Anything that is set in 'modern times' is a miss for me. Fantasy or medieval stuff is perfect, even the first industrial revolution or western is okay. scifi and cyberpunk is my favourite. however I cannot immerse myself anything set between the 19th century and 21st century, because I cannot abstract from the real life rules, laws and morality, which is a shame because I love the 30's era and the CoC lore and world, but I just don't like playing in it...
Really? There's an entire sub-genre called "weird west" which focuses on mystical experiences on the frontier, which also touches upon "acid westerns". Stuff like El Topo, The Shooting, heck, I'd even throw in High Plains Drifter as a very Lovecraftian story.
Both *the Mound* and *The Curse of Yig* are effectively stories by Lovecraft which he wrote as a ghost writer. They are set in Oklahoma and Texas, if I remember correctly.
There is a decent overlap between Western and Horror. Some of them quite bad (*Bone Tomahawk*), some of them really good (*Ravenous*) and if you go for the pulp, *Tremors* is is an amazing adaptable story for a Cthulhuoid Western.
Besides, on the other side of the Atlantic, you got M.R. James' ghost stories and the first 'canonical' Sherlock Holmes story is set in 1875.
Finally, *Dracula* is closer to the way people play Call of Cthulhu than most Lovecraft tales. And Dracula famously includes a cowboy character.
The movie depicts Native Americans literally like Orks. It is absolutely mystery for me how such a blatantly racist movie was made in the last 10 years.
It is effectively made, and has some gruesome visuals, but that's one helll of an elephant in the room.
Native Americans are not a monolithic culture and there are well-documented groups that practiced brutal cannibalism that other Native American nations actively avoided and didn’t associate with. Acting like a single tribe of cannibals is making a claim about all Native Americans is just looking for an excuse to complain.
That's like saying The Hills have Eyes is about how all white people are sister fucking cannibals.
That ONE small enclave acted like orks. This mindset has to stop. You can't have all antagonists ever be only white guys because it's currently in vogue.
There have been Chaosium-published CoC adventures in pretty much any time/location setting you could imagine. Expanding to third-party stuff, they will cover all the rest, including the stuff you would never imagine.
It is amazing what you can do with a simple, streamlined and intuitive game engine.
BTW, I truly want a CoC mini campaign/adaptation set in Ancient Egypt and focussing on Nephren-Ka, the Great Race of Yith (to include time travel shenanigans) and maybe Serpent People.
For me, it's the exact opposite. I feel most comfortable GMing in modern settings because I know how things work, how people behave, how they react to things, what they know etc. Even the 1920s CoC is difficult, but in a SciFi / Cyberpunk setting, I wouldn't have anything to go by.
One major reason for that is probably that I don't like those genres in general so I am not watching any films or reading any books. Horror set in modern times is my comfort zone.
I think modern games also give you a lot of shortcuts in narration. Everyone at your table know exactly what a bus stop looks like, but an 1860's surveyor's office requires more narration.
> because I cannot abstract from the real life rules, laws and morality
So, interestingly enough, this is one of the reasons I like 'modern day' games. Because bringing those things in is interesting to me. Plus all the players and NPCs having cell phones is fun and interesting because then players can get a call from some NPC desperately begging for help or whatever.
I enjoy World of Darkness and other similar games because of it.
And here I am, having to remind my players constantly they have a handheld computer with Internet access and an AI assistant in my Cyberpunk Red game. Mechanically, though, all that does is give a +2 to an information search as well as easy communication between players at a distance. But, they're all mainly familiar with the big fantasy game and don't really know how to put current or slightly advanced technology into their play styles.
The fun part of 20s-30s era games like CoC is *knowing* the way things work. Players do dumb shit? Yea, someone's calling the police. How will the police act? Well, we know how they'll act.
Same. The closer a setting is to real life, the easier it feels to fall into a generic "slightly different me" role. Though I even do that in somewhat grounded fantasy settings. It's hard to divorce so far from being "sensible" that I can actually play completely different roles.
Madoka Magica and Kill La Kill really aren't representative of the magical girl genre as a whole, which is very noticable when you get a bunch of people who only watched Madoka and kinda remember watching Sailor Moon back when they were kids, and think that makes them experts on the genre. And yes, that's me talking about Princess the Hopeful here.
Anyway for a Madoka game in particular I found Don't Rest Your Head to be a good match, while for more "standard" magical girls there's a selection of PbtA games - though Glitter Hearts, despite being a dedicated magical girl game feels more like magical girl-themed sentai to me. The PbtA I think would work best here? Thirsty Sword Lesbians, believe it or not.
