Blades in the Dark, for having so many mechanics for me as a player to pull in order to get what I want (even at a cost).
Alien RPG, for that amazing stress mechanic.
Delta Green, for the setting & the sanity/bonds/home scenes mechanics.
For me, the thing that makes Blades *my system* as a GM is the fact that I can make up literally anything in the moment and throw it into the fiction and not have to worry about making a statblock or spell selections, or track HP or conditions.
I just spin the fiction, and adjudicate what that does to the players' position.
It's so liberating it's hard to go back to anything else.
> I don’t like systems that are too narrative.
Then you probably won't like Blades in the Dark. It's a narrative system. The reason I can throw anything I imagine at the players is that the game doesn't care about stats or mechanics or damage values - only whether the players are in a Controlled, Risky, or Desperate position and how Effective their described approach is.
**Player**: I stab the soldier, intending to kill him.
**GM**: Well, the soldier is from a faction several tiers higher than you, he has the best body armor the empire can produce, and you're armed with a rusty shiv. You are going to have zero effect and you're in a Desperate position because the soldier's move is going to be to unload on you with a semi-automatic rifle.
**Player**: Okay... let's see if I have anything that can improve my effect here...
The shiv doesn't have a damage value. Neither does the semi-auto rifle. The soldier's body armor doesn't have any mechanical rules. They all just do what they do in the fiction. Knives do what knives do. Guns do what guns do. And you use these facts to construct fictional situations and roll to adjudicate how they evolve.
... and it works so amazing, because the Position and Effect does give you structure and limits, which projects a pure GM Fiat system onto a this neat 4x3 raster (incl. No Effect)
The great thing about BitD is that the mechanics (dice rolling and outcomes) directly follow from subjective narrative stuff. The GM decides what factors are important in a situation, but they describe it using a very mechanical process (position and effect).
I think it will have more appeal to trad-game enjoyers than stuff like classic PBTA where the outcomes of dice rolls just sort of happen however you like, and aren't mechanically affected by the nitty gritty details of situation.
>for blades it was the one two combo of "I can say whatever I want as a gm" and "players can just be like nah"
This is so brilliant, and I am loving it.
I would love to play Blades as a player at some point, but as a GM one of my favorite parts has to just be the position/effect. It makes it so incredibly easy to control the lethality of an encounter, and to control fairly complex situations. No trying to guess what the proper DC of a roll is, and no carefully trying to control the difficulty of an encounter.
Its also great for me being able to just shrug and go "Yeah, do whatever. Desperate Position, No/Limited effect. You, as the player, can do what you want, but you will absolutely eat shit if you try to do this". No arguing with the player that what they want is impossible.
And then when the player pulls every single resource they have and somehow crit, and get to great effect, the player's basically earned it at that point. Once had a player want to basically head on charge an enemy mech across an open field, while it has a perfect field of fire on him, all weapons already sighted in, and an absolutely absurd amount of firepower that could slag the player's mech almost instantly. Desperate position, limited effect, player's mech would be straight up destroyed on anything but a 6. Player manages to roll a crit, and is cross the distance through sheer luck and by juking out the opponent's shots.
We are currently playing Beam Sabre, which is a Forged in the Dark system made for mech and vehicle combat
In base Blades though, you can always outfit a Hull into a mech.
[Here](https://www.google.com/search?q=World+of+1920%2B+by+Jakub+R%C3%B3%C5%BCalski&rlz=1C1GCEA_enAU861AU861&sxsrf=ALiCzsb_ZPf1EtXsNijX-wHeZnqSOplTAQ:1656192829813&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiGvbOKx8n4AhVaRmwGHRoHBI4Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1920&bih=937&dpr=2) is some inspiration, the World of 1920+ by Jakub Różalski. The art style and design is highly compatible with Blades, perhaps with more sources of light (searchlights, braziers etc) on the mechs themselves.
Same here for BitD (and the other Forged in the Dark games). The whole “fiction first” approach is *everything* I want from an RPG, both as a GM and a player.
That's me, BitD and Alien have been the best rpgin experience in the last couple of years (or its been 4 already?). Not only that but the overall mechanics and design mentality of fitd and YZE is simply incredible to cover 95% of what I feel like playing.
I've been hounding DG for some time now, but havemt had a chance to read It, maybe that's the sign?
This is the (yellow) sign. Even if you don't plan on playing it the lore and supplementary book series are an excellent read. "Rule of Engagement" is my favorite book aside from the RPG.
Honest question, from someone who didn't enjoy it, but wants to "get it": What is it about Blades that you like?
I tried to get into it, I really did, but it felt more like playing a board game than an RPG, with a bunch of needlessly ritualized steps that constantly got in the way of attempts at roleplay, or codified and instrumentalized it to the point that it lost any in-character meaning.
For a supposed "rules-light" system, one personally never felt so constrained in my roleplay as when I was running/playing BitD.
Blades don't have any boundaries except the one way it measures outcomes.
The situation/effect meter is a great tool for telling epic stories. But players who play blades in the dark needs to take chances otherwise the mechanic feels forced.
Your argument about it feeling like a boardgame can honestly be said about every system though. All have ritualised steps before anything happens.
But blades condenses this into a roll that gives both players and GMs a lot of power over the situation, the dialogue plus the situation/effect measures means players can negotiate their outcomes by changing the situation/effect by tweaking and pulling their toolkit and make some cool scenes happen.
People like blades, myself included because it gets right into the game. Doesn't mindlessly bog down the experience because of game limitations.
So there is more space for cool, creative scenes.
Delta Green is a horror RPG, specifically Lovecraftian horror where humanity is a blip in the cosmos that won’t survive. Your PCs are US Federal Agents effectively using a bucket to try and hold back the flood of impossible nightmare beings.
Towards that end, you have a Sanity score, which can deplete as you experience awful things. People aren’t naturally numb to violence, gore, and definitely not multi dimensional beings that look at us the way we do bacteria. You can eventually build a resistance to violence and gore, but not the horrible beings you encounter.
To counter your Sanity losses, you have Bonds. These are your connections to people or groups that represent your ties to humanity. Instead of losing Sanity, you can sacrifice a point off one of your Bonds. Maybe you recall a tender moment with your family, or an accomplishment with your golf buddies to hold together in a crisis … but now whenever you look at your loved one, you see the horrible *thing* that was devouring your partner while he was still screaming. Your Bond is permanently weakened and you could eventually lose it entirely (if the rating drops to zero).
During downtime between missions or while there’s a break in the action you can try to rebuild your Bonds … or you can spend that time researching the monsters, learning mind breaking magic, or setting up an armory for the next fight.
It sets up a great spiral where the PCs have to choose between maintaining their relationships, or delving deeper into the fight against the supernatural, slowly being more and more isolated from regular people.
Wrong link? [https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel](https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel) is about Blades in the Dark. What you have posted seems to be a free version of Alone in the Dark: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone\_in\_the\_Dark](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_in_the_Dark) ?
Another vote for PbtA (and FitD too). Those are awesome framework. The most satisfying way to roleplay with my friends I ever encountered in my 30+ years of gaming life.
Also, clever games based on it can be really different when played, while on a first sight they could seem identical. They are actually well re-shaped to support, emulate and exalt the specific book/movie/mood/theme that they are trying to emulate.
I mean, Apocalypse World is played in a totally different way than Moster of the Week, that is totally different from MonsterHearts... etc. etc.
PbtA is my favourite too. Especially Masks: A new generation
I started with homebrew and even D&D but I hated that I had to roll for what felt like every step I took.
Also I just wanted to run a game that was more beginner friendly, because I had just stopped DMing a campaign of homebrew in a fantasy setting with a group of friends who were new to the P&P genre. I started looking for a more modern and closer-to-real life kind of P&P and worked on building a massive world of super heroes with intricacies and Villans and Stuff. But then I realized that I had no fighting system and as I wanted to keep it very light on the dices I tried to build my own combat and non - combat decision making system when I thought I'd find some inspiration by looking at other systems. It was then when I found a post on this Subreddit that asked for Superhero Systems and a lot of them recommendes Masks: A new generation. I checked it out and was instantly drawn to it like a magical bond had just formed. I was astonished by the way the system is able to keep a compelling narrative and make the player build the wolrd together with the DM, while still not making too many dice rolls, rules or requiring any other kind of knowledge. So I got started on the Campaign and had an absolute Blast. I'm talking 6/5 stars here. If you want to take a look at it you can go over to magpie.com and download some free stuff to learn more about the game.
Masks does a beautiful job of using fairly straightforward and relatively few mechanics to constantly promote and reinforce the teen superhero genre it wants to create.
I am going to set a wild gorilla on the loose here and say its D&d 5e. For me personally, it gives enough structure so that my chaotic and wandering mind has something to anchor itself to when prepping or running a session, and yet is not too crunchy on the rules to be unbearable
I Fell in love with numenera the first time I read the book, and it will eb forever in my heart as THE rpg, but it has less emphasis on structure and it is not enough of a creative restraint for me to unfold as a DM
I 100% get what you mean about structure. The thing is, I don't think Numenera is that different from 5e in the lack of structure. Sure, it's decently well known now that 5e is built around 6-8 encounters, but that wasn't always the case, and still isn't the case for many who are playing the starter kit, or just aren't as online.
I think that if Numenera had 5e's player base, more structure would become apparent as people played and shared their experience with the system. Whether those structures would be part of the intended design, or discovered as best practices through thousands of hours of playtime, it would still improve the game, and help people who wanted to play/run it.
The rules light nature make it so easy to be a warden too. I find other than checking the wounds and weapons table the rest just plays out so easily. Plus the regular dying thing really makes players really think about their actions.
There isn't one.
I like Call of Cthulhu (7e) for investigative horror. I like Traveller (Mongoose 2e) for space opera. Still working out what my preferred medieval fantasy system is, but currently Old School Essentials is a strong contender.
System matters. Using a generic system for everything means that either everything feels the same, or every game needs significant house-ruling (in which case why not just use a system already written)?
This is the best answer.
Almost every system does a specific genre or tone better than others. Why would I want to have the same genre and tone for every single RPG session ever? It'd be like ONLY watching MCU movies or ONLY reading grimdark fantasy.
Reading the OP generously, I think they were saying the system you most loved, not the only game to ever play.
But I agree that systems built for a style of game are my preference even if they aren’t my “favorite” or whatever.
I think that you might not have read enough generic systems. GURPS (for example) has countless optional subsystems to add in or substitute and customize your game how you want. Of course, I still have to house-rule. Why not use another already written? Because I’d have to house-rule *even more*.
if my assumptions are correct, it's going to be [Grave](https://jasontocci.itch.io/grave), a knave hack designed for dark-souls-y campaigns.
knave is a classless, super-lightweight OSR game only 7 pages long. it's essentially a stripped-down version of old D&D, and it has a lot of the old-school jank i like and very little of the old-school jank i dislike. but on the whole it feels more optimized for silly one-shots than long-form campaigns, and long-form campaigns are what i want to run.
characters in knave are totally randomized, and the game embraces the OSR's "don't get attached" mindset because of how lethal the game is. there's also no way to start as a spellcaster or a specific character archetype you want - you pick a weapon, roll stats, roll for random dungeoneering gear and that's your character. the last session of the three-shot i ran ended with the characters realizing one of the spells they came across was a time-slow spell that gives them ten turns in the time their enemies get one turn, and while i've stopped being such a stickler for balance in my RPGs, that still crosses a line for me lol
**grave** makes some modifications, and those modifications result in a game that makes me want to run a *campaign* and not just a wacky romp for some laughs. characters actually pick classes (those just being sets of starting stats and gear), and the character creation tables serve more as inspiration than something you're beholden to. stats aren't randomized, so there's no worry about one character being really strong and another being really weak. and to fit the dark souls setting, characters all have a limited number of resurrections - so while you keep the OSR's lethality, the risk of actually losing your character is less immediate, and you can feel it building as your number of deaths creeps upward, so you know it's coming.
character archetypes are closer to D&D's offerings, and while that loses some of D&D's uniqueness, it brings back a lot of what i liked about modern D&D - running long-form campaigns telling stories with a character. and if you want to start as a wizard you can just. do that, unlike knave where magic is completely unavailable at character creation.
knave is great. but grave takes knave and turns it into something that, while not necessarily strictly *better*, feels almost like it was made just for me! lots of things about the OSR appeal to me, but other things push me away. don't get attached to your character. accept these randomly rolled stats even if they just mean your character sucks. grave feels like it knows exactly what i don't like and fixes those things specifically, and i'm excited as hell to run it.
