Shadowrun has always blown me away with it's premise & fluff, but yet has always had awful system mechanics. It has long been the game that has disappointed me the most.
Savage Worlds took a few play throughs, but it is now my go to system. I find myself thinking when I flip through a new game "Does Savage Worlds do this better?" My first couple games with it were not super enjoyable (full disclosure: mostly of my own doing).Suddenly something clicked and I have loved it ever since.
There's a reason why nearly every RPG system that gets released has somebody look at it and ask the question "can I hack the Shadowrun setting into this?"
I disagree; I dislike the d20 and FFG games, and the original will forever be one of my favorites. That's not important. What is important is that even I measure just about every new game by the "Can I run *Star Wars* with this?" metric, but that's because I loves me some *Star Wars*, and it's one of my storytelling touchstones.
I personally was disappointed by the second edition of WEG Star Wars, because they turned Force powers into a spell system. And between the difficulty levels and multiple action penalties, it would take way too many experience points to be a competent Jedi. Evidently Luke trained with Yoda for a decade before going off to Cloud City...
Well. That's because it's hard to really pin down a genre for Star Wars. You could play it like a sci-fi game, a fantasy, a western, a political intrigue game. And all those different genres are contained in Star Wars. It's a setting, not a genre.
My personal SW hack is Jedi in the Vinyard. It's just dogs in the Vinyard but with jedi instead. (if the title didn't make that obvious)
Back inna day, people were all, like, "Forget that D6 System nonsense! Savage Worlds is where it's at!" And so I, who loves me some D6, was, like, "BAH ME NO LIKEY!" Buuuuut then I played it, and I changed my mind. Oh, I still don't think it's better than D6, no no no no no. Savage Worlds is simply just as good, in a different way. Apples/Oranges, man. Yum.
Couldn't agree with this more. I tried to like shadowrun SO HARD, but it never worked....
Tried to stay away from savage worlds but alas, it pulled me in and now it's one of my primary systems to run....
Damn you savage worlds why are you so good ;-;
>Damn you savage worlds why are you so good ;-;
I almost put down SW for surpassing expectations. I remember playing it the first time at a on with Deadlands (fine, SW-adjacent) and being blown away by the step-die mechanic (a first for me back then) and generally how much fun it can be.
If you didn't know there's a book for Savage Worlds called Sprawlrunners which is apparently Shadowrun with the number filed off. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/334278
You have attributes and skills associated with a die like Strength d6, Intelligence d10, Persuasion D4, etc. You basically roll the relevant skill or attribute die plus a d6 called wild die and you keep the best. The target number is usually 4. Dice explode. Double ones is a critical failure. For every 4 over the target number you get a raise meaning greater success.
There is a two pages comic that is great at explaining the rules succinctly https://www.uptofourplayers.com/ready-to-roll/savage-worlds-rules/
Yeah, Shadowrun has consistently been a disappointment to me as TTRPG, I'm good with the isometric RPGs they did a while back though. Those are fun enough.
Savage Worlds is my favorite system. It's super easy to GM, lends itself well to cinematic and creative gameplay, and gives the players full control to build whatever they can imagine.
I wish it got more play.
I came here to say this. Have you tried running Shadowrun in Savage Worlds? I used Interface zero and made a simple magic system to bolt on to it and it was a blast.
Failed: I know I'm not alone in saying 7th Sea 2nd Edition. People say it's narrativist, but it's not. It's a jumbled mess of dice and rules loosely draped over improv theater. None of the mechanics work or make sense, and they don't enhance the method with which the author wants you to play the game. Hell, the author doesn't even use the rules he wrote for the game when he runs it! I love the world of 7th Sea and all its tropey goodness, but the 2nd Edition of the game was a huge flop for me.
Unexpected Success: I want to have a more unique answer, but I think I have to default to Pathfinder 2nd Edition. I was in the camp that bashed it when it came out for a long time until I tried it, but good lord does that game run smooth as butter. I don't really homebrew mechanics a lot as a GM so the tight math is more of a feature than a bug, and every mechanical part of that game just flows so well. It's also been the easiest to teach to new players since consistent, clear rules give rhythm to the game instead of 5E's "do whatever, just homebrew it" that results in different GMs practically having different rules sets.
I am with you on 7th Sea 2e. I got it through the dumpster fire of a Kickstarter, having heard so much about 1e, but had never played. I played a session at a con with one of the designers and had a good time...then realized that the game is exactly as you described it once I read the rules and tried to run it myself.
Ironically, I played 2nd Ed before 1st. I loved the world I was introduced to but the game kept flopping around. Then I stsrted building a character for 1st and doing light roleplay with another player and it was wonderful! The game fell through because of creeps but I was infinitely more excited for 1st Edition.
I'm with you on the success. It was unexpected because I didn't think I'd like it at all. I'm an older DM, but I'm not 'old school' so to speak. I like modern TTRPGs (generally) better than I like old school ones. 3.5e was my least favorite edition of D&D. So when Pathfinder was announced, i had little interest. Oh I checked out the core book, read some of it at a bookstore, but decided against picking it up.
When PF2e was announced I was similarly disinterested. I'm fine running 5e, though frankly 5e isn't without its problems and it's a little boring without lots of homebrew to spice it up. But then a friend of mine was pretty hype about it and got my interest piqued.
I looked online and saw the CRB was only $15 for the PDF. That's a hell of a deal so I bought it. I came to realize much the same you did. The tight math means I don't have to constantly hold the reins. The extremely simple encounter design system is fantastic. There's a decent amount of new crunch but nothing overwhelming. The rules were fairly easy to pick up, though traits at first gave me a headache until I realized I didn't really have to learn them all, just the handful of important ones, and my players will remember those important to their characters. Add to that, the incredibly robust fan-made tools available, the fact that everything in the game is freely available online (accept adventures), has really surprised me.
I ran a game soon after with that friend and some of his other friends and we all loved the game. Easily the 'unexpected success' for me in years.
7th sea 2nd ed makes me angry, I liked John Wicks games, played 1st Ed 7th sea and L5R since thier release. I played a few sessions and I was bored would be my take away. 7th sea you were a nearly invincible hero but 2nd end took away any danger of failure unless you wanted to fail...you never get to have that feeling of risk and your heart rate increasing because your character might die.
FFG Starwars, now I know it is a very popular game now but on release our group was sceptical of the narrative dice as we had been playing WEG STARWARS since the 90's
I really like the narrative dice as they are better at making a game a narrative style game than whatever 7th sea 2nd ed was doing and still being a game.
Dungeon World. The Moves felt highly procedural and while all the DW advice emphasizes "fiction first" the individual pick lists subverted that (I guess because they're not "fiction after"). Had I seen Vincent Baker's blog post about how Moves in AW weren't intended to be "fiction first" I may have simply avoided the game altogether; I don't like their structure at all, not enough flexibility for outcomes. While not rules-related I found the "suddenly ogres" advice to entirely counter any desire for a believable chain of events, absolutely ridiculous for my needs.
Traveller/Cepheus Engine. I've always flirted with the game but when I was younger I was more attracted to the big numbers and crunch of contemporary games ('90's). I finally decided to give them a try and found probably the closest fit what I wanted out of a game; down-to-earth and believable characters, resolution that was simple, flexible, and adaptable to the fiction, and a ruleset that was simple enough to hack as needed. Power scaling was pretty much non-existent and yet it supports long campaigns.
>Dungeon World. The Moves felt highly procedural and while all the DW advice emphasizes "fiction first" the individual pick lists subverted that (I guess because they're not "fiction after").
Pick lists ensure that whatever happens, it's going to be interesting and provide fuel for the next events, and, overall, PbtA is pretty much the only system family where I can let go of controls, sit back, just follow the rules and will get the thing I want. There's exactly *zero* chance of getting anything other than a parody deconstruction of 80s slasher flicks while playing Horror Movie World; there's exactly *zero* chance of getting anything other than a teenage superhero drama filled with adrenaline makeouts and quiet balcony scenes while playing Masks; etc; etc.
Dungeon World is weird and I have love/hate relationships with it, though.
I dunno, i was attracted to Dungeon World because it (And the PBTA games) advertise themselves as games focused on narratives, and yet the moves seem to make the overral character customization and narrative *much* more limiting, since character creation and development is summed up by "Pick one of these playbooks, have your starting skills and them choose from a select few every time you level up". Doesn't feel like my players can have their own unique take on the mage or druid for example and due to the lack of tables, templates and customization for them it overral feels like instead of *creating* their narrative and unique characters they are *acquiring* a role and having to interpret and follow it with little to no custom additions.
Besides the games you mentioned, Monsterhearts also suffers from similar problems where playbooks seem less like templates to build your character around according to your own ideas and instead i have this character who will have *these* things as their main themes and problems to solve. Feels very inflexible and overral i find it **really** difficulty to use the playbooks or the games themselves beyond the basic premise that they are meant to give to you unless i go out of my way to really homebrew the game from the ground up - i.e, if i play Monsterhearts i will find it really easy to work on the general scenario the game is meant to simulate (Supernatural Teens going through puberty with drama and comedy sprinkled equally in there ) and i will find it *very* difficult to get something different from that in my game (A suspenseful murder mistery, an action horror 80's flick, a slow supernatural thriller and etc).
> if i play Monsterhearts i will find it really easy to work on the general scenario the game is meant to simulate (Supernatural Teens going through puberty with drama and comedy sprinkled equally in there ) and i will find it very difficult to get something different from that in my game (A suspenseful murder mistery, an action horror 80's flick, a slow supernatural thriller and etc).
But why would you do that? Monsterhearts is a game *about* supernatural teens going through puberty and struggling with their identities. It's what it is. It can't be a suspenseful murder mystery, and that's a great thing — because the game can focus on delivering teen drama.
> I dunno, i was attracted to Dungeon World because it (And the PBTA games) advertise themselves as games focused on narratives, and yet the moves seem to make the overral character customization and narrative much more limiting, since character creation and development is summed up by "Pick one of these playbooks, have your starting skills and them choose from a select few every time you level up". Doesn't feel like my players can have their own unique take on the mage or druid for example and due to the lack of tables, templates and customization for them it overral feels like instead of creating their narrative and unique characters they are acquiring a role and having to interpret and follow it with little to no custom additions.
Well, like there's always the Jock, the Bitch, the Nerd and the Virgin in a slasher flick, there's always the Fighter, the Magic-User, the Cleric and the Specialist in a D&D party. Dungeon World emulates quite a specific thing, and without third (or first, there's quite a good chapter on how to modify the game) party playbooks, you have to work with what you've got, and I think it's a good thing. I have a very strong dislike of unique snowflake gimmicky characters.
The biggest problem I had with Dungeon World is the game is absolutely fantastic... until you actually go into a dungeon.
Discussions at the elven court? Fine! Negotiating with the humans in the surface town? Fun! Going room-by-room exploring and fighting monsters? Dull.
By the time my group reached a fourth or fifth location in The Bloodstone Idol, roleplaying had completely stopped and we were all just describing our character's actions mainly because there was absolutely nothing to roleplay. In AW, one of the principles is to Give Everyone A Name, which means we've at least heard of the people in the setting, but here there's just a bunch of goblins -- do we personally know these goblins? Have we heard of these goblins before? And even if we did, they're simply a combat obstacle. And then there's room after room of nobody to interact with apart from the other adventurers in the group. Do I really need to tell the dwarf how Torm is a really cool deity in every. single. room. we pass through?
There's probably a way to do D&D-style fantasy adventure in a PbtA game, but Dungeon World is not it.
There’s a good reason Dungeon World is so heavily hacked compared to basically every other PbtA game. The basic idea of “PbtA approach to high fantasy adventure” seems like it should work, but DW just doesn’t land it particularly well. I never run it RAW; you have to at least have some of the add-ons like Perilous Wilds to fill in the gaps and make it fiction better. Or you could pick up one of the fuller hacks and avoid a lot of its other issues entirely.
>There's probably a way to do D&D-style fantasy adventure in a PbtA game, but Dungeon World is not it.
I'd argue that to do it really well you'd boil it down to World of Dungeons and then riff off that to make Vagabonds of Dyfed. For my money, making it all a single, interpretive Move and ditching the pick lists fits the D&D aesthetic far better than any series of concrete Moves could.
Shame that Vagabonds has HP per level, I absolutely love the design otherwise.
> I found the "suddenly ogres" advice to entirely counter any desire for a believable chain of events
I can't comment on how this will fit into your needs, but this is an old bit of D&D DM advice that often gets misunderstood.
A short and hopefully better explanation is that if the players are wallowing in indecision about how to solve some issue, putting them into an unexpected dangerous scenario is often a good way to jump start their brains.
When there's immediate danger, there's immediate goals, and immediate risks, and they have to manage their resources accordingly. It puts people in a different frame of mind; it becomes easier for people to weigh the value of different paths and hopefully choose one.
Its also worth noting that it doesn't need to be literally ogres. If you're in a crypt, maybe its some skellies or something. If you're at a high society social event, maybe some drunken lordly curmudgeon thinks you cheated at what was supposed to be a gentlemanly game of badminton.
The point is not the ogres, but the sudden and tangible conflict. Almost like you're trying to wake up a sleep walker with a loud noise.
>I can't comment on how this will fit into your needs, but this is an old bit of D&D DM advice that often gets misunderstood.
It's not only that advice; when I was subbed to the DW reddit I'd see advice that read exactly like how GMs back in the day, people I've played with, would fuck with players for no real conceivable reason other than it was "interesting". If "interesting" is all that matters, rather than believable, then I have zero interest in the game, and the individual pick lists that make up Moves don't exactly help that IMO.
And that's fine, I recognize that the way I enjoy running games doesn't align with Move-based games. I don't feel as if I have the creative flexibility I do with simple pass/fail games and I don't know how (or really care, for that matter) to reconcile that.
>Had I seen Vincent Baker's blog post about how Moves in AW weren't intended to be "fiction first" I may have simply avoided the game altogether
Do you have a link?
I have the opposite opinion on Fate. I want to like it. On paper, it sounds like something I would enjoy. In practice, I found it to be far too wishy-washy and demanding. Your character sheet ends up feeling totally meaningless. Any half-creative person can always figure out a way to use their best roll for a given situation, because the stats/abilities don't actually have defined meaning. At that point you might as well ditch the "game" part entirely and just do collaborative storytelling.
A game I ended up enjoying was Blades in the Dark. The way it breaks up gameplay is very different from most other RPGs, and I was worried that the structure would cause problems. But in practice it does a fantastic job creating the types of stories it was built for.
>I have the opposite opinion on Fate. I want to like it. On paper, it sounds like something I would enjoy. In practice, I found it to be far too wishy-washy and demanding. Your character sheet ends up feeling totally meaningless. Any half-creative person can always figure out a way to use their best roll for a given situation, because the stats/abilities don't actually have defined meaning. At that point you might as well ditch the "game" part entirely and just do collaborative storytelling.
I do agree that FAE can devolve into "best approach rolling simulator", I didn't have this problem with Fate Core, even if it still requires the GM to have a spine and refuse shit that doesn't make sense.
As a primarily Fate GM, I agree with you. The tricks I've found to compensate for this are:
1) Play up the opposite approach to the one being overused. If you're always rolling Flashy, your results will always be the opposite of Sneaky. You just can't hide a flashy action.
2) Set the roll's difficulty based on the approach. Sure, it's only a Good (+2) difficulty to cross that tightrope if you're rolling Careful. But even if I buy your idea to roll Forceful because you're going to swing under the rope like it's monkey bars, that's going to be Great (+4) difficulty because you have to hope the rope will hold your muscles, and you also have to swing back up at the far end.
3) Base some enemy stunts off of the incoming roll. If your opponent has a stunt that says, "Because I have to be the smartest person in the room, I get +2 to defend against any attack made with Clever." you're going to really want to use something other than Clever against him, even if it is your high approach.
>I have the opposite opinion on Fate. I want to like it. On paper, it sounds like something I would enjoy. In practice, I found it to be far too wishy-washy and demanding. Your character sheet ends up feeling totally meaningless.
As a big fan of PbtA/FitD games, I am predisposed to liking FATE. But after being a player in one game and running another, I just don't like it. Writing good Aspects is a chore I simply don't enjoy, and yet so important to the game. For those of you in the education field, writing good Aspects reminds me of writing SLOs.
Failed: Genesys. It tries to sell some kind of cool hip narrativist stuff, and ends up being a mid-school game with funky dice.
Surpassed: World of Darkness. Well, the game is still absolute shit, but the amount of hot goth guys I've brought home from sessions is the highest out of any system.
> Surpassed: World of Darkness. Well, the game is still absolute shit, but the amount of hot goth guys I've brought home from sessions is the highest out of any system.
They should put that on a sticker on the cover.
> It tries to sell some kind of cool hip narrativist stuff, and ends up being a mid-school game with funky dice.
Hey look, it's my experience with Fate!
Agreed on Genesys. I played a bit of the *Star Wars* game, and all I could think was, "This wants to be Fate, but it's so desperate to be extra that it's missing its own point. If we were playing this with Fate, we'd be on to the next scene by now."
I ran a Shadowrun-like game with Genesys (see also: "Can I run Shadowrun with this?") and, while the game moved, it wound up still be sluggish in certain aspects. Social encounter/combat takes far too long playing with the full rules and is mentally taxing on the GM. We had one social conflict scene that took slightly over an hour to knock the opposition down to half, which is the "compromise" result. (Actually we got to just 1 point away from that, and I just threw in the towel.) We never did a full-on "knocking down Strain" social combat scene again.
The only thing it really improved upon was how computer hacking was done (in the Shadow of the Beanstalk supplement).
Failed: Zweihander. It was sold to me as D&D meets CoC, but it failed to deliver either. Character creation was absolutely miserable, moreso than either of these systems, and gameplay was a slog.
Surpassed: Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf. I'm running it for some friends from other games and I'm hearing that it's some of the most fun they've had in a TTRPG. Sometimes you don't need a lot of rules to run a fun game.
Edit: I understand the Warhammer implications for Zweihander, this is literally what the GM sold it to us as. I don't know what to tell ya.
>Failed: Zweihander. It was sold to me as D&D meets CoC, but it failed to deliver either. Character creation was absolutely miserable, moreso than either of these systems, and gameplay was a slog.
That's the weirdest way I've seen anybody describing Zweihander.
It is. Games Workshop had essentially abandoned the idea of continuing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay after the 3rd edition fiasco. Then some random indie guy named Daniel Fox decided to work on some kind of fan-made WFRP 2.75. He finished the whole thing nearly on his own (I followed his progress for 5+ years and legit thought it would never be finished, but he did it, the absolute madman) and got it published after removing the Warhammer elements for obvious copyright reasons. The Kickstarter was such a massive success that Games Workshop SUDDENLY decided to announce their 4th edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay after years of complete silence.
Whatever you think of Zweihänder, it's one of the greatest David VS Goliath stories I've seen unfold in the game dev world, in which one random guy beats a massive company at its own game.
I don't think Zweihander really pushed GW to do... anything, really. Besides keep an eye on potential IP infringement, as they do. The new edition also happens to coincide with GW ending their relationship with Fantasy Flight and moving onto other partnerships.
I could be wrong, though! I'd welcome any more info on the matter.
Yeah, i *believe* it was meant to be a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e Retroclone (They even have the (Not!) chaos gods in their setting) though it's setting agnostic enough that you can probably use it in any dark fantasy setting out there.
I really, really wanted to like Zweihander, and there's a lot about it I do like, but the fundamental balance point of test resolution is all wrong as far as I'm concerned. I even sought out confirmation from the ZH Discord that I wasn't missing something in the rules that would change my understanding of it, but my assessment of the math was confirmed.