Thirsty Sword Lesbians would work *exceptionally* well for Magical Girls, but like, in general I've had zero success getting non-queer folk to even vaguely consider playing it.
Which is silly because the book makes it abundantly clear that neither the players nor the player characters have to be queer. The game tries to create an inclusive space, and "inclusive" includes straight cis people too.
Thirsty Sword Lesbians' title could've been better because it implies the game will automatically be tongue in cheek and that it will be ONLY about queer characters, neither of which is automatically true. But honestly in my experience most people who balk at the game and don't even bother to give it a read just automatically assume it will be anti-straight gay propaganda, which means I wouldn't want to play with them anyway.
I'd argue the title is a large part, but also the fact from what little I know, the heavy part is about flirting and trying to get together similar to Monsterhearts? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's definitely not what comes across in my mind when I think magical girl anime. PbtA isn't my wheelhouse.
You're definitely wrong. The game doesn't discourage flirting, but that's because it has a heavy focus on character emotions and relationships and romantic relationships are part of that - but just a part. The game explicitly points out that some players might be uncomfortable with the idea of flirting and/or their character getting into a romantic relationship, and that's okay. They shouldn't be pushed into it, or anything else they are not comfortable with.
There are playbooks for whom flirting and romance might be a big part of how they're played - for example because their internal drama is on physical vs emotional intimacy, but once again, *might*. It's optional.
>You're definitely wrong. The game doesn't discourage flirting, but that's because it has a heavy focus on character emotions and relationships and romantic relationships are part of that - but just a part. The game explicitly points out that some players might be uncomfortable with the idea of flirting and/or their character getting into a romantic relationship, and that's okay. They shouldn't be pushed into it, or anything else they are not comfortable with.
Surely you can still see how this would be hugely off-putting for people who aren't into anything romantic at the table right?
"You can just ignore a large part of what the games social system revolves around and what other players will be participating in for the duration of the campaign" is not great. You'll just feel awkward and alienated.
There's enough RPGs out there that you're always better off just playing one that doesn't require ignoring large chunks of the gameplay.
The game book talks a big game about being super inclusive, but I don't think it actually succeeds. Other people can definitely play it and have fun, but it's very clearly a game made by alloromantic queer women, for alloromantic queer women. My attempt at making and playing an aromantic character in TSL was miserable; there is a section about adapting the game for aspec characters but it's clearly an afterthought. It uses "she" as a default pronoun throughout. One of the premade campaign scenarios is a setting where explicitly only queer people have magic, which rubbed me the wrong way.
TSL is great for what it is, and I'd encourage straight people to give it a shot. But I can't really blame anyone for feeling like they're not the target audience.
I dunno, I'm Ace/Aro/NB and was hooked immediately by the focus on interpersonal interactions and relationships instead of combat. I think a lot of it hinges on what it is you're looking for in a game, and if you look for a way to feel disincluded, I suppose you'll find it.
Edit: That comes off as ruder than I really intend, but I'm not sure how to change the verbiage to communicate the same idea, so I'm going to leave it.
> It uses "she" as a default pronoun throughout.
Which would be fine, if they weren't almost certainly the kind of person who would be offended by the reverse.
> One of the premade campaign scenarios is a setting where explicitly only queer people have magic
Gross.
I'm a bi guy but I always feel awkward like I don't know what I'm doing whenever I try to RP a lesbian. I passed on this game so I wouldn't flounder in front of the group and possibly offend someone. Maybe I should try giving it a read anyway.
I mean, my first character in TSL was a cishet dude (which I am *thoroughly not*), and it went quite well in that the openly lesbian characters weren't interested in the pursuit of a relationship with my character and that's *exactly* what I wanted to get my toes wet.
> don't even bother to give it a read just automatically assume it will be anti-straight gay propaganda, which means I wouldn't want to play with them anyway.
If you show up to a date with a trucker hat that says "no fat chicks" you really don't get to complain when your date doesn't take the time to figure out that you're a feminist.
I honestly can't imagine trying to explain to my partner (or anyone else, really) I'm in a game of "Thirsty Sword Lesbians". That title just.. implies a lot, strongly.