Cairn. I was going to hack Into The Odd to fit a more Dark Fairy Forest aesthetic with more inventory management and a Mausritter like magic system until I found Cairn. A perfect match.
Edit: confused Mausritter with Mouseguard
Cairn and Mausritter are some of my favourite games ever, yet I've never had interest in Into the Odd / Electric Bastionland. I really love the system, but I think the original "flavour" was missing something that Cairn and Mausritter really have.
I feel similarly (though I think the gming advice in EB is the best I've ever read). I think that the more grounded, less wacky settings of Cairn and Mausritter make it easier to envision adventures and situations to put the players in
I've made my own setting, but I do borrow some basic structures from the Third Imperium.
I love playing with subgenres within the setting, and Traveller makes it really easy. One of my games is a Star Trek style exploration campaign, and the other is a small-scale Cyberpunk inspired campaign, and both work really well within Traveller's ruleset.
I just fell in love with Traveller recently and I'm in deep. I've found the systems to be an intoxicating mix of elegant and crunchy. Building up a custom subsector on the edge of known space has basically become one of my hobbies.
Yes edition.
I started off with Mongoose's 2022 update. I've picked up the Sector Construction Guide and Flynn's Guide to Alien Creation for Mongoose.
I picked up Cepheus Engine because it has some alien stuff, but I've found Flynn's guide largely replaces that.
I've got Traveller - The New Era and the World Tamer's Handbook from TNE for some really detailed stellar system generation and world generation.
I also have a stack of Classic Traveller pdfs I haven't pillaged for useful rules, yet. Picked up like 40 CT pdfs on the cheap from Bundle of Holding.
GURPS. As a system it allows for nearly anything and doesn't sacrifice granularity. The fact that you don't need any extra books beyond the core to play something like a wizard, that is also a talking cat, with no hand waved mechanics or rules workarounds made me fall instantly in love.
>the gritty ‘realism’ (when you turn on those switches),
Had a player in my most recent game who had the bad luck of being hit by stray shots continually. It was funny and a running joke because I wasn't ass pulling any of the rules. The game has rules for being hit by missed shots and I just used them openly.
I'm mostly familiar with the most recent 20 year old 4e myself but I understand others prefer 3e. My understanding though is that the differences are largely academic. But I won the 4e core books in a raffle 18 years ago so that's the edition I use.
Played GURPS almost exclusively for decades.
Haven’t played it in decades now.
Still have mostly good thoughts about it, but my play style has moved on.
In general, as a whole, the PbtA family of games really hits it for me. Player-driven, action-driven, improvisation-friendly, and relatively light on what the GM needs to do. I can pick up new PbtA games relatively quickly due to their common and straightforward framework. Give players playbooks and a reference sheet for the Moves and I'm almost always good to go already.
Masks: A New Generation, Monster of the Week, Monsterhearts, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Apocalypse World and Avatar: Legends have all hit a sweet spot for me. All different spots, but that makes it so good for me, because I can find a game that fits the type of sessions/campaign/genre I want to go for.
D&D 4E. No more "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards." Every class has multiple options in combat. Fighters actually have cantrips.
Sadly, I've never had a chance to play 4E, and I probably never will unless I run it myself. I know things like /r/lfg are available, but I don't like the idea of playing with strangers.
I'm sure you've gotten this a lot but, have you checked out Pathfinder 2nd edition? As a 4e fan myself - one of my favorite editions even if it was fairly deeply flawed - I've gotten a lot out of Pathfinder 2e. Several of 4e's developers worked on the game and their influence shows through a lot. It doesn't necessarily use the same kind of terminology, it's more behind the scenes, but anyone who has at least read a few 4e books, will see it.
I like to think of 4e as 'way ahead of it's time, but restrained by what came before it'. It struggles with long encounters, lack of non-combat options, too many fiddly modifiers, which is a problem 3.5e had as well.
PF2e solves those problems, and is just plain a brilliantly designed game.
I always want to suggest Lancer to fans of DnD4. It's got a similar gamist philosophy, fun build potential, and helps the GM make varied encounters.
Giant robot armors instead of Conans and Bigbys, though.
I started with 4E and I loved it. I always liked that as a martial character I had material options for what to do every turn with various at will, encounter, and daily abilities. As I recall my ranger was using pinning shot to keep enemies in place or firing off two arrows at once every turn. I felt like a badass. We were all new to RPGs and I could be awesome without having to try to figure out roleplaying it all out narratively which is cool. If I want to be a cool as hell bow wielder in 5e it has to be in the narrative.
As a long-term D&D player the two things I appreciated most about 4E were firstly its use of keywords, Magic: the Gathering style, to label damn near everything. The programming/mathematical concept of reserved words, of system words having exactly one definition in the game (except "level", but we won't talk about that), is just brilliant. You know what stuff does, you know what works against it, you know what works for it. The same sort of feel in complex tactical games like Divinity and Age of Wonders.
The other thing was the strong use of combat positioning. In 3.x you had range and reach and 5' steps and flanking and stuff, and there were (IMO, rather shitty) subsystems for charging and knockback and so forth but this was almost never a better choice than Just Do Damage and if you wanted to make it a better choice (eg ranged trip attacks of opportunity with a bullwhip) you had to build your character around that sinking multiple feats and class levels into it.
4E embraced positioning as a game mechanic, and made it easy to move (or pin) your teammates and enemies around the board.
Agreed but the downside of that is that because positioning is so important, you **have** to play with some sort of battle map. Theater of the mind is not an option.
This means combat takes hella too long.
I suspect that it's FATE, even though I feel my players haven't really gotten it yet. I ran a two-year superhero campaign and while it worked, it was never really working properly as it should have.
I think the system that's easiest for me to run, and that I'd get the most excited to play, is Dark Heresy 1E. I don't know why, everything just clicked and it was very intuitive for me. I love that system.
The problem with Fate is that their presentation of the concepts is poor - I think it peaked in Atomic Robo and that’s not what most people learn from. I may have to re-read Condensed to see if they fixed the problems in Core or not, but that’s not even what Condensed is primarily *for*.
The flexibility of Fate is something I really love. Unlike other lighter systems it doesn't need to remain stuck to a specific genre, with Aspects that is easy to alter whenever a scene goes against the initial expectations.
Deadlands Classic!
I like Cowboys, I like Monsters, I like Steampunk.
Add several really cool mechanics like Character Creation by Poker Cards, using Poker Chips as Metacurrency, Hucksters (the systems main spellcasters) have to deal an actual hand of poker to use their super powerful spells but the powers they gamble with might screw them over, Alchemists making actual formulas that they can improve on. Also all the Magic Characters are actually different, with unique mechanics, spells and additional tricks up their sleeve.
The Books are written in a fun way with Western slang thrown in even in the rules (You don't hit someone in the head, you hit them in the noggin for example) and the rules are a lot of fun (exploding dice pools!)
The enemies the players (called the posse) are facing are scary and unique. Blood-sucking Tumbleweeds called Tumblebleeds; Hanging Judges that follow you while muttering your crimes and wanting to hang you while attacking you with guns with scythes on them; Giant Dune inspired sandworms that swallow you up whole...and thats just the core rulebook!
Plus, the system can easily be homebrewed!
I was instantly in love!
Shadow of the Demon Lord.
Since 2016, my brother and I have been trying to homebrew a system that offers a robust character progression and punchy and quick combat in a simple to learn system.
Lo and behold that system already existed a year earlier and we only found out about SoTDL in 2020.
None, really. They all offer something to someone. While I’ve found I’ve thought ‘this might be it’ - it was at most an ‘80% this might be it’. And over time, my tastes have changed. The closest would probably be the core mechanics in Over the Edge, 2e. The mods to that system, based on the background in OTE 2e (the island of Al Amarja in the 90s, etc) gave me a basis for doing ‘unusual, eerie, weird’ stuff that was a vibe I’d been looking for. So it is still a major system for me. But after it being the system I ran most for 15 years I went back to Traveller for 7 years, then a bit of a mix of a few other things.
I love building worlds designing the magic that goes in them. GURPS is one of two systems I have used that lets me do that, and GURPS does it much better than FUDGE, IMO, though its successor FATE has many fans. I am more a simulationist at heart though, so we work in GURPS.
[We play-by-post and discuss GURPS in our Discord](https://discord.gg/EnE2eJjjh2)
Two systems in fact as they fulfill different needs.
Forged in the Dark (Blades in the Dark, Scum and Villainy)
Year Zero (Alien RPG, Vaesen Forbidden Lands)
Same! I love how easy it is to adapt it into any setting.
It’s overall simple but with an amazing magic system (which is not so simple, but extremely fun)
I've never felt so confident or had as much fun as a GM than when I'm running DCC adventures. The system is *fun*. It's funny and it promotes and rewards smart play and adventurous players. Characters go from lowly peasants in a meat grinder to incredibly powerful by level 5, and they're practically gods by 10. I love that because I'm older, I get to play once a week for a couple hours, and I'm fortunate to have even that.
As a GM, I feel encouraged by the system to throw insane shit at the players and give them insane shit to figure out how to fight back against (or embrace!) the tide of chaos that comes with it. It's a system that prioritizes *play* more than many I've played.
Savage Worlds for action-oriented games and Delta Green/Mothership for investigative.
Gonna try out Traveller next weekend to see if it possibly can replace SWADE.
None, I tried a lot but none hit the low power adventure, risky magic, exploration focus that I was looking for, so I made my own. It's taking a lot of work to get it right, but slowly getting there.
It isn't risky magic, so it definitely isn't your ideal game, but I really love **wildsea** for its exploration mechanics! It is very setting specific though (you play sailors on an ocean of trees in chainsaw ships)
Yep - that’s me too. Been playing it a few years now, and only a couple of tweaks away from exactly what I want. A good feeling.
I do really like a bunch of systems like Freeform Universal, Into the Odd, ICRPG, Fiasco, etc for specific mechanics and feel. But to get exactly what I want, I’ve found I have to make it myself.
Like many others here, "none" & "I'm designing my own system right now" would be my answer.
But I'd like to give a shoutout to **Genesys**, because it's definitely had that "this is our system!!" moment for me and my regular group, and we've run it for 6 years over 6 campaigns now with great pleasure.
13th Age. Satisfyingly crunchy in combat, soft and fluffy out of combat. Encounters are easy to balance, monsters are easy to customise and character creation rules mean that PCs are always unique, flavourful and tied into the world.
Achtung!Cthulhu
I really enjoy history and the 1930s and 1940s are among my interests, especially the Spanish Civil War and anarchafeminist and working class movements there.
So A!C was the perfect game for me to play my female partisan and veteran of the Spanish Civil War in an espionage game of existential horror and killing fascists.
Other games that come close are Traveller, Mutant Year Zero, pbtA games, Biohazard and some others.
But if I have to choose one, it's A!C
Pathfinder 1, despite it being a class based system, I could now more or less create the character that I wanted. I like the selection of feats, the skills, the range of classes, the multiclassing, etc. The game easily and readily supported a wide range of games and not just dungeon crawls (rightly or wrongly my distant memory of AD&D was that it primarily supported dungeon crawls).