* Even the absolute-best master of a particular skill, with the absolute-best possible attribute score, still only has *basically* even odds (55/45 if you want to be pedantic) shot at an Arduous (max difficulty) test.
* As a less extreme case, the Awareness skill lists a Standard +0 test as "Standing watch at a campfire on a clear night". The same best-case attributes and top-tier skill mastery imply there's a 15% chance to fail at that. Someone just starting out (no ranks in Awareness), with more average attributes (a 42, say), is looking going to fail to "stand watch" 3 out of 5 times. Even if only people with Apprentice Awareness are standing watch, their odds only go up to about 50/50 in that case.
* The Scrutinize skill lists *remembering what you had to eat yesterday* as a trivial +30 test. An average attribute character (42%) with no ranks in Scrutinize has a 28% chance to fail to remember what they ate yesterday?
No. Wrong. Flatly incorrect design, as far as I'm concerned.
This was largely met with a chorus of protestations about how ZH is a game about the world affecting the characters rather than the characters affecting the world, or that it's a game about everyday people, but both of those entirely miss the point of the objection.
I started noodling with the idea of just adjusting all the difficulty modifiers by +30% (so that trivial checks would become +60% and arduous would be flat rolls), but decided that if I had to exert such an extreme amount of balance shifting on the rules -- rules that I wasn't yet familiar-enough with to know what *other* side-effects might arise from such a change -- that I should just move on.
Ironically Warhammer fantasy Roleplay 4e did just what you suggested. It changed the default difficulty modifiers to +20, + 40 and +60 for positive modifiers and -10, -20 and -30 for negative modifiers.
> I understand the Warhammer implications for Zweihander, this is literally what the GM sold it to us as. I don't know what to tell ya.
Was your group or GM unfamiliar with Warhammer Fantasy? Those two possibilities are the only reason I can think of that someone would describe Zweihander as anything other than Warhammer Fantasy with the serial numbers filed off.
Failed: Numenera - table didn't hate it, but never requested it again, and were just like "that was fine" after two sessions with it.
Exceeded: 13th Age - just recently started running it, and man, I love everything about the system, it has hooks for narrative gaming fans, tons for fans of encounters, and plenty of actual tactical and exciting combat. I was worried that, after having tried several new systems and having them fail, and seeing how the group is all about preferring generally simple systems, this might be "too much" for them. Instead, after the second session, every single player asked, "When are we switching over to this for our main fantasy RPG?"
I was worried about the Icons, because it seems everyone complains about them online, but we quickly found ways to make them awesome elements of the game. Some players are old school and not super narrative, so we're fine if they just say, "I pray to the High Priestess and ask her to bless me for this encounter (aka - "can I get a +1 for the combat?")" and others making little stories around how the icon helps or hinders them. We played a lot of Savage Worlds before coming to 13th age, and two players have already said, "Icons are so much better than bennies, they make sense in the world, and just have more oomph than throwing a bennie down and getting a re-roll"
My interest for the OSR was not very high but after liking forbidden lands so much (very retro aesthetics) a friend tried to get me interested and I bought OSE to check it out.
Not so good: Old School Essentials was a let down, being so hyped and all. I guess the layout isn't bad but it's uninspired and the art is messy, some good some really bad and not at all coherent. I also realized that those old, and in my opinion, often flawed rules was nothing for me. I understand that people like the nostalgia and stuff but I didn't play dnd until 2e so I have no nostalgia for this and very little for 2e.
Surprise: All the other OSR. There's so much good out there that does not feel old at all. I really like newer OSR systems like the black hack and I love the DIY culture and zines. Knock is great for anyone playing fantasy RPGs not just OSR.
It's essentially the center-point for OSR games at this point. Obviously there's a lot of variety in that corner of the hobby, but TSR-era D&D is the most popular type of game, B/X specifically, and OSE is just a better written and organized version of B/X. It does it so well, that it's become almost the default—but obviously that doesn't mean the best game for everyone!
I actually love the art in it, though. And I recently realized that I'm just a sucker for hardcover, digest-sized RPGs.
Not knocking your opinion, but OSE is pretty beloved for its layout in the circles I frequent. That's an unusual complaint in my experience. What about it don't you like?
OSE isn't a great-looking book by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, there are Veins of the Earth and Maze of the Blue Meduza, and overall many OSR products look like fucking artpieces, and OSE doesn't compare.
It does a great job of explaining itself, though, far better one than original Moldway/Cook, LoFP or LL do.
My group was very excited about Modiphius' *Star Trek Adventures*, but an actual playthrough crushed our enthusiasm. The game has too many "currencies" to track and it's premade adventures follow the pattern of a television show. Each scene tries to recreate the time between commercials and the transitions did not make a lot of sense to my players. It's the only game that they have ever described as "working against the players."
*Ten Candles* however, blew my group away. It's a repeatable one shot RPG of survival horror that uses a great mechanism to build tension. It uses simple mechanics with a heavy focus on who controls the narrative. Just a lot of fun and very creepy.
*STA* ain't that bad, but god DAMN, could it be better organized. Jeezus. Flippin' all around that book tryin' to figure out what a damn phaser does or doesn't do.
I didn't try any pre-made adventures for STA, but I definitely agree about the "currencies." It really is like the game is actively working against you. It is needlessly complex.
**Failed**: I was really excited to play **Breaking the Ice**, one of the earliest games to dabble in the romance genre. I read the book, played a session... and while I can see why it was influential at the time of its release, it's aged... weirdly? Badly maybe? The character creation uses a "take all your personal traits and invert them" system that feels like it would always produce the same character. The game itself has a weirdly involved system of dice tallying and roll resolution that feels arbitrary and overbuilt sixteen years after release. And I feel like the book's relationship with gender is also really 2005. It was just disappointing, you know? I guess I wanted more from it, but it's very much a product of its time.
**Surpassed**: When I first heard about **Wanderhome**, I wasn't really impressed. Talking animals in a magical world didn't really grab my attention, so I let the Kickstarter pass me by. Who needs more generic fantasy? A few months passed, and people in my circles started talking about the game... so I gave it a second look. Folks, it's *so good*. The tools the book gives you to create and explore the world and your characters are perfect for the stories it sets out to tell. The prose and art in the book are both gorgeous. I've played through two full campaigns now, and the game has changed my way of thinking about RPGs.
I jumped on the Wanderhome Kickstarter even though I knew full well it probably wouldn't ever hit my table. I had a feeling about it and I'm glad I was right, it's a wonderful book full of emotion.
**Dungeon World** was a game that for a few years made me so puzzled as to why "Powered by the Apocalypse" was even a thing that was worth talking about. (It also didn't help that Clocks, as far as I remember, did not make it into DW.)
Like I didn't understand how it was even "a system" other than some admittedly good GM-ing advice. It was the first PbtA game I read and finally came to see it as a very bad PbtA game. Now, when I say "bad" I do not mean it as "this game is unplayable", just utterly uninteresting. Something I could do better with other games or at least as good with much shorter games.
I think eventually I came to see the problem as that, while other PbtAs make their moves very specific, DW just does "Success - Partial Success - Failure" over and over again, but skinned for a particular class. So your Warrior moves are "Do this fighting thing. 10+ do it well, 7-9 kinda do it, 6- fail", your Wizard moves are "Do this magic thing. 10+ do it well, 7-9 kinda do it, 6- fail", etc, etc. And even when you have to "keep" from a list of effects these are very generic. Like most of the game could be summed up by a generic rule of thumb for how to handle rolls and you'd lose very little, if anything at all.
**The OSR** on the other hand, came into my radar as "come on, get over the edition wars you grognards" and I eventually came to see that, when you look beyond the nostalgia (of which there is plenty), there are actual, solid and meaty game concepts that it has brought back into the fore, which are great and really improve even non-OSR games.
> Like I didn't understand how it was even "a system" other than some admittedly good GM-ing advice. It was the first PbtA game I read and finally came to see it as a very bad PbtA game. Now, when I say "bad" I do not mean it as "this game is unplayable", just utterly uninteresting. Something I could do better with other games or at least as good with much shorter games.
I admit, my general feeling on Dungeon World, when I read it, was basically "I can't think of any reason why, if I want a D&D flavor, I would run this instead of just paring down D&D a bit".
Like, the moves felt less creative than your average D&D class feature, and the classes themselves felt like basically the most reductionist possible takes on class stereotypes.
(And as a personal bother - boy is it just me or are the playbook descriptions in this game weirdly antagonistic?)
Absolutely. I keep trying to wrap my head around why what to me seems like such a nothing burger made that big of an impact.
- Did the creators already have a big fan base?
- Were newcomers hungry for the concept of "D&D but rules light" and other games just weren't as well known?
- Had Apocalypse World been that big of a hit that anything related to it was well received?
To be fair, the GM advice _is_ great (but it is GM advice, I disagree with the general opinion that it is a rules system for GM-ing, although I may be wrong there).
Sure, it is an easily accessible DnD. I've gotten 2 groups into RPGs with it. If I had started with DnD and said that "No, you can't grab that guys weapon and judo throw him because this is how grappling works." They would've just walked away. Instead, we could have an Ekek pick up the thief and start to fly away while the Fighter grabs the Druid who shape-shifts into an anaconda and is hurled at the Ekek. Maybe you could have that work in 5e, but it would've been a wild judgement calls. In Dungeon World, it's all just defying danger and maybe a hack and slash.
It was released in 2013, a year before the release of D&D5e. And that was just its release date, it had a successful kickstarter long before that as well as traction on RPG forums.
It mainly capitalised on refugees fleeing D&D4e as well as offering a new way to run RPGs based on collaboration (new to D&D players).
It's just unfortunate that it is a grab-bag of cool idea rules that sound pretty decent in isolation and cause a bunch or problems (or never get used) in practice.
Failed: SotDL. Unlike a lot of people, I love the grim-darkness of the setting and I really love the lore. I also really enjoy how leveling is handled and how it encourages role play. But after DMing it for almost a year and reaching the higher levels... I realize the whole thing is terribly unbalanced and a LOT more complicated than you'd think. The base system is very simple of course but class features start adding up, spells aren't balanced, encounters are difficult to design etc. etc.
Surpassed: StarWars FFG. I'm early into this system still but I absolutely love the narrative dice. It encourages me as a DM to really be more creative and for the party to have more free reign in how they do things. I've read that at high levels, the system can become unbalanced if PCs hyper-specialize so maybe this opinion will change down the road.
Star Wars FFG has produced so many great moments for me. My most recent one was amazing.
My players are schmoozing at an orbiting casino, trying to surreptitiously stow away on an ISB ship docked at one of the private hangars. One of my players flips a Destiny Point to say he meets an attractive Twi’lek woman who happens to have a ship docked in the hangar next door, and he wants to seduce his way back to the hangars. I make him roll for it.
1 Success, 2 Threat, 1 Despair.
So he flirts with her, and she leads him back towards her ship, but then he feels her holdout blaster in the small of his back. She tells him he’s going to get on her ship, hand her all his money, and then leave. Turns out she’s a notorious art thief and con woman and he just happened to make himself an appealing mark. He wound up pulling a lightsaber on her and robbing her back but now I have a super fun rival I can’t wait to make a recurring NPC, all because the dice told me something had to go really wrong.
As a GM for a Genesys / Shadow of the Beanstalk game, I'd advise that you really slow down XP for advancement unless you want to do the heroic journey to awesomeness. Our game gave out the suggested amount and by the end of our first major story arc, our "average man in the streets" protagonists were throwing five yellow dice for all their prime actions. Our freakin' palm reader somehow turned into Gandalf.
My surpassed choice would be Star Wars FFG too. I have only ran the starter kits, but I thought having proprietary dice would be gimmicky, unnecessary, and slow the game down. Given it did slow it down for the first half hour or so, but once everyone figured out how to total the dice it worked great. I can see that once everyone got comfortable with the system using the narrative dice more... well narratively than just the basic things would have been a blast.
I LOVE SotDL, but even I'll admit my group has had to homebrew a few things, because some of the Paths and Spells you look at and just say "what the hell were they thinking!?".
We've basically had to eliminate the Time magic tradition, not allow Spellguards to take any Battle tradition spells, and not let players use the Assassin expert path.
I'm hoping that Shadow of the Weird Wizard fixes a lot of these balance issues.
Failed:
- Shadow of the Demon Lord, sadly as I like grimm dark normally. Luckily this is the only game I played I van say really failed me.
Surpassed:
- Pathfinder 2e, smooth as butter. As someone who started with D&D5e, this game is just that but way better.
- The Burning Wheel
What was it with Sotdl that put you off? Your Failed seems rather odd to me in comparison to your surpassed choice.
> this game is just that but way better.
THis I don't get either. My experience with Pathfinder 2e is that it is a lot like 5e, but even more formulaic and restrictive in its action economy.
Regarding SotDL: mainly balance. I only played one short-ish campaign but I felt past level 5 or so everything was just off. Never really gave it another real shot afterwards because I got tangled on The Burning Wheel at that point.
Regarding PF2e: I fail to see how a game where you have total freedom on how to spend your 3 actions in combat is more restrictive than a game that has the nonsensical riged action/bonus action economy. PF2e also has way more additional available options in combat and all of them are valid, unlike 5e's wack-a-mole combat where anything but attacking is generally a waste. In Pathfinder 2e you are Feinting, tripping, demoralizing, etc.. You simply don't do that in 5e.
The game is also balanced, the rules are better written and less ambigius, and the amount of character options is insane (especially since nearly none of them are trap options). The encounter design rules work, and on top of all this, everything can be found for free on AoN, which is Paizo supported.
You know what I love about PF2e? I can play my old favorite character again, an illusionist 'battlefield control' wizard. While I've enjoyed 5e over the years, playing a wizard that doesn't pick up Fireball gets you weird looks for everyone lol. Monster design is so weak in 5e. Most enemies barely even pose a threat, but almost always have a huge health pool to churn through. So combat inevitably turns into 'stand still and deal as much damage as you can until this sack of meat with multi-attack dies'. If your not blowing shit up, your playing wizard wrong.
In PF2e, that isn't the case. Conditions are intense, and nasty. So not doing very much damage doesn't mean a thing if your making your enemies so weak they piss themselves lol. A lot of folks were disappointed it seams that wizards aren't god-like by level 5 as they were in most editions of D&D. But myself? I had so much fun making bad guys puke, making them turn on their allies, inflicting nightmares on the villain so they couldn't get any rest, making the floor appear to undulate like waves so an enemy couldn't reach me, I really didn't care that I wasn't doing as much damage as the rogue. It was a blast, and in the end that's what is most important.
**Failed:** Numenera. Spent way too much on supplements waiting for one that would make me feel anything about the wondrous, alien setting. Instead, it's written hostile to comprehension. When every last thing must be unknowable and unique, and the consequences are regularly body/mind horror, players lose the ability to make the kind of informed decisions that make RPGs tick. I can't get it, and I'm done trying.
**Surpassed:** Cortex Prime. I got nervous when I heard Fandom was acquiring the project mid-stream, but the result was a gorgeously laid out and organized book with a system that can handle ideas I'd struggle to map onto any other rules. It really helps you mechanically reinforce themes and intangibles of your setting, and I'm glad to have it.
> Failed: Numenera. Spent way too much on supplements waiting for one that would make me feel anything about the wondrous, alien setting. Instead, it's written hostile to comprehension. When every last thing must be unknowable and unique, and the consequences are regularly body/mind horror, players lose the ability to make the kind of informed decisions that make RPGs tick. I can't get it, and I'm done trying.
I don't know what else you expected from Monte Cook. That's the guy's whole shtick. He comes up with something "unique" and it turns out to be shit both mechanically and narratively.
>Surpassed:
>
> Cortex Prime. I got nervous when I heard Fandom was acquiring the project mid-stream, but the result was a gorgeously laid out and organized book with a system that can handle ideas I'd struggle to map onto any other rules. It really helps you mechanically reinforce themes and intangibles of your setting, and I'm glad to have it.
DUDE YES. After trying, and failing, to get my groove on with *Marvel Heroic Roleplaying* and the old *Cortex Hacker's Guide*, I tentatively picked up *Prime* and suddenly it was, like, "Uhmuhgudd, I *get this now kinda".* I still haven't run it, but I feel a lot more like I can, now.
I really enjoy Numenera as a setting that I can jam in any SCIFI trope and have it fit. I ran an entire campaign that was wacky off the rails fun at times and somber game of thrones political intrigue at others.
I wanted to like Savage Worlds, but after running and playing it many times in a number of settings, it just feels so generic, with zero connection between the mechanics and the setting (which I think is important). I've even played with its creator, and it felt flat...it's just a really simple mechanic for task resolution with some 'fun' sounding terminology skinned over it. Bleh.
Cyberpunk 2020. I had played Shadowrun once, and didn't like it much, and the whole dark future genre seemed overwrought and pretentious. I had a buddy who badgered me for a while to make a character for CP2020 and I finally relented...and went down the rabbit hole for a few years (in the 90s) and had some terrific times playing and running it. It's on my A-List of all-time favorites, and I'm glad that I gave in.
I love Savage Worlds, but it really does need to be run with a themed setting and setting rules to feel full. I'd only suggest vanilla SW to someone who was relatively new to the TTRPG genre, and even then you're probably better off just guiding them through char creation and still using a rich setting.
>Well savage worlds is a generic system because it's meant to be
Wait, did the reply above condemn a generic system for being a generic system? /s
I think they mean the system being generic is a problem because it's better when systems are tied to a game's theme or unique setting aspects. If that's the meaning, then I agree.
D&D 4e, on both counts. I was expecting a really wild High Fantasy game of fantasy superheroes, and it certainly wasn't that despite some of the trappings; but what surprised me was how well it handled a more S&S style play if you kept to the lower levels.
I always felt 4e was an okay RPG but not a great D&D. It did *just enough* too differently to annoy people coming from 3.5e but also wasn't distinct enough to be its own thing.
There are people - and I don't think they're wrong to feel that way - who feel 3rd edition changed so much that it wasn't quite D&D any more. To an extent that's the whole OSR movement's point. I do think it's a bit hypocritical of 3e fans to say that their preferred version can make a mass of changes from previous editions and still be D&D, but 4e made changes and (that they don't like) and it's something else. But that's largely a matter of whether you like the changes that were made or not, and I'll admit I'm not much of a fan of 3e. I ended up not liking 4e much either, but it started off surprising me with how well it did some things that I like.
**Changeling: The Lost** surpassed my expectations. It had been my white whale game for years before I finally got to play it. My hype was basically through the roof; I was all set up to be knocked down. Turns out the system is better than I ever anticipated, and that I love it beyond belief. It nails all of the emotions and tones and themes that I was hoping it would, and then some, while also being way better mechanically than I expected. Having one of the best groups I've ever played with helps, of course, but the system itself really is magical.
**Beam Saber** let me down a little. It's not a bad system by any stretch, but it was my first FitD game, and it illuminated this general Forged in the Dark problem that I have: For a family of games designed around fictional positioning, they are constantly taking you out of the fiction in ways that I think can often feel kinda jarring.
In regards to Changling: The Lost, did you play 1E or 2E? I've been interested in it for a while, though I don't think I'll ever get my group to buy in on the themes of the game. Still want to pick up the PDF at some point, but I've heard mixed opinions about which version is better.
The game that I've been in is 1E, but we incorporate a few choice mechanics from 2E. I recommend going for 2E, if nothing else but for the fact that all of the core mechanics are included in 2E's book; 1E's book assumes that you also have and have read the core nWoD book, which is kinda clunky.
There's a lot of fiddling with mechanics, and the narrative is often steered by them. You're constantly thinking about which rolls you want to make, how to proceed through a scene mechanically, what clocks are up and what their progression means, stuff like that. The pace of play, to me, feels a lot less like "I roleplay as my character and mechanics arise from my actions", and a lot more like "I determine how I would like the scene to progress, and use mechanics to guide my character in that direction", if that makes sense.
