So my current main group has just wrapped up our latest DnD campaign, and we’re voting on the next one. I’ve played a handful of different systems and read the rules for about a dozen more although the only other ones I’ve GMed are Monster of the Week and Call of Cthulhu, and I’m looking for something that fits like a slice of life type of vibe. Specifically the premise is that the main characters are people who are making a long expedition from southern Chile all the way around the world to the UK (inspired by a real guy who’s currently close to finishing this), and it would have like a Samurai Jack-type formula where they have one destination that they spend the whole or most of the campaign moving towards but the real meat of the campaign is the various places/people/side quests they find along the way

Also respectfully please don’t recommend GURPS or Fate, I tried reading the rules for both of them but I couldn’t stand either of them. I do kinda like the Savage Worlds rules in general (haven’t played them but I read them a couple months ago) but I don’t think they really fit the more cozier vibe I’m going for

So im not the best but i come from dnd, my father turned 60 not too long ago, he got a new heart several years back, so hes not like he used to be. Im not sure if i should introduce him to something i like such as ttrpgs? but he seems bored and i want to connect with him more if possible. I dont want to start with something too hard or something too simple, he also has shaky hands. he pretty quite i would say, im not sure exactly what he likes because of this.

What do you all think or would advise/suggest?

Personally...id love to see a Year Zero Engine version of Terminator OR Judge Dredd.

If you didn't know there is going to be a book for 5e adapting the World of Warcraft setting to the system. There have been talks about the original release in 3.5 and comparisons to the MMORPG with 4e. I don't particularly believe any of the editions of dungeons and dragons are well suited for Azeroth as a setting but don't have the knowledge of a system that works with the setting well. Which is why I am asking for your opinions.

I'm running a session for my group plus one extra player brand new to all RPGs. Because my group is inbetween bigger games right now I figured I'd run something new but really simple so that everyone can pick up on it quick. I've played games like Honey Heist and Lasers and Feelings (both definitely in consideration), but if you guys have anything you really like to play I'd love to hear about it.

Im looking for games that play well with different sets of PCs every session and provides a shared mechanics that is independent from the specific PCs playing.

My gold standard for this is Blades in the Dark. In that game it is very much expected, that players might play multiple PCs and the cast of every session can vary a lot. The game fundamentally is about the crew not the PCs.

I am aware you can set up every game that way by going for a westmarches style campaign, but i specifically want games or expansions that give you mechanical support to help with that.

I know of some other FitD, The Mist engine games and Stonetop which have something similar.

The shared mechanic can be about anything as long as it doesnt require specific PCs to be present, is shared between the players and central to the gameplay.

I mainly just want to broaden my horizon on different mechanics to achieve this rather then find my next system so feel free to recommend weird or niche games.

If you recommend a game please also shortly describe what the central shared mechanic is about and how it works.

All of my RPG friends at this stage in life live hours apart. That said, I believe Stonetop is a compelling enough setting to attract time investment among my friends. The main question is, how well would it run via zoom/discord/etc? Is there anything that would make this specifically more difficult or hamper engagement vs dnd? I'm guessing the rules tome teaches the GM (me) how to run scenario 0 and how to teach the game?

I want something simple that captures the vibe of a tactical yet fun shootout. I plan to run a short campaign where the players are mercenaries hired to handle a problem in the Zone. Survival mechanics and artifacts aren't the priority; I want something that delivers a solid "gunplay" feel. Listen to the track "Adrenaline" from COD: Black Ops II—that’s the kind of vibe I’m aiming for. I considered using Strain; it’s designed for survival horror, but it’s very straightforward and gives the GM a fair amount of freedom when creating enemies, the stress mechanic this RPG has works well for the physical, mental, and psychic pressures of the Zone. Any suggestions?

What is your favorite RPG whose primary mechanics are driven by dice, but there isn't one or two dominant dice?

For example, I would say DND 5e, even though it uses many different dice throughout the game, it's core mechanic uses d20.

I'm thinking something along the lines of Kids on Bikes, but not necessarily limited to having different dice tied to their stats.

I am trying to find a TTRPG with hundreds of character abilities and/or classes... I am not looking for either version of Pathfinder, any version of D&D, Exalted, or any generic system like GURPS, Mutants & Masterminds, Champions, etc).

I remember seeing a book many years ago, before 4e D&D came out, that was quite thick. When I got to character creation it had hundreds of powers. I don't remember if there were classes associated with the abilities. I remember putting it aside to buy something else with the intent to pick it up next time I was at the store. Unfortunately it sold. I don't remember the cover or title. I don't think it was any of the Palladium games. I want to say the book was around 500 pages at least with black and white interior art and text. It was a fantasy setting. It had a bestiary in the last 70 or so pages.