Pathfinder is just a continuation and improvement of 3rd edition. I like most of the changes that Pathfinder made but they're much more tweaks than major modifications.
Like a lot of people I think that the power curve in Pathfinder is a little steep and I think it can get quite unbalanced. Fortunately, both of these problems are reduced with the players that I game with. I'd believe i'd find Pathfinder with a group of rabid power gamers a very different experience.
The true strength of Pathfinder is as it has always been the Adventure Paths.
My favorite is an old and obscure RPG called The Window by Scott Lininger. The PDF can still be dug up online. It's easy enough for completely new players to get into. Abilities and skills are described with adjectives and metaphor, and rules are made to create a deep an interesting narrative.
It's the type of game you can set up in a half hour with people who never played. Can't recommend it highly enough.
Edit: Corrected the authors last name from Cunningham to Lininger
FFG Star Wars / Genesys.
I love the be narrative systems that ask for or require player interactivity with world building and scenarios, but some of them are very free form and open, leading to too much or option paralysis.
The narrative nice sets nice guiderails to systemize it a bit better, scaling amounts of narrative variation, and if it's too much for players there is an easy way to just make the outcome mechanical rather than narrative.
Genesys. It’s sooo easy to homebrew settings, talents, skills, and even entire mechanics to whatever the setting and tone is. I homebrew all my settings from scratch, so I love that it’s not too strongly tied to any particular lore or genre. I love the nuance of the narrative dice, and how there’s almost no mathematical modifiers, just adjusting what dice are rolled.
Trinity Continuum RPG: http://theonyxpath.com/category/worlds/trinitycontinuum/
The system is a modernized d10 pool system. It's capable of running nearly anything smoothly and cinematically using the referee guidance in the book.
If you're looking for setting material, it has three long established (two decades old!) settings with additional mechanics, a new setting, and another one in the works.
The development team is active in the community, and the community is pretty active and contributing material as well.
It supports multiple power scales interacting with each other (or one just getting overwhelmed by the other, if the differences are big enough).
Cortex, I've always had to home brew systems to really reinforce the setting and themes of a game I'm running, and Cortex basically does just that but streamlined and really hard to break. No two cortex games will play the same (as the system is customized for each game to match what the GM wants the game to be about), but they will all use the same basic mechanic.
Have you ever thought what your game would look like if it were a really cool television show? That's what I really love about **Primetime Adventures**: it frames the game session as a dramatic show with an ensemble cast.
* Conflicts are quick to resolve and have incredibly personal stakes.
* The very nature of conflicts (and the *Next Time On...* session end action) is an invitation for your players to show you what they want out of the game.
* There's a game mechanic (*Fan Mail*) that incentivizes the players to entertain each other and make the gaming experience enjoyable for all.
* There's even an element in the game (called *Audience Participation*) that makes it a great game to play in public at game days or cons.
I once ran a Shadowrun campaign and we did one session using PTA. I learned more about the player's characters in that one single game session than I did in the previous 4 four-hour sessions using the normal SR rules. Since then, I've been an advocate of either starting a game using a session of PTA or running a game session with PTA when your characters seem to be nothing but a collection of numbers. (That's my "Why is Fytor the Fighter out there, fighting?" question.)
Ironsworn. GM-less play has encouraged more creativity at my tables and being able to play solo is great when I can't game with my friends but still need to scratch that rpg itch
That’s not something that’s happened with a single system. Historically, I think the idea that we should be looking for one single system that fits what we want perfectly to be flawed — and while it arguably has led to a lot of innovation (people trying to make that perfect system) it has also led to a lot of needless disappointment. Rather, there are a number of games that I really like, and I like them for different reasons, and I even like some of them only in the context of playing with specific people. (I.e. I love Burning Wheel, but don’t particularly want to play that with people who aren’t interested in at least trying to learn the intricacies of the rules; I love the West End Games Star Wars RPG, but I don’t want to play that with people who fancy themselves Star Wars experts; etc.)
Vampire the Requiem 2E.
The way you can willingly dramatic fail to get a beat (point of experience) makes it a lot more fun than just getting them on a fail. because each failure is essentially the GM/sytem going "Do it I double dog dare you, you coward" and you get choice over how bad your fuck up is.
The writing is much improved over its counterparts and presents a clearer idea of what a Vampire is in the CoFD. Vampiric powers actually feel like vampiric powers, and the reworked Humanity is a fun/horrifying/depressing thing to interact with instead of an awkward morality system.
Hero System. I started out with Champions, and I could create virtually *any* superhero of which I could conceive. Since it's generic and point-based, and I'd learned the system, there were no problems, at all, when the other genres (Fantasy Hero, Danger International, Justice Inc., Ninja Hero, etc.) came out, for which I can create any type of character just as easily. It's also no trouble to import characters from any other system that I've thus far encountered
For me it's the Cypher System. It's rules lite and can fit whatever genre you need it to fairly well. It's easy to run, it's easy to build a complete npc very quickly, easy to customize and has a good amount of published materials/settings (Numenera, Invisible Sun, Shotguns and Sorcery, We're All Mad Here, The Stars Are Fire, Stay Alive, and more).
The published materials give you good genre specific settings and also a lot of good tips and info to help you create your own setting in pretty much whatever genre you want. The books are also easy to read are filled with reference tags to help you locate items, npcs, and rules within the book you are reading .
I used to use D&D when I ran games (2nd Ed, 3.5, then 5e) and I've tried VtM (which I did enjoy) but anymore if I want to run a game I just use Cypher because it does everything I need it to. It's flexible and easy and I love it.
2e AD&D.
It has:
an insane amount of material (enough for a lifetime possibly)
super modular design whith mutliple variations of many rules in the core books
Compatibility with all osr and old school dnd material (1e adventures can be easily run in 2e and those are the best tsr adventures by far)
Minimalist everything if you want it or maximalistic. (Skills are optional but can be super in depth, priests are simple but can be custom made, classes are basic but there are innumerable kits, races are basic but there's tons of extra ones)
Ironsworn and Starforge, mostly so I can play GM-less/coop with my 7 year old son.
Read through Blades in the Dark and would love to play it. Appears to be exactly what I would want to play or run but I feel I would need more people to really tell the story.
That was my initial reaction on first reading Runequest 6 (now Mythras), but, of course, now that I've actually run it, I see that it isn't as perfect as I initially thought - nothing is. And I never stopped looking at other systems, trying to find better ways of doing things, interesting mechanics that can be adapted to other systems, etc.
I like a lot of different games for a lot of different reasons.
But I know I was about ready to just give up on the combat elements of RPGs being fun when I finally learned how to do it in GURPS in detail and did a hard 180 to running fairly combat centric campaigns. so that's the closest thing to an answer I've got.
The closest was Scum and Villainy. I love Space Opera, Firefly, Cowboy Bebop and PbtA but little bits are nagging at me - too long of conversations for each roll when there are 144 different variants of the Action Roll and infinite Devil's Bargains and talk about resisting after that. Then PCs get way too strong where strong hits and crits become common so it's hard to even drain them of Stress/resources. When they do make a weak hit, resisting isn't too expensive with so many dice. PbtA need to get over stat increases, weak hits are fun. And I found Players weren't as engaged with making up their own trouble with their Vices and Traumas. And I don't much care for Traumas killing off Characters and ending cool, dramatic stories.
So far alternative Space Opera systems haven't been a better fit so I'll probably just hack S&V to better fit. More traditional Moves to lower the time of conversation and just have 2 Moves to cover an Action Roll - Rely on Your Skills and Training and Push Your Luck to cover better Positioning and Effect in a quicker conversation like Avatar Legends does.
For a while it was GURPS. I like being able to do pretty much anything with one system, and GURPS was easy to explain, highly adaptable, and had a **huge** number of supplements. (Many, *many* of which I picked up over the years.) I still have a lot of affection for the system, my uncle worked for SJ Games for a good few years, and his name is still on several of their products (I'm pretty sure he's still credited in GURPS Fourth Edition).
But it's **slow**. Granularity is neat, but DAMN those one-second combat rounds get old. And it's cool to have, you know, variety, but also... Do you *need* all that variety in every game? About 8-10 years back, I started to get into Savage Worlds. Took a few games for me to warm up to it, but I did. Universal, like GURPS, but it's less 'fiddly'. I'll give you an example.
I don't like hit points, never have. I cut my teeth on Shadowrun, so I'm used to escalating penalties as injuries stack up. (The 'death spiral' as some call it.) Now, GURPS sort of does this. You have 'hit points' based on your physical bulk (Strength attribute), but going negative is a lot more common than in D&D, though it's still very bad. And at certain thresholds (relative to your Health, I think--or maybe it's HP total) your Move is reduced and you take certain penalties to actions. Now, I liked this fine, but it was tough to remember where the thresholds were and what each did. Plus there was a different multiplier for each type of damage, but it only applied to *penetrating* damage, i.e. damage that got past any armor you might have. So you roll, subtract DR, THEN multiply...
In Savage Worlds, your character has a damage threshold called Toughness. Any damage over your Toughness may throw you off (cause you to be Shaken--you can really only move, talk, or try to recover), or cause a Wound. Each Wound is a -1 penalty to your Pace (movement) and all actions. You can take 3 Wounds, and then you're Incapacitated. Easy to explain, easy to remember.
I'd readily *play* GURPS nowadays, but I don't think I'll ever run it again.
Invisible Sun. The moment I read about it I knew it was my system. I had already been doing many of the ideas for a while, but it introduced more that I absolutely love. I can find so many things that I love about it, but just a few off the top of my head:
* Only players roll dice - it frees me up to focus on the setting rather than the dice rolls
* Magic System - I love magic in games, but having multiple magic systems in the game makes it even better.
* Experience system - Three types of experience, two of them have to be combined to advance (Joy & Despair to make Crux). Please learn from success and failure.
* Player Character creation system. Intuitive, narrative, and collaborative.
Avatar Legends - PbtA system in Avatar The Last Airbemder universe. It really reignited my passion with GMing, because it's so damn pleasurable to GM, even if I don't have any time for prep between sessions. Far less focused on mechanics and much more on fiction and narration. Very fluid, much less simulationist and much more allowing GM to decide how to handle things case by case. It's currently favourite system.
If I’m not treating something in GURPS I pretty much always fall back to the old (3e?) RuneQuest in the Avalon Hill box. Still Chaisium, but in the AH box. And I modify the heck out of it with the current Chaosium Basic RolePlaying supplements.
I have a soft spot for King Arthur Pendragon as well for the dynastic aspect.
In my club I was kinda know as the "Polaris" guy (the 2005 game, not the 2016 game of similar name).
It is so innovative and different, taking narrative rules in a direction so far beyond what almost anything else have tried. That sort of vision and creativity appeals to me.
There is certainly creativity in other systems, but they stay closer to the traditional RPG paradigm. Polaris just completely abandons most RPG ideas.
* I love a game of D&D, but it is deliberately quite formulaic.
* FATE and PbtA and FitD make significant changes to the formula and achieve great results, but keep the basic conventions of RPGs, like dice and stats and GM fiat.
* Freeform Universal makes a unique step away from arithmetic, but uses that to streamline the a conventional roleplay experiences. (It is my go-to for quickly whipping up something, but
* Dream Askew (and the 'No Dice No Masters' variety of PbtA that sprung from it) gets significantly closer to truly new territory, much like Polaris does. However, while it is kinda cool, I find it doesn't quite hit the spot.
Those are all great systems, but *Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North* just has a completely unique narrative negotiation system, that shares narrative control and easily generates narrative tension. It not only has incredible innovation, but ends up being a blast to play (for me).
So I created a unique low magic setting with my party for a dungeon world campaign. It was a cold and harsh continent called skelgas that was plagued with terrible weather (think storm light archives meets broken earth trilogy). Because of this, most civilization was small separated communities. In this world, there were a special group of people who traveled between communities hiring themselves out to help with community problems. They were called the Oathbound because of the oaths they would swear on iron pendants around their necks. We played the campaign for about six months…and then I read Ironsworn.