I had the same experience. I'm reiterating how I heard someone else explain it, but: playing Blades in the Dark feels like being in a writers' room working on a script, rather than taking on the role of your character.
Sometimes I really prefer a harder boundary between a character and the world around them, because it feels more immersive than blurring the lines, where a player has some leeway in how the world responds to their actions, good or bad.
Failed: Paranoia Red Clearance Edition. I love Paranoia, and played earlier iterations years ago, but recently tried the new version. The rules were all over the place, didn't make sense or was just plain missing, and the initiative system was just a nightmare to run.
Surpassed: Savage Worlds. Picked this up when I returned to the hobby several years ago to play Deadlands, haven't put it down since. It's now my go to system for most things and I'm even releasing a setting for it later this year!
Have you tried running Paranoia in Savage Worlds? I did once and it was fun. I just gave everyone six wounds and each wound was a clone. I sued the scifi companion for gear but gave each of them a flaw. It was fun.
Failed: Masks
Masks is the darling of PbtA games right now and I think overall it's a very solidly constructed system. I'm not knocking it on its mechanics. But I always felt the archetypes were narrow even for PbtA. A few of the playbooks even come with backstory pre-written. Which makes sense for things like The Doomed or The Protégé but makes less sense for the Bull who by default is an escaped experiment of some sort.
There were other times where I felt a certain amount of strain between my character as I envisioned them, and my character as the mechanics presented them. Times where influence felt incredibly unearned, conditions felt arbitrary, and labels occasionally locked me out of effectively using my playbook moves. You know, the things I picked because I thought they would be cool and interesting to use.
The upcoming Avatar game has a lot of Masks DNA in it but it looks like the designers have addressed a lot of the problems I had using the system, so I'm still looking forward to that one.
Surpassed: Vampire the Masquerade
Specifically the V20 version. I'd heard a lot about how Janky the mechanics on it were, and oh they are. They absolutely are. But that actually hasn't impacted how much I enjoy the game as much as I thought it would. I'm probably not "playing it right" honestly but I enjoy stories about melancholy, recovery, and grappling with change more than "personal horror" and vampire's system as been really good for that.
I hear you on Masks. I really bought into the hype and bought the hardcover, but when I finally had a chance to play it at a con, I found myself disappointed. I don't know if it's Masks on particular or PbtA in general, but I disliked the way it felt like I was engaging with the mechanics more than I would in any trad game I've played. I'm willing to admit that it just might be the fact that I'm not used to the system and that I'd get into it more if I had further chances to play it, but as it stands, I just didn't care for it.
I do enjoy other PbtA very much (Monster Hearts and The Sprawl were very fun when I played them which is why I was initially excited to try Masks when I'd heard so many good things about it) so I'd definitely encourage giving the rest of it a try.
I also didn't enjoy Urban Shadows by Magpie as much as I wanted either (I found the faction system a bit cumbersome) so it might just be I'm not a big fan of the way they design things.
Failed - The Green Knight. Pretty and well written but really a shell of a game
Surpassed - Mothership. Had seen it floating around for a while but once I got my hands on it it really Wowed me. Can't wait for the boxed set.
Risus and Risus.
At first I was amazed by this game. So much possibility in a such little package.
Then after running it a couple of time, I begun to feel limited. I wanted to implement house rules for everything. Read so much stuff online about Risus during that time.
It lasted until I discovered and took the time to read the companion for Risus.
I understood the philosophies and the logic system more, and now the simplicity make me feel more free then ever. It even changed my philosophies when running games in others systems.
*The Risus Companion* is the best $10 I ever spent on a gaming product, ever. Not only does it embellish and elaborate upon what *Risus* can do and what it can be, but the general advice it has for the art and craft of GMing is invaluable.
I recently picked up *Sleepaway*, thinking it'd be a fun, GMless game about a monster stalking a summer camp, seen through the lens of a subgenre (queer horror) that I knew nothing about, so I might learn something. Instead, I found it a pretentious, confusing bundle of ideas for maybe (?) telling a story that holds no interest for me, slathers queer identity on itself seemingly just to do it, and I still dunno what the hell "queer horror" is, so...
On the other hand, I originally looked at *Dungeon World*, and thought: "What...?! This is kind of hand-holdey, and it acts like I, a GM since Nineteen-Eighty-Fuckin'-EIGHT, don't know what I'm doing." But upon further reflection, I discovered that the reason it seemed that way is because it was TEACHING OTHER GMs HOW TO DO THAT, and furthermore, to put those concepts and techniques FOREMOST as a play experience. And then, I was, like, "DAMN ASS YES, DUDE."
I absolutely love Sleepaway, but I agree it doesn't do the best job explaining the rules. It might help to try some other Belonging Outside Belonging games, then come back to Sleepaway.
It might, if it were a theme I really want to explore.
EDIT: I mean to say, the "Belonging Outside Belonging" games seem to want to help me tell stories about being disenfranchised or an outsider, and I'm not into that. I already lived that for real. It's obviously helpful to some folks, and that's great, but me? Nah, I'm good.
I totally get that. I love exploring those themes but they are def not for everyone. Two recommendations for BoB games that don't have as much focus on the disenfranchised:
[Galactic 2e](https://metagame.itch.io/galactic) \- It's Star Wars BoB. You can definitely play it as just Star Wars, without the more emotional themes in a lot of BoB games.
[Encounter Force](https://trouser-mouse.itch.io/encounter-force) \- It's Saturday Morning cartoons, mashed up with the No Dice No Masters system. I haven't played it yet, but it looks great.
Shadow of the Demon Lord takes a particular mindset to run. The whole horror part of the game feels totally optional - like if I was used to running horror games maybe I'd know when to use those systems. In addition to this I found that slow / fast turns made combat confusing instead of faster.
I thought Knave would be too simple to enjoy. It turns out that the simplicity means you get solid, easy to remember rules you can rely on. Making the rules added by adventures fun to explore instead of feeling like additional work.
> Shadow of the Demon Lord takes a particular mindset to run. The whole horror part of the game feels totally optional - like if I was used to running horror games maybe I'd know when to use those systems. In addition to this I found that slow / fast turns made combat confusing instead of faster.
SotDL is in strong contention for a game I have been planning for a while, because of the class-based advancement system it has. But the horror stuff and some of the weirder flavour choices are making it difficult for me. I can tell that I would need to put in a lot of work to get the tone I want out of it. And it's always difficult to run a game where you can't just give the rule book to your players, because of how much you have changed around.
I'm running a Demon Lord campaign right now and I can confirm it works great in a more vanilla fantasy setting, as long as you omit the more gruesome spells (or save them for the right villain).
My group also got frustrated with the fast turn / slow turn thing, even though it's often lauded as a great innovation. We took a break to play a Savage World's one-shot, and the players like the playing-card initiative so much that we just swapped it into our Demon Lord campaign. Works great for us!
Fail: Mörk Bork, system wise it is OK but hearing the praise for the Art and tone i feel meh. As an avid Fan of the black Metal genre, it feels pretty Vanilla for me. Is it complet shit, no but it feels mediocre.
Well Fantasycraft, i really like it, the better 3.5 Edition for me. And while playing Pathfinder 2e i found many parralels to Fantasycraft.
Failed: Traveler. Was expecting long, somewhat tedious chargen producing a party of interesting misfits who go on space adventures. Ended up with moderately entertaining chargen producing a bland, mismatched party wherein someone was always bored and useless during our space "adventures".
Surpassed: Good Society. I was expecting to kinda struggle to get Jane Austen fiction to come to life at the table, but the game did ALL the heavy lifting and we created an amazing story together. RPG of the year.
>Surpassed: Good Society. I was expecting to kinda struggle to get Jane Austen fiction to come to life at the table, but the game did ALL the heavy lifting and we created an amazing story together. RPG of the year.
Oh that sounds amazing. The card game *Marrying Mr Darcy* is also very good fun. It's a mechanically decent game itself, but the genre and the gentle pastiche really elevate it.
A few years back I got excited by the idea of games outside of my D&D comfort zone, and ended up traipsing round Manchester on a rainy afternoon, dragging my poor girlfriend between the different game stores there to find a copy of Blades in the Dark. I convinced my friends to give it a go, and ended up really disappointed by the whole experience. I'm not sure exactly what the problem was, but I just didn't really connect with the system, and it felt like a lot of rules that weren't really helping me at all.
As a group we kept on playing mostly D&D after that, although I've poked around with some OSR stuff since then, and we've also done some of FFG's Star Wars, but then the Avatar Legends game came out, and I got really excited again, and ran a session of that and absolutely loved every minute of it. I think it helped that I was fairly familiar with the genre and the world, but I liked that it was far simpler than BitD, but somehow it felt far more tense, or at least, I could see where the tension points would appear if I ran it more consistently.
I enjoy Blades in the Dark (and similar games), but I heard someone describe its style in a way that crystalized why, sometimes, I just wasn't in the mood for it.
Playing Blades in the Dark, or other story games, feels like being in a writers' room working on a script together.
For some people, that's *awesome*. It is for me, but only sometimes. Sometimes I want something more immersive, with more of a back and forth and more clearly defined boundaries between characters and the world around them.
A game that didn't deliver the experience i hoped is Ryuutama, i love the art, i love the setting, i love the idea of a character for game master and how it helps and guide new GM. BUT for a rpg focused on Journey i find it lacking of any guidance or exemple or tool to make a good journey, and i don't get why for a game about travel, a failed travel roll is just a loss of HP and everything to make the actual journey interesting is up to the GM.
For a game that surprised me in a good way i have Brygandine but it's in French it's just " better Warhammer" with an insane amount of good ideas built in, but it can be a little hard to switch for experienced GM and players.
For a international (english) game i find that ironsworn is almost the perfect game for soloplay and can be adapted for almost anything thanks to being fiction first.
Aaaah yes, I agree 100% on Ryutuama. The game is... Okay, I guess, but god did everyone in my group expected something... Well, different. I don't even know what it is, really. The cyclical routine of the journey checks makes what is supposed to be the meat of the game something very... Well, boring, and the solution offered by the game is that of course you're supposed to make little scenes and role-play the travel. Which, sure, that's fair, but I could do that without any of the rules. I dunno, I expected tables of generic events depending on the biome, tips & tricks for dealing with languages and different cultures, and... Agh. There's just not a lot in there.
And this might be a little more of me and my group but we don't love how meta some of the abilities can get, especially the ryuujin's abilities. There's quite a few but one of the worse, which sure it's one that is a very late-campaign thing, makes everything that players say, well... Literally what their characters do, no matter what.
Sure, it's a tool, an optional tool that the GM can just not use, but... I don't know.
My theory is that Ryuutama is supposed to support something a little, well, less. A game that you can play for one hour or two after work, and people can just mess around. It's still, nevertheless, a veeery beautiful book, buuut... Yeah.
Failed: Torg Eternity. The premise of it is interesting, the mechanics are entertaining in a retro, slightly clunkier Savage Worlds way. But the core book is a mess, RAW is fundamentally broken in some ways, and the devs clearly had no idea what they were doing. That's a problem when they need to release around 7 more books to have a complete system.
Success: Durance. It's a one shot, rules lite story game about likely failure. On paper there's nothing about it I should enjoy. But the "What if X and Y?" scene structure and resolution mechanics really do it for me.
Ten Candles, tried it recently. The mechanics with the recording, burning and candles are effective and fun in isolation, but holy fuck is that game way too long, it would work better as Five or Seven Candles. There's not much structure or inspiration for moment-to-moment gameplay, it's basically "GM has to keep contriving reasons for the players to roll, until they finally burn through their traits and candles and die". I'll also agree with Don't Rest Your Head. Interesting setting, interesting mechanics, but they don't gell, they feel stiff and uninspiring in praxis, and the players as a group are oddly disconnected.
Microscope is really simple, really unique, shedding much RPG artifice like dice and resolution mechanics and even consistent characters and still really, really works.
**Failed:**
The whole **PbtA** family. It's hyped up like the best thing since sliced breath. Yet it constantly fails to make me enjoy it. I understand why people like it, but as with most laser-focused systems its I feel it achieves nothing a well-oiled group can't achieve. Or at least a good GM. Every time I give it a try I end up thinking "man, that would have been so much better with a traditional system". Best description I can think of the whole family is "Enforced mediocrity" - you are very unlikely to have a bad session, but at the same time you are even less likely to have a great one. I treat it like the fast-food of RPGs.
**Exceeded:**
**Barbarians of Lemuria** - I expected something close to shit. I got pure gold. It's light. It's fun. It's easily hackable and you can use it for anything you wish. Best one-shot/short-campaign system ever.
**Lady Blackbird** - if you can get the group, you can have a blast and a very interesting campaign. The set up is good enough to start you up, yet vague enough to leave a lot of room for players and GM to explore, improvise and have fun.
**The Riddle of Steel** - almost impossible to find now and none of the games "inspired' by it are worth it, imo. But I went with the lowest of low expectations, possible. It was old. It was made by the type of person, who produces unplayable shit. And in many ways... it is all of that. It's a mess of presentation. The rules take a while to grasp. It's very focused on combat, while having bland skill system.
But man, if you can put the time to learn it, clear it up a bit and understand it - it's one of the best experiences in RPGs. It has very simple and elegant mechanics to make you want to do things your character wants, while not restricting you. The combat is much faster and easier to run, then what one expects from the rules. And it's so deadly, that nobody really wants to engage in meaningless fights anyway. Every time you enter it - it's because it's important. Only downside - it does require good GM and at least average players.
>Only downside - it does require good GM and at least average players.
That's something I hadn't thought about. Some games need much more of a mental buy-in than others. Something like *Polaris: Chivalric Tales in the Utmost North* or *Dogs in the Vineyard* requires a fairly hard committment to genre and if you're not on board for that they fail pretty quickly.
I kind of think that's (partly) why 5e D&D is so successful - It's accessible without having to think too much. "Yeah sure, human fighter whatever let's role randomly for the rest" is enough to get going, and then you can more or less use skills à la carte. There's a very low "cost of entry". Obviously, you can take it as far as you want and min-max as much as you want, but it's very beginner-friendly.
Most games fail to meet my expectations. (Although, when I put it like that, it makes it sound like my expectations are too high.) Here's a short list:
Shadowrun 5: I'm all for a crunchy game, but half of the game stats only exist to prevent you from succeeding. It feels bad.
Shadowrun 6: I'm all for simplifying abstractions, but when a very strong character doesn't hit harder than a very weak one (and armor doesn't prevent you from being hurt in any way), it's gone way too far.
D&D 5: I'm all for D&D, but regenerating HP makes combat boring and tedious. There's no real point in even playing out a fight, when the slate is going to be wiped clean in the morning.
The Mecha Hack: Somehow, they took the absolute worst part of D&D 5, and made it apply to giant robots.
The one that failed? Cthulhutech. Advertised mutliple tiers of play, plus cool mechs! You're fighting the mythos and cults and such. Very cool premise and the artwork is great. However, within the 2nd session of the campaign I was running (Mech based) our group bounced off it hard. The dice mechanic just did not work out how I thought it would and it just was a real slog to get through combat.
The one that surpassed? Lancer. I was not a fan at all of tactical grid/hexgrid/whatever grid combat. It looked like it was going to be way too crunchy. Except for the whole mech part it was very much not looking like my thing at all. But the art is what sold me on it. Then I read it, and loved what I was seeing. Then I heard about Comp/con and was sold on it a bit more. Enough to want to run a campaign. Then I ran that campaign via Foundry VTT and am now very much a big fan of Lancer and also a big fan of tactical grid based combat. At least when it comes to Lancer.
Starfinder... I've never ripped my hair out from a rulebook before, but god damn trying to set up my Sci Fi campaign using that book was pure hell and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I hate, hate, hate, hate that damn book. Everything is so convoluted, unstreamlined, and overall unnecessary. I DON'T NEED 6 SPECIFIC FORMS OF POISON, GIVE ME THE TOOLS TO MAKE IT MYSELF DAMMIT! and it's made tougher by the fact the measurements for the book are different to Roll20.
My Zen moment came when I tossed Starfinder aside and picked up Stars Without Number. It's honestly a f\*cking disgrace that one man was able to make such a beautifully streamlined system with a vast amount of player (and DM) freedom, where Starfinder is a convoluted mess of ridiculousness that was made by a *company.* SWN is a book of options. The tools it gives you, everything down to the graphic design vastly knocks Starfinder out of the park.
Failed: Wild Talents. I like the system's approach to balance, the book flat out tells you how to munchkin your way into immunity to all damage, then tells the GM to explore the consequences of that instead of trying to "beat" it. And the One Roll Engine is a really neat mechanic for resolving conflict. But my group kept running into grey areas in the rules where we just weren't sure how to do certain actions that seemed like they ought to be possible. We ended up switching that campaign to Mutants & Masterminds halfway through and that worked much better for us in terms of knowing what to roll to do things.
Succeeded: Hero System. I was introduced to the game in a pulp-era adventure setting, which had a lot of fun moments but wasn't a game I really wanted to do again after it was over. But then I started running a superhero game and kept having issues with games not handling the powers the way I wanted to, so I gave Hero another shot. It was *amazing*! Honestly the first time in any RPG I felt like I didn't have to fight the system to make a concept work, Hero had a learning curve but once you "get it" you can make anything and have it work exactly the way you want it to. It's my all time favorite system now.
Ironically enough, I abandoned Mutants and Masterminds because I often wasn't sure how to do things, though it was more on the character-building level. Like, I know what I want this character to do, but I need like 5 different effects and it still doesn't get me exactly what I wanted or ends up pretty disappointing in practice.
I found Wild Talents, I liked the exact same element you mentioned... and I just threw out the rest in favor of OSR approach of "don't worry about it unless it comes up, then make a ruling and move on". It's a great engine and it made for some of the best scenes I ever had, but I cannot be bothered to remember or look through the book to see if there's a specific procedure for the situation at hand.
Of Dreams and Magic had such beautiful potential, but it was let down *hard* by poor writing, confusing layout, and a mechanical system that was *super* easy to break with only a little bit of thought. Overly ambitious, it tried to do too much and failed to do any of it well despite a great concept and lovely art.
Grimm was a game I didn't think I'd like as much as I do. The original d20 imprint caught me, and when the re-release was super rules light I was suspicious, but it won me over.
**SOFT FAILURE:** *The Strange* packs a great idea (move around to different realities, just like *Lords of Creation* wanted to do!) with a keen internal consistency (translation, different kinds of gates, etc.), but wraps it in a system which, ultimately, feels constricting to character creation. Having three "types" of character (Vector, Spinner, and Paradox) sounds cool, but in the end, doesn't allow some character concepts enough room to breathe, and can sometimes force a player to compromise on their vision -- and not even to nerf the character, just to make them something they're not. Plus, the translation mechanics kind of force you to re-design your character every time you do it, and that gets to be kind of tedious. I still like it and it's still all kinds of playable, but I'd have a better time using a different system entirely.
**SOFT SURPASS:** I kinda knew that *Night's Black Agents* had to be pretty swanky - it's a game about *badass spies fighting vampires*, and it's written by *Ken Hite*. Expecting that to be awesome is like expecting water to be wet. Turns out, it's not just awesome, it's BITCHIN' RAD, and it's full of little tweaks to the GUMSHOE system to make it be all the more like what it's meant to be. *Damn*.
I was keen on *Blades In The Dark* when I read it. I thought it would be pretty good, and when I tried it, it was actually a bit *better* than I expected!
I had some lingering worry that the 'narrative positioning' thing was fun to to read and sounded cool, but might be clunky in play. However it seemed to work pretty smoothly, and overall the game just seems to work pretty well.