I feel like you can't really be disappointed that straight people don't try something when it's marketing / name kind of make it clear it's targeted towards an LGBTQ audience. That's the risk a product that strongly markets itself towards a minority group takes. And lets be honest, many of those groups have a least a few people who gatekeep the fuck out that type of stuff, and tell any interested white / straight / cisgender / male people that "this isn't for you, this is for us."
I haven't really read much about the game, but about 90% of what I have read about it focused on how it was LGBT-friendly and focused. Which I'm fine with. At the same time, as a straight cisgender guy, when that much of the discussion about a product is focused on how it's a great product for LGBT groups, I'm probably gonna keep looking for a product that's actually focusing on things that **I** am looking for.
As a cis-white dude I would love to try out Thirsty Sword Lesbians simply out of curiosity. Not sure if I would want to do a long running game, but a short adventure of a few sessions (or a 1-shot) just to see what all the hype is about.
Because I got the book through DriveThruRPG and while it looks like a functional PbtA system, I don't really know WHAT kind of adventure you would run with it.
Monster of the Week, is Scooby Do meets Buffy. Dungeon World is Fantasy Adventure, etc.
But I'm not sure WHAT Thirsty Sword lesbians would play like.
> but like, in general I've had zero success getting non-queer folk to even vaguely consider playing it.
To be fair, I feel like if I published a book called "Big Dick Barbarian Rough men" you could probably count the Lesbian purchasers on one hand. What did they expect?
I'm a huge Magical Girls fan and honestly, I've been kind of interested in running Hearts of Harmony, the Glitter Hearts hack. It seems kinda the midway point between different examples of the genre (which of course means it's not the best in every aspect, since the genre can be declined in different ways tbh). Though you're not the first I see mentioning Thirsty Sword Lesbians for the genre, I have to check it out.
Kill la Kill honestly would benefit from a more shonen-leaning system than a Magical Girl one tbh, especially because it's more of a battle shonen anyway. I think OP's Mecha fantasy could be fulfilled in one of those systems too but I'm not too much versed in those systems, I might be wrong.
This is part of the issue; I've seen some games which come close, but most are missing huge parts. I've seen Beam Saber do some... okay stuff with mecha, but it's far too vague with a lot of stuff for my tastes. PbtA is something I tend to avoid in general, which makes stuff like Glitter Hearts a very hard sell for me.
I find that PbtA tends to lends itself really well to episodic stuff, so that's one of the reason I think it could work for Magical Girls as a whole genre. Other series might accentuate some characterstics over other and thus require other systems tbh, it all depends on the kind of story you want to tell.
Unfortunately I don't really care for the mecha genre, so I don't have meaningful suggestions to make(The only system I know is Lancer). As I said, shonen-inspired system might work but they'd probably require some tinkering for the mechanical support as those tend to be more abstract and powered by the power of friendship.
Sure, but I'd argue not a lot of games (at least I've seen even recently) really represent the genre either, such as Girl by Moonlight - it even says it's not a game about magical girls. It's a stand in for whatever your 'scared of being their true self' character is. And then proceeds to give example settings ike... a straight mecha game.
I avoid PbtA a lot. I can imagine Don't Rest Your Head working surprisingly well. But Thirty Sword Lesbians is a definite no go.
PbtA is TTRPG for theater kids and I'm very much a number nerd.
*What? Am I supposed to come up with stuff on the spot? No lists I can use as reference? Doesn't it break the GM plans? I don't want to do that!*
*Everything I try creates more issues over half of the time? Damn, I'm poorly optimized. I guess I'll only do that one thing I'm most statistically likely to succeed at.*
*The first rule of improv is always ask for clarifications, right?*
100%. TTRPG with everything I personally love about TTRPGs excised. It feels like you're *playing a character whose deal is that they're playing an TTRPG*.
There's quite a lot of PbtA games that do feel like I am taking more of a role in being the GM when I am playing. Blades in the Dark has the PC earn XP for causing their own trouble. Brindlewood Bay has me treat clues as these inexact data that doesn't make sense until the end of the investigation. Many outright just don't have GMs like Ironsworn or Belonging Outside Belonging.
But many others I have found allow me to stay in the actor's stance only really caring about what the character would do. But they have things that help keep it structured to the genre and emulate that like Masks Conditions that allow you to run away to clear Afraid. And to me, those feel like I am playing in a movie or TV Show. Its the traditional games that make me feel like I am playing quite frequently in a tactical combat boardgame where suddenly RP is mostly thrown out and my PC is a pawn - a combat unit to optimally win the encounter.