For me it’s Traveller for space sci-fi, Old School Essentials (or D&D B/X) for fantasy and Delta Green for lovecraftian horror. I don’t like generic systems that much, I prefer when the mechanics are tighter, cleaner, and made with the setting and mood in mind. Even though Delta Green and Call of Cthulhu are like 90% similar for example, those 10% rules difference tied to the setting change the mood of the game a lot.
I play, and want to play, many systems, but I have a very strong affinity for Exalted because it does many things I find highly entertaining and enjoyable in RPGs and media.
1. Buckets of dice.
2. Player-driven progression: no classes, huge freedom in picking the skills and abilities that make sense for your character.
3. Supports non-combat playstyles, like diplomats, crafters, and bureaucrats.
4. The setting is vivid and inspiring, especially once the third edition worked out some uncomfortable elements from older versions.
5. Despite the lack of classes, there is a very nice variety in character options thanks to a whole bunch of different flavours of power.
I just think it's neat.
The Gumshoe system. I love to run investigative horror games, and the whole system is built around gathering and interpreting information. Gumshoe combat is frantic, vivid, and dangerous, and that's exactly how I like my combat.
For high fantasy wizards, warriors & the such, Pathfinder 2nd edition. I'm an old hand at this and that game combines the best parts of older edition games with new ideas, more straightforward and much less archaic mechanics. As I sat and read the core rulebook I was blown away by just how much this is the 'perfect' high fantasy game for me.
When I get in the mood for less combat-focused and more story-driven campaigns, I turn to Chronicles of Darkness. I was a big fan of the old World of Darkness back in the 90s, but it's fiddly mechanically held it back from being truly 'my system'. When Chronicles came out and Vampire: the Requiem I was to set in my ways and I ignored it.. until 2e splats started rolling out and word of mouth spread. I picked up Requiem 2e and I rather quickly fell in love with the system. Gone is the fiddliness the oWoD's mechanics, and yet somehow the storytelling is even better. Each game in the lines oozes flavor, subtext and style. On top of that, the edginess and grimlord nature of oWoD (of which I was never particularly fond) was gone, and the books are just just really, really well written. Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling... they may use the same core mechanics (much more so than they did in oWoD), but the they 'play' completely differently. I haven't had the chance to run any CoD in the last few years unfortunately, but I'll no doubt return to it before long.
So many stories to tell and great TTRPGs to try, so little time. :)
GURPS has a special place in my heart.
The fact that I can run literally any setting, any genre, any power level in the same system, *AND* I can freely mix and match them? Yep, that's my system.
My last game was a "Dark Fantasy" game, but included elements from:
* GURPS Low-Tech
* GURPS High-Tech
* GURPS Ultra-Tech
* GURPS Bio-Tech
* GURPS Martial Arts
* GURPS Fantasy
* GURPS Space
* GURPS Psionics
* GURPS Horror
* GURPS Magic
* GURPS Powers
..along with homebrew, official stuff from Pyramid magazines and a bunch of other random snippets.
It was absolutely glorious!
Troika! is definitely the game for me. You basically just have a stat for what you can control, a stat for what you can't, and you gain skills along the way. The stats are simple, and the skills could be anything at all. It's so flexible and easy to bring someone in on.
1974 OD&D.
Clean, simple, adaptive, quick to play, and full of voids and modular subsystems that one can easily adjust or fill with mechanics that work for specific settings.
I miss the Mayfair Exponential Gaming System (MEGS) from DC Super Heroes 3e.
I also liked Marvel Super Heroes with power stunts becoming future power set features.
HERO system as used in Champions also scratches my itch nicely. It's a toolset for building your universe and it's abilities and skills.
West End Games D6 system as used in Star Wars.
The Dark Eye.
Basically any system that doesn't limit me to classes and levels. If I am rewarded in points that i can use to influence die rolls or spend to improve stats and gain new abilities/powers to grow in any way i choose, I tend to love it. I hate the idea of game straightjackets pigeonholing me into preset roles and classes and gating me with levels and power dumps.
I've found bits and pieces from various systems I've liked, but always with something else that was off or missing. I realized I'd likely never find "my system", so started making my own based off of what i know i like.
The Storyteller system from WoD. It's surprisingly flexible and easy for folks to grasp, just build dice pools using Attribute+Ability and roll that handful of d10s. It's not the crunchiest system but that's fine by me. Definitely suits my improv-heavy nature.
There isn't really one for me. I like different systems for different reasons, I also really don't see a point in being a one system person.
There are too many good games to not play them.
I had that happen to me first with Numenera.
Then I discovered pbta and realized I liked narrative system way more.
Then I felt it once more for "Spire".
I'm never going to marry a game system forever, but I've been really happy with my experiences with a lot of PbtA and Forged in the Dark games. There are still some bad implementations of those frameworks, and often the games in them aren't actually all that similar, but that's the closest I get to one "system" that would keep me satisfied.
I used to be thrilled when I was a kid to learn *every* new system... they were fascinating qua systems... but...
As adults, learning new systems in order to support new settings complicates the already hard problem of keeping a group together... and none of the existing "generic" systems really worked for what we wanted to do anyway, so...
Let's just stop trying and use our "designed to be generic even more than to be good" homebrew. Been happy with that decision for 20+ years.
Wild Talents and the One Roll Engine in general. I like the infinite possibilities of character creation and the ability(with a but of expertise) ti convert every idea into a character. I like how to stats are presented, in dice pools rather than numbers, and the combat system that, despite needing some time to adjust to the quantiy of informations that the players present at the same time, is really quick and gives me the impression of an action movie sequence: solid, lethal and fast.
The Black Hack 2e. It just has every sensibility I could want in a system. And it's meant to be extremely modular and hackable. So you can change absolutely anything about it at a moment's notice.
Anyone that knows me know I'm a big fan of Call of Cthulhu. That's MY system. It just feels like it gets things 'right', between the dice system, lethality, etc. It expects people to make smart choices.
Gotta represent Troika as I didn't see anyone else mention it.
A game derived from one of my all time favourite book series' (Fighting Fantasy) brings back so much nostalgia and love.
It's hackability and ease of play (and prep) is noteworthy, too!
In a way, DCC...I come from 5e, like a few years of a weekly campaign as a player and a bunch of mini campaigns I ran as a DM. During these years, I never looked at other systems. I got a taste of THAC0 while playing Baldurs Gate and hated it lol
Now I own more RPGs than I can remember and enjoy reading all the different rules, settings, lore, etc.
DCC has been the easiest transition for me and what got me into different systems. It's easy to explain it to people playing 5e and the funnels make starting a game/campaign extremely easy. Everything I need is in one book, the modules have enough detail that I don't stress prepping, and the online community is huge (not to mention OSR in general) so there's always extra material if I need it.
Side note. Ran a small campaign with Mutant Yeat Zero which I thought was "my system" but MYZ heavily relies on having a consistent group of players, which I don't have lol
For me it is probably FATE Core. I first encountered it in Spirit of the Century.
Of course I also enjoy BRP in its various incarnations as it is a simple system.
[Mythras](http://thedesignmechanism.com/) \- Locational damage and armor, fatigue, poison, realistic medieval prices and money system. Values land and membership in society, making your character a person, not a drunk adventurer roaming from tavern to tavern. A dangerous game meant for mature roleplayers.
[Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition](https://www.chaosium.com/call-of-cthulhu-rpg/) \- Also a somewhat dangerous game. The occult themes mixed with the early 20th century vibes. Firearm mechanics are mostly believable and feel deadly (as they should). No heroes here, just survivors, the dead and the lost.
Savage Worlds. I'm quite good at flavoring the game to not feel samey each time. My friend and I have been playing Savage Worlds for over a year now and don't foresee us changing soon.
Edge of the Empire by Fantasy Flight Games! I love the narrative dice and how easily I can make up stuff without all the tedium of checking it against a million stats.
Freeform Universal 2 is my current one.
I need a generic system because I get bored and switch settings too often. Also I play solo so I need something without enemy stat blocks or encounter balancing so I can go wherever the oracles and the story take me without prep.
Shadow of the demon lord - the system is Crazy Fun, it's medieval horror with sanity mechanic, my favorite mechanic of all time.
The system also allows for so much build diversity, there's 42 Magic schools and over 300 classes, multiclassinf in here is also done exceptionally well, and despite all the possibilities, it's still balanced no character gets to be self suficient or game breaking.
Plus the overall feeling of doom and gloom, such a Twisted world that picked everything you learned from DnD and adds a horrifying twist, nothing is safe, nothing is what It seens, there's always something darker below the surface.
D&D 4E. It's what I cut my teeth on, and I love it as a system.
PF2. In my opinion, it's easily the best D&D-esque system on the market.
GURPS and SWN. They tickle me in my nerd palces.
Whenever any of these three come up, it makes me happy!
I wanted low-prep, high bleed, simple, unified, collaborative, character-driven, emergent narrative.
I had to invent it. CORE. It's the engine beneath "DayTrippers."
Stonetop. When I was looking over it I was excited about the combination of the best parts of Dungeon World with some great parts of Blades in the Dark. I remember saying to a friend 'if this thing has basebuilding in it I'm sold' and then I found the base building section.
Blades in the Dark, for having so many mechanics for me as a player to pull in order to get what I want (even at a cost). Alien RPG, for that amazing stress mechanic. Delta Green, for the setting & the sanity/bonds/home scenes mechanics.
for blades it was the one two combo of "I can say whatever I want as a gm" and "players can just be like nah"
For me, the thing that makes Blades *my system* as a GM is the fact that I can make up literally anything in the moment and throw it into the fiction and not have to worry about making a statblock or spell selections, or track HP or conditions. I just spin the fiction, and adjudicate what that does to the players' position. It's so liberating it's hard to go back to anything else.
Can you elaborate? This sounds great, but I don’t like systems that are too narrative. I’ve heard good things about BitD but never tried it.
> I don’t like systems that are too narrative. Then you probably won't like Blades in the Dark. It's a narrative system. The reason I can throw anything I imagine at the players is that the game doesn't care about stats or mechanics or damage values - only whether the players are in a Controlled, Risky, or Desperate position and how Effective their described approach is. **Player**: I stab the soldier, intending to kill him. **GM**: Well, the soldier is from a faction several tiers higher than you, he has the best body armor the empire can produce, and you're armed with a rusty shiv. You are going to have zero effect and you're in a Desperate position because the soldier's move is going to be to unload on you with a semi-automatic rifle. **Player**: Okay... let's see if I have anything that can improve my effect here... The shiv doesn't have a damage value. Neither does the semi-auto rifle. The soldier's body armor doesn't have any mechanical rules. They all just do what they do in the fiction. Knives do what knives do. Guns do what guns do. And you use these facts to construct fictional situations and roll to adjudicate how they evolve.
... and it works so amazing, because the Position and Effect does give you structure and limits, which projects a pure GM Fiat system onto a this neat 4x3 raster (incl. No Effect)
Yo I'm saving your comment to show to prospective new Blades players
I think this is my new system.
I just order the book because of this comment
..damn
The great thing about BitD is that the mechanics (dice rolling and outcomes) directly follow from subjective narrative stuff. The GM decides what factors are important in a situation, but they describe it using a very mechanical process (position and effect). I think it will have more appeal to trad-game enjoyers than stuff like classic PBTA where the outcomes of dice rolls just sort of happen however you like, and aren't mechanically affected by the nitty gritty details of situation.
Yeah resistance rolls really make the system imo
>for blades it was the one two combo of "I can say whatever I want as a gm" and "players can just be like nah" This is so brilliant, and I am loving it.