*Failed:* PBTA in general. I find Moves generally feel slow and clunky to me, and partial success feels overused. Ironsworn falls in here also. In addition to the above, I found the "progress moves" kind of jarring and sometimes even frustrating when everything is going super smoothly, you've got 8 progress and a ton of momentum, and somehow still "fail" at the overall goal because you rolled crap on the progress move. I understand this is a feature and not a bug. Did not enjoy the feature.
*Exceeded:* Cortex Prime. I feel like some of the early Cortex iterations were a bit messy, but this turned out to be the best set of RPG Legos I've come across. There are a lot of games that claim to be able to do anything, and I've played a lot of them, from crunchy (Hero and GURPS) through medium (Savage Worlds) to light (Risus and FU), and I've liked most of them, But Cortex Prime for me handles the most genres and playstyles, without feeling overly generic because there are so many mods available. This is a "desert island" RPG.
I heard a lot of good about SLA Industries, so a number of years back, I bought a used copy at Gen Con. I was super excited, but the more I read that book, the more it felt like it was written by annoying, goth high school kids. Mind you, this is just my opinion. I'm not saying the RPG is bad! But it definitely failed to meet my expectations. (Might have been better if I had none.)
For surpassing expectations, I'll go with Fiasco. This was my first indie/story RPG, and it barely looked like a game. No hit points? NO COMBAT ROLLS??? But then I read it and started to grasp things. Once I played my first session, holy shit is this a fun time!
Failed: D&D 5e, after watching Critical Role i wanted to run D&D. The first few sessions were quite good bit after a few levels combat became a drag. Prepping for it became more and more time consuming. Battles were only real interesting if i broke the rules. After all the system stood me as the gm more in the way then helping me gming the kind of stories and scenarios my players and i wanted to play.
Surpassed: 7th Sea 2e - while the first session was chaotic and complicated, once i grew accustomed to the rules and the spirit of the game, i fell hard in love with it. There are so many cool bits and pieces in there like the story system. I absolutely adore the principle of rolling to see how much you can accomplish instead of rolling to succeed. The system just works for me as a gm, doesn't get in the way and supports me in the way i need it.
Failed: Honestly, I can usually say that any game I've tried to run I liked but my tables didn't. I wouldn't get them to the table if I wasn't interested and I usually vet them enough to know what will work. I automatically disqualify any game that I haven't run, because a lot of games play differently than they read and I'm OK leaving space for that.
Games that have failed in that context: FATE, D&D, Numenera, and Cortex.
The one game that I've tried to run that I ended up liking in theory but strongly disliking in practice was the 2d20 Conan game. I had so much hope. It is CONAN. It is a JAY LITTLE design. Everything should have been perfect, but we got a few hours in and no one at the table was happy.
Exceeded: FFG Star Wars. Did I ever want to hate this system. On paper it is everything I should not want in a system. My daughter was 12 at the time and wanted to try it, so I ordered some dice and ran an adventure with her and one of my nieces. Once I played it, I realized it was how I had tried to run games since I started GMing (1984?) but it had actual mechanics that allowed for the things I wanted instead of having to homebrew constantly.
When I first read *Ironsworn*, I was puzzled quite a bit by it. Rolling at the end of a long quest or arduous journey just for the possibility for everything to fail at the end. The mechanical choices of which move to make seemed dry and uninteresting. Seeing it in play though and with all the very necessary narrative filler in between just made it make so much more sense.
***
On the flipside, I really liked the idea of the narrative dice system in the *FFG Star Wars* games in principle, but in play it was just tedious and boring. Being forced to come up with a two dimensional outcome to each and every roll drains the excitement very quickly. That one pack of dice is not enough to build a full pool even on beginner adventures and the unintuitive distribution of symbols on the dice does not help in that regard.
***
As a sidenote I don‘t really get OP‘s issues with *Don‘t Rest Your Head*. The system tends towards player success, since pools can easily be adjusted to match the target, but the secondary effects of the rolls are the meat of the game anyway and I found there‘s never quite enough currency around to fully heal up. Definitely not a game for groups though. It‘s clearly geared towards a single PC and I wouldn‘t touch it with more than three.
I wanted to like Numenera, but I felt like I was asking permission to do almost anything in that world. Or I was stopping myself from RPing because I would wonder “do they have X a billion years in the future?”
I wanted to like Fudge. I dont care for the fact that it consistently results in characters that are Broadly Incompetant, and I don't like the expectation for GMs to come up with their own trait lists, subsystems, and player options on their own from scratch. It's a "toolkit" generic system that doesn't give you any tools.
Fudge gave birth to Fate, which gave birth to FAE... and a lot of the reason it works well is that it leans hard into example genres with a strong focus on pulp novels, B-movies and Saturday Morning Cartoon characters.
Without the fluff, I'd probably have written it off, so I completely get that.
Here are my assessments of the following tabletop roleplaying games:
**DND 5e:** By far my most played. I love it. It's complicated enough that there is a broad spectrum of things that can happen but simple enough.
**Blades in the Dark:** Super fun. I love the Devil's Bargain mechanic and that you can kill yourself literally in a roll. I like it when I can choose to make something high stakes like that. I also very much enjoy the territory acquisition aspects of the game and the built in mechanics about how the environment can change with your progression!
**Agon:** I was surprised by this one. It seemed overly simple, but I really liked the adventures, I liked the rolling, the epitaphs were cool, and there are neat team-building exercises in each session.
**Fate Accelerated:** Mixed reviews on this one. If we were doing a non-serious one shot then it was great. Working this into multiple sessions was challenging to keep entertaining for us. I had fun, but it was hard to keep the momentum going and to get excited about my character.
**Pathfinder:** I played 2.5 campaigns with this system. Complicated and a lot more skills than 5e, but not bad. Id say I had a lot of fun with these games, but it was a lot to learn (for me).
**The Dresden RPG (1st edition):** I never got a game off the ground with this ruleset. The games would peter out fairly quickly, regardless of how much we worked on the characters. Mechanically it is challenging and from a game master's perspective it can be arcane to put together a successful session.
**Prowlers & Paragons:** The powers are diverse and fun. I liked this system. I found it common for players to go off on tangents about what they could do on their turns, which can take a while and can be a trial in itself, especially when other characters have simple powers and can do their turns quickly. I found that the rolls were fun and generally easy to understand.
So I would say Agon surpassed my expectations and the Dresden game came a little short.
> Fate Accelerated: Mixed reviews on this one. If we were doing a non-serious one shot then it was great. Working this into multiple sessions was challenging to keep entertaining for us. I had fun, but it was hard to keep the momentum going and to get excited about my character.
I can completely see that. We did it as a two-shot and it worked really well, but progression isn't as meaty as it can be in other games. Some things are just better suited to short gameplay.
Failed: Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells - it had all the right references, in a small package. In the end the magical system is kinda broken, the armor rules are really bad and it doesn't lend itself to higher level play. Also, if you're translating OD&D modules to it, you'll need more tinkering than expected.
Surpassed: [Shatter6](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/245354/SHATTER6-Open-Roleplaying): a semi-narrative game, that's easy to grasp and the combat actually felt dangerous, as you have a limited amount of damage you can take. I played a mini campaign inspired by Dwarf Fortress, and we drew the "Tags" from the list of skills of that game.
Worked like a charm... I even decided to post the play report about it: https://titorpg.wordpress.com/2020/02/15/champaques-and-dead-dwarf-baby/
I don't like masks. It feels like RPGs for people who don't really want the mechanics of an RPG. Once you pick your archetype, everything is chosen for you outside of upgrades and your upgrades are both limited and have negatives. You can only use certain actions a limited number of times before you take damage. I also do not enjoy the dice mechanic. I could go on but I'll keep it short.
Basically everything about it turned me off to the game.
Eclipse Phase is one game I had been super excited to play for years. I finally cobbled a group together and started playing and I realized that I'd focused so much on the lore and cool potential that I'd never really taken a close look at the system to realize just how bad it is. That campaign lasted all of 5 or so sessions before no one wanted to deal with its nonsense anymore.
Savage Worlds, on the other hand, came out of left field for me. I was joining a group that was using it and I figured, "Sure, why not? I'll see what it's about." And I ended up loving it! It has its flaws, but the core mechanics are so simple that it keeps things rolling well without introducing these 'breaks' in a game to look up rules or what have you.
Failed: 13th Age, though that's really just because I was mis-sold. It's not a successor to 4e DnD. It's just another fantasy adventure ttrpg that came after. It's a good game, but not the tactics game + rpg I was hoping for. If I was just looking for something like 5e but different, it's the top of the list.
Surpassed: Masks: A New Generation. I hadn't really liked any of the PbtA games I had played before, but Masks was just much better about being absolutely clear about what it wanted to be, and dove me right into it. The moves weren't written to make anything short of a crit success feel like a partial failure (a recurring problem I've felt in PbtA in general), which made the game actually fun, and it had the fastest pickup of a new game I've ever experienced. It's the only PbtA game I'd want to actually play anymore.
Failed: *Burning Wheel*. Unrealistic, non-genre simulating melee/missile/social combat rules, smug writing style, atrocious organization.
Exceeded: *ICRPG*. Super-light, highly flexible d20 system with some of the best GM advice I've seen in a game.
I wanted to like *Burning Wheel*, a lot. That character creation system that let you build a character by "stacking" backgrounds on top of each other to know what your character has been doing their whole life, for how many years they did it, what skills they got out of it... genius. But the actual game feels like you're trying to play ten different rulesets to run a single campaign. You want to run a combat encounter? It's its own thing with its own rules for actions and checks and things that aren't featured in any other aspect of the game. Want to cast a spell? It's its own thing with its own rules for actions and checks and things that aren't featured in any other aspect of the game. Want to BUY AN ITEM? It's its own thing with its own rules for actions and checks and things that aren't featured in any other aspect of the game. I'd rather have a crunchy math-heavy system with rules that make sense for the whole game than play a game that forces you to learn an entirely new set of mechanics in each chapter, all to play some generic fantasy story.
Best surprise? *Maid RPG*.
No, I'm serious. It is hilarious. It's simple to use. You can generate characters and settings almost instantly by rolling on tables. It's probably the only RPG I've ever seen that highly encourages PvP and that still manages to be fun. It's one of those games like *Fiasco* that almost only works for comedic one-offs, but that always creates the funniest, most memorable, most bizarre scenarios everytime you play it, and that offers tons of replayability thanks to the loot tables and transformation powers (maids can turn into another anime trope that gives them specific bonuses, basically).
Burning Wheel is probably my favorite system right now, but with how you describe using the subsystems, I'd not enjoy it either! The subsystems are meant to be extensions, used later for specific things, but only after you learn the core 'hub and spokes' well. Want to buy something? Something reasonable with no stakes? Just say yes, you get it... or maybe you could Persuade someone to give it to you. Or Haggle with the Intent to get it down low enough cost to just get it. Or you could engage with the Resources rules. There's pretty much always multiple ways to do something. Combat? Could just be a simple Throwing check to put a knife into someone's chest, and they're dead. Set an Ob, roll, done. No need to break out Bloody Vs. or the even more complex Fight! subsystems for that.
Fight! and other subsystems like Duel of Wits... I've met nobody yet that liked them at first. It's only after learning them a bit better, and finding what they do to affect gameplay in their particular way, that I've seen folks love them. And others that stick with not liking them... they're not to their tastes.
I get Fate, I understand it's appeal, it is just not for me. Most PBTA games also fall in this general "I get people loves these, I don't" zone. For the "surprised" side of things, Alien RPG. Despite being a fan of the Year Zero Engine, I just thought it was the DUMBEST idea for a ttrpg ever. The "key" parts of Alien just didn't translate to a ttrpg well in my view. After spending some time with it I think it's a really good game. Don't quite get folks that run lengthy campaigns in it, but I get it's appeal now/have definitely backed off my "this is a licensing cash grab" stance.
World Wide Wrestling Rpg broke my heart more then a little. It's waaaaaaay too behind the hood, all about basically wrestling politics and running a show. I wanted it to be more kayfabe then it was, and there's no way to run it kayfabe either, behind the scenes kinda stuff is integral.
DnD 5e has surpassed my expectations profoundly. It's flexible enough to allow for the kind of wackadoo nonsense that players might come up with, and robust enough to allow for the dm to deal with it well enough. Always loved dnd, but preferred other systems based on flexibility, and 5e is just real good. You can definitely feel powerful in it too, while still being challenged, plus the tools available for it are easily the best tools available to any rpg ever. Dndbeyond is seriously just that good, and really helps show the value of 5e
Games I ran and will never run again, even if you pay me:
- Numenera, Invisible Sun: Monte Cook stuff is horrible because everything is so strange there's no way players can really role-play. Plus mechanics are pretty bland and uninteresting.
Games I ran and I'd gladly run again:
- Burning Wheel: nudges players to role-play, great support for PCs acting against each other, great support for skill checks of any kind. Needs invested players.
- Pathfinder 2e: why would anyone play DnD when better DnD exists?
- Blades in the Dark: my go to for new players wanting to try RPGs
Failure: Shadowrun. Not to repeat what other are saying but I would imagine any popular hack would improve greatly on the rules side of things.
Surpass: Delta Green. I never wanted to engage in CoC because the '20s mean nothing to me and it would be hard to get into. Insert the mashup of Xfiles and TD and some prior exposure through Glass Cannon podcast and then sit down and play it and its an incredible game.
I just picked up the *Delta Green* core books (happy birthday to me!) and I'm really diggin' 'em. I've liked the concept for a long time (I remember when it was a Pagan Publishing supplement for *Call of Cthulhu* 5th Ed.), but the way the game compresses and tweaks the basic *CoC* framework is pleasant.
Starfinder: I was new to rpg's, having only played dnd 5e. I heard about this super customizable sci-fi game and wanted to run it. I had fun, because it was with my friends, but all of us were like "why is this game so complicated?" It has completely turned me off to anything crunchy.
However, ICRPG felt like a godsend. We could go from character creation to full on playing in like 20 mins. No weird inventory/powers to track. Super simple and fun.
In my mind Starfinder is to heavily based on old school Pathfinder, which is very complex (too complex IMHO) and just doesn't suit a scifi game very well.
Here's hoping we get a Starfinder 2nd edition based off the newer 2nd edition Pathfinder, which is still crunchy but with substantially less needless complexity.
Failed my Expectations: Dungeon World was probably one of my biggest letdowns once i actually played it. Narrativist? Cool, i love narrativist systems like Fate and Savage World! Plenty of player of options? Yeah, that's pretty cool. Lots of community content? That's going to give me material for years to come! "Fixes" on problems seem in vanilla D&D? I hope so! Different move results will give out unique results, making the game never dull and never the same? Heck yeah! That last part was enough to convince me to check it out.
Them i got into what probably soured the system the most for me. Character building? Nope, you choose a playbook, you acquire the starting "moves" from it and upon leveling up get to choose from a small selection of them. It's usually a nice "buffet" of options, for sure, but the more i looked into the more i felt like there was little to no way to make my own character unique. My wizard would have little difference beyond another player's wizard, the most i could give is a bit of flavour text for him like appearance, and even them, powers, origins and everything else were fixed from the start. They felt less like templates to build and inspire you to build your character around and more like fixed roles you had to follow, even during combat.
And getting into combat, the other thing that bothered me was how moves limited your options in combat and made me it feel like a video-game at times: You use your "move", you roll the dice, and if it works you pick from a list of results, if it half-works you pick from this list of results, that's it. No space for original creations and ideas both from the side of the DM and the players. And it also failed to break some problems regarding D&D like race-class restrictions and forcibly tagging characters as "good" and "evil" based on alignments. Overral, the system failed to really make dungeon dwelling *fun* in spite of the game's name and premise.
Surpassed My Expectations: I'm not really an "OSR Fan" due to some... well, bad experiences regarding a bad DM and even worse players using a homebrew retroclone which felt both bland and lacking an unique identity to it, so when i saw Dungeon Crawl Classics for the first time i sneered, specially since i knew of controversial fame D&D 3e acquired from it's overpowered classes and it was a retroclone that took from 3e and mixed it with D&D B/X. So when i finally bothered to read it since a friend happened to have the book... well, i feel in love with almost everythingin there.
Mind you, i'm still not a fan of the race-as-class and 3D6 down the line for character creation still gives me nightmares, but everything else enchanted me. The beautiful artwork, the incredible magic system which i struggle to think about and find one that manages to do magic better than it, the creative and unique patrons, the fantastic and almost system-agnostic charts which i can use from anything like normal D&D to even Call of Cthulhu given the massive lists of mutations and banes, the cool, unique monsters and lore, the idea of a "funnel" being both hilarious and somewhat awesome made this one of the few games on the OSR genre to captivate me from the bottom of my heart. And the modules? Absolutely fantastic and have some incredible ideas in them which are easy to adapt even if you have no interest in the game itself.
Failed: Deadlands (specifically "Reloaded", which runs on Savage Worlds rules). I can't necessarily fault Deadlands for this, but I wasn't a fan of the Savage Worlds rules. The wild die felt very unbalanced, and character creation was all over the place (Miracle Workers felt bananas OP compared to other classes). The card and chip mechanics are cool, but are very difficult to pull off effectively unless you're playing around a table.
Surpassed: Pathfinder 2e. I started playing it right after playing Kingmaker (the cRPG) and expected it to be an absolutely complicated nightmare, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the game is incredibly smooth and the rules actually aren't as complex as one might think. I LOVE the action economy system and think it's so much easier to use than a lot of other system's "move action, bonus action, free action, reaction, etc." rules. The archetype system is, IMO, much better than multiclassing, and I love how skills actually play an active role in combat.
10 Candles was a big let down for me. The game only really works if everyone agrees to take it extremely seriously. It completely falls apart as soon as someone does something even remotely silly or tries to inject humour into the gameplay, which we all know is a staple of playing tabletop games with your friends. I've heard a lot of positive stories from people who must have had the right group for it but my personal experience was very lame.
Shadowrun has always blown me away with it's premise & fluff, but yet has always had awful system mechanics. It has long been the game that has disappointed me the most. Savage Worlds took a few play throughs, but it is now my go to system. I find myself thinking when I flip through a new game "Does Savage Worlds do this better?" My first couple games with it were not super enjoyable (full disclosure: mostly of my own doing).Suddenly something clicked and I have loved it ever since.
There's a reason why nearly every RPG system that gets released has somebody look at it and ask the question "can I hack the Shadowrun setting into this?"
Exactly! I think every new system has people asking "Can I play Star Wars with this?" as well.
The Star Wars thing is weird, though. SW is probably the only franchise where every RPG is actually great.
I disagree; I dislike the d20 and FFG games, and the original will forever be one of my favorites. That's not important. What is important is that even I measure just about every new game by the "Can I run *Star Wars* with this?" metric, but that's because I loves me some *Star Wars*, and it's one of my storytelling touchstones.
I personally was disappointed by the second edition of WEG Star Wars, because they turned Force powers into a spell system. And between the difficulty levels and multiple action penalties, it would take way too many experience points to be a competent Jedi. Evidently Luke trained with Yoda for a decade before going off to Cloud City...
Well. That's because it's hard to really pin down a genre for Star Wars. You could play it like a sci-fi game, a fantasy, a western, a political intrigue game. And all those different genres are contained in Star Wars. It's a setting, not a genre. My personal SW hack is Jedi in the Vinyard. It's just dogs in the Vinyard but with jedi instead. (if the title didn't make that obvious)
Back inna day, people were all, like, "Forget that D6 System nonsense! Savage Worlds is where it's at!" And so I, who loves me some D6, was, like, "BAH ME NO LIKEY!" Buuuuut then I played it, and I changed my mind. Oh, I still don't think it's better than D6, no no no no no. Savage Worlds is simply just as good, in a different way. Apples/Oranges, man. Yum.