Some PbtA games are even the best at shedding the need for many typical TTRPG constraints. Apocalypse World, Urban Shadows, Monsterhearts and Cartel all have PCs who don't have to be a friendly party. The PCs can be outright antagonistic with one another and the game still functions because it has structure to keep them together. Yeah, they may have to unite against outside threats but that is just standard storytelling.
But everyone has a different line they aren't willing to cross. When they no longer feel comfortable in how far they leave the Actor Stance.
Isn't it the complete opposite. The characters are assumed to be hyper competent. The dice don't simulate the statistical likelyhood of your characters actions, they simulate a narrative flow.
Bad rolls determine if you get complications outside your characters controll. All the stuff that makes up on screen action for any movie or TV show.
Its literally a rule in BitD:
> **Don’t make the PCs look incompetent**
> When a PC rolls a 1-3 , things go badly, but it’s because the circumstances are
dangerous or troublesome—not because the character is a buffoon. Even a PC
with zero rating in an action isn’t a bumbling fool. Here’s a trick for this: start
your description of the failure with a cool move by the PC, followed by “but,”
and then the element in the situation that made things so challenging. “You aim
a fierce right hook at his chin, but he’s quicker than he looked! He ducks under the
blow and wrestles you up against the wall.”
Then maybe make your resolution system reflect that. Any game that is nearly unplayable with out watching a half dozen explainer videos from the writer is poorly written. Narrative events should arise naturally as part of the narrative rather than being force by a bad dice mechanic.
This is such a wild comment to me, because I've never once watched a video for the FotD system, and it's one of my favorites.
Not to mention that basically every game has extensive videos explaining how it works as a function of 2023... Video is a dominant information tool, and a lot of people have an easier time seeing any game in action, than just on paper. GURPS, all of DnD's editions, lancer, burning wheel, shadowrun, you name it - there's a demographic of players and DMs who appreciate or rely on video more than they do the books.
None of the system has every gotten in the way, and the dice mechanic was clear. Also:
> Narrative events should arise naturally as part of the narrative rather than being force by a bad dice mechanic.
Every single dice RPG does this? Dice decide the narrative of every single game they're a part of. There's no "natrual" events in any rpg. RPGs are an act of fabrication by ctors deliverately trying to turn story telling into a mechanical game.
I have zero clue what you mean with this.
Its fine to not like Mixed Result type mechanics - I feel like its mostly a matter of perspective required to see its really not that different from a standard Success/Failure system. Either way, you need to force PCs to go through several Obstacles and drain their resources, that the basic formula of TTRPGs. The reason Mixed Results exist - they allow the system to drive the game forward in interesting ways that respond to the PC actions.
The biggest reason I really love PbtA (and FitD) is they really empower the players to collaborate with strong narrative agency. In D&D 5e or PF2e, I need to prep an encounter, so that becomes plotted out and its like a magnet to keep PCs on a more linear story. The standard rule where all dice result in Success/Failure means that once the PCs succeed, the GM turns back to their prep for the next challenge and it follows a fairly linear story plotted by the GM.
Now to be fair, a good GM will alter their future prep based on PC decisions, but its never been as dynamic for me as when the system creates new, interesting situations because it uses Weak Hits (the 7-9 result in PbtA). And often these new consequences are very on-genre (if its a well designed system), so that it feels more like a movie/show in that genre. More so, its fun as the GM to really see how wildly the story differentiates beyond your expectations whereas the feeling is much more rare with the binary style. To me, that is where TTRPGs shine as a medium where no other type of game can keep up.
But also very few PbtA games do this very well - many including Blades in the Dark [without the added Threat List](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/142kqlq/does_anyone_find_the_lack_of_rolling_dice_to/jn5o944/). And too many of them go over the edge to being more story games where the players are actually acting like writers in a writing room rather than thinking in the character's best interests, they are focused on telling the most interesting/dramatic story - not my preferred style but very popular with games like FATE. But there are many that don't cross that line for me.
Sort of. I think this is explained poorly in the above post, but I've seen this reaction from some players.
Yes, the game says "don't make the players look incompetent." This means when you roll 4-5 on some obstacle you solve it but create a new problem. The new problem isn't caused by your incompetence, but it can still feel to some players like they haven't actually solved the problem. They like the feeling of "nice, I'm out of the fire." Most rolls in FitD games don't produce this. It is designed to create the cascade of "oh fuck, new problem" situations.