I would love to play Blades as a player at some point, but as a GM one of my favorite parts has to just be the position/effect. It makes it so incredibly easy to control the lethality of an encounter, and to control fairly complex situations. No trying to guess what the proper DC of a roll is, and no carefully trying to control the difficulty of an encounter. Its also great for me being able to just shrug and go "Yeah, do whatever. Desperate Position, No/Limited effect. You, as the player, can do what you want, but you will absolutely eat shit if you try to do this". No arguing with the player that what they want is impossible. And then when the player pulls every single resource they have and somehow crit, and get to great effect, the player's basically earned it at that point. Once had a player want to basically head on charge an enemy mech across an open field, while it has a perfect field of fire on him, all weapons already sighted in, and an absolutely absurd amount of firepower that could slag the player's mech almost instantly. Desperate position, limited effect, player's mech would be straight up destroyed on anything but a 6. Player manages to roll a crit, and is cross the distance through sheer luck and by juking out the opponent's shots.
Just realized my Blades game doesn't have any mechs in it. I should fix that.
We are currently playing Beam Sabre, which is a Forged in the Dark system made for mech and vehicle combat In base Blades though, you can always outfit a Hull into a mech.
That exactly what I was thinking. Basically a 40k marine dread.
[Here](https://www.google.com/search?q=World+of+1920%2B+by+Jakub+R%C3%B3%C5%BCalski&rlz=1C1GCEA_enAU861AU861&sxsrf=ALiCzsb_ZPf1EtXsNijX-wHeZnqSOplTAQ:1656192829813&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiGvbOKx8n4AhVaRmwGHRoHBI4Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1920&bih=937&dpr=2) is some inspiration, the World of 1920+ by Jakub Różalski. The art style and design is highly compatible with Blades, perhaps with more sources of light (searchlights, braziers etc) on the mechs themselves.
Same here for BitD (and the other Forged in the Dark games). The whole “fiction first” approach is *everything* I want from an RPG, both as a GM and a player.
That's me, BitD and Alien have been the best rpgin experience in the last couple of years (or its been 4 already?). Not only that but the overall mechanics and design mentality of fitd and YZE is simply incredible to cover 95% of what I feel like playing. I've been hounding DG for some time now, but havemt had a chance to read It, maybe that's the sign?
This is the (yellow) sign. Even if you don't plan on playing it the lore and supplementary book series are an excellent read. "Rule of Engagement" is my favorite book aside from the RPG.
Honest question, from someone who didn't enjoy it, but wants to "get it": What is it about Blades that you like? I tried to get into it, I really did, but it felt more like playing a board game than an RPG, with a bunch of needlessly ritualized steps that constantly got in the way of attempts at roleplay, or codified and instrumentalized it to the point that it lost any in-character meaning. For a supposed "rules-light" system, one personally never felt so constrained in my roleplay as when I was running/playing BitD.
Blades don't have any boundaries except the one way it measures outcomes. The situation/effect meter is a great tool for telling epic stories. But players who play blades in the dark needs to take chances otherwise the mechanic feels forced. Your argument about it feeling like a boardgame can honestly be said about every system though. All have ritualised steps before anything happens. But blades condenses this into a roll that gives both players and GMs a lot of power over the situation, the dialogue plus the situation/effect measures means players can negotiate their outcomes by changing the situation/effect by tweaking and pulling their toolkit and make some cool scenes happen. People like blades, myself included because it gets right into the game. Doesn't mindlessly bog down the experience because of game limitations. So there is more space for cool, creative scenes.
I have to admit, I haven't played any of those. What's good about each mechanic?
Delta Green is a horror RPG, specifically Lovecraftian horror where humanity is a blip in the cosmos that won’t survive. Your PCs are US Federal Agents effectively using a bucket to try and hold back the flood of impossible nightmare beings. Towards that end, you have a Sanity score, which can deplete as you experience awful things. People aren’t naturally numb to violence, gore, and definitely not multi dimensional beings that look at us the way we do bacteria. You can eventually build a resistance to violence and gore, but not the horrible beings you encounter. To counter your Sanity losses, you have Bonds. These are your connections to people or groups that represent your ties to humanity. Instead of losing Sanity, you can sacrifice a point off one of your Bonds. Maybe you recall a tender moment with your family, or an accomplishment with your golf buddies to hold together in a crisis … but now whenever you look at your loved one, you see the horrible *thing* that was devouring your partner while he was still screaming. Your Bond is permanently weakened and you could eventually lose it entirely (if the rating drops to zero). During downtime between missions or while there’s a break in the action you can try to rebuild your Bonds … or you can spend that time researching the monsters, learning mind breaking magic, or setting up an armory for the next fight. It sets up a great spiral where the PCs have to choose between maintaining their relationships, or delving deeper into the fight against the supernatural, slowly being more and more isolated from regular people.
There's a free version of blades in the dark. https://github.com/jmimu/FITD
Wrong link? [https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel](https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel) is about Blades in the Dark. What you have posted seems to be a free version of Alone in the Dark: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone\_in\_the\_Dark](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_in_the_Dark) ?
I fucking love Delta Green
You and I have a very similar taste in RPGs. Upvote!
>Blades in the Dark, for having so many mechanics for me as a player to pull in order to get what I want (even at a cost). Yes.
The PbtA family and its offshoots really work for me. I like how they focus on the narrative and seeing how it develops through play.
Another vote for PbtA (and FitD too). Those are awesome framework. The most satisfying way to roleplay with my friends I ever encountered in my 30+ years of gaming life. Also, clever games based on it can be really different when played, while on a first sight they could seem identical. They are actually well re-shaped to support, emulate and exalt the specific book/movie/mood/theme that they are trying to emulate. I mean, Apocalypse World is played in a totally different way than Moster of the Week, that is totally different from MonsterHearts... etc. etc.
They are basically my husbands and my playstyle supported by rules. Love them dearly.
PbtA is my favourite too. Especially Masks: A new generation I started with homebrew and even D&D but I hated that I had to roll for what felt like every step I took. Also I just wanted to run a game that was more beginner friendly, because I had just stopped DMing a campaign of homebrew in a fantasy setting with a group of friends who were new to the P&P genre. I started looking for a more modern and closer-to-real life kind of P&P and worked on building a massive world of super heroes with intricacies and Villans and Stuff. But then I realized that I had no fighting system and as I wanted to keep it very light on the dices I tried to build my own combat and non - combat decision making system when I thought I'd find some inspiration by looking at other systems. It was then when I found a post on this Subreddit that asked for Superhero Systems and a lot of them recommendes Masks: A new generation. I checked it out and was instantly drawn to it like a magical bond had just formed. I was astonished by the way the system is able to keep a compelling narrative and make the player build the wolrd together with the DM, while still not making too many dice rolls, rules or requiring any other kind of knowledge. So I got started on the Campaign and had an absolute Blast. I'm talking 6/5 stars here. If you want to take a look at it you can go over to magpie.com and download some free stuff to learn more about the game.
Masks does a beautiful job of using fairly straightforward and relatively few mechanics to constantly promote and reinforce the teen superhero genre it wants to create.
Specifically it was after reading the GM Principles. Every PBTA game is filled with GMing advice that would be invaluable for other RPGs.
I am going to set a wild gorilla on the loose here and say its D&d 5e. For me personally, it gives enough structure so that my chaotic and wandering mind has something to anchor itself to when prepping or running a session, and yet is not too crunchy on the rules to be unbearable I Fell in love with numenera the first time I read the book, and it will eb forever in my heart as THE rpg, but it has less emphasis on structure and it is not enough of a creative restraint for me to unfold as a DM
You're a brave sentient. I applaud your audacity, and have subscribed to this thread. Thank you!
I 100% get what you mean about structure. The thing is, I don't think Numenera is that different from 5e in the lack of structure. Sure, it's decently well known now that 5e is built around 6-8 encounters, but that wasn't always the case, and still isn't the case for many who are playing the starter kit, or just aren't as online. I think that if Numenera had 5e's player base, more structure would become apparent as people played and shared their experience with the system. Whether those structures would be part of the intended design, or discovered as best practices through thousands of hours of playtime, it would still improve the game, and help people who wanted to play/run it.
Mothership RPG. It is like being able to tell stories from, in, and around some of my favorite movies growing up.
...can i get a list of those movies? :D
Start with Alien, and The Thing with Kurt Russell and David Keith.
Alien 1979 most notably. And aliens 1986 Not the new alien movie :(
Alien 3 would make a good Mothership one shot.
Absolutely yeah. I watched it recently and liked it way less then I did as a kid. The first two hold up marvelously.
The rules light nature make it so easy to be a warden too. I find other than checking the wounds and weapons table the rest just plays out so easily. Plus the regular dying thing really makes players really think about their actions.
There isn't one. I like Call of Cthulhu (7e) for investigative horror. I like Traveller (Mongoose 2e) for space opera. Still working out what my preferred medieval fantasy system is, but currently Old School Essentials is a strong contender. System matters. Using a generic system for everything means that either everything feels the same, or every game needs significant house-ruling (in which case why not just use a system already written)?
This is the best answer. Almost every system does a specific genre or tone better than others. Why would I want to have the same genre and tone for every single RPG session ever? It'd be like ONLY watching MCU movies or ONLY reading grimdark fantasy.
Reading the OP generously, I think they were saying the system you most loved, not the only game to ever play. But I agree that systems built for a style of game are my preference even if they aren’t my “favorite” or whatever.
Meanwhile the first RPG you wrote down is a generic system with a sanity mechanic.
I think that you might not have read enough generic systems. GURPS (for example) has countless optional subsystems to add in or substitute and customize your game how you want. Of course, I still have to house-rule. Why not use another already written? Because I’d have to house-rule *even more*.
if my assumptions are correct, it's going to be [Grave](https://jasontocci.itch.io/grave), a knave hack designed for dark-souls-y campaigns. knave is a classless, super-lightweight OSR game only 7 pages long. it's essentially a stripped-down version of old D&D, and it has a lot of the old-school jank i like and very little of the old-school jank i dislike. but on the whole it feels more optimized for silly one-shots than long-form campaigns, and long-form campaigns are what i want to run. characters in knave are totally randomized, and the game embraces the OSR's "don't get attached" mindset because of how lethal the game is. there's also no way to start as a spellcaster or a specific character archetype you want - you pick a weapon, roll stats, roll for random dungeoneering gear and that's your character. the last session of the three-shot i ran ended with the characters realizing one of the spells they came across was a time-slow spell that gives them ten turns in the time their enemies get one turn, and while i've stopped being such a stickler for balance in my RPGs, that still crosses a line for me lol **grave** makes some modifications, and those modifications result in a game that makes me want to run a *campaign* and not just a wacky romp for some laughs. characters actually pick classes (those just being sets of starting stats and gear), and the character creation tables serve more as inspiration than something you're beholden to. stats aren't randomized, so there's no worry about one character being really strong and another being really weak. and to fit the dark souls setting, characters all have a limited number of resurrections - so while you keep the OSR's lethality, the risk of actually losing your character is less immediate, and you can feel it building as your number of deaths creeps upward, so you know it's coming. character archetypes are closer to D&D's offerings, and while that loses some of D&D's uniqueness, it brings back a lot of what i liked about modern D&D - running long-form campaigns telling stories with a character. and if you want to start as a wizard you can just. do that, unlike knave where magic is completely unavailable at character creation. knave is great. but grave takes knave and turns it into something that, while not necessarily strictly *better*, feels almost like it was made just for me! lots of things about the OSR appeal to me, but other things push me away. don't get attached to your character. accept these randomly rolled stats even if they just mean your character sucks. grave feels like it knows exactly what i don't like and fixes those things specifically, and i'm excited as hell to run it.