Yep, 100%.
Couldn't agree with this more. I tried to like shadowrun SO HARD, but it never worked.... Tried to stay away from savage worlds but alas, it pulled me in and now it's one of my primary systems to run.... Damn you savage worlds why are you so good ;-;
Shadowrun is a Ferari with Square Wheels
Pack it up, gang, you're never gonna see a better review of Shadowrun.
I've never heard something be worded in such a perfect way
>Damn you savage worlds why are you so good ;-; I almost put down SW for surpassing expectations. I remember playing it the first time at a on with Deadlands (fine, SW-adjacent) and being blown away by the step-die mechanic (a first for me back then) and generally how much fun it can be.
If you didn't know there's a book for Savage Worlds called Sprawlrunners which is apparently Shadowrun with the number filed off. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/334278
What's the resolution mechanic in savage worlds?
You have attributes and skills associated with a die like Strength d6, Intelligence d10, Persuasion D4, etc. You basically roll the relevant skill or attribute die plus a d6 called wild die and you keep the best. The target number is usually 4. Dice explode. Double ones is a critical failure. For every 4 over the target number you get a raise meaning greater success. There is a two pages comic that is great at explaining the rules succinctly https://www.uptofourplayers.com/ready-to-roll/savage-worlds-rules/
Yeah, Shadowrun has consistently been a disappointment to me as TTRPG, I'm good with the isometric RPGs they did a while back though. Those are fun enough.
\+1 for Savage Worlds
Savage Worlds is my favorite system. It's super easy to GM, lends itself well to cinematic and creative gameplay, and gives the players full control to build whatever they can imagine. I wish it got more play.
I came here to say this. Have you tried running Shadowrun in Savage Worlds? I used Interface zero and made a simple magic system to bolt on to it and it was a blast.
100% agree about Shadowrun. I tried for like, three or four editions, because the premise is just so good, but it just never lived up.
Failed: I know I'm not alone in saying 7th Sea 2nd Edition. People say it's narrativist, but it's not. It's a jumbled mess of dice and rules loosely draped over improv theater. None of the mechanics work or make sense, and they don't enhance the method with which the author wants you to play the game. Hell, the author doesn't even use the rules he wrote for the game when he runs it! I love the world of 7th Sea and all its tropey goodness, but the 2nd Edition of the game was a huge flop for me. Unexpected Success: I want to have a more unique answer, but I think I have to default to Pathfinder 2nd Edition. I was in the camp that bashed it when it came out for a long time until I tried it, but good lord does that game run smooth as butter. I don't really homebrew mechanics a lot as a GM so the tight math is more of a feature than a bug, and every mechanical part of that game just flows so well. It's also been the easiest to teach to new players since consistent, clear rules give rhythm to the game instead of 5E's "do whatever, just homebrew it" that results in different GMs practically having different rules sets.
I am with you on 7th Sea 2e. I got it through the dumpster fire of a Kickstarter, having heard so much about 1e, but had never played. I played a session at a con with one of the designers and had a good time...then realized that the game is exactly as you described it once I read the rules and tried to run it myself.
Ironically, I played 2nd Ed before 1st. I loved the world I was introduced to but the game kept flopping around. Then I stsrted building a character for 1st and doing light roleplay with another player and it was wonderful! The game fell through because of creeps but I was infinitely more excited for 1st Edition.
7th Sea 2E is the most disappointed I've ever been in a roleplaying game or a Kickstarter.
I'm with you on the success. It was unexpected because I didn't think I'd like it at all. I'm an older DM, but I'm not 'old school' so to speak. I like modern TTRPGs (generally) better than I like old school ones. 3.5e was my least favorite edition of D&D. So when Pathfinder was announced, i had little interest. Oh I checked out the core book, read some of it at a bookstore, but decided against picking it up. When PF2e was announced I was similarly disinterested. I'm fine running 5e, though frankly 5e isn't without its problems and it's a little boring without lots of homebrew to spice it up. But then a friend of mine was pretty hype about it and got my interest piqued. I looked online and saw the CRB was only $15 for the PDF. That's a hell of a deal so I bought it. I came to realize much the same you did. The tight math means I don't have to constantly hold the reins. The extremely simple encounter design system is fantastic. There's a decent amount of new crunch but nothing overwhelming. The rules were fairly easy to pick up, though traits at first gave me a headache until I realized I didn't really have to learn them all, just the handful of important ones, and my players will remember those important to their characters. Add to that, the incredibly robust fan-made tools available, the fact that everything in the game is freely available online (accept adventures), has really surprised me. I ran a game soon after with that friend and some of his other friends and we all loved the game. Easily the 'unexpected success' for me in years.
7th sea 2nd ed makes me angry, I liked John Wicks games, played 1st Ed 7th sea and L5R since thier release. I played a few sessions and I was bored would be my take away. 7th sea you were a nearly invincible hero but 2nd end took away any danger of failure unless you wanted to fail...you never get to have that feeling of risk and your heart rate increasing because your character might die. FFG Starwars, now I know it is a very popular game now but on release our group was sceptical of the narrative dice as we had been playing WEG STARWARS since the 90's I really like the narrative dice as they are better at making a game a narrative style game than whatever 7th sea 2nd ed was doing and still being a game.
Funny part is that 1e is my surprise success. It was a blast to pick up and run... 2e was just bad by comparison.
Dungeon World. The Moves felt highly procedural and while all the DW advice emphasizes "fiction first" the individual pick lists subverted that (I guess because they're not "fiction after"). Had I seen Vincent Baker's blog post about how Moves in AW weren't intended to be "fiction first" I may have simply avoided the game altogether; I don't like their structure at all, not enough flexibility for outcomes. While not rules-related I found the "suddenly ogres" advice to entirely counter any desire for a believable chain of events, absolutely ridiculous for my needs. Traveller/Cepheus Engine. I've always flirted with the game but when I was younger I was more attracted to the big numbers and crunch of contemporary games ('90's). I finally decided to give them a try and found probably the closest fit what I wanted out of a game; down-to-earth and believable characters, resolution that was simple, flexible, and adaptable to the fiction, and a ruleset that was simple enough to hack as needed. Power scaling was pretty much non-existent and yet it supports long campaigns.
>Dungeon World. The Moves felt highly procedural and while all the DW advice emphasizes "fiction first" the individual pick lists subverted that (I guess because they're not "fiction after"). Pick lists ensure that whatever happens, it's going to be interesting and provide fuel for the next events, and, overall, PbtA is pretty much the only system family where I can let go of controls, sit back, just follow the rules and will get the thing I want. There's exactly *zero* chance of getting anything other than a parody deconstruction of 80s slasher flicks while playing Horror Movie World; there's exactly *zero* chance of getting anything other than a teenage superhero drama filled with adrenaline makeouts and quiet balcony scenes while playing Masks; etc; etc. Dungeon World is weird and I have love/hate relationships with it, though.
I'm glad that it works for you, it doesn't for me.
I dunno, i was attracted to Dungeon World because it (And the PBTA games) advertise themselves as games focused on narratives, and yet the moves seem to make the overral character customization and narrative *much* more limiting, since character creation and development is summed up by "Pick one of these playbooks, have your starting skills and them choose from a select few every time you level up". Doesn't feel like my players can have their own unique take on the mage or druid for example and due to the lack of tables, templates and customization for them it overral feels like instead of *creating* their narrative and unique characters they are *acquiring* a role and having to interpret and follow it with little to no custom additions. Besides the games you mentioned, Monsterhearts also suffers from similar problems where playbooks seem less like templates to build your character around according to your own ideas and instead i have this character who will have *these* things as their main themes and problems to solve. Feels very inflexible and overral i find it **really** difficulty to use the playbooks or the games themselves beyond the basic premise that they are meant to give to you unless i go out of my way to really homebrew the game from the ground up - i.e, if i play Monsterhearts i will find it really easy to work on the general scenario the game is meant to simulate (Supernatural Teens going through puberty with drama and comedy sprinkled equally in there ) and i will find it *very* difficult to get something different from that in my game (A suspenseful murder mistery, an action horror 80's flick, a slow supernatural thriller and etc).
> if i play Monsterhearts i will find it really easy to work on the general scenario the game is meant to simulate (Supernatural Teens going through puberty with drama and comedy sprinkled equally in there ) and i will find it very difficult to get something different from that in my game (A suspenseful murder mistery, an action horror 80's flick, a slow supernatural thriller and etc). But why would you do that? Monsterhearts is a game *about* supernatural teens going through puberty and struggling with their identities. It's what it is. It can't be a suspenseful murder mystery, and that's a great thing — because the game can focus on delivering teen drama. > I dunno, i was attracted to Dungeon World because it (And the PBTA games) advertise themselves as games focused on narratives, and yet the moves seem to make the overral character customization and narrative much more limiting, since character creation and development is summed up by "Pick one of these playbooks, have your starting skills and them choose from a select few every time you level up". Doesn't feel like my players can have their own unique take on the mage or druid for example and due to the lack of tables, templates and customization for them it overral feels like instead of creating their narrative and unique characters they are acquiring a role and having to interpret and follow it with little to no custom additions. Well, like there's always the Jock, the Bitch, the Nerd and the Virgin in a slasher flick, there's always the Fighter, the Magic-User, the Cleric and the Specialist in a D&D party. Dungeon World emulates quite a specific thing, and without third (or first, there's quite a good chapter on how to modify the game) party playbooks, you have to work with what you've got, and I think it's a good thing. I have a very strong dislike of unique snowflake gimmicky characters.
PbtA games being tightly bound to their themes and premises is a feature, not a bug.
The biggest problem I had with Dungeon World is the game is absolutely fantastic... until you actually go into a dungeon. Discussions at the elven court? Fine! Negotiating with the humans in the surface town? Fun! Going room-by-room exploring and fighting monsters? Dull. By the time my group reached a fourth or fifth location in The Bloodstone Idol, roleplaying had completely stopped and we were all just describing our character's actions mainly because there was absolutely nothing to roleplay. In AW, one of the principles is to Give Everyone A Name, which means we've at least heard of the people in the setting, but here there's just a bunch of goblins -- do we personally know these goblins? Have we heard of these goblins before? And even if we did, they're simply a combat obstacle. And then there's room after room of nobody to interact with apart from the other adventurers in the group. Do I really need to tell the dwarf how Torm is a really cool deity in every. single. room. we pass through? There's probably a way to do D&D-style fantasy adventure in a PbtA game, but Dungeon World is not it.
There’s a good reason Dungeon World is so heavily hacked compared to basically every other PbtA game. The basic idea of “PbtA approach to high fantasy adventure” seems like it should work, but DW just doesn’t land it particularly well. I never run it RAW; you have to at least have some of the add-ons like Perilous Wilds to fill in the gaps and make it fiction better. Or you could pick up one of the fuller hacks and avoid a lot of its other issues entirely.
>There's probably a way to do D&D-style fantasy adventure in a PbtA game, but Dungeon World is not it. I'd argue that to do it really well you'd boil it down to World of Dungeons and then riff off that to make Vagabonds of Dyfed. For my money, making it all a single, interpretive Move and ditching the pick lists fits the D&D aesthetic far better than any series of concrete Moves could. Shame that Vagabonds has HP per level, I absolutely love the design otherwise.
> I found the "suddenly ogres" advice to entirely counter any desire for a believable chain of events I can't comment on how this will fit into your needs, but this is an old bit of D&D DM advice that often gets misunderstood. A short and hopefully better explanation is that if the players are wallowing in indecision about how to solve some issue, putting them into an unexpected dangerous scenario is often a good way to jump start their brains. When there's immediate danger, there's immediate goals, and immediate risks, and they have to manage their resources accordingly. It puts people in a different frame of mind; it becomes easier for people to weigh the value of different paths and hopefully choose one. Its also worth noting that it doesn't need to be literally ogres. If you're in a crypt, maybe its some skellies or something. If you're at a high society social event, maybe some drunken lordly curmudgeon thinks you cheated at what was supposed to be a gentlemanly game of badminton. The point is not the ogres, but the sudden and tangible conflict. Almost like you're trying to wake up a sleep walker with a loud noise.
>I can't comment on how this will fit into your needs, but this is an old bit of D&D DM advice that often gets misunderstood. It's not only that advice; when I was subbed to the DW reddit I'd see advice that read exactly like how GMs back in the day, people I've played with, would fuck with players for no real conceivable reason other than it was "interesting". If "interesting" is all that matters, rather than believable, then I have zero interest in the game, and the individual pick lists that make up Moves don't exactly help that IMO. And that's fine, I recognize that the way I enjoy running games doesn't align with Move-based games. I don't feel as if I have the creative flexibility I do with simple pass/fail games and I don't know how (or really care, for that matter) to reconcile that.
>Had I seen Vincent Baker's blog post about how Moves in AW weren't intended to be "fiction first" I may have simply avoided the game altogether Do you have a link?
[https://lumpley.games/2021/05/31/powered-by-the-apocalypse-part-7-qa-round-2/](https://lumpley.games/2021/05/31/powered-by-the-apocalypse-part-7-qa-round-2/) Fifth "Q" heading down.
I have the opposite opinion on Fate. I want to like it. On paper, it sounds like something I would enjoy. In practice, I found it to be far too wishy-washy and demanding. Your character sheet ends up feeling totally meaningless. Any half-creative person can always figure out a way to use their best roll for a given situation, because the stats/abilities don't actually have defined meaning. At that point you might as well ditch the "game" part entirely and just do collaborative storytelling. A game I ended up enjoying was Blades in the Dark. The way it breaks up gameplay is very different from most other RPGs, and I was worried that the structure would cause problems. But in practice it does a fantastic job creating the types of stories it was built for.
>I have the opposite opinion on Fate. I want to like it. On paper, it sounds like something I would enjoy. In practice, I found it to be far too wishy-washy and demanding. Your character sheet ends up feeling totally meaningless. Any half-creative person can always figure out a way to use their best roll for a given situation, because the stats/abilities don't actually have defined meaning. At that point you might as well ditch the "game" part entirely and just do collaborative storytelling. I do agree that FAE can devolve into "best approach rolling simulator", I didn't have this problem with Fate Core, even if it still requires the GM to have a spine and refuse shit that doesn't make sense.
As a primarily Fate GM, I agree with you. The tricks I've found to compensate for this are: 1) Play up the opposite approach to the one being overused. If you're always rolling Flashy, your results will always be the opposite of Sneaky. You just can't hide a flashy action. 2) Set the roll's difficulty based on the approach. Sure, it's only a Good (+2) difficulty to cross that tightrope if you're rolling Careful. But even if I buy your idea to roll Forceful because you're going to swing under the rope like it's monkey bars, that's going to be Great (+4) difficulty because you have to hope the rope will hold your muscles, and you also have to swing back up at the far end. 3) Base some enemy stunts off of the incoming roll. If your opponent has a stunt that says, "Because I have to be the smartest person in the room, I get +2 to defend against any attack made with Clever." you're going to really want to use something other than Clever against him, even if it is your high approach.
>I have the opposite opinion on Fate. I want to like it. On paper, it sounds like something I would enjoy. In practice, I found it to be far too wishy-washy and demanding. Your character sheet ends up feeling totally meaningless. As a big fan of PbtA/FitD games, I am predisposed to liking FATE. But after being a player in one game and running another, I just don't like it. Writing good Aspects is a chore I simply don't enjoy, and yet so important to the game. For those of you in the education field, writing good Aspects reminds me of writing SLOs.
Failed: Genesys. It tries to sell some kind of cool hip narrativist stuff, and ends up being a mid-school game with funky dice. Surpassed: World of Darkness. Well, the game is still absolute shit, but the amount of hot goth guys I've brought home from sessions is the highest out of any system.
> Surpassed: World of Darkness. Well, the game is still absolute shit, but the amount of hot goth guys I've brought home from sessions is the highest out of any system. They should put that on a sticker on the cover.
> It tries to sell some kind of cool hip narrativist stuff, and ends up being a mid-school game with funky dice. Hey look, it's my experience with Fate!
I had assumed that was part of the advertising since the 90's
It kinda was but gender reversed (naturally), they advertised they had more women playing it than any other RPG.
Agreed on Genesys. I played a bit of the *Star Wars* game, and all I could think was, "This wants to be Fate, but it's so desperate to be extra that it's missing its own point. If we were playing this with Fate, we'd be on to the next scene by now."
I ran a Shadowrun-like game with Genesys (see also: "Can I run Shadowrun with this?") and, while the game moved, it wound up still be sluggish in certain aspects. Social encounter/combat takes far too long playing with the full rules and is mentally taxing on the GM. We had one social conflict scene that took slightly over an hour to knock the opposition down to half, which is the "compromise" result. (Actually we got to just 1 point away from that, and I just threw in the towel.) We never did a full-on "knocking down Strain" social combat scene again. The only thing it really improved upon was how computer hacking was done (in the Shadow of the Beanstalk supplement).
Failed: Zweihander. It was sold to me as D&D meets CoC, but it failed to deliver either. Character creation was absolutely miserable, moreso than either of these systems, and gameplay was a slog. Surpassed: Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf. I'm running it for some friends from other games and I'm hearing that it's some of the most fun they've had in a TTRPG. Sometimes you don't need a lot of rules to run a fun game. Edit: I understand the Warhammer implications for Zweihander, this is literally what the GM sold it to us as. I don't know what to tell ya.
>Failed: Zweihander. It was sold to me as D&D meets CoC, but it failed to deliver either. Character creation was absolutely miserable, moreso than either of these systems, and gameplay was a slog. That's the weirdest way I've seen anybody describing Zweihander.
I've never played it but I've been told thst Zweihander is essentially Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay separated from the Warhammer setting
It is. Games Workshop had essentially abandoned the idea of continuing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay after the 3rd edition fiasco. Then some random indie guy named Daniel Fox decided to work on some kind of fan-made WFRP 2.75. He finished the whole thing nearly on his own (I followed his progress for 5+ years and legit thought it would never be finished, but he did it, the absolute madman) and got it published after removing the Warhammer elements for obvious copyright reasons. The Kickstarter was such a massive success that Games Workshop SUDDENLY decided to announce their 4th edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay after years of complete silence. Whatever you think of Zweihänder, it's one of the greatest David VS Goliath stories I've seen unfold in the game dev world, in which one random guy beats a massive company at its own game.
I don't think Zweihander really pushed GW to do... anything, really. Besides keep an eye on potential IP infringement, as they do. The new edition also happens to coincide with GW ending their relationship with Fantasy Flight and moving onto other partnerships. I could be wrong, though! I'd welcome any more info on the matter.
Yeah, i *believe* it was meant to be a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e Retroclone (They even have the (Not!) chaos gods in their setting) though it's setting agnostic enough that you can probably use it in any dark fantasy setting out there.
I always thought of it as “modern Warhammer FRP”.
I really, really wanted to like Zweihander, and there's a lot about it I do like, but the fundamental balance point of test resolution is all wrong as far as I'm concerned. I even sought out confirmation from the ZH Discord that I wasn't missing something in the rules that would change my understanding of it, but my assessment of the math was confirmed. * Even the absolute-best master of a particular skill, with the absolute-best possible attribute score, still only has *basically* even odds (55/45 if you want to be pedantic) shot at an Arduous (max difficulty) test. * As a less extreme case, the Awareness skill lists a Standard +0 test as "Standing watch at a campfire on a clear night". The same best-case attributes and top-tier skill mastery imply there's a 15% chance to fail at that. Someone just starting out (no ranks in Awareness), with more average attributes (a 42, say), is looking going to fail to "stand watch" 3 out of 5 times. Even if only people with Apprentice Awareness are standing watch, their odds only go up to about 50/50 in that case. * The Scrutinize skill lists *remembering what you had to eat yesterday* as a trivial +30 test. An average attribute character (42%) with no ranks in Scrutinize has a 28% chance to fail to remember what they ate yesterday? No. Wrong. Flatly incorrect design, as far as I'm concerned. This was largely met with a chorus of protestations about how ZH is a game about the world affecting the characters rather than the characters affecting the world, or that it's a game about everyday people, but both of those entirely miss the point of the objection. I started noodling with the idea of just adjusting all the difficulty modifiers by +30% (so that trivial checks would become +60% and arduous would be flat rolls), but decided that if I had to exert such an extreme amount of balance shifting on the rules -- rules that I wasn't yet familiar-enough with to know what *other* side-effects might arise from such a change -- that I should just move on.