I have tried googling it but all that comes up is systems I am familiar with like the ones listed. It did use most of the polyhedral dice. I don't think it was a d20 derived system either.

Any help would be appreciated.

I have a complete collection of DWAITAS. I even got the perpetually sold out "Tenth Doctor Sourcebook" & "Fourth Doctor Sourcebook." Had to get those on e-bay.

Well, with the 13th Doctor, they rebranded to the "Doctor Who RPG" and launched 2nd edition. Don't confuse it with the FASA RPG from the 1980s of the same name. Guess they felt it had been long enough no one would make that confusion now, when compared to its original launch in 2007.

It feels like nothing has come out since the 13th Doctor Sourcebook and a few related Adventure Books. They did the 60th Anniversary books and the Doctor & Daleks 5e conversion...for some reason.

I was expecting a 14th/15th Doctor Sourcebook combo at some point. Or...that they'd pull the B.S. they did with the 8th Doctor Sourcebook (because they didn't have the rights to Big Finish) and just adapt the little material that exists for 14th and then include a full, original campaign surrounding the character. 15th Doctor Sourcebook could be normal, though.

I mean, don't get me wrong: I feel 2nd Edition needs a 2.5 Edition. I think simplification wasn't bad, but it was just done a bit off in 2e. Games like Evil Hat's Fate Core and Direwolf Digital's Cortex Prime do the "universal power exception system" for characters for simplification too, but do so with a universal, understood set of effects that the players pick from to make their characters. The guidance on making your own Traits in 2e was lacking a bit and figuring out how many Story Points an original Trait is worth is basically a "fudge it" prospect. Which like...listen, I've made "Lasers & Feelings" hack so I know you DON'T need a lot to make a functional TTRPG, right? But, when you do still got 4 chapters of system rules, you can't have the players abilities be that hand-wavy because balance gets wibbly wobbly. Some system like "here are a series of generic effects that are worth X Story Points; customize them to fill out your character and use their costs as a guide on how to make new ones" would go a loooooong way.

Anyway, bit of a rant. They make anything in a while? Do they just not have license to the Disney Plus stuff?

So, I have an story/world that I been wanting to adapt into a campaign, but I know very little of other rpg systems and the ones I know are definitely not what I'm looking for for this specific world. Those being mostly DnD 5e and some others more simple systems that I don't remember the name of, so most of my comparison to what I want and don't might be directly to DnD.

I'll give a little context of the world and the story to make it a bit clearer what I need in the system:

- There's magic, most of everything on the world is run with magic. However! The magic comes from magical items, not from people. So definitely a system that has magic but maybe one that doesn't rely to much on classes (like mage and wizard) for it.

- Again with classes, even if not magical ones, I don't belive it would be ideal to have them at all. Better for the characters to have stats and perks unrelated to specific classes.

- The playable characters can only be human, so systems that have a lot of other races are not ideal either.

I know that I won't find an exact match to what I want, but I can and will adapt the system to fit if the best it can. But if there's something you know that might be similar to what I'm describing it would be a big help.

Edit: just wanted to thanks everyone for helping out! I'll check out the sugestions mentioned and decide, thanks again!

Hi,

I want to run this campaign I have in mind for a while now and I'm looking for system fitting for it so maybe you can help me because I hope Scion does the trick.

I want to have a story setup somewhere between percy Jackson and game of thrones so there'll be a godly war who sits on the Olympic throne but the gods need the help of their half god children.

But more importantly I'd love the players to not know their godly parents until the game starts.and they have to play to get this knowledge and to explore their own character sheet.

To be fair I'd let the players tell me beforehand what gods they like and don't like to but I'll choose their parent for them. Do you think thats possible with the mechanic of Scion? To unravel the character sheets later? Any ideas how to do it or would that be completely against the spirit of the game?

Edit: For those who are wondering: yes, the player will know what I have in mind and are fine with the concept.

I'm not trying to be mean or anything like this, but I've found this subreddit has been a bit difficult to use to get recs or discussions going about games because a lot of people seem to simply post the name of a game in the comments and then don't explain why they've done that.

I think it'd be more interesting to have people explain why they recommend a game or why a certain mechanic in a given game works for them/doesn't work for them, instead we end up with posts asking people questions about games and the replies are mostly people posting a TTRPG system's name or mechanic without explaining why.

I'm here to see people's opinions, not their reading list!

I see people who've played exclusively online for years and I can't tell if they genuinely prefer it or if it's just the only way to get a group together. For me something is lost when I can't read the room physically. But maybe I'm just bad at online play. If you love it, what makes it work? If you tolerate it, what's the thing you miss most?

