Probably Bad RPG Ideas

A list of the ideas used in the Probably Bad Podcast

1. Describe all fights as uncharitably as possible
2. Corporate branded RPGs
3. Every time you introduce a new NPC, roll a D20. On a one it’s actually Asmodeous, Lord Of The Nine Hells, who’s here in disguise for reasons totally unrelated to the current plot
4. When a character drops to zero hitpoints, they can automatically succeed a death saving throw by trading in a level. You survive, but you go down levels (submitted by a-daydreaming-fox)
5. Refusing to differentiate important and unimportant information in your scene description
6. Your monster hunters are called to a town where someone has been reporting a lot of ghost sightings. When they get there, it turns out the whole town is ghosts, and they’re complaining about the one living person
7. Feed a person vampire blood you get a ghoul, feed an animal vampire blood you get a hellhound, feed it to a plant you get a mandrake, fill up your car probably good things let’s try it.
8. One of the best parts about worldbuilding is creating unique takes on the classical mythological concepts. Revel in this feeling by creating 20 different takes on demons/elves/wizards/etc and rolling randomly at the start of each session to see which one is used this week
9. Make everyone switch character sheets just before the first session (submitted by roundaboutnow)
10. N/A
11. Have your players roll incredibly hard perception checks every 10 minutes. When someone finally succeeds you reveal the big bad has been standing right there for the whole adventure
12. You know your favourite novelty silly song? that’s now your character’s backstory
13. Host your game session in an escape room and don’t let anyone out until the campaign is done
14. Give your players a disintegration gun. It actually sends people into the future in the final session all people they shot with it blink into existence at once
15. Play in real time
16. A benjamin button style campaign where your characters level in reverse, starting at 20 then going to level 1 (submitted by bari-sax-bisexual)
17. Instead of the GM deciding what the player needs to roll, the player chooses one of their skills to use and the GM decides the DC based on the relevance of the skill (submitted by headless-horseboy)
18. Scroll through the not an idea tag and use what you find in your next campaign (submitted anonymously)
19. Create a cosmic level enemy whose attack damages the player not just on a surface level, but on all levels of reality. If an attack hits a character, hit the character’s player in the face IRL
20. N/A
21. A warlock’s patron is actually a wizard that did an elaborate scam that got in way too deep. He’s really just following them around doing an invisibility enchantment and casting spells as needed (submitted by rubikscube60)
22. N/A
23. Normal D&D except the DM pulls each player aside individually and tells them they’re a spirit inhabiting the body of their character. You must act as human as possible (submitted by parafoxicalk)
24. Experiment with style by having werewolf transformations happen in the style of magical girl transformation sequences/describing all wildshape in the really horrendous way that animorphs does it
25. A warlock who seems to have a terribly dark secret that torments him every day but his secret is he’s a halfling who made a pact with a demon just to be tall (submitted by discount-nerd)/Remember, bigfoot is like salt for your campaign. No matter what your campaign is, you can’t go wrong with bigfoot coming into the scene
26. Outlaw backstories. Pcs have amnesia. Npcs have amnesia, heck, everyone has amnesia. Submitted by the appropriately named effects of entropy
27. A dragon who runs an orphanage. Their horde is the children they raise (submitted by TD-Whisperer)
28. A supernatural campaign where in the end the supernatural doesn’t really exist
29. The party are the proud owners of ravenloft’s first ever chuck e cheese
30. N/A
31. I want to play a tabletop rpg where my six stats are gumption hutzpah moxie childlike wonder and the cut of my jib and a certain je ne sais quoi (posted by philosophyshitscribble)
32. World of darkness campaign where you never encounter anything supernatural sure the vampire conspiracies, and werewolf armies are out there, the gm reassures you but this campaign is focused on the DMV
33. A game of the secret of cats where one of the PCs is secretly a standard, non-sentient cat
34. Invite people round to play pathfinder. Once there, have them roleplay being workers of the mapping ordinance survey. Seem confused when they raise objection
35. A great disaster has been unleashed upon the land. Your pcs are a committee formed to find a way to deal with it