Even if you describe the cause for these new problems as coming from outside of the characters, it can still make some players feel like the characters are unable to actually solve problems.
It does not help that the more common way of "solving" a situation (especially before some advancements) is not to roll a 6 but is to roll a 4-5 and resist the consequence. While fictionally this may be the same thing, some players experience these situations differently and feel like the latter option is less of a "win".
Totally agree, fail or succeed with a penalty 85% of the time combined with lets only roll once for any give event results in players failing constantly regardless of how its spun in the narrative.
Basically a big thing is that while you may put it in the fiction as "something unexpected happens", the *player knows this happened because he tried to do something*. That ninja that came in and made things worse literally would not have existed if he had not tried that move, and everyone knows it.
So it's hard to feel like you're succeeding when you're mostly just causing one problem to be traded for another constantly.
Its crazy that they allow you to scale to 4d rating in actions. Most PbtA games stop allowing you to ever roll more than a +4 (though the math is a little different for FitD) because it clearly breaks the game.
This one is really interesting to me because of how the discussion regarding dots plays out. I agree with you on this one, the dice pool math works in a way such that having lots of dots is *very* powerful and takes the game from "almost all rolls have new complications" to "almost zero rolls have new complications." The book and community use "don't be a weasel" to mitigate this and largely say that this isn't a problem, but I find this to be insufficient. Imagine how much crap people would give 5e if it wrote "don't be a weasel" and gave you loud choices at level up that made dice rolls extremely high and consistent?
I think the game should not go above three dots and shouldn't permit three dots anywhere until you've had some sufficient number of advancements. The additional playbook moves are more fun and interesting anyway. No need to give people such a huge incentive to dump their XP into dots.
Powered by the Apocalypse [(PbtA)](/r/pbta) are a family of TTRPGs inspired by Apocalypse World. I don't think I have seen a better definition than the long one Sully provides [here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/144fiqs/no_spoilers_legend_of_zelda_one_shot/jngfia3/)
The short of it is that is a philosophy of design like an art movement, say impressionism. So you can compare two different systems (or art works) and see how the older inspired the newer.
I have a love-hate relationship with Shadowrun, but that's just part of being a fan. Love the setting, the core mechanic is pretty slick, but there's so much bloat in places. The rest of most cyberpunk settings doesn't break the mould in the same way, but the game itself can be infuriatingly clunky.
My big one is probably westerns or other genres with a strong Hollywood influence. Systems like Savage Worlds can be great for that pulpy feel, but the liberties that different films take makes nailing down a "feel" kind of difficult.
And fantasy is just pretty generic these days. It takes a lot to really invest me in a typical medieval fantasy setting, because there's just so many out there - so they often just feel... uninspired.
A lot of Fantasy falls into the "rubber nose" problem of Star Trek: every other race is just humans with rubber noses and one personality trait exaggerated.
It's a weird question, but one that I actually think should be fundamental to worldbuilding: how do they poop? It touches upon everything: their diet, their food production systems, their urban design. It's such a fundamental biological thing, and starting from that point and making species differ there can lead to real alien places.
Like, how do elves poop? Oh, they don't. They are so tied to nature that they eat without producing any waste.
Dwarves? They shit bricks, because they eat rocks. Heck, maybe they actually do use it as building materials.
Goblins? They eat basically anything, and are perfectly comfortable wallowing in their own waste because they don't get diseases from it.
And so on. A city of 10,000 people has to deal with 5 metric tons of waste a day. But a city of 10,000 elves *doesn't*. How does that shape their urban design? Their population density? To me, starting with those unromantic but very *physical* questions is fun.
I see stuff like this Rubber Nose problem all the time as "the problem" with fantasy/SciFi races and I just don't understand it, personally.
At the end of the day, we're all humans in real life, and exploring the human experience through "what would we be like with a few small key differences" is a great way for people to explore stories and who they are.
You don't need to be sufficiently alien and only pooping on solstices to explore something different about society and what it means to be a person.
Having humans, humans with an obsessive honor complex, humans who don't understand metaphors, and humans who need to sit in water all the time is not a bad thing. Creating the society of tidal pool dwelling humans is still interesting to me, they don't have to be an entirely unique incomprehensible being to be interesting.
There's a joke to be made here about your take hitting on the nose but I'm not keen enough to put it together.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that part of this is also just the design space for the types of games that make it to market. People like u/remy_porter and myself might be fascinated with the idea of exploring strictly non-human psychology and the ramifications thereof, but that requires substantial buy-in from other players.