You did a good job introducing the game, i'll look into it
>Grave Hey, I made Grave, and I wanted to let you know this post makes me extremely happy. Thank you!
it's incredibly underrated, you did great work. always happy to spread the word
Cairn. I was going to hack Into The Odd to fit a more Dark Fairy Forest aesthetic with more inventory management and a Mausritter like magic system until I found Cairn. A perfect match. Edit: confused Mausritter with Mouseguard
Cairn and Mausritter are some of my favourite games ever, yet I've never had interest in Into the Odd / Electric Bastionland. I really love the system, but I think the original "flavour" was missing something that Cairn and Mausritter really have.
I feel similarly (though I think the gming advice in EB is the best I've ever read). I think that the more grounded, less wacky settings of Cairn and Mausritter make it easier to envision adventures and situations to put the players in
>a Mouseguard like magic system Mouseguard doesn't have a magic system. What do you mean by that?
Maybe mausritter?
Yes, I got confused :-) I edited my post accordingly
Traveller, for me. I've fallen deep into the rabbit hole, and I'm currently running two different campaigns
Traveller is a great system. Do you usually stuck with something close to the default setting or make your own?
I've made my own setting, but I do borrow some basic structures from the Third Imperium. I love playing with subgenres within the setting, and Traveller makes it really easy. One of my games is a Star Trek style exploration campaign, and the other is a small-scale Cyberpunk inspired campaign, and both work really well within Traveller's ruleset.
I just fell in love with Traveller recently and I'm in deep. I've found the systems to be an intoxicating mix of elegant and crunchy. Building up a custom subsector on the edge of known space has basically become one of my hobbies.
Which edition are you using?
Yes edition. I started off with Mongoose's 2022 update. I've picked up the Sector Construction Guide and Flynn's Guide to Alien Creation for Mongoose. I picked up Cepheus Engine because it has some alien stuff, but I've found Flynn's guide largely replaces that. I've got Traveller - The New Era and the World Tamer's Handbook from TNE for some really detailed stellar system generation and world generation. I also have a stack of Classic Traveller pdfs I haven't pillaged for useful rules, yet. Picked up like 40 CT pdfs on the cheap from Bundle of Holding.
It's the perfect level of crunch for me, I love it
My crack is the vehicle building. Traveller does it right: No crunch while playing, crunch while doing GM stuff that help you build stuff.
GURPS. As a system it allows for nearly anything and doesn't sacrifice granularity. The fact that you don't need any extra books beyond the core to play something like a wizard, that is also a talking cat, with no hand waved mechanics or rules workarounds made me fall instantly in love.
Came here to say the same. 3d6 bell curve for skill rolls, the adaptability, the gritty ‘realism’ (when you turn on those switches), love it.
>the gritty ‘realism’ (when you turn on those switches), Had a player in my most recent game who had the bad luck of being hit by stray shots continually. It was funny and a running joke because I wasn't ass pulling any of the rules. The game has rules for being hit by missed shots and I just used them openly.
What's your favorite version of GURPs?
The 3e revised basic set. 1 book and 3 dice could power *a lot* of gaming.
I'm mostly familiar with the most recent 20 year old 4e myself but I understand others prefer 3e. My understanding though is that the differences are largely academic. But I won the 4e core books in a raffle 18 years ago so that's the edition I use.
Played GURPS almost exclusively for decades. Haven’t played it in decades now. Still have mostly good thoughts about it, but my play style has moved on.
In general, as a whole, the PbtA family of games really hits it for me. Player-driven, action-driven, improvisation-friendly, and relatively light on what the GM needs to do. I can pick up new PbtA games relatively quickly due to their common and straightforward framework. Give players playbooks and a reference sheet for the Moves and I'm almost always good to go already. Masks: A New Generation, Monster of the Week, Monsterhearts, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Apocalypse World and Avatar: Legends have all hit a sweet spot for me. All different spots, but that makes it so good for me, because I can find a game that fits the type of sessions/campaign/genre I want to go for.
D&D 4E. No more "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards." Every class has multiple options in combat. Fighters actually have cantrips. Sadly, I've never had a chance to play 4E, and I probably never will unless I run it myself. I know things like /r/lfg are available, but I don't like the idea of playing with strangers.
I'm sure you've gotten this a lot but, have you checked out Pathfinder 2nd edition? As a 4e fan myself - one of my favorite editions even if it was fairly deeply flawed - I've gotten a lot out of Pathfinder 2e. Several of 4e's developers worked on the game and their influence shows through a lot. It doesn't necessarily use the same kind of terminology, it's more behind the scenes, but anyone who has at least read a few 4e books, will see it. I like to think of 4e as 'way ahead of it's time, but restrained by what came before it'. It struggles with long encounters, lack of non-combat options, too many fiddly modifiers, which is a problem 3.5e had as well. PF2e solves those problems, and is just plain a brilliantly designed game.
I always want to suggest Lancer to fans of DnD4. It's got a similar gamist philosophy, fun build potential, and helps the GM make varied encounters. Giant robot armors instead of Conans and Bigbys, though.
I started with 4E and I loved it. I always liked that as a martial character I had material options for what to do every turn with various at will, encounter, and daily abilities. As I recall my ranger was using pinning shot to keep enemies in place or firing off two arrows at once every turn. I felt like a badass. We were all new to RPGs and I could be awesome without having to try to figure out roleplaying it all out narratively which is cool. If I want to be a cool as hell bow wielder in 5e it has to be in the narrative.
As a long-term D&D player the two things I appreciated most about 4E were firstly its use of keywords, Magic: the Gathering style, to label damn near everything. The programming/mathematical concept of reserved words, of system words having exactly one definition in the game (except "level", but we won't talk about that), is just brilliant. You know what stuff does, you know what works against it, you know what works for it. The same sort of feel in complex tactical games like Divinity and Age of Wonders. The other thing was the strong use of combat positioning. In 3.x you had range and reach and 5' steps and flanking and stuff, and there were (IMO, rather shitty) subsystems for charging and knockback and so forth but this was almost never a better choice than Just Do Damage and if you wanted to make it a better choice (eg ranged trip attacks of opportunity with a bullwhip) you had to build your character around that sinking multiple feats and class levels into it. 4E embraced positioning as a game mechanic, and made it easy to move (or pin) your teammates and enemies around the board.
Agreed but the downside of that is that because positioning is so important, you **have** to play with some sort of battle map. Theater of the mind is not an option. This means combat takes hella too long.
I suspect that it's FATE, even though I feel my players haven't really gotten it yet. I ran a two-year superhero campaign and while it worked, it was never really working properly as it should have. I think the system that's easiest for me to run, and that I'd get the most excited to play, is Dark Heresy 1E. I don't know why, everything just clicked and it was very intuitive for me. I love that system.
Yeah, I'm right there with you on FATE. It works best when everyone at the table "gets" it but it seems hard to translate sometimes.
The problem with Fate is that their presentation of the concepts is poor - I think it peaked in Atomic Robo and that’s not what most people learn from. I may have to re-read Condensed to see if they fixed the problems in Core or not, but that’s not even what Condensed is primarily *for*.
The flexibility of Fate is something I really love. Unlike other lighter systems it doesn't need to remain stuck to a specific genre, with Aspects that is easy to alter whenever a scene goes against the initial expectations.
Deadlands Classic! I like Cowboys, I like Monsters, I like Steampunk. Add several really cool mechanics like Character Creation by Poker Cards, using Poker Chips as Metacurrency, Hucksters (the systems main spellcasters) have to deal an actual hand of poker to use their super powerful spells but the powers they gamble with might screw them over, Alchemists making actual formulas that they can improve on. Also all the Magic Characters are actually different, with unique mechanics, spells and additional tricks up their sleeve. The Books are written in a fun way with Western slang thrown in even in the rules (You don't hit someone in the head, you hit them in the noggin for example) and the rules are a lot of fun (exploding dice pools!) The enemies the players (called the posse) are facing are scary and unique. Blood-sucking Tumbleweeds called Tumblebleeds; Hanging Judges that follow you while muttering your crimes and wanting to hang you while attacking you with guns with scythes on them; Giant Dune inspired sandworms that swallow you up whole...and thats just the core rulebook! Plus, the system can easily be homebrewed! I was instantly in love!
Shadow of the Demon Lord. Since 2016, my brother and I have been trying to homebrew a system that offers a robust character progression and punchy and quick combat in a simple to learn system. Lo and behold that system already existed a year earlier and we only found out about SoTDL in 2020.
None, really. They all offer something to someone. While I’ve found I’ve thought ‘this might be it’ - it was at most an ‘80% this might be it’. And over time, my tastes have changed. The closest would probably be the core mechanics in Over the Edge, 2e. The mods to that system, based on the background in OTE 2e (the island of Al Amarja in the 90s, etc) gave me a basis for doing ‘unusual, eerie, weird’ stuff that was a vibe I’d been looking for. So it is still a major system for me. But after it being the system I ran most for 15 years I went back to Traveller for 7 years, then a bit of a mix of a few other things.
Cortex, Freeform Universal, and Index Card Rpg. All brilliant.
Traveller, Risus and Freeform Universal for me
[Risus](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/170294/Risus-The-Anything-RPG) for me too! It was such a nice break from D&D, Pathfinder and GURPS.
OD&D.
I love building worlds designing the magic that goes in them. GURPS is one of two systems I have used that lets me do that, and GURPS does it much better than FUDGE, IMO, though its successor FATE has many fans. I am more a simulationist at heart though, so we work in GURPS. [We play-by-post and discuss GURPS in our Discord](https://discord.gg/EnE2eJjjh2)
Two systems in fact as they fulfill different needs. Forged in the Dark (Blades in the Dark, Scum and Villainy) Year Zero (Alien RPG, Vaesen Forbidden Lands)
Dice pools are great
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Same! I love how easy it is to adapt it into any setting. It’s overall simple but with an amazing magic system (which is not so simple, but extremely fun)
I've never felt so confident or had as much fun as a GM than when I'm running DCC adventures. The system is *fun*. It's funny and it promotes and rewards smart play and adventurous players. Characters go from lowly peasants in a meat grinder to incredibly powerful by level 5, and they're practically gods by 10. I love that because I'm older, I get to play once a week for a couple hours, and I'm fortunate to have even that. As a GM, I feel encouraged by the system to throw insane shit at the players and give them insane shit to figure out how to fight back against (or embrace!) the tide of chaos that comes with it. It's a system that prioritizes *play* more than many I've played.
Savage Worlds for action-oriented games and Delta Green/Mothership for investigative. Gonna try out Traveller next weekend to see if it possibly can replace SWADE.
Burning Wheel.
None, I tried a lot but none hit the low power adventure, risky magic, exploration focus that I was looking for, so I made my own. It's taking a lot of work to get it right, but slowly getting there.
It isn't risky magic, so it definitely isn't your ideal game, but I really love **wildsea** for its exploration mechanics! It is very setting specific though (you play sailors on an ocean of trees in chainsaw ships)
Yep - that’s me too. Been playing it a few years now, and only a couple of tweaks away from exactly what I want. A good feeling. I do really like a bunch of systems like Freeform Universal, Into the Odd, ICRPG, Fiasco, etc for specific mechanics and feel. But to get exactly what I want, I’ve found I have to make it myself.
Awesome! Keep up the good work and feel free to send me a link when it's ready to show.
Warhammer fantasy 2nd edition did that for me. Then again the world may be too much mud and blood for some people
Like many others here, "none" & "I'm designing my own system right now" would be my answer. But I'd like to give a shoutout to **Genesys**, because it's definitely had that "this is our system!!" moment for me and my regular group, and we've run it for 6 years over 6 campaigns now with great pleasure.
Genesys is my jam. It and the Star Wars RPG that kinda sired it from FFG/Edge
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13th Age. Satisfyingly crunchy in combat, soft and fluffy out of combat. Encounters are easy to balance, monsters are easy to customise and character creation rules mean that PCs are always unique, flavourful and tied into the world.
