If youāre into collaborative, narrativist systems, BiTD can do a lot of really cool stuff. It embraces playersā desire to succeed at anything by making success on just about anything reasonably likely, or at least possible, but stacking consequences and complications on. The setting is interesting but non-essential (our Duskvol is more London than Dunwall), and I really like the āclocksā system that it uses for ongoing effects.
My favorite RPG system is The Sprawl, or really, most Powered By the Apocalypse games. Rules are simple and keeps the action flowing. It is also very thematic and easy to get in the right mindset.
I do have a soft spot for Cyberpunk 2020. The first system I played with a truly excellent GM. That system was a mess and tried to do way too much, but it was fast paced and deadly compared to my first system of DnD 3.5.
When it games to the more mechanics driven games like Dungeons and Dragons, my favorite would probably be Fantasy Craft. Fantasy Craft was a system heavily based on 3.5 but really improved balance and made all classes interesting, while having a lot of useful enemy creation tools for GMs. It also had some great guides to create your own player races with racial bonuses and abilities. I managed to make really good Zelda races such as Zora and Goron using that system. Too bad I never got that off the ground.
Over the years Iāve really moved away from those mechanics heavy systems in favor for rules light systems.
1 Like
@dogsarecool I love shared narrative systems. BitDās flashback thing (iirc thatās a thing right?) appeals to me a lot.
@CBTech OMG I used to play and run SO much Cyberpunk 2020. Looking back, I abhor the system itself for many reasons, but I and my friends enjoyed it immensely despite the rules. Edit: I have moved away from super-crunchy stuff as well. As I get older, I am more about telling stories (and letting players tell theirs) than about sophisticated achievement systems.
1 Like
Yeah, the flashback system is really fun - done right it can play out like a great heist movie. I also enjoy that inventory exists in limbo until the players decide to take āloadā to have an item or tool on their person. It can provide a wonderful balance of risk/reward, which is what BiTD is all about.
Iāve played a lot of systems over the years - Traveller, AD&D, Shadowrun, 13th Age, Vampire, Aeon Trinity, etc etc and really the #1 dictate is that a good group can have fun with almost any system.
Maybe even Hackmaster, but Iāve never convinced people to give that a serious try. Hell, we had a one-shot of Human Occupied Landfill once and had a good time with it.
CP2020 was such a strange system. It felt like it wanted to be simple and fast paced, but had a ridiculous amount of skills. Why would I ever need skills in finance or zoology? Iām a trained killer! The cyberware was also very funny in retrospect. Iāll implant a cassette tape into my arm so I can record things. Having first played the system in 2009 all of the cyberware felt very anachronistic.
1 Like
Iām currently playing in an Exalted 3E game. Itās enjoyable, but mostly because we have a really good storyteller. The system is okay, but certainly not one of my favorites.
I enjoy many of the Powered by the Apocalypse engine games. I bought a copy of Blades in the Dark, which seems wonderful, but havenāt gotten around to playing it yet.
I have toyed around with trying Exalted but never had a group to do so with. But what I will say is somewhat similar to what @dogsarecool said: a good group (and/or storyteller in this case of your example) can make pretty much any system work just fine.
I just like to think about the systems themselves outside of that sometimes to imagine what best ushers along the process of telling a shared story. There are SO many approaches, and itās crazy that though I have been playing for decades, I still get surprised by the creative ways in which developers find new ones. Itās fascinating to me to sort of analyze the interplay between how the rules might affect the storytelling and vice versa.
Iāve messed around with a lot of systems, but I have yet to find something better than the Chronicles of Darkness Storyteller System. It is fairly easy to adjust for pretty much any genre of game and it is a perfect balance of mechanics solid player-focused mechanics (though I do house-rule it here and there). Plus you can tweak it easily to be more or less mechanic focused based on your preference, there are a few official books with various house-rule suggestions which are really good for customizing the system to your liking. Iāve always favored dice pool systems and D20 is just cancer on the entire hobby.
If I do want to play something more āhardcoreā I pull out Cyberpunk 2020 with Friday Night Firefight rules and a couple of my own tweaks. It is more bookkeeping than I generally like and table lookups are annoying, but you get as close to a realistic simulation of modern combat as possible in PnP.
I also have a special place in my heart for Risus. Iāve run a couple a great goofy one-shots with the system and its perfect for just on-the-spot pickup and go games.
For more traditional tabletop stuff, Iāve really liked Mutants & Masterminds, both 2e and 3e. It has a good balance of freedom and structure, and while itās not too hard for players to get a little OP, itās built for superheroes and supervillains, so thatās encouraged a little bit. Itās really fun to run Justice League or Avengers style teams, with a mix of super-powered people, rich gadgeteers, and magic users. For a GM it presents some fun challenges- making sure you have stuff for Batman-types to do while the Superman-types do their thing too means you need a lot of variety and different ways to handle situations in your campaigns. Which is what I love about tabletop stuff!
Also speedsters are the most fun thing to play in tabletop games, period.
Always wanted to play since I used to run a fantasy True20 game some years ago and knew it was a more general take on the M&M system. Upon reading up, I quickly realized that they were quite differentā¦ more like divergent variations of 3.5 D&D than the same system used in different contexts.
But I have been told that M&M is a great superhero game. Strangely, I have never played a superhero PnP game!
As a good friend of mine once said, in PbtA games the system has the decency to get out of your way and let you have fun telling stories with your friends.