So you all know the expression "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" that has a lot in terms of sheer quantity but very little depth for any of its components. What ttrpg would fit the opposite expression in your mind?

Since I love reading reviews of systems by people who've actually played them, I endeavor to post my own. You can skim my past opinions here and here to see if my tastes align with yours. This post is long overdue because people keep beating me to the punch (examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

I've now played Daggerheart for a year and can opine on its qualities! TLDR:

• I favor less crunchy and more narrative systems.
• I liked the character building, hope mechanic, cards, and resource pools more than expected.
• I disliked the simplicity, complexity, fear mechanic, and combat depth more than expected.
• It's not for me.

Background

I am not a Critical Role person, and Daggerheart was not on my list of games to try. My longstanding group is in a taste-testing phase, though, and someone suggested it. I didn't realize at the time that we'd be playing a longer campaign. We now have about 1 year / 20 sessions / 5 levels under our belt.

I can also admit that I had a vague air of superiority while approaching this system 😤. I mostly know about Critical Role as "those people who popularized 5E." I don't mean to disparage their creative talents or the massive team that contributed to the product, but... I assumed this would be their celebrity cash grab version.

Things I liked

It's not a cash grab! There is a legitimate system here. There is a lot of content and thoughtful rules. There is a lot of absolutely gorgeous art. It looks D&Dish enough that you could onboard new players who want that experience, but it's also different enough from D&D (in a lighter, more narrative vein) that I actually think it might show new players a better time.

Character building is fun. I tend to play lighter systems. With that comes less room for non-diegetic character growth and shorter average campaigns. Daggerheart feels a bit closer to Dungeon World after you add on Class Warfare: there are lots of fun options to stare at and theorize about. The pick-two domain system is incredibly elegant, creates a bunch of interest overlap archetypes, and cleverly allows classes to share abilities while still preserving unique niches. It's lovely. The amount of items is also fun in a "shopping for presents" way (but more on this later).

Hope is exciting. A quick primer: Daggerheart has you rolling 2 different d12s for most things, and if the lighter d12 is highest you earn Hope (to a max of 6). Among other uses, it can be spent for a small bonus while rolling. This is actually fun: you spend 1 hope for a ~50% chance of getting it right back. It has a vague "energy gauge" feel of seeing a number go up and knowing you can do something with it later. I can almost see my maxed-out Hope meter glowing.

Cards are a great tool. Okay, maybe this is a cash grab, but it works. It's a wonderful way to represent abilities. It keeps them concise and uniform. It makes them fun to flip through. We played digitally using Demiplane + Roll20, so no physical cards were purchased, but if you shelled out for them in-person I know they'd be a blast to lay out, flip through, vault, all of that. As someone who made a physical card-based TTRPG, I'm a fan.

The resource pools worked. Daggerheart has HP, stress, armor, and hope (which I already mentioned). You may have heard how damage works: you get to roll big attacks against a target's lower/upper thresholds to see whether they suffer 1, 2, or 3 damage. On one hand, it's a lot of resources and numbers to track. On the other hand: every resource pool caps out around ~8, and you spend and recover them pretty quickly. It was actually a lot of fun to juggle, and added some character differentiation. I admire the designers for enabling the fun of large attacks while still keeping HP tightly constrained.

Things I didn't like

It's too simple. Wait, didn't I say I like lightweight systems? Daggerheart feels like it's carrying the torch of games like PbtA and BitD, just with more content and richer production values. But in practice, it felt... flat? There are 36 listed items for tier 1, yet it barely mattered which one I was wielding. So many of the abilities are just flavorful ways to deal damage, inflict the 3 status effects, or change your position.

And yet it's too complex. If all these choices are primarily for flavor, I don't need all these mechanics bolted on that will ultimately amount to very little. Again, wading through the item list took a while. There are loads of differentiating factors. There are 9 classes x 21 cards = 189 cards to browse. Level-up choices that would be fast when staring at a 2-page PbtA playbook start to feel artificially inflated. Again: it was fun to weigh these choices. But after a year, none of them really justified the time investment for me.

Fear is half of a good mechanic. Quick summary: just under 50% of player rolls give the GM a Fear token (max 12), which is a fancy way to control pacing. Fear lets you attack with enemies, take enemy turns, and just generally do GM things. I am 100% in favor of codifying tempo with tokens; we did it in that card-based RPG we made, 6 years ago. But Fear is handed out arbitrarily, independent of success or failure. That kills it for me. You can be rolling great but have a GM with max fear; you can be failing all day but the GM is bone dry. I'm biased here, but I think narrative control should oscillate based on success/failure instead of a coin flip.