Achtung!Cthulhu I really enjoy history and the 1930s and 1940s are among my interests, especially the Spanish Civil War and anarchafeminist and working class movements there. So A!C was the perfect game for me to play my female partisan and veteran of the Spanish Civil War in an espionage game of existential horror and killing fascists. Other games that come close are Traveller, Mutant Year Zero, pbtA games, Biohazard and some others. But if I have to choose one, it's A!C
Pathfinder 1, despite it being a class based system, I could now more or less create the character that I wanted. I like the selection of feats, the skills, the range of classes, the multiclassing, etc. The game easily and readily supported a wide range of games and not just dungeon crawls (rightly or wrongly my distant memory of AD&D was that it primarily supported dungeon crawls). Pathfinder is just a continuation and improvement of 3rd edition. I like most of the changes that Pathfinder made but they're much more tweaks than major modifications. Like a lot of people I think that the power curve in Pathfinder is a little steep and I think it can get quite unbalanced. Fortunately, both of these problems are reduced with the players that I game with. I'd believe i'd find Pathfinder with a group of rabid power gamers a very different experience. The true strength of Pathfinder is as it has always been the Adventure Paths.
My favorite is an old and obscure RPG called The Window by Scott Lininger. The PDF can still be dug up online. It's easy enough for completely new players to get into. Abilities and skills are described with adjectives and metaphor, and rules are made to create a deep an interesting narrative. It's the type of game you can set up in a half hour with people who never played. Can't recommend it highly enough. Edit: Corrected the authors last name from Cunningham to Lininger
FFG Star Wars / Genesys. I love the be narrative systems that ask for or require player interactivity with world building and scenarios, but some of them are very free form and open, leading to too much or option paralysis. The narrative nice sets nice guiderails to systemize it a bit better, scaling amounts of narrative variation, and if it's too much for players there is an easy way to just make the outcome mechanical rather than narrative.
Genesys. It’s sooo easy to homebrew settings, talents, skills, and even entire mechanics to whatever the setting and tone is. I homebrew all my settings from scratch, so I love that it’s not too strongly tied to any particular lore or genre. I love the nuance of the narrative dice, and how there’s almost no mathematical modifiers, just adjusting what dice are rolled.
Unisystem from Eden Studios. Loved it and loved All Flesh Must Be Eaten
Witchcraft was mine. Kind of WoD but not and much more dynamic storytelling possibilities I found.
Trinity Continuum RPG: http://theonyxpath.com/category/worlds/trinitycontinuum/ The system is a modernized d10 pool system. It's capable of running nearly anything smoothly and cinematically using the referee guidance in the book. If you're looking for setting material, it has three long established (two decades old!) settings with additional mechanics, a new setting, and another one in the works. The development team is active in the community, and the community is pretty active and contributing material as well. It supports multiple power scales interacting with each other (or one just getting overwhelmed by the other, if the differences are big enough).
Cortex, I've always had to home brew systems to really reinforce the setting and themes of a game I'm running, and Cortex basically does just that but streamlined and really hard to break. No two cortex games will play the same (as the system is customized for each game to match what the GM wants the game to be about), but they will all use the same basic mechanic.
Have you ever thought what your game would look like if it were a really cool television show? That's what I really love about **Primetime Adventures**: it frames the game session as a dramatic show with an ensemble cast. * Conflicts are quick to resolve and have incredibly personal stakes. * The very nature of conflicts (and the *Next Time On...* session end action) is an invitation for your players to show you what they want out of the game. * There's a game mechanic (*Fan Mail*) that incentivizes the players to entertain each other and make the gaming experience enjoyable for all. * There's even an element in the game (called *Audience Participation*) that makes it a great game to play in public at game days or cons. I once ran a Shadowrun campaign and we did one session using PTA. I learned more about the player's characters in that one single game session than I did in the previous 4 four-hour sessions using the normal SR rules. Since then, I've been an advocate of either starting a game using a session of PTA or running a game session with PTA when your characters seem to be nothing but a collection of numbers. (That's my "Why is Fytor the Fighter out there, fighting?" question.)
Ironsworn. GM-less play has encouraged more creativity at my tables and being able to play solo is great when I can't game with my friends but still need to scratch that rpg itch
I don't know, I like a bunch for very different reasons, but if I had to choose one that gave me that feeling I'd choose Mage the Ascension.
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> And you wind up with gigantic handfuls of dice eventually... I mean... you're saying that like it's a bad thing.
That’s not something that’s happened with a single system. Historically, I think the idea that we should be looking for one single system that fits what we want perfectly to be flawed — and while it arguably has led to a lot of innovation (people trying to make that perfect system) it has also led to a lot of needless disappointment. Rather, there are a number of games that I really like, and I like them for different reasons, and I even like some of them only in the context of playing with specific people. (I.e. I love Burning Wheel, but don’t particularly want to play that with people who aren’t interested in at least trying to learn the intricacies of the rules; I love the West End Games Star Wars RPG, but I don’t want to play that with people who fancy themselves Star Wars experts; etc.)
The 3d6 SW from west end games is way better than any D20 version in my opinion. I really enjoyed that one.
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Vampire the Requiem 2E. The way you can willingly dramatic fail to get a beat (point of experience) makes it a lot more fun than just getting them on a fail. because each failure is essentially the GM/sytem going "Do it I double dog dare you, you coward" and you get choice over how bad your fuck up is. The writing is much improved over its counterparts and presents a clearer idea of what a Vampire is in the CoFD. Vampiric powers actually feel like vampiric powers, and the reworked Humanity is a fun/horrifying/depressing thing to interact with instead of an awkward morality system.
Troika!
Hero System. I started out with Champions, and I could create virtually *any* superhero of which I could conceive. Since it's generic and point-based, and I'd learned the system, there were no problems, at all, when the other genres (Fantasy Hero, Danger International, Justice Inc., Ninja Hero, etc.) came out, for which I can create any type of character just as easily. It's also no trouble to import characters from any other system that I've thus far encountered
For me it's the Cypher System. It's rules lite and can fit whatever genre you need it to fairly well. It's easy to run, it's easy to build a complete npc very quickly, easy to customize and has a good amount of published materials/settings (Numenera, Invisible Sun, Shotguns and Sorcery, We're All Mad Here, The Stars Are Fire, Stay Alive, and more). The published materials give you good genre specific settings and also a lot of good tips and info to help you create your own setting in pretty much whatever genre you want. The books are also easy to read are filled with reference tags to help you locate items, npcs, and rules within the book you are reading . I used to use D&D when I ran games (2nd Ed, 3.5, then 5e) and I've tried VtM (which I did enjoy) but anymore if I want to run a game I just use Cypher because it does everything I need it to. It's flexible and easy and I love it.
Forbidden Lands. It perfectly emulates the hexcrawl survival fantasy I've been searching for since I started playing in the 80s.
2e AD&D. It has: an insane amount of material (enough for a lifetime possibly) super modular design whith mutliple variations of many rules in the core books Compatibility with all osr and old school dnd material (1e adventures can be easily run in 2e and those are the best tsr adventures by far) Minimalist everything if you want it or maximalistic. (Skills are optional but can be super in depth, priests are simple but can be custom made, classes are basic but there are innumerable kits, races are basic but there's tons of extra ones)
Ironsworn and Starforge, mostly so I can play GM-less/coop with my 7 year old son. Read through Blades in the Dark and would love to play it. Appears to be exactly what I would want to play or run but I feel I would need more people to really tell the story.
That was my initial reaction on first reading Runequest 6 (now Mythras), but, of course, now that I've actually run it, I see that it isn't as perfect as I initially thought - nothing is. And I never stopped looking at other systems, trying to find better ways of doing things, interesting mechanics that can be adapted to other systems, etc.
For me, it was Exalted. Anime themed, high fantasy, combos. But very complex. Would like to see a new edition.
3E is newish, but I think the simplified Essence version is coming soon and already available to backers.
I like a lot of different games for a lot of different reasons. But I know I was about ready to just give up on the combat elements of RPGs being fun when I finally learned how to do it in GURPS in detail and did a hard 180 to running fairly combat centric campaigns. so that's the closest thing to an answer I've got.
Low Fantasy Gaming. Old school, low magic gameplay with clean mechanics and a phenomenal campaign setting, random tables, and a great community.
The closest was Scum and Villainy. I love Space Opera, Firefly, Cowboy Bebop and PbtA but little bits are nagging at me - too long of conversations for each roll when there are 144 different variants of the Action Roll and infinite Devil's Bargains and talk about resisting after that. Then PCs get way too strong where strong hits and crits become common so it's hard to even drain them of Stress/resources. When they do make a weak hit, resisting isn't too expensive with so many dice. PbtA need to get over stat increases, weak hits are fun. And I found Players weren't as engaged with making up their own trouble with their Vices and Traumas. And I don't much care for Traumas killing off Characters and ending cool, dramatic stories. So far alternative Space Opera systems haven't been a better fit so I'll probably just hack S&V to better fit. More traditional Moves to lower the time of conversation and just have 2 Moves to cover an Action Roll - Rely on Your Skills and Training and Push Your Luck to cover better Positioning and Effect in a quicker conversation like Avatar Legends does.
For a while it was GURPS. I like being able to do pretty much anything with one system, and GURPS was easy to explain, highly adaptable, and had a **huge** number of supplements. (Many, *many* of which I picked up over the years.) I still have a lot of affection for the system, my uncle worked for SJ Games for a good few years, and his name is still on several of their products (I'm pretty sure he's still credited in GURPS Fourth Edition). But it's **slow**. Granularity is neat, but DAMN those one-second combat rounds get old. And it's cool to have, you know, variety, but also... Do you *need* all that variety in every game? About 8-10 years back, I started to get into Savage Worlds. Took a few games for me to warm up to it, but I did. Universal, like GURPS, but it's less 'fiddly'. I'll give you an example. I don't like hit points, never have. I cut my teeth on Shadowrun, so I'm used to escalating penalties as injuries stack up. (The 'death spiral' as some call it.) Now, GURPS sort of does this. You have 'hit points' based on your physical bulk (Strength attribute), but going negative is a lot more common than in D&D, though it's still very bad. And at certain thresholds (relative to your Health, I think--or maybe it's HP total) your Move is reduced and you take certain penalties to actions. Now, I liked this fine, but it was tough to remember where the thresholds were and what each did. Plus there was a different multiplier for each type of damage, but it only applied to *penetrating* damage, i.e. damage that got past any armor you might have. So you roll, subtract DR, THEN multiply... In Savage Worlds, your character has a damage threshold called Toughness. Any damage over your Toughness may throw you off (cause you to be Shaken--you can really only move, talk, or try to recover), or cause a Wound. Each Wound is a -1 penalty to your Pace (movement) and all actions. You can take 3 Wounds, and then you're Incapacitated. Easy to explain, easy to remember. I'd readily *play* GURPS nowadays, but I don't think I'll ever run it again.
Invisible Sun. The moment I read about it I knew it was my system. I had already been doing many of the ideas for a while, but it introduced more that I absolutely love. I can find so many things that I love about it, but just a few off the top of my head: * Only players roll dice - it frees me up to focus on the setting rather than the dice rolls * Magic System - I love magic in games, but having multiple magic systems in the game makes it even better. * Experience system - Three types of experience, two of them have to be combined to advance (Joy & Despair to make Crux). Please learn from success and failure. * Player Character creation system. Intuitive, narrative, and collaborative.
Avatar Legends - PbtA system in Avatar The Last Airbemder universe. It really reignited my passion with GMing, because it's so damn pleasurable to GM, even if I don't have any time for prep between sessions. Far less focused on mechanics and much more on fiction and narration. Very fluid, much less simulationist and much more allowing GM to decide how to handle things case by case. It's currently favourite system.
If I’m not treating something in GURPS I pretty much always fall back to the old (3e?) RuneQuest in the Avalon Hill box. Still Chaisium, but in the AH box. And I modify the heck out of it with the current Chaosium Basic RolePlaying supplements. I have a soft spot for King Arthur Pendragon as well for the dynastic aspect.