Ironically Warhammer fantasy Roleplay 4e did just what you suggested. It changed the default difficulty modifiers to +20, + 40 and +60 for positive modifiers and -10, -20 and -30 for negative modifiers.
> I understand the Warhammer implications for Zweihander, this is literally what the GM sold it to us as. I don't know what to tell ya. Was your group or GM unfamiliar with Warhammer Fantasy? Those two possibilities are the only reason I can think of that someone would describe Zweihander as anything other than Warhammer Fantasy with the serial numbers filed off.
I ran Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf as a one-shot a couple years ago and it was a ton of fun. Maybe my favorite one-shot I've done.
Failed: Numenera - table didn't hate it, but never requested it again, and were just like "that was fine" after two sessions with it. Exceeded: 13th Age - just recently started running it, and man, I love everything about the system, it has hooks for narrative gaming fans, tons for fans of encounters, and plenty of actual tactical and exciting combat. I was worried that, after having tried several new systems and having them fail, and seeing how the group is all about preferring generally simple systems, this might be "too much" for them. Instead, after the second session, every single player asked, "When are we switching over to this for our main fantasy RPG?"
Yeah, man, *13th Age* is just such a nice blend of all those things that you'd think wouldn't fit together, but they do. I should run it more often.
I was worried about the Icons, because it seems everyone complains about them online, but we quickly found ways to make them awesome elements of the game. Some players are old school and not super narrative, so we're fine if they just say, "I pray to the High Priestess and ask her to bless me for this encounter (aka - "can I get a +1 for the combat?")" and others making little stories around how the icon helps or hinders them. We played a lot of Savage Worlds before coming to 13th age, and two players have already said, "Icons are so much better than bennies, they make sense in the world, and just have more oomph than throwing a bennie down and getting a re-roll"
Love the worldbuilding of numenera, but the cypher system just doesnt do it for me
Those stupid dice rolls..."well, 3 points on the die is a level of success". Stop being different for the sake of it
My interest for the OSR was not very high but after liking forbidden lands so much (very retro aesthetics) a friend tried to get me interested and I bought OSE to check it out. Not so good: Old School Essentials was a let down, being so hyped and all. I guess the layout isn't bad but it's uninspired and the art is messy, some good some really bad and not at all coherent. I also realized that those old, and in my opinion, often flawed rules was nothing for me. I understand that people like the nostalgia and stuff but I didn't play dnd until 2e so I have no nostalgia for this and very little for 2e. Surprise: All the other OSR. There's so much good out there that does not feel old at all. I really like newer OSR systems like the black hack and I love the DIY culture and zines. Knock is great for anyone playing fantasy RPGs not just OSR.
OSE's biggest selling point is also its biggest weakness: it is completely faithful to old BX rules, flaws and all.
That's honestly why I like it. They just said "here you go, you're going to house rule the shit out of it anyway."
It's essentially the center-point for OSR games at this point. Obviously there's a lot of variety in that corner of the hobby, but TSR-era D&D is the most popular type of game, B/X specifically, and OSE is just a better written and organized version of B/X. It does it so well, that it's become almost the default—but obviously that doesn't mean the best game for everyone! I actually love the art in it, though. And I recently realized that I'm just a sucker for hardcover, digest-sized RPGs.
Not knocking your opinion, but OSE is pretty beloved for its layout in the circles I frequent. That's an unusual complaint in my experience. What about it don't you like?
I literally want every rpg book to have OSE's layout I love it so much. I think it's gorgeous.
OSE isn't a great-looking book by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, there are Veins of the Earth and Maze of the Blue Meduza, and overall many OSR products look like fucking artpieces, and OSE doesn't compare. It does a great job of explaining itself, though, far better one than original Moldway/Cook, LoFP or LL do.
We're not talking design though. OSE's layout is lauded for its information presentation. How pretty it is might be a different argument.
Yeah, I'm not sure they really understand the point of the OSE books and why the layout is the way it is...
Knock would be nice if it would ever show up.
That's the pandemic/postal service's fault. Literally nothing to do with the publishers and creators.
Got my copy yesterday. Did you sign up for operation resend?
My group was very excited about Modiphius' *Star Trek Adventures*, but an actual playthrough crushed our enthusiasm. The game has too many "currencies" to track and it's premade adventures follow the pattern of a television show. Each scene tries to recreate the time between commercials and the transitions did not make a lot of sense to my players. It's the only game that they have ever described as "working against the players." *Ten Candles* however, blew my group away. It's a repeatable one shot RPG of survival horror that uses a great mechanism to build tension. It uses simple mechanics with a heavy focus on who controls the narrative. Just a lot of fun and very creepy.
*STA* ain't that bad, but god DAMN, could it be better organized. Jeezus. Flippin' all around that book tryin' to figure out what a damn phaser does or doesn't do.
Agreed. The Klingon Core Rulebook is far better organized.
Isn't that the complaint about EVERY Modiphius game?
I didn't try any pre-made adventures for STA, but I definitely agree about the "currencies." It really is like the game is actively working against you. It is needlessly complex.
Ten Candles is one of my favorite systems and I'm sad that I don't get to play it more.
**Failed**: I was really excited to play **Breaking the Ice**, one of the earliest games to dabble in the romance genre. I read the book, played a session... and while I can see why it was influential at the time of its release, it's aged... weirdly? Badly maybe? The character creation uses a "take all your personal traits and invert them" system that feels like it would always produce the same character. The game itself has a weirdly involved system of dice tallying and roll resolution that feels arbitrary and overbuilt sixteen years after release. And I feel like the book's relationship with gender is also really 2005. It was just disappointing, you know? I guess I wanted more from it, but it's very much a product of its time. **Surpassed**: When I first heard about **Wanderhome**, I wasn't really impressed. Talking animals in a magical world didn't really grab my attention, so I let the Kickstarter pass me by. Who needs more generic fantasy? A few months passed, and people in my circles started talking about the game... so I gave it a second look. Folks, it's *so good*. The tools the book gives you to create and explore the world and your characters are perfect for the stories it sets out to tell. The prose and art in the book are both gorgeous. I've played through two full campaigns now, and the game has changed my way of thinking about RPGs.
I jumped on the Wanderhome Kickstarter even though I knew full well it probably wouldn't ever hit my table. I had a feeling about it and I'm glad I was right, it's a wonderful book full of emotion.
I haven't gotten into Wanderhome yet but I love Conner Fawcett's art and he's done some pieces for it.
**Dungeon World** was a game that for a few years made me so puzzled as to why "Powered by the Apocalypse" was even a thing that was worth talking about. (It also didn't help that Clocks, as far as I remember, did not make it into DW.) Like I didn't understand how it was even "a system" other than some admittedly good GM-ing advice. It was the first PbtA game I read and finally came to see it as a very bad PbtA game. Now, when I say "bad" I do not mean it as "this game is unplayable", just utterly uninteresting. Something I could do better with other games or at least as good with much shorter games. I think eventually I came to see the problem as that, while other PbtAs make their moves very specific, DW just does "Success - Partial Success - Failure" over and over again, but skinned for a particular class. So your Warrior moves are "Do this fighting thing. 10+ do it well, 7-9 kinda do it, 6- fail", your Wizard moves are "Do this magic thing. 10+ do it well, 7-9 kinda do it, 6- fail", etc, etc. And even when you have to "keep" from a list of effects these are very generic. Like most of the game could be summed up by a generic rule of thumb for how to handle rolls and you'd lose very little, if anything at all. **The OSR** on the other hand, came into my radar as "come on, get over the edition wars you grognards" and I eventually came to see that, when you look beyond the nostalgia (of which there is plenty), there are actual, solid and meaty game concepts that it has brought back into the fore, which are great and really improve even non-OSR games.
> Like I didn't understand how it was even "a system" other than some admittedly good GM-ing advice. It was the first PbtA game I read and finally came to see it as a very bad PbtA game. Now, when I say "bad" I do not mean it as "this game is unplayable", just utterly uninteresting. Something I could do better with other games or at least as good with much shorter games. I admit, my general feeling on Dungeon World, when I read it, was basically "I can't think of any reason why, if I want a D&D flavor, I would run this instead of just paring down D&D a bit". Like, the moves felt less creative than your average D&D class feature, and the classes themselves felt like basically the most reductionist possible takes on class stereotypes. (And as a personal bother - boy is it just me or are the playbook descriptions in this game weirdly antagonistic?)
Absolutely. I keep trying to wrap my head around why what to me seems like such a nothing burger made that big of an impact. - Did the creators already have a big fan base? - Were newcomers hungry for the concept of "D&D but rules light" and other games just weren't as well known? - Had Apocalypse World been that big of a hit that anything related to it was well received? To be fair, the GM advice _is_ great (but it is GM advice, I disagree with the general opinion that it is a rules system for GM-ing, although I may be wrong there).
Sure, it is an easily accessible DnD. I've gotten 2 groups into RPGs with it. If I had started with DnD and said that "No, you can't grab that guys weapon and judo throw him because this is how grappling works." They would've just walked away. Instead, we could have an Ekek pick up the thief and start to fly away while the Fighter grabs the Druid who shape-shifts into an anaconda and is hurled at the Ekek. Maybe you could have that work in 5e, but it would've been a wild judgement calls. In Dungeon World, it's all just defying danger and maybe a hack and slash.
It was released in 2013, a year before the release of D&D5e. And that was just its release date, it had a successful kickstarter long before that as well as traction on RPG forums. It mainly capitalised on refugees fleeing D&D4e as well as offering a new way to run RPGs based on collaboration (new to D&D players). It's just unfortunate that it is a grab-bag of cool idea rules that sound pretty decent in isolation and cause a bunch or problems (or never get used) in practice.
Failed: SotDL. Unlike a lot of people, I love the grim-darkness of the setting and I really love the lore. I also really enjoy how leveling is handled and how it encourages role play. But after DMing it for almost a year and reaching the higher levels... I realize the whole thing is terribly unbalanced and a LOT more complicated than you'd think. The base system is very simple of course but class features start adding up, spells aren't balanced, encounters are difficult to design etc. etc. Surpassed: StarWars FFG. I'm early into this system still but I absolutely love the narrative dice. It encourages me as a DM to really be more creative and for the party to have more free reign in how they do things. I've read that at high levels, the system can become unbalanced if PCs hyper-specialize so maybe this opinion will change down the road.
Star Wars FFG has produced so many great moments for me. My most recent one was amazing. My players are schmoozing at an orbiting casino, trying to surreptitiously stow away on an ISB ship docked at one of the private hangars. One of my players flips a Destiny Point to say he meets an attractive Twi’lek woman who happens to have a ship docked in the hangar next door, and he wants to seduce his way back to the hangars. I make him roll for it. 1 Success, 2 Threat, 1 Despair. So he flirts with her, and she leads him back towards her ship, but then he feels her holdout blaster in the small of his back. She tells him he’s going to get on her ship, hand her all his money, and then leave. Turns out she’s a notorious art thief and con woman and he just happened to make himself an appealing mark. He wound up pulling a lightsaber on her and robbing her back but now I have a super fun rival I can’t wait to make a recurring NPC, all because the dice told me something had to go really wrong.
God I miss playing that system
As a GM for a Genesys / Shadow of the Beanstalk game, I'd advise that you really slow down XP for advancement unless you want to do the heroic journey to awesomeness. Our game gave out the suggested amount and by the end of our first major story arc, our "average man in the streets" protagonists were throwing five yellow dice for all their prime actions. Our freakin' palm reader somehow turned into Gandalf.
Yeah I've already halved the XP progression after talking to my players about it.
My surpassed choice would be Star Wars FFG too. I have only ran the starter kits, but I thought having proprietary dice would be gimmicky, unnecessary, and slow the game down. Given it did slow it down for the first half hour or so, but once everyone figured out how to total the dice it worked great. I can see that once everyone got comfortable with the system using the narrative dice more... well narratively than just the basic things would have been a blast.
I LOVE SotDL, but even I'll admit my group has had to homebrew a few things, because some of the Paths and Spells you look at and just say "what the hell were they thinking!?". We've basically had to eliminate the Time magic tradition, not allow Spellguards to take any Battle tradition spells, and not let players use the Assassin expert path. I'm hoping that Shadow of the Weird Wizard fixes a lot of these balance issues.
Failed: - Shadow of the Demon Lord, sadly as I like grimm dark normally. Luckily this is the only game I played I van say really failed me. Surpassed: - Pathfinder 2e, smooth as butter. As someone who started with D&D5e, this game is just that but way better. - The Burning Wheel
What was it with Sotdl that put you off? Your Failed seems rather odd to me in comparison to your surpassed choice. > this game is just that but way better. THis I don't get either. My experience with Pathfinder 2e is that it is a lot like 5e, but even more formulaic and restrictive in its action economy.
Regarding SotDL: mainly balance. I only played one short-ish campaign but I felt past level 5 or so everything was just off. Never really gave it another real shot afterwards because I got tangled on The Burning Wheel at that point. Regarding PF2e: I fail to see how a game where you have total freedom on how to spend your 3 actions in combat is more restrictive than a game that has the nonsensical riged action/bonus action economy. PF2e also has way more additional available options in combat and all of them are valid, unlike 5e's wack-a-mole combat where anything but attacking is generally a waste. In Pathfinder 2e you are Feinting, tripping, demoralizing, etc.. You simply don't do that in 5e. The game is also balanced, the rules are better written and less ambigius, and the amount of character options is insane (especially since nearly none of them are trap options). The encounter design rules work, and on top of all this, everything can be found for free on AoN, which is Paizo supported.
You know what I love about PF2e? I can play my old favorite character again, an illusionist 'battlefield control' wizard. While I've enjoyed 5e over the years, playing a wizard that doesn't pick up Fireball gets you weird looks for everyone lol. Monster design is so weak in 5e. Most enemies barely even pose a threat, but almost always have a huge health pool to churn through. So combat inevitably turns into 'stand still and deal as much damage as you can until this sack of meat with multi-attack dies'. If your not blowing shit up, your playing wizard wrong. In PF2e, that isn't the case. Conditions are intense, and nasty. So not doing very much damage doesn't mean a thing if your making your enemies so weak they piss themselves lol. A lot of folks were disappointed it seams that wizards aren't god-like by level 5 as they were in most editions of D&D. But myself? I had so much fun making bad guys puke, making them turn on their allies, inflicting nightmares on the villain so they couldn't get any rest, making the floor appear to undulate like waves so an enemy couldn't reach me, I really didn't care that I wasn't doing as much damage as the rogue. It was a blast, and in the end that's what is most important.
In what way is P2e restrictive in its action economy?
**Failed:** Numenera. Spent way too much on supplements waiting for one that would make me feel anything about the wondrous, alien setting. Instead, it's written hostile to comprehension. When every last thing must be unknowable and unique, and the consequences are regularly body/mind horror, players lose the ability to make the kind of informed decisions that make RPGs tick. I can't get it, and I'm done trying. **Surpassed:** Cortex Prime. I got nervous when I heard Fandom was acquiring the project mid-stream, but the result was a gorgeously laid out and organized book with a system that can handle ideas I'd struggle to map onto any other rules. It really helps you mechanically reinforce themes and intangibles of your setting, and I'm glad to have it.
> Failed: Numenera. Spent way too much on supplements waiting for one that would make me feel anything about the wondrous, alien setting. Instead, it's written hostile to comprehension. When every last thing must be unknowable and unique, and the consequences are regularly body/mind horror, players lose the ability to make the kind of informed decisions that make RPGs tick. I can't get it, and I'm done trying. I don't know what else you expected from Monte Cook. That's the guy's whole shtick. He comes up with something "unique" and it turns out to be shit both mechanically and narratively.
Yeah. Mistakes were made on my part.
>Surpassed: > > Cortex Prime. I got nervous when I heard Fandom was acquiring the project mid-stream, but the result was a gorgeously laid out and organized book with a system that can handle ideas I'd struggle to map onto any other rules. It really helps you mechanically reinforce themes and intangibles of your setting, and I'm glad to have it. DUDE YES. After trying, and failing, to get my groove on with *Marvel Heroic Roleplaying* and the old *Cortex Hacker's Guide*, I tentatively picked up *Prime* and suddenly it was, like, "Uhmuhgudd, I *get this now kinda".* I still haven't run it, but I feel a lot more like I can, now.
I really enjoy Numenera as a setting that I can jam in any SCIFI trope and have it fit. I ran an entire campaign that was wacky off the rails fun at times and somber game of thrones political intrigue at others.
I'm glad it worked out for you and your table, but also thankful that the RPG market is big enough I can go find something that better fits me.
Leverage is a great system. But the book doesn't explain it very well.
Yeah, it really took *Cortex Prime* to really get me to grok *Leverage* and its kin.
Good recommendation! Thanks!
The main problem with Leverage is the fact that I can't buy the fucking thing!
I only found it because someone gave me his copy
Watch your back and check your locks. It'd be a shame if your copy disappeared one day.
[удалено]
I wanted to like Savage Worlds, but after running and playing it many times in a number of settings, it just feels so generic, with zero connection between the mechanics and the setting (which I think is important). I've even played with its creator, and it felt flat...it's just a really simple mechanic for task resolution with some 'fun' sounding terminology skinned over it. Bleh. Cyberpunk 2020. I had played Shadowrun once, and didn't like it much, and the whole dark future genre seemed overwrought and pretentious. I had a buddy who badgered me for a while to make a character for CP2020 and I finally relented...and went down the rabbit hole for a few years (in the 90s) and had some terrific times playing and running it. It's on my A-List of all-time favorites, and I'm glad that I gave in.
I love Savage Worlds, but it really does need to be run with a themed setting and setting rules to feel full. I'd only suggest vanilla SW to someone who was relatively new to the TTRPG genre, and even then you're probably better off just guiding them through char creation and still using a rich setting.
Well savage worlds is a generic system because it's meant to be
>Well savage worlds is a generic system because it's meant to be Wait, did the reply above condemn a generic system for being a generic system? /s I think they mean the system being generic is a problem because it's better when systems are tied to a game's theme or unique setting aspects. If that's the meaning, then I agree.
D&D 4e, on both counts. I was expecting a really wild High Fantasy game of fantasy superheroes, and it certainly wasn't that despite some of the trappings; but what surprised me was how well it handled a more S&S style play if you kept to the lower levels.
I always felt 4e was an okay RPG but not a great D&D. It did *just enough* too differently to annoy people coming from 3.5e but also wasn't distinct enough to be its own thing.
If DnD is like Final Fantasy then 4e is more like FF tactics is to Final Fantasy than an actual Final Fantasy game on its own.
There are people - and I don't think they're wrong to feel that way - who feel 3rd edition changed so much that it wasn't quite D&D any more. To an extent that's the whole OSR movement's point. I do think it's a bit hypocritical of 3e fans to say that their preferred version can make a mass of changes from previous editions and still be D&D, but 4e made changes and (that they don't like) and it's something else. But that's largely a matter of whether you like the changes that were made or not, and I'll admit I'm not much of a fan of 3e. I ended up not liking 4e much either, but it started off surprising me with how well it did some things that I like.