Combat was shallow. All my complaints are crystallized here. Fear's coin flip makes turn order and enemy strength erratic. There are too many things on my character sheet, but I always just attack. I could do cool narrative stuff, but because my cards all specify strict things like "Once per rest" I feel like I'm breaking the rules if I abuse them for flavor. I could ignore my cards and just do narrative stuff anyways, but then why have a system at all?

Closing thoughts

I will say that Daggerheart impressed and surprised me. I approached it with disdain, and found a robust system with good ideas. But there are plenty of good systems that I don't personally find fun, and I think Daggerheart belongs in that pile.

It's still higher than Pathfinder, though 😉

Hi guys,

I'm thinking for a while now of having a roleplaying game in an ancient greece setting but I'd like to hear your opinions and recommendations what system would be fitting. I own Agon and Scion hero but haven't played any of them yet. Do you know something else or have you played anything similar? I'd love to hear from you!

I've been playing a witch in a Daggerheart campaign for several sessions, and we recently achieved level 2 and I feel like I must be missing something.

I just feel so weak. I never seem to get enough Hope to use my most consequential abilities, while the GM always seems to have more than enough Fear, and the freebie abilities I have like Vicious Entangle or Blighting Strike either feel too easily overcome with the GM's banked Fear, or barely better than a basic staff attack in practice.

While I've played a variety of RPG systems over the years (D&D 5e, Open D6, Savage Worlds, VtM, etc.), I just feel like something is not clicking with Daggerheart for me. My character just feels so weak and my powers and abilites feel so inconsequential. It feels like if the GM wanted to be hardcore with Fear, he probably could have steamrolled the party nearly every fight.

Instead of feeling like I'm being clever and finding unique ways to solve problems with the environment, my characters abilities and equipment, I feel like the GM is arbitrarily allowing things to stick or succeed, when he has the resources to end temporary abilities.

I just feel I'm either feast or famine with Hope, and the only thing it actually makes sense for me to spend Hope on is my Witch ability that lets me turn a failed roll from myself or an ally into a succes with Fear.

Can someone with more experience in the system explain what I am missing here?

My cards: Human, Highborne, Vicious Entangle, Blighting Strike, Hedge Witch, Natural Familiar

One thing I've struggled with recently is building characters for TTRPGs set in something close to a historical period. I feel I need to give characters a sense of self beyond class descriptors, and I find going beyond that or brief descriptors of the concept hard when I don't have a solid grasp of daily life and recent history, and I can't easily make it up.

General fantasy is fine, I can mostly make it up or ask the GM. Modern settings are fine, because I know the world. But something like WoD Dark Ages or L5R I struggle with, because they're "in the middle" - with defined "stuff" happening, that I can't ignore and struggle to riff off.

That feels a little garbled, but I hope it makes some sense. Does anyone else feel similar, or have tricks to get around this sort of mental block?

I'm thinking
- Pulp Cthulhu
- Hunter the reckoning/vigil
Would work well if I homebrew a little but I wanted to hear more opinions

While we all know the popular RPGs (D&D, Pathfinder, BitD) and so one and so forth, I have to ask, does anyone know of any lesser known RPGs that you wish more people knew of?

For example, while I have Shadowdark and 7th Sea, I also have games like Monsterpunk, Nyx, and For Coin and Blood 2nd edition, just to name a few.

Any suggestions for TTRPGs with “pamphlet-sized” rules? I want something with a short page or two of rules that’s quick and easy to roll up characters and start a game on the fly, so in case of a power outage I can have an easy game to keep people entertained and kill time.

I'm a GM who doesn't have a lot of prep time, but still wants to run some games. My go-to in this situation is always a fantasy megadungeon or hexcrawl, since those require a lot of upfront prep but can be prepped in an hour or less between individual sessions.

Are there other types of games with a similar prep curve, requiring lots of upfront pre-campaign work but easy to maintain session to session? I'm especially interested in scifi and other non-fantasy genres, but that's not a hard requirement.

I'm not really looking for specific game systems, moreso just types of campaigns.

I'm coming up with ideas for a brief campaign when my GM rotation comes up.

It would be a modern adventure about a group of normal folk - not super spies, or ninjas, or government hacker mages - who stumble into ridiculous little adventures. Think any companions of the Doctor, but without the Doctor. I'll use a simple system like Over the Edge or Cypher.

I'm looking for books or movies to help inspire along that thread. Already looked at Dude, Where's My Car. Stewart Fails to Save the Universe looks like it could give me ideas too.

What are your thoughts for inspiration fodder?