I'm bored with it all.

[Baumi]

I find a good way to lighten to gm-load and therefore avoid burn out, is to use pregenerated adventures. But the problem is that most of them are hack'n slay which you don't want.

So I would recommend to try Savage Worlds with a Plot Point Campaign. The great thing about Plot Point Campaigns is that they let the players find there own style and very easy to run. Each plot point campaign has the background info for the world, monsters, a main plot that you can advance as you see fit, a generic adventure generator and most importantly a map with all the important places where you will always find one or more mini-adventures pregenerated for you.

These Adventures are very small (usually half a page) but they still take several session since they are seldom about combat and mainly about the plot. Since many of them cannot be done by force alone, they will start to think about new ways and you will have a more diverse adventures that way.

I really like the style since it is extremly easy to master (nearly no prepartions after the Campaign begins) and it all feels very naturaly, they are not railroaded but always challenged and they start to begin their own adventures after a while. The only limit is that it should be played with Savage Worlds since the world is not level-based.... you can travel through the whole world at any time and find it challenging but possible, which would be hard to do in a level based System.

 

[maddman75]

Get away from D&D for awhile. Run a couple of games of Dread. No stats, no dice, just you and the tower. Most fun you can have with a one-shot.

 

[Wraith Form]

you can probably have fight-loot-repeat in Call of Cthulhu.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

No offense, but...have you played CoC?

 

[Wraith Form]

My humble opinion is that video games poisoned table top RPG, a great deal.

This is a biased opinion: I'm not into video games. But my older brother was a D&Der before everyone had a games console (and so was I, though quite young) and it seems to me there was a lot more role play in RPG back then, compared to what you often get now.

The premise of most video games is ongoing shock effect and cheap thrills: Battle after endless battle, spectacular visuals, one guy facing down legions of bad guys. And that seems to create an adrenaline rush that a lot of guys get addicted to. So they expect something at least somewhat similar in their table top RPG.

But, for those of us who like a STORY, with character evolution and development, video game style play is freaking BORING!

The only solution I've found is to simply be more picky about who I game with . And that has in fact led me to doing the bulk of my gaming online, now. You get a much larger player pool to choose from, that way. Also, a fair amount of people that game online are those who have the vocabulary and intelligence to be able to write at least somewhat well, and those tend to be more interested in their characters as people, rather than just playing pieces.

For anyone whose had similar dissatisfactions, I would also highly recommend throwing online gaming into the mix to improve the quality of your gaming. (This is to say, RPGs that are played over e-mail or boards, not MUDs and the like.)

This. Basically FTW.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Ha ha ha ha ha!

No offense, but...have you played CoC?

You can play CoC that way.

That doesn't mean that you should.

 

[maddman75]

You can play CoC that way.

That doesn't mean that you should.

Dude, I killed those cultists, now I have their sacrificial dagger, this cool eyeball symbol thing, and the dude's spellbook. I'm totally gonna learn all those spells and start nuking bad guys.

Wait, when does my Sanity refresh again? I'm almost out.

 

[Cardboard Carnage]

The players and the DM are as much to blame... I have seen games go from rich ROLE playing games, to very boring ROLL playing games very quickly, people just stop role playing and get comfortable rolling dice and killing things, at first it seems like the games go faster and you get more fun in, but suddenly you realize everyone has become bored and tired or it all.

The solution I had to this (I am almost always the DM), was at the end of a session I awarded some bonus XP to a player for "best ROLE playing" of the session. The other players were all like "What? Huh? Wow!" and as the weeks went on, they became more and more fun to play with, really ROLE playing more and more... now it is just standard practice for me to award a little extra XP to the best ROLE player each time, and the games have become a lot more fun.

D.