My group recently played Fate and Fate Accelerated, and we really liked that system. I have a decent amount of experience with D&D and Pathfinder, but I grew sick of the crunchy-ness of the systems. It took us a little to un-learn the bad (IMO) habits from those systems to fully appreciate a system like Fate.
Grew up with D20 based systems, mostly Pathfinder and D&D 3.5. I dabbled in ADnD and 2e but my friends didnāt have the patience for it.
I love those systems dearly in the sense that theyāre basically made to be broken, min-maxed, and exploited to make the party as powerful as possible. It creates some really fun situations with mages casting fuck-off huge fireballs, monks running at like 100ft a turn, rogues jumping off 10 story buildings to assassinate a target from stealth and running around naked because their Dex modifier basically means they donāt need armour.
But, at least how I tended to play them, they donāt offer a fantastic system for conversational role-play, and thats what Iāve come to love more than rolling dice and moving miniatures.
For that Iāve basically moved into Powered By The Apocalypse games (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, The Sprawl, etc). Sessions of those games always feel so much more collaborative and fruitful.
The GM and players are forced to ask each other questions and make things up on the fly that more often than not, creates a world and characters that everyone can feel good about. Thereās still a lot of prep (I have a 15 page Google Doc of prep for a Sprawl game) but the systems themselves I think encourage GMs to not be so precious about that prep. Listen to the players. Make a map and leave blank spaces.
I just wrapped my 21st session of GMing Blades in the Dark.
It was the end of our second narrative arc. I think for next season Iām going to start hacking the game a little (starting with the XP triggers).
1 Like
Currently, Starfinder. Pathfinder and Dnd3.5 was my jam for the longest time (iām a sucker for those Adventure Paths and Golarion books). Also, Numenera (OG Cypher system) was my sci-fi fix before Starfinder.
When I was much younger I fell in love with BattleTech, which is an old table-top game with miniatures, it was spun into the computer games series MechWarrior and MechCommander, it also had a MechWarrior RPG later called BattleTech: A Time of War the BattleTech RPG, its a mouthful for sure.
You played MechWarrior RPG like any other RPG, you had a GM, and other players and do stealth missions or just general living your RPG life kind of things, but my group we had not only MechWarrior RPG but also BattleTech, BattleSpace and AeroTech, they all kind of tied in with eachother so youād be playing your character running around doing RPG stuff, then suit up in a BattleMech, later weād use BattleSpace to roleplay some space adventures, Star Trek style, then go back to MechWarrior RPG for on-the-ground missions.
This was awesome, I did have the tabletop miniatures for the BattleTech parts, think of it like WarHammer, and it was some of the most detailed RPGing Iāve done in my life.
The two games I currently enjoy the most are Fantasy Flightās Star Wars (Age of Rebellion specifically) and Stars Without Number.
If you like the setting, FF Star Wars is cool if you have the disposable income, because even the core rulebook isnāt exactly cheap and youāre likely going to want at least one additional set of their completely custom dice. The game itself is not perfect, but a lot of fun, with the so-called ānarrative diceā bringing a lot of variation to skill check results: itās completely possible that the dice dictate that you totally succeed at what youāre trying to do, but also have something terrible happen, or the other way around.
Stars Without Number on the other hand has a completely free version that has everything you need. There is a paid version of the core rules that has a few additional (but 100% non-essential) chapters, plus several supplements, but the free edition really is a full package.
The setting is a kind of post-post-apocalypse, with humanity and other alien species starting to come back from a psychic Scream that effectively disabled most of their technology.
The game is very focused on sandbox gaming, giving the GM lots of tools to facilitate this, mostly in the form of random tables and structural advice. The actual mechanics are relatively lightweight and purposely old-school so that itās easy to import stats for things like D&D Monsters and reskin them to fit the sci-fi setting.
If youāre interested in this system, a revised edition has recently kickstarted and the beta version of the new rules is also available for free. I like the changes a LOT, especially character creation gives players way more tools to make their characters mechanically distinct.
My personal favorites are the Burning Wheel and the Powered by the Apocalypse families of games, as well as Blades in the Dark.
Burning Wheel is an dense and heavy game focused on drilling down into what your characters care about. It has extensive skill and traits lists and itās character creation system lets you build anything from a ditch digger to an elven king. Iāve found it to be well suited to more social focused fantasy campaigns. Austin also played in an awesome campaign of BW over on Roll20. Other games in the BW family are Torchbearer, which is all about dark and dreary dungeon crawling, and Mouse Guard, which is about sentient mice protecting their country.
The PbtA game Iāve player the most is Dungeon World. In my AFK group we prefer it over D&D, as itās really quick to get going and doesnāt have a lot of bookkeeping. Of course it also features all of the failing forward goodness that other PbtA games provide.
Lastly thereās Blades in the Dark, which is absolutely incredible. Itās also easy enough to modify that Iāve decided to build my own monster hunting themed RPG on top of it. Design for that has been going pretty slow, but Iāll ask around here when the time for playtesting comes.
All these games I need to check out! Some interesting systems described in here, particularly in regard to character development and storytelling.
Been wanting to expand my small collection, so all of your thoughts are super-appreciated.
Prolly going for BitD first. Sounds like something that I need to experience. 
I like Feng Shui a lot - mechanically it does a really good job of handling the action to emulate the feel of action movies.
I also have a special place in my heart for Big Eyes, Small Mouth, though I know it has some very real flaws.