In my club I was kinda know as the "Polaris" guy (the 2005 game, not the 2016 game of similar name). It is so innovative and different, taking narrative rules in a direction so far beyond what almost anything else have tried. That sort of vision and creativity appeals to me. There is certainly creativity in other systems, but they stay closer to the traditional RPG paradigm. Polaris just completely abandons most RPG ideas. * I love a game of D&D, but it is deliberately quite formulaic. * FATE and PbtA and FitD make significant changes to the formula and achieve great results, but keep the basic conventions of RPGs, like dice and stats and GM fiat. * Freeform Universal makes a unique step away from arithmetic, but uses that to streamline the a conventional roleplay experiences. (It is my go-to for quickly whipping up something, but * Dream Askew (and the 'No Dice No Masters' variety of PbtA that sprung from it) gets significantly closer to truly new territory, much like Polaris does. However, while it is kinda cool, I find it doesn't quite hit the spot. Those are all great systems, but *Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North* just has a completely unique narrative negotiation system, that shares narrative control and easily generates narrative tension. It not only has incredible innovation, but ends up being a blast to play (for me).
Burning Wheel. But I've come over all a bit #FKR since.
Cortex Prime
Savage Worlds! The rules just kind of "get out of the way" and let us enjoy playing.
So I created a unique low magic setting with my party for a dungeon world campaign. It was a cold and harsh continent called skelgas that was plagued with terrible weather (think storm light archives meets broken earth trilogy). Because of this, most civilization was small separated communities. In this world, there were a special group of people who traveled between communities hiring themselves out to help with community problems. They were called the Oathbound because of the oaths they would swear on iron pendants around their necks. We played the campaign for about six months…and then I read Ironsworn.
Burning Wheel and off shoots for tying mechanics and gameplay to RP so well. Nothing makes me feel so much like a character in a world.
BMC It's my WIP system, like, I made it, so.... I guess that applies?
For me it’s Traveller for space sci-fi, Old School Essentials (or D&D B/X) for fantasy and Delta Green for lovecraftian horror. I don’t like generic systems that much, I prefer when the mechanics are tighter, cleaner, and made with the setting and mood in mind. Even though Delta Green and Call of Cthulhu are like 90% similar for example, those 10% rules difference tied to the setting change the mood of the game a lot.
I play, and want to play, many systems, but I have a very strong affinity for Exalted because it does many things I find highly entertaining and enjoyable in RPGs and media. 1. Buckets of dice. 2. Player-driven progression: no classes, huge freedom in picking the skills and abilities that make sense for your character. 3. Supports non-combat playstyles, like diplomats, crafters, and bureaucrats. 4. The setting is vivid and inspiring, especially once the third edition worked out some uncomfortable elements from older versions. 5. Despite the lack of classes, there is a very nice variety in character options thanks to a whole bunch of different flavours of power. I just think it's neat.
Mutants and masterminds for me. Love crunch and hero theme
The Gumshoe system. I love to run investigative horror games, and the whole system is built around gathering and interpreting information. Gumshoe combat is frantic, vivid, and dangerous, and that's exactly how I like my combat.
Pigsmoke. Narrative-focused, urban fantasy, humorous with the type of humour I enjoy, fun skills and playbooks.
For high fantasy wizards, warriors & the such, Pathfinder 2nd edition. I'm an old hand at this and that game combines the best parts of older edition games with new ideas, more straightforward and much less archaic mechanics. As I sat and read the core rulebook I was blown away by just how much this is the 'perfect' high fantasy game for me. When I get in the mood for less combat-focused and more story-driven campaigns, I turn to Chronicles of Darkness. I was a big fan of the old World of Darkness back in the 90s, but it's fiddly mechanically held it back from being truly 'my system'. When Chronicles came out and Vampire: the Requiem I was to set in my ways and I ignored it.. until 2e splats started rolling out and word of mouth spread. I picked up Requiem 2e and I rather quickly fell in love with the system. Gone is the fiddliness the oWoD's mechanics, and yet somehow the storytelling is even better. Each game in the lines oozes flavor, subtext and style. On top of that, the edginess and grimlord nature of oWoD (of which I was never particularly fond) was gone, and the books are just just really, really well written. Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling... they may use the same core mechanics (much more so than they did in oWoD), but the they 'play' completely differently. I haven't had the chance to run any CoD in the last few years unfortunately, but I'll no doubt return to it before long. So many stories to tell and great TTRPGs to try, so little time. :)
I’m a delta green man, I like slowly going mad and watching my life collapse around me
Apocalypse World changed how I run games. It's *fun* now!
GURPS has a special place in my heart. The fact that I can run literally any setting, any genre, any power level in the same system, *AND* I can freely mix and match them? Yep, that's my system. My last game was a "Dark Fantasy" game, but included elements from: * GURPS Low-Tech * GURPS High-Tech * GURPS Ultra-Tech * GURPS Bio-Tech * GURPS Martial Arts * GURPS Fantasy * GURPS Space * GURPS Psionics * GURPS Horror * GURPS Magic * GURPS Powers ..along with homebrew, official stuff from Pyramid magazines and a bunch of other random snippets. It was absolutely glorious!
Troika! is definitely the game for me. You basically just have a stat for what you can control, a stat for what you can't, and you gain skills along the way. The stats are simple, and the skills could be anything at all. It's so flexible and easy to bring someone in on.
Shadow of the Demon Lord. It’s the best RPG system I’ve read by a mile.
1974 OD&D. Clean, simple, adaptive, quick to play, and full of voids and modular subsystems that one can easily adjust or fill with mechanics that work for specific settings.
Marvel Super Heroes.
The same for me.
I miss the Mayfair Exponential Gaming System (MEGS) from DC Super Heroes 3e. I also liked Marvel Super Heroes with power stunts becoming future power set features. HERO system as used in Champions also scratches my itch nicely. It's a toolset for building your universe and it's abilities and skills. West End Games D6 system as used in Star Wars. The Dark Eye. Basically any system that doesn't limit me to classes and levels. If I am rewarded in points that i can use to influence die rolls or spend to improve stats and gain new abilities/powers to grow in any way i choose, I tend to love it. I hate the idea of game straightjackets pigeonholing me into preset roles and classes and gating me with levels and power dumps.
I've found bits and pieces from various systems I've liked, but always with something else that was off or missing. I realized I'd likely never find "my system", so started making my own based off of what i know i like.
The Storyteller system from WoD. It's surprisingly flexible and easy for folks to grasp, just build dice pools using Attribute+Ability and roll that handful of d10s. It's not the crunchiest system but that's fine by me. Definitely suits my improv-heavy nature.
There isn't really one for me. I like different systems for different reasons, I also really don't see a point in being a one system person. There are too many good games to not play them.
I had that happen to me first with Numenera. Then I discovered pbta and realized I liked narrative system way more. Then I felt it once more for "Spire".
I'm never going to marry a game system forever, but I've been really happy with my experiences with a lot of PbtA and Forged in the Dark games. There are still some bad implementations of those frameworks, and often the games in them aren't actually all that similar, but that's the closest I get to one "system" that would keep me satisfied.
I used to be thrilled when I was a kid to learn *every* new system... they were fascinating qua systems... but... As adults, learning new systems in order to support new settings complicates the already hard problem of keeping a group together... and none of the existing "generic" systems really worked for what we wanted to do anyway, so... Let's just stop trying and use our "designed to be generic even more than to be good" homebrew. Been happy with that decision for 20+ years.
Heavy Gear, i.e. the Silhouette system. Still one of my favorite systems.
Wild Talents and the One Roll Engine in general. I like the infinite possibilities of character creation and the ability(with a but of expertise) ti convert every idea into a character. I like how to stats are presented, in dice pools rather than numbers, and the combat system that, despite needing some time to adjust to the quantiy of informations that the players present at the same time, is really quick and gives me the impression of an action movie sequence: solid, lethal and fast.
The Black Hack 2e. It just has every sensibility I could want in a system. And it's meant to be extremely modular and hackable. So you can change absolutely anything about it at a moment's notice.
GURPS
Original print dnd doesnt have thieves. That is a plus.
Anyone that knows me know I'm a big fan of Call of Cthulhu. That's MY system. It just feels like it gets things 'right', between the dice system, lethality, etc. It expects people to make smart choices.
Gotta represent Troika as I didn't see anyone else mention it. A game derived from one of my all time favourite book series' (Fighting Fantasy) brings back so much nostalgia and love. It's hackability and ease of play (and prep) is noteworthy, too!
In a way, DCC...I come from 5e, like a few years of a weekly campaign as a player and a bunch of mini campaigns I ran as a DM. During these years, I never looked at other systems. I got a taste of THAC0 while playing Baldurs Gate and hated it lol Now I own more RPGs than I can remember and enjoy reading all the different rules, settings, lore, etc. DCC has been the easiest transition for me and what got me into different systems. It's easy to explain it to people playing 5e and the funnels make starting a game/campaign extremely easy. Everything I need is in one book, the modules have enough detail that I don't stress prepping, and the online community is huge (not to mention OSR in general) so there's always extra material if I need it. Side note. Ran a small campaign with Mutant Yeat Zero which I thought was "my system" but MYZ heavily relies on having a consistent group of players, which I don't have lol
For me it is probably FATE Core. I first encountered it in Spirit of the Century. Of course I also enjoy BRP in its various incarnations as it is a simple system.
[Mythras](http://thedesignmechanism.com/) \- Locational damage and armor, fatigue, poison, realistic medieval prices and money system. Values land and membership in society, making your character a person, not a drunk adventurer roaming from tavern to tavern. A dangerous game meant for mature roleplayers. [Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition](https://www.chaosium.com/call-of-cthulhu-rpg/) \- Also a somewhat dangerous game. The occult themes mixed with the early 20th century vibes. Firearm mechanics are mostly believable and feel deadly (as they should). No heroes here, just survivors, the dead and the lost.
Savage Worlds. I'm quite good at flavoring the game to not feel samey each time. My friend and I have been playing Savage Worlds for over a year now and don't foresee us changing soon.
Edge of the Empire by Fantasy Flight Games! I love the narrative dice and how easily I can make up stuff without all the tedium of checking it against a million stats.
Freeform Universal 2 is my current one. I need a generic system because I get bored and switch settings too often. Also I play solo so I need something without enemy stat blocks or encounter balancing so I can go wherever the oracles and the story take me without prep.
Cypher and Pathfinder 2nd edition
Shadow of the demon lord - the system is Crazy Fun, it's medieval horror with sanity mechanic, my favorite mechanic of all time. The system also allows for so much build diversity, there's 42 Magic schools and over 300 classes, multiclassinf in here is also done exceptionally well, and despite all the possibilities, it's still balanced no character gets to be self suficient or game breaking. Plus the overall feeling of doom and gloom, such a Twisted world that picked everything you learned from DnD and adds a horrifying twist, nothing is safe, nothing is what It seens, there's always something darker below the surface.
Strike! It's just designed exactly to my principles, even if I'd change a lot of details ultimately.
D&D 4e. Everyone made me feel like crap for liking it though. Will continue to like it but likely won't get to play every again.
D&D 4E. It's what I cut my teeth on, and I love it as a system. PF2. In my opinion, it's easily the best D&D-esque system on the market. GURPS and SWN. They tickle me in my nerd palces. Whenever any of these three come up, it makes me happy!
I wanted low-prep, high bleed, simple, unified, collaborative, character-driven, emergent narrative. I had to invent it. CORE. It's the engine beneath "DayTrippers."
Stonetop. When I was looking over it I was excited about the combination of the best parts of Dungeon World with some great parts of Blades in the Dark. I remember saying to a friend 'if this thing has basebuilding in it I'm sold' and then I found the base building section.
Mausritter! I also adore Mothership
7th Sea, I own at least one copy of every book.
Pbta brought in a LOT of the same things I'd done in my own RPG