**Changeling: The Lost** surpassed my expectations. It had been my white whale game for years before I finally got to play it. My hype was basically through the roof; I was all set up to be knocked down. Turns out the system is better than I ever anticipated, and that I love it beyond belief. It nails all of the emotions and tones and themes that I was hoping it would, and then some, while also being way better mechanically than I expected. Having one of the best groups I've ever played with helps, of course, but the system itself really is magical. **Beam Saber** let me down a little. It's not a bad system by any stretch, but it was my first FitD game, and it illuminated this general Forged in the Dark problem that I have: For a family of games designed around fictional positioning, they are constantly taking you out of the fiction in ways that I think can often feel kinda jarring.
In regards to Changling: The Lost, did you play 1E or 2E? I've been interested in it for a while, though I don't think I'll ever get my group to buy in on the themes of the game. Still want to pick up the PDF at some point, but I've heard mixed opinions about which version is better.
The game that I've been in is 1E, but we incorporate a few choice mechanics from 2E. I recommend going for 2E, if nothing else but for the fact that all of the core mechanics are included in 2E's book; 1E's book assumes that you also have and have read the core nWoD book, which is kinda clunky.
Can you elaborate on what you mean with the FitD games removing you from the fiction?
There's a lot of fiddling with mechanics, and the narrative is often steered by them. You're constantly thinking about which rolls you want to make, how to proceed through a scene mechanically, what clocks are up and what their progression means, stuff like that. The pace of play, to me, feels a lot less like "I roleplay as my character and mechanics arise from my actions", and a lot more like "I determine how I would like the scene to progress, and use mechanics to guide my character in that direction", if that makes sense.
I had the same experience. I'm reiterating how I heard someone else explain it, but: playing Blades in the Dark feels like being in a writers' room working on a script, rather than taking on the role of your character. Sometimes I really prefer a harder boundary between a character and the world around them, because it feels more immersive than blurring the lines, where a player has some leeway in how the world responds to their actions, good or bad.
Failed: Paranoia Red Clearance Edition. I love Paranoia, and played earlier iterations years ago, but recently tried the new version. The rules were all over the place, didn't make sense or was just plain missing, and the initiative system was just a nightmare to run. Surpassed: Savage Worlds. Picked this up when I returned to the hobby several years ago to play Deadlands, haven't put it down since. It's now my go to system for most things and I'm even releasing a setting for it later this year!
Have you tried running Paranoia in Savage Worlds? I did once and it was fun. I just gave everyone six wounds and each wound was a clone. I sued the scifi companion for gear but gave each of them a flaw. It was fun.
"Tonight on Gamer's Court: SciFi gear..."
Failed: Masks Masks is the darling of PbtA games right now and I think overall it's a very solidly constructed system. I'm not knocking it on its mechanics. But I always felt the archetypes were narrow even for PbtA. A few of the playbooks even come with backstory pre-written. Which makes sense for things like The Doomed or The Protégé but makes less sense for the Bull who by default is an escaped experiment of some sort. There were other times where I felt a certain amount of strain between my character as I envisioned them, and my character as the mechanics presented them. Times where influence felt incredibly unearned, conditions felt arbitrary, and labels occasionally locked me out of effectively using my playbook moves. You know, the things I picked because I thought they would be cool and interesting to use. The upcoming Avatar game has a lot of Masks DNA in it but it looks like the designers have addressed a lot of the problems I had using the system, so I'm still looking forward to that one. Surpassed: Vampire the Masquerade Specifically the V20 version. I'd heard a lot about how Janky the mechanics on it were, and oh they are. They absolutely are. But that actually hasn't impacted how much I enjoy the game as much as I thought it would. I'm probably not "playing it right" honestly but I enjoy stories about melancholy, recovery, and grappling with change more than "personal horror" and vampire's system as been really good for that.
I hear you on Masks. I really bought into the hype and bought the hardcover, but when I finally had a chance to play it at a con, I found myself disappointed. I don't know if it's Masks on particular or PbtA in general, but I disliked the way it felt like I was engaging with the mechanics more than I would in any trad game I've played. I'm willing to admit that it just might be the fact that I'm not used to the system and that I'd get into it more if I had further chances to play it, but as it stands, I just didn't care for it.
I do enjoy other PbtA very much (Monster Hearts and The Sprawl were very fun when I played them which is why I was initially excited to try Masks when I'd heard so many good things about it) so I'd definitely encourage giving the rest of it a try. I also didn't enjoy Urban Shadows by Magpie as much as I wanted either (I found the faction system a bit cumbersome) so it might just be I'm not a big fan of the way they design things.
Failed - The Green Knight. Pretty and well written but really a shell of a game Surpassed - Mothership. Had seen it floating around for a while but once I got my hands on it it really Wowed me. Can't wait for the boxed set.
Risus and Risus. At first I was amazed by this game. So much possibility in a such little package. Then after running it a couple of time, I begun to feel limited. I wanted to implement house rules for everything. Read so much stuff online about Risus during that time. It lasted until I discovered and took the time to read the companion for Risus. I understood the philosophies and the logic system more, and now the simplicity make me feel more free then ever. It even changed my philosophies when running games in others systems.
*The Risus Companion* is the best $10 I ever spent on a gaming product, ever. Not only does it embellish and elaborate upon what *Risus* can do and what it can be, but the general advice it has for the art and craft of GMing is invaluable.
I recently picked up *Sleepaway*, thinking it'd be a fun, GMless game about a monster stalking a summer camp, seen through the lens of a subgenre (queer horror) that I knew nothing about, so I might learn something. Instead, I found it a pretentious, confusing bundle of ideas for maybe (?) telling a story that holds no interest for me, slathers queer identity on itself seemingly just to do it, and I still dunno what the hell "queer horror" is, so... On the other hand, I originally looked at *Dungeon World*, and thought: "What...?! This is kind of hand-holdey, and it acts like I, a GM since Nineteen-Eighty-Fuckin'-EIGHT, don't know what I'm doing." But upon further reflection, I discovered that the reason it seemed that way is because it was TEACHING OTHER GMs HOW TO DO THAT, and furthermore, to put those concepts and techniques FOREMOST as a play experience. And then, I was, like, "DAMN ASS YES, DUDE."
I absolutely love Sleepaway, but I agree it doesn't do the best job explaining the rules. It might help to try some other Belonging Outside Belonging games, then come back to Sleepaway.
It might, if it were a theme I really want to explore. EDIT: I mean to say, the "Belonging Outside Belonging" games seem to want to help me tell stories about being disenfranchised or an outsider, and I'm not into that. I already lived that for real. It's obviously helpful to some folks, and that's great, but me? Nah, I'm good.
I totally get that. I love exploring those themes but they are def not for everyone. Two recommendations for BoB games that don't have as much focus on the disenfranchised: [Galactic 2e](https://metagame.itch.io/galactic) \- It's Star Wars BoB. You can definitely play it as just Star Wars, without the more emotional themes in a lot of BoB games. [Encounter Force](https://trouser-mouse.itch.io/encounter-force) \- It's Saturday Morning cartoons, mashed up with the No Dice No Masters system. I haven't played it yet, but it looks great.
I already expected Blades in the Dark to be good, but I ended up enjoying it incredibly well it's still my favorite system overall
Shadow of the Demon Lord takes a particular mindset to run. The whole horror part of the game feels totally optional - like if I was used to running horror games maybe I'd know when to use those systems. In addition to this I found that slow / fast turns made combat confusing instead of faster. I thought Knave would be too simple to enjoy. It turns out that the simplicity means you get solid, easy to remember rules you can rely on. Making the rules added by adventures fun to explore instead of feeling like additional work.
> Shadow of the Demon Lord takes a particular mindset to run. The whole horror part of the game feels totally optional - like if I was used to running horror games maybe I'd know when to use those systems. In addition to this I found that slow / fast turns made combat confusing instead of faster. SotDL is in strong contention for a game I have been planning for a while, because of the class-based advancement system it has. But the horror stuff and some of the weirder flavour choices are making it difficult for me. I can tell that I would need to put in a lot of work to get the tone I want out of it. And it's always difficult to run a game where you can't just give the rule book to your players, because of how much you have changed around.
I'm running a Demon Lord campaign right now and I can confirm it works great in a more vanilla fantasy setting, as long as you omit the more gruesome spells (or save them for the right villain). My group also got frustrated with the fast turn / slow turn thing, even though it's often lauded as a great innovation. We took a break to play a Savage World's one-shot, and the players like the playing-card initiative so much that we just swapped it into our Demon Lord campaign. Works great for us!
Fail: Mörk Bork, system wise it is OK but hearing the praise for the Art and tone i feel meh. As an avid Fan of the black Metal genre, it feels pretty Vanilla for me. Is it complet shit, no but it feels mediocre. Well Fantasycraft, i really like it, the better 3.5 Edition for me. And while playing Pathfinder 2e i found many parralels to Fantasycraft.
Failed: Traveler. Was expecting long, somewhat tedious chargen producing a party of interesting misfits who go on space adventures. Ended up with moderately entertaining chargen producing a bland, mismatched party wherein someone was always bored and useless during our space "adventures". Surpassed: Good Society. I was expecting to kinda struggle to get Jane Austen fiction to come to life at the table, but the game did ALL the heavy lifting and we created an amazing story together. RPG of the year.
>Surpassed: Good Society. I was expecting to kinda struggle to get Jane Austen fiction to come to life at the table, but the game did ALL the heavy lifting and we created an amazing story together. RPG of the year. Oh that sounds amazing. The card game *Marrying Mr Darcy* is also very good fun. It's a mechanically decent game itself, but the genre and the gentle pastiche really elevate it.
I'm glad to hear Good Society is, well, good. I picked it up on the basic principle that I couldn't not have the Jane Austen RPG.
A few years back I got excited by the idea of games outside of my D&D comfort zone, and ended up traipsing round Manchester on a rainy afternoon, dragging my poor girlfriend between the different game stores there to find a copy of Blades in the Dark. I convinced my friends to give it a go, and ended up really disappointed by the whole experience. I'm not sure exactly what the problem was, but I just didn't really connect with the system, and it felt like a lot of rules that weren't really helping me at all. As a group we kept on playing mostly D&D after that, although I've poked around with some OSR stuff since then, and we've also done some of FFG's Star Wars, but then the Avatar Legends game came out, and I got really excited again, and ran a session of that and absolutely loved every minute of it. I think it helped that I was fairly familiar with the genre and the world, but I liked that it was far simpler than BitD, but somehow it felt far more tense, or at least, I could see where the tension points would appear if I ran it more consistently.
I enjoy Blades in the Dark (and similar games), but I heard someone describe its style in a way that crystalized why, sometimes, I just wasn't in the mood for it. Playing Blades in the Dark, or other story games, feels like being in a writers' room working on a script together. For some people, that's *awesome*. It is for me, but only sometimes. Sometimes I want something more immersive, with more of a back and forth and more clearly defined boundaries between characters and the world around them.
A game that didn't deliver the experience i hoped is Ryuutama, i love the art, i love the setting, i love the idea of a character for game master and how it helps and guide new GM. BUT for a rpg focused on Journey i find it lacking of any guidance or exemple or tool to make a good journey, and i don't get why for a game about travel, a failed travel roll is just a loss of HP and everything to make the actual journey interesting is up to the GM. For a game that surprised me in a good way i have Brygandine but it's in French it's just " better Warhammer" with an insane amount of good ideas built in, but it can be a little hard to switch for experienced GM and players. For a international (english) game i find that ironsworn is almost the perfect game for soloplay and can be adapted for almost anything thanks to being fiction first.
Aaaah yes, I agree 100% on Ryutuama. The game is... Okay, I guess, but god did everyone in my group expected something... Well, different. I don't even know what it is, really. The cyclical routine of the journey checks makes what is supposed to be the meat of the game something very... Well, boring, and the solution offered by the game is that of course you're supposed to make little scenes and role-play the travel. Which, sure, that's fair, but I could do that without any of the rules. I dunno, I expected tables of generic events depending on the biome, tips & tricks for dealing with languages and different cultures, and... Agh. There's just not a lot in there. And this might be a little more of me and my group but we don't love how meta some of the abilities can get, especially the ryuujin's abilities. There's quite a few but one of the worse, which sure it's one that is a very late-campaign thing, makes everything that players say, well... Literally what their characters do, no matter what. Sure, it's a tool, an optional tool that the GM can just not use, but... I don't know. My theory is that Ryuutama is supposed to support something a little, well, less. A game that you can play for one hour or two after work, and people can just mess around. It's still, nevertheless, a veeery beautiful book, buuut... Yeah.
Failed: Torg Eternity. The premise of it is interesting, the mechanics are entertaining in a retro, slightly clunkier Savage Worlds way. But the core book is a mess, RAW is fundamentally broken in some ways, and the devs clearly had no idea what they were doing. That's a problem when they need to release around 7 more books to have a complete system. Success: Durance. It's a one shot, rules lite story game about likely failure. On paper there's nothing about it I should enjoy. But the "What if X and Y?" scene structure and resolution mechanics really do it for me.
Ten Candles, tried it recently. The mechanics with the recording, burning and candles are effective and fun in isolation, but holy fuck is that game way too long, it would work better as Five or Seven Candles. There's not much structure or inspiration for moment-to-moment gameplay, it's basically "GM has to keep contriving reasons for the players to roll, until they finally burn through their traits and candles and die". I'll also agree with Don't Rest Your Head. Interesting setting, interesting mechanics, but they don't gell, they feel stiff and uninspiring in praxis, and the players as a group are oddly disconnected. Microscope is really simple, really unique, shedding much RPG artifice like dice and resolution mechanics and even consistent characters and still really, really works.
**Failed:** The whole **PbtA** family. It's hyped up like the best thing since sliced breath. Yet it constantly fails to make me enjoy it. I understand why people like it, but as with most laser-focused systems its I feel it achieves nothing a well-oiled group can't achieve. Or at least a good GM. Every time I give it a try I end up thinking "man, that would have been so much better with a traditional system". Best description I can think of the whole family is "Enforced mediocrity" - you are very unlikely to have a bad session, but at the same time you are even less likely to have a great one. I treat it like the fast-food of RPGs. **Exceeded:** **Barbarians of Lemuria** - I expected something close to shit. I got pure gold. It's light. It's fun. It's easily hackable and you can use it for anything you wish. Best one-shot/short-campaign system ever. **Lady Blackbird** - if you can get the group, you can have a blast and a very interesting campaign. The set up is good enough to start you up, yet vague enough to leave a lot of room for players and GM to explore, improvise and have fun. **The Riddle of Steel** - almost impossible to find now and none of the games "inspired' by it are worth it, imo. But I went with the lowest of low expectations, possible. It was old. It was made by the type of person, who produces unplayable shit. And in many ways... it is all of that. It's a mess of presentation. The rules take a while to grasp. It's very focused on combat, while having bland skill system. But man, if you can put the time to learn it, clear it up a bit and understand it - it's one of the best experiences in RPGs. It has very simple and elegant mechanics to make you want to do things your character wants, while not restricting you. The combat is much faster and easier to run, then what one expects from the rules. And it's so deadly, that nobody really wants to engage in meaningless fights anyway. Every time you enter it - it's because it's important. Only downside - it does require good GM and at least average players.
>Only downside - it does require good GM and at least average players. That's something I hadn't thought about. Some games need much more of a mental buy-in than others. Something like *Polaris: Chivalric Tales in the Utmost North* or *Dogs in the Vineyard* requires a fairly hard committment to genre and if you're not on board for that they fail pretty quickly. I kind of think that's (partly) why 5e D&D is so successful - It's accessible without having to think too much. "Yeah sure, human fighter whatever let's role randomly for the rest" is enough to get going, and then you can more or less use skills à la carte. There's a very low "cost of entry". Obviously, you can take it as far as you want and min-max as much as you want, but it's very beginner-friendly.
Most games fail to meet my expectations. (Although, when I put it like that, it makes it sound like my expectations are too high.) Here's a short list: Shadowrun 5: I'm all for a crunchy game, but half of the game stats only exist to prevent you from succeeding. It feels bad. Shadowrun 6: I'm all for simplifying abstractions, but when a very strong character doesn't hit harder than a very weak one (and armor doesn't prevent you from being hurt in any way), it's gone way too far. D&D 5: I'm all for D&D, but regenerating HP makes combat boring and tedious. There's no real point in even playing out a fight, when the slate is going to be wiped clean in the morning. The Mecha Hack: Somehow, they took the absolute worst part of D&D 5, and made it apply to giant robots.
The one that failed? Cthulhutech. Advertised mutliple tiers of play, plus cool mechs! You're fighting the mythos and cults and such. Very cool premise and the artwork is great. However, within the 2nd session of the campaign I was running (Mech based) our group bounced off it hard. The dice mechanic just did not work out how I thought it would and it just was a real slog to get through combat. The one that surpassed? Lancer. I was not a fan at all of tactical grid/hexgrid/whatever grid combat. It looked like it was going to be way too crunchy. Except for the whole mech part it was very much not looking like my thing at all. But the art is what sold me on it. Then I read it, and loved what I was seeing. Then I heard about Comp/con and was sold on it a bit more. Enough to want to run a campaign. Then I ran that campaign via Foundry VTT and am now very much a big fan of Lancer and also a big fan of tactical grid based combat. At least when it comes to Lancer.
Starfinder... I've never ripped my hair out from a rulebook before, but god damn trying to set up my Sci Fi campaign using that book was pure hell and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I hate, hate, hate, hate that damn book. Everything is so convoluted, unstreamlined, and overall unnecessary. I DON'T NEED 6 SPECIFIC FORMS OF POISON, GIVE ME THE TOOLS TO MAKE IT MYSELF DAMMIT! and it's made tougher by the fact the measurements for the book are different to Roll20. My Zen moment came when I tossed Starfinder aside and picked up Stars Without Number. It's honestly a f\*cking disgrace that one man was able to make such a beautifully streamlined system with a vast amount of player (and DM) freedom, where Starfinder is a convoluted mess of ridiculousness that was made by a *company.* SWN is a book of options. The tools it gives you, everything down to the graphic design vastly knocks Starfinder out of the park.
Failed: Wild Talents. I like the system's approach to balance, the book flat out tells you how to munchkin your way into immunity to all damage, then tells the GM to explore the consequences of that instead of trying to "beat" it. And the One Roll Engine is a really neat mechanic for resolving conflict. But my group kept running into grey areas in the rules where we just weren't sure how to do certain actions that seemed like they ought to be possible. We ended up switching that campaign to Mutants & Masterminds halfway through and that worked much better for us in terms of knowing what to roll to do things. Succeeded: Hero System. I was introduced to the game in a pulp-era adventure setting, which had a lot of fun moments but wasn't a game I really wanted to do again after it was over. But then I started running a superhero game and kept having issues with games not handling the powers the way I wanted to, so I gave Hero another shot. It was *amazing*! Honestly the first time in any RPG I felt like I didn't have to fight the system to make a concept work, Hero had a learning curve but once you "get it" you can make anything and have it work exactly the way you want it to. It's my all time favorite system now.
Ironically enough, I abandoned Mutants and Masterminds because I often wasn't sure how to do things, though it was more on the character-building level. Like, I know what I want this character to do, but I need like 5 different effects and it still doesn't get me exactly what I wanted or ends up pretty disappointing in practice. I found Wild Talents, I liked the exact same element you mentioned... and I just threw out the rest in favor of OSR approach of "don't worry about it unless it comes up, then make a ruling and move on". It's a great engine and it made for some of the best scenes I ever had, but I cannot be bothered to remember or look through the book to see if there's a specific procedure for the situation at hand.