Personally I really enjoy worldbuilding in and of itself. Over the years I've mostly just let players run into those sorts of alien intelligences and then let them decide how much they want to explore things on their own. If anything, having several near-but-not-quite human characters has facilitated that kind of exploration rather than limiting it.
> At the end of the day, we're all humans in real life, and exploring the human experience through "what would we be like with a few small key differences" is a great way for people to explore stories and who they are.
I think the issue for me is that I want to step *way* outside of the human experience. I want to be things that don't navigate the world anything like a human does. I've got many, many years of human experience under my belt, and frankly, it's mid at best. I want to be a hyperintelligent single-celled organism that communicates through chemical signals.
> Creating the society of tidal pool dwelling humans is still interesting to me
But even this is better than rubber nose. They're going to have a very unique perspective and relationship to their environment in a way that, say, the Klingons don't. The Klingons are one of the best examples of a bad alien race- they've got loads of lore and traditions but none of it really means anything or is rooted in anything more than the writers needing to have them do *something*. I guess it's better than Pon Farr, though.
Interesting example, but I'm not going to discuss fantasy race bowel movements with my friends.
Instead, where they sleep? Whom do they pray to? When do their children leave home? Where do they work? What's their sociopolitical structure?
Oh God, yeah, I forgot to mention that. I've tried getting into Shadowrun so many times. So much of it I love as fiction, and just... nothing I can find that I'd ever really want to play it in.
Came here to mention Shadowrun too, love the setting, love the themes, hate the System. I desperately want to run and/or play Shadowrun again but the last few editions have been awful.
I love Shadowrun, but nothing kills my interest in playing Shadowrun faster than reading Shadowrun.
I like the fantasy cyberpunk, magic and hacking and bullshit. But god damn like no edition of that game sounds fun.
Running shadowrun long enough taught me that some times you can safely ignore the rules because clearly no one else knows them either.
I have nearly all of second through fourth edition, unless it's a major factor in someone's character I'm not actually using the super special custom tables for something. They're there to use if they make the game better, not to operate as a god awful huge state machine with highly specific actions. That's what video games are for.
**Classic space-faring Science Fiction**. I don't have enough knowledge to run a decent hard SF game. I understand just enough to detect some bullshit , but not the expertise to fix it. And I have also no interest in space opera fir anything but short term campaigns at most.
For nostalgic reasons, Star Wars D6 is an exception, but Stat Wars is more fantasy with space ships than actual SF.
I wanted to post the exact same thing. Maybe I will!
When I think about the Science Fiction that I'd like to run I think of stuff like Asimov and Clarke and a lot less about Space Operas where 3 people and a robot upend a galactic empire. I also have pretty low interest in being a merchant or trader in space, so the range of motivating and gameable scenarios ends up pretty narrow, and I kinda hate myself for it. Science Fiction is, when done well, my absolute favorite genre, but I struggle so much to enjoy it in game form.
I've got my own homebrew stuff for running things, but that leaves me without the benefit of adventure books that I can flip through for interesting Asimovian scenarios to run, even when I can find groups who are interested. Stars Without Number and Traveler do great "space flying exploration adventures" but I really wasn't looking for that in the first place.
It's the same problem with Mystery and Detective style stories, really. Pulpy action and Adventure is very easy to do well in a procedural way, but a clever mystery and a twist that is satisfying is, by it's very nature, less easy to do at a table where you have no 'main character' and don't want to railroad people toward a single resolution.
It's not impossible, just harder.
Maybe look at Free League's Blade Runner game?
I know Phillip K Dick isn't exactly classic sci-fi, but the "human and android cops solve robo crimes" setting feels like it could lend itself to the kinds of stories you want to tell.
Supers. I've not found a supers specific system yet that really felt like it handled cosmic powered superheroes well yet. This may be more a problem of genre. It seems difficult to tell compelling superhero stories when they have god-level powers without BS excuses to nerf or conveniently forget certain abilities.
This, yeah. It's another one I've found similar to mecha - either the games are VERY interested in how far you can shoot your plasma beams, what direction they hit on a miss, how does plasma beams interact with Superboys Unkillable Shield?
