. GMing Pathfinder was a blast and I highly prefer it over dnd now. It'll be my go to system once the mad mage campaign ends which might well be another 2 years. After my Pathfinder campaign ends another player will GM Storm King's Thunder which we already got characters for and began to play when I couldn't make prep work in time since GMing 2 groups is a lot for my schedule.

Lastly I began offering beginner one shots in Pathfinder 2e in my flgs and it's been absolutely awesome. People routinely buy PF books right there at the store after the session ends which is probably the biggest compliment. The beginner box is great for that.

I'm working on a proper dnd 5e beginner adventure similar to the Pathfinder box since the dnd sets aren't really beginner friendly at all nor do they have proper matirials at the ready.

All in all I had a fantastic RPG year. I hope things can keep going like this in the future.

Started the year off GMing the Gumshoe Yellow King RPG. It definitely takes more prep than other games I'm used to but is thematic and a great horror experience.

Our group then switched to the Avatar RPG, which has been an absolute blast. I've been playing a firebender in the Aang era. We're currently on our second season.

In between the Avatar game when scheduling falls through I've been GMing Blades in the Dark, which has been one of the most rewarding and exciting games I've played.

Our group mostly plays weekly and we've been together for 6ish years mostly playing D&D.

We had a pause in late summer due to a number of deaths.

Hoping that what's in the schedule for 2024 doesn't get cancelled due to death.

I've played through all of Agents of Edgewatch, started playing Gatewalkers, started playing a heavily modded Spelljammer module, and began running a sandbox campaign of my own design. I've come to the conclusion that all APs, canned adventures, and modules are bad and I'm utterly bored by all of them. They evoke the feeling of going to a movie theater, but with the pacing and scheduling issues associated with TTRPGs. They're just poor match for the character or objective driven campaigns that I crave.

Stil GM on a two years long campaign. High fantasy which started as Dungeon World and is now Fate.

The funny thing they still haven't found is that, except 2 NPCs they met, all others are honest and tell the truth. Some are blatantly incompetent or stupid though.

We had the second-highest number of sessions in our Pathfinder game (the Hell's Rebels AP) since we started in 2019. 8 sessions this year, 2019 was the highest number with 9.

Started playing Changeling with a different group, most of whom I'd never played with before. That game is fortnightly and still going. It's the first time I've played a regular game with another group since my 'main' group started playing together in 2004-ish. Actually, if I count those sessions, I've played more this year than I have in the past ten years.

I ran a session of Delta Green for the first time this year. I've been interested since it first came out. I'm currently in the exploratory stages of finding out who will be available for a regular game of that, but it won't be starting until next year.

Actually, that's another one. I've played more new games this year than I have before, other than convention games, at least. Played Fate, Changeling and Delta Green for the first time.

Baldurs Gate 3 sidelined my whole backlog-- which is just fine by me, I'm not trying to schedule actual table meets, whether IRL or online, until my degree is done