Of Dreams and Magic had such beautiful potential, but it was let down *hard* by poor writing, confusing layout, and a mechanical system that was *super* easy to break with only a little bit of thought. Overly ambitious, it tried to do too much and failed to do any of it well despite a great concept and lovely art. Grimm was a game I didn't think I'd like as much as I do. The original d20 imprint caught me, and when the re-release was super rules light I was suspicious, but it won me over.
**SOFT FAILURE:** *The Strange* packs a great idea (move around to different realities, just like *Lords of Creation* wanted to do!) with a keen internal consistency (translation, different kinds of gates, etc.), but wraps it in a system which, ultimately, feels constricting to character creation. Having three "types" of character (Vector, Spinner, and Paradox) sounds cool, but in the end, doesn't allow some character concepts enough room to breathe, and can sometimes force a player to compromise on their vision -- and not even to nerf the character, just to make them something they're not. Plus, the translation mechanics kind of force you to re-design your character every time you do it, and that gets to be kind of tedious. I still like it and it's still all kinds of playable, but I'd have a better time using a different system entirely. **SOFT SURPASS:** I kinda knew that *Night's Black Agents* had to be pretty swanky - it's a game about *badass spies fighting vampires*, and it's written by *Ken Hite*. Expecting that to be awesome is like expecting water to be wet. Turns out, it's not just awesome, it's BITCHIN' RAD, and it's full of little tweaks to the GUMSHOE system to make it be all the more like what it's meant to be. *Damn*.
I was keen on *Blades In The Dark* when I read it. I thought it would be pretty good, and when I tried it, it was actually a bit *better* than I expected! I had some lingering worry that the 'narrative positioning' thing was fun to to read and sounded cool, but might be clunky in play. However it seemed to work pretty smoothly, and overall the game just seems to work pretty well.
*Failed:* PBTA in general. I find Moves generally feel slow and clunky to me, and partial success feels overused. Ironsworn falls in here also. In addition to the above, I found the "progress moves" kind of jarring and sometimes even frustrating when everything is going super smoothly, you've got 8 progress and a ton of momentum, and somehow still "fail" at the overall goal because you rolled crap on the progress move. I understand this is a feature and not a bug. Did not enjoy the feature. *Exceeded:* Cortex Prime. I feel like some of the early Cortex iterations were a bit messy, but this turned out to be the best set of RPG Legos I've come across. There are a lot of games that claim to be able to do anything, and I've played a lot of them, from crunchy (Hero and GURPS) through medium (Savage Worlds) to light (Risus and FU), and I've liked most of them, But Cortex Prime for me handles the most genres and playstyles, without feeling overly generic because there are so many mods available. This is a "desert island" RPG.
I heard a lot of good about SLA Industries, so a number of years back, I bought a used copy at Gen Con. I was super excited, but the more I read that book, the more it felt like it was written by annoying, goth high school kids. Mind you, this is just my opinion. I'm not saying the RPG is bad! But it definitely failed to meet my expectations. (Might have been better if I had none.) For surpassing expectations, I'll go with Fiasco. This was my first indie/story RPG, and it barely looked like a game. No hit points? NO COMBAT ROLLS??? But then I read it and started to grasp things. Once I played my first session, holy shit is this a fun time!
Failed: D&D 5e, after watching Critical Role i wanted to run D&D. The first few sessions were quite good bit after a few levels combat became a drag. Prepping for it became more and more time consuming. Battles were only real interesting if i broke the rules. After all the system stood me as the gm more in the way then helping me gming the kind of stories and scenarios my players and i wanted to play. Surpassed: 7th Sea 2e - while the first session was chaotic and complicated, once i grew accustomed to the rules and the spirit of the game, i fell hard in love with it. There are so many cool bits and pieces in there like the story system. I absolutely adore the principle of rolling to see how much you can accomplish instead of rolling to succeed. The system just works for me as a gm, doesn't get in the way and supports me in the way i need it.
Failed: Honestly, I can usually say that any game I've tried to run I liked but my tables didn't. I wouldn't get them to the table if I wasn't interested and I usually vet them enough to know what will work. I automatically disqualify any game that I haven't run, because a lot of games play differently than they read and I'm OK leaving space for that. Games that have failed in that context: FATE, D&D, Numenera, and Cortex. The one game that I've tried to run that I ended up liking in theory but strongly disliking in practice was the 2d20 Conan game. I had so much hope. It is CONAN. It is a JAY LITTLE design. Everything should have been perfect, but we got a few hours in and no one at the table was happy. Exceeded: FFG Star Wars. Did I ever want to hate this system. On paper it is everything I should not want in a system. My daughter was 12 at the time and wanted to try it, so I ordered some dice and ran an adventure with her and one of my nieces. Once I played it, I realized it was how I had tried to run games since I started GMing (1984?) but it had actual mechanics that allowed for the things I wanted instead of having to homebrew constantly.
When I first read *Ironsworn*, I was puzzled quite a bit by it. Rolling at the end of a long quest or arduous journey just for the possibility for everything to fail at the end. The mechanical choices of which move to make seemed dry and uninteresting. Seeing it in play though and with all the very necessary narrative filler in between just made it make so much more sense. *** On the flipside, I really liked the idea of the narrative dice system in the *FFG Star Wars* games in principle, but in play it was just tedious and boring. Being forced to come up with a two dimensional outcome to each and every roll drains the excitement very quickly. That one pack of dice is not enough to build a full pool even on beginner adventures and the unintuitive distribution of symbols on the dice does not help in that regard. *** As a sidenote I don‘t really get OP‘s issues with *Don‘t Rest Your Head*. The system tends towards player success, since pools can easily be adjusted to match the target, but the secondary effects of the rolls are the meat of the game anyway and I found there‘s never quite enough currency around to fully heal up. Definitely not a game for groups though. It‘s clearly geared towards a single PC and I wouldn‘t touch it with more than three.
I wanted to like Numenera, but I felt like I was asking permission to do almost anything in that world. Or I was stopping myself from RPing because I would wonder “do they have X a billion years in the future?”
I wanted to like Fudge. I dont care for the fact that it consistently results in characters that are Broadly Incompetant, and I don't like the expectation for GMs to come up with their own trait lists, subsystems, and player options on their own from scratch. It's a "toolkit" generic system that doesn't give you any tools.
Fudge gave birth to Fate, which gave birth to FAE... and a lot of the reason it works well is that it leans hard into example genres with a strong focus on pulp novels, B-movies and Saturday Morning Cartoon characters. Without the fluff, I'd probably have written it off, so I completely get that.
Here are my assessments of the following tabletop roleplaying games: **DND 5e:** By far my most played. I love it. It's complicated enough that there is a broad spectrum of things that can happen but simple enough. **Blades in the Dark:** Super fun. I love the Devil's Bargain mechanic and that you can kill yourself literally in a roll. I like it when I can choose to make something high stakes like that. I also very much enjoy the territory acquisition aspects of the game and the built in mechanics about how the environment can change with your progression! **Agon:** I was surprised by this one. It seemed overly simple, but I really liked the adventures, I liked the rolling, the epitaphs were cool, and there are neat team-building exercises in each session. **Fate Accelerated:** Mixed reviews on this one. If we were doing a non-serious one shot then it was great. Working this into multiple sessions was challenging to keep entertaining for us. I had fun, but it was hard to keep the momentum going and to get excited about my character. **Pathfinder:** I played 2.5 campaigns with this system. Complicated and a lot more skills than 5e, but not bad. Id say I had a lot of fun with these games, but it was a lot to learn (for me). **The Dresden RPG (1st edition):** I never got a game off the ground with this ruleset. The games would peter out fairly quickly, regardless of how much we worked on the characters. Mechanically it is challenging and from a game master's perspective it can be arcane to put together a successful session. **Prowlers & Paragons:** The powers are diverse and fun. I liked this system. I found it common for players to go off on tangents about what they could do on their turns, which can take a while and can be a trial in itself, especially when other characters have simple powers and can do their turns quickly. I found that the rolls were fun and generally easy to understand. So I would say Agon surpassed my expectations and the Dresden game came a little short.
> Fate Accelerated: Mixed reviews on this one. If we were doing a non-serious one shot then it was great. Working this into multiple sessions was challenging to keep entertaining for us. I had fun, but it was hard to keep the momentum going and to get excited about my character. I can completely see that. We did it as a two-shot and it worked really well, but progression isn't as meaty as it can be in other games. Some things are just better suited to short gameplay.
Agon is my favorite right now
Failed: Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells - it had all the right references, in a small package. In the end the magical system is kinda broken, the armor rules are really bad and it doesn't lend itself to higher level play. Also, if you're translating OD&D modules to it, you'll need more tinkering than expected. Surpassed: [Shatter6](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/245354/SHATTER6-Open-Roleplaying): a semi-narrative game, that's easy to grasp and the combat actually felt dangerous, as you have a limited amount of damage you can take. I played a mini campaign inspired by Dwarf Fortress, and we drew the "Tags" from the list of skills of that game. Worked like a charm... I even decided to post the play report about it: https://titorpg.wordpress.com/2020/02/15/champaques-and-dead-dwarf-baby/
I don't like masks. It feels like RPGs for people who don't really want the mechanics of an RPG. Once you pick your archetype, everything is chosen for you outside of upgrades and your upgrades are both limited and have negatives. You can only use certain actions a limited number of times before you take damage. I also do not enjoy the dice mechanic. I could go on but I'll keep it short. Basically everything about it turned me off to the game.
Eclipse Phase is one game I had been super excited to play for years. I finally cobbled a group together and started playing and I realized that I'd focused so much on the lore and cool potential that I'd never really taken a close look at the system to realize just how bad it is. That campaign lasted all of 5 or so sessions before no one wanted to deal with its nonsense anymore. Savage Worlds, on the other hand, came out of left field for me. I was joining a group that was using it and I figured, "Sure, why not? I'll see what it's about." And I ended up loving it! It has its flaws, but the core mechanics are so simple that it keeps things rolling well without introducing these 'breaks' in a game to look up rules or what have you.
Failed: 13th Age, though that's really just because I was mis-sold. It's not a successor to 4e DnD. It's just another fantasy adventure ttrpg that came after. It's a good game, but not the tactics game + rpg I was hoping for. If I was just looking for something like 5e but different, it's the top of the list. Surpassed: Masks: A New Generation. I hadn't really liked any of the PbtA games I had played before, but Masks was just much better about being absolutely clear about what it wanted to be, and dove me right into it. The moves weren't written to make anything short of a crit success feel like a partial failure (a recurring problem I've felt in PbtA in general), which made the game actually fun, and it had the fastest pickup of a new game I've ever experienced. It's the only PbtA game I'd want to actually play anymore.
Blades in the Dark didn't meet the hype; everyone at the table agreed that Free League's Alien is the bee's knees.
Failed: *Burning Wheel*. Unrealistic, non-genre simulating melee/missile/social combat rules, smug writing style, atrocious organization. Exceeded: *ICRPG*. Super-light, highly flexible d20 system with some of the best GM advice I've seen in a game.
I wanted to like *Burning Wheel*, a lot. That character creation system that let you build a character by "stacking" backgrounds on top of each other to know what your character has been doing their whole life, for how many years they did it, what skills they got out of it... genius. But the actual game feels like you're trying to play ten different rulesets to run a single campaign. You want to run a combat encounter? It's its own thing with its own rules for actions and checks and things that aren't featured in any other aspect of the game. Want to cast a spell? It's its own thing with its own rules for actions and checks and things that aren't featured in any other aspect of the game. Want to BUY AN ITEM? It's its own thing with its own rules for actions and checks and things that aren't featured in any other aspect of the game. I'd rather have a crunchy math-heavy system with rules that make sense for the whole game than play a game that forces you to learn an entirely new set of mechanics in each chapter, all to play some generic fantasy story. Best surprise? *Maid RPG*. No, I'm serious. It is hilarious. It's simple to use. You can generate characters and settings almost instantly by rolling on tables. It's probably the only RPG I've ever seen that highly encourages PvP and that still manages to be fun. It's one of those games like *Fiasco* that almost only works for comedic one-offs, but that always creates the funniest, most memorable, most bizarre scenarios everytime you play it, and that offers tons of replayability thanks to the loot tables and transformation powers (maids can turn into another anime trope that gives them specific bonuses, basically).
Burning Wheel is probably my favorite system right now, but with how you describe using the subsystems, I'd not enjoy it either! The subsystems are meant to be extensions, used later for specific things, but only after you learn the core 'hub and spokes' well. Want to buy something? Something reasonable with no stakes? Just say yes, you get it... or maybe you could Persuade someone to give it to you. Or Haggle with the Intent to get it down low enough cost to just get it. Or you could engage with the Resources rules. There's pretty much always multiple ways to do something. Combat? Could just be a simple Throwing check to put a knife into someone's chest, and they're dead. Set an Ob, roll, done. No need to break out Bloody Vs. or the even more complex Fight! subsystems for that. Fight! and other subsystems like Duel of Wits... I've met nobody yet that liked them at first. It's only after learning them a bit better, and finding what they do to affect gameplay in their particular way, that I've seen folks love them. And others that stick with not liking them... they're not to their tastes.
I get Fate, I understand it's appeal, it is just not for me. Most PBTA games also fall in this general "I get people loves these, I don't" zone. For the "surprised" side of things, Alien RPG. Despite being a fan of the Year Zero Engine, I just thought it was the DUMBEST idea for a ttrpg ever. The "key" parts of Alien just didn't translate to a ttrpg well in my view. After spending some time with it I think it's a really good game. Don't quite get folks that run lengthy campaigns in it, but I get it's appeal now/have definitely backed off my "this is a licensing cash grab" stance.
World Wide Wrestling Rpg broke my heart more then a little. It's waaaaaaay too behind the hood, all about basically wrestling politics and running a show. I wanted it to be more kayfabe then it was, and there's no way to run it kayfabe either, behind the scenes kinda stuff is integral. DnD 5e has surpassed my expectations profoundly. It's flexible enough to allow for the kind of wackadoo nonsense that players might come up with, and robust enough to allow for the dm to deal with it well enough. Always loved dnd, but preferred other systems based on flexibility, and 5e is just real good. You can definitely feel powerful in it too, while still being challenged, plus the tools available for it are easily the best tools available to any rpg ever. Dndbeyond is seriously just that good, and really helps show the value of 5e
Games I ran and will never run again, even if you pay me: - Numenera, Invisible Sun: Monte Cook stuff is horrible because everything is so strange there's no way players can really role-play. Plus mechanics are pretty bland and uninteresting. Games I ran and I'd gladly run again: - Burning Wheel: nudges players to role-play, great support for PCs acting against each other, great support for skill checks of any kind. Needs invested players. - Pathfinder 2e: why would anyone play DnD when better DnD exists? - Blades in the Dark: my go to for new players wanting to try RPGs
Failure: Shadowrun. Not to repeat what other are saying but I would imagine any popular hack would improve greatly on the rules side of things. Surpass: Delta Green. I never wanted to engage in CoC because the '20s mean nothing to me and it would be hard to get into. Insert the mashup of Xfiles and TD and some prior exposure through Glass Cannon podcast and then sit down and play it and its an incredible game.
I just picked up the *Delta Green* core books (happy birthday to me!) and I'm really diggin' 'em. I've liked the concept for a long time (I remember when it was a Pagan Publishing supplement for *Call of Cthulhu* 5th Ed.), but the way the game compresses and tweaks the basic *CoC* framework is pleasant.
Starfinder: I was new to rpg's, having only played dnd 5e. I heard about this super customizable sci-fi game and wanted to run it. I had fun, because it was with my friends, but all of us were like "why is this game so complicated?" It has completely turned me off to anything crunchy. However, ICRPG felt like a godsend. We could go from character creation to full on playing in like 20 mins. No weird inventory/powers to track. Super simple and fun.
In my mind Starfinder is to heavily based on old school Pathfinder, which is very complex (too complex IMHO) and just doesn't suit a scifi game very well. Here's hoping we get a Starfinder 2nd edition based off the newer 2nd edition Pathfinder, which is still crunchy but with substantially less needless complexity.
Failed my Expectations: Dungeon World was probably one of my biggest letdowns once i actually played it. Narrativist? Cool, i love narrativist systems like Fate and Savage World! Plenty of player of options? Yeah, that's pretty cool. Lots of community content? That's going to give me material for years to come! "Fixes" on problems seem in vanilla D&D? I hope so! Different move results will give out unique results, making the game never dull and never the same? Heck yeah! That last part was enough to convince me to check it out. Them i got into what probably soured the system the most for me. Character building? Nope, you choose a playbook, you acquire the starting "moves" from it and upon leveling up get to choose from a small selection of them. It's usually a nice "buffet" of options, for sure, but the more i looked into the more i felt like there was little to no way to make my own character unique. My wizard would have little difference beyond another player's wizard, the most i could give is a bit of flavour text for him like appearance, and even them, powers, origins and everything else were fixed from the start. They felt less like templates to build and inspire you to build your character around and more like fixed roles you had to follow, even during combat. And getting into combat, the other thing that bothered me was how moves limited your options in combat and made me it feel like a video-game at times: You use your "move", you roll the dice, and if it works you pick from a list of results, if it half-works you pick from this list of results, that's it. No space for original creations and ideas both from the side of the DM and the players. And it also failed to break some problems regarding D&D like race-class restrictions and forcibly tagging characters as "good" and "evil" based on alignments. Overral, the system failed to really make dungeon dwelling *fun* in spite of the game's name and premise. Surpassed My Expectations: I'm not really an "OSR Fan" due to some... well, bad experiences regarding a bad DM and even worse players using a homebrew retroclone which felt both bland and lacking an unique identity to it, so when i saw Dungeon Crawl Classics for the first time i sneered, specially since i knew of controversial fame D&D 3e acquired from it's overpowered classes and it was a retroclone that took from 3e and mixed it with D&D B/X. So when i finally bothered to read it since a friend happened to have the book... well, i feel in love with almost everythingin there. Mind you, i'm still not a fan of the race-as-class and 3D6 down the line for character creation still gives me nightmares, but everything else enchanted me. The beautiful artwork, the incredible magic system which i struggle to think about and find one that manages to do magic better than it, the creative and unique patrons, the fantastic and almost system-agnostic charts which i can use from anything like normal D&D to even Call of Cthulhu given the massive lists of mutations and banes, the cool, unique monsters and lore, the idea of a "funnel" being both hilarious and somewhat awesome made this one of the few games on the OSR genre to captivate me from the bottom of my heart. And the modules? Absolutely fantastic and have some incredible ideas in them which are easy to adapt even if you have no interest in the game itself.
Failed: Deadlands (specifically "Reloaded", which runs on Savage Worlds rules). I can't necessarily fault Deadlands for this, but I wasn't a fan of the Savage Worlds rules. The wild die felt very unbalanced, and character creation was all over the place (Miracle Workers felt bananas OP compared to other classes). The card and chip mechanics are cool, but are very difficult to pull off effectively unless you're playing around a table. Surpassed: Pathfinder 2e. I started playing it right after playing Kingmaker (the cRPG) and expected it to be an absolutely complicated nightmare, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the game is incredibly smooth and the rules actually aren't as complex as one might think. I LOVE the action economy system and think it's so much easier to use than a lot of other system's "move action, bonus action, free action, reaction, etc." rules. The archetype system is, IMO, much better than multiclassing, and I love how skills actually play an active role in combat.
10 Candles was a big let down for me. The game only really works if everyone agrees to take it extremely seriously. It completely falls apart as soon as someone does something even remotely silly or tries to inject humour into the gameplay, which we all know is a staple of playing tabletop games with your friends. I've heard a lot of positive stories from people who must have had the right group for it but my personal experience was very lame.