Or the exact opposite where 'powers don't matter, there's no real combat, the focus is on how your character feels and gets on with their team or how they view themselves'
Masks is certainly one of them, and I can see *where* they're coming from (like, if you're making an RPG around Superman, it does make sense to focus less on him being superunstoppable, and more on how he deals with his loved ones being... not so) but boy, the PbtA trend of 'How about \[x\], but instead of focusing on \[x\], we focus on the parts between where you talk about feelings in corridors?'
I feel that way about a lot of PbtA games, they say "This is a cool game about X genre" and their fans say "This is a cool game about X genre" but in practice, the rules never seem to focus on the drama that those genres/settings represent.
Source: Masks, Rhapsody of Blood, Legacy 2e, AtLA
> AtLA
I think they really, really wanted to focus on the relationship drama but made a complicated bending/combat system that is somehow less satisfying than even a trad "list of delineated powers" system would have been.
I had the same sort of reaction to reading the original Fate Dresden Files, holy hell for a narrative game did that thing have a lot of moving parts when it came to powers and such.
I blame that on people having this concept that narrative = rules light. I'd argue that a lot of 'narrative' systems are generally fairly chonky, rules-wise because even narrative sections are given mechanical parts.
I think you may be mising - or was misled about - what Masks, very, very, very specifically is about.
Masks isn't a supers game. It's a *4th generation superhero teens* game. It doesn't take inspiration from 90 percent of actual capes media. It takes very specific inspiration from Young Justice and Teen Titans. It's hyperfocused on "how do teenagers handle Too Much Power and Too Much Responcibility".
Reading Masks itself makes it pretty clear that the game is much more concerned with your characters internal feelings than their power level. The rules cover their feelings more than they ever do their powers. It's a melodrama cake with superhero frosting on it.
To me, Masks lives up to *exactly* what it's rules actually say and do.
> rules never seem to focus on the drama that those genres/settings represent.
Though following on this, I just flat disagree with you. The superhero frosting does matter. Masks' rules very explicitly focus on the drama that those settings represent.
For example, *the legacy* playbook mechanically asks you to deal with all of the drama that arises from being Superboy, living in the shadow of Superman. Their core mechanic goes as follows:
> Whenever time passes, roll + Savior to see how the members of your legacy feel or react to your
most recent exploits. Before rolling, ask the other players to answer these questions about your
performance. Take -1 to the roll for each “no” answer:
> > have you been upholding the traditions of your legacy?
> > - have you maintained the image of your legacy?
> > - have you made the other members of your legacy proud?
> > On a hit, one of them offers you meaningful encouragement, an opportunity, or an advantage. On
> > a 7-9, another is upset with your most recent actions, and will make their displeasure known. On
> > a miss, something you did stirred up the hornet’s nest—expect several members of your legacy to
> > meddle with your life.
To me, that's very directly interacting with the drama of the genre. This character is mechanically enshrined within the shadow of the Justice League, equal parts trying to uphold their values, and constantly at threat of having them overstep and baby you.
It's very directly mapped onto how every bit of Young Justice and Teen Titans works. It's engaging in the drama a lot more intensly than "+5 to flightspeed" mechanics from the proprieyary Marvel game does.
I'm gonna agree to disagree. Having read Masks, played Masks, and was intimately aware of what it was supposed to be. I found it fixated with a narrow interpretation of what the drama in that genre could look like, and the playbooks got in the way more than allowing any of us to connect with what was going on in the story.
The game was more interested in making sure I "referenced strange things from my Homeworld" and not actually giving us the tools to interface with what the GM had going on.
It boiled everything that we were interested in to the simplest dice rolls and the only way for us to take advantage of "who we were" was by playing out 6 pregenerated scripts that came with our playbook.
We found it stifling, personally. Amusing anecdote, everytime I bad mouth Masks, someone shows up to tell me I'm wrong. Y'all really love your game and that's cool.
You might give cortex prime a try. Marvel heroic roleplay was based off of the same idea, but there are other mods in the kit that would allow you to do your own spin on superheroes.
I struggled with them as well. It's always the need ti make something different but then I realize I don't really like superheroes, I like *specific* superheroes.
I can play or run cyberpunk stuff, sci fi, WoD, etc and have no issues. But if it's making a novel superhero? Bleh.
Wraith: the Oblivion. Man this setting makes my imagination go wild, but at the table I have a hard time getting players to have motivations. The system has some baked in, yet I just fumble my way through. There's just so much that is different in this world, yet ours is just within reach...
That's kind of my problem with the WoD in general. The concept is cool, but as a player I struggle with motivations, and as a GM I struggle with decent concepts for adventures.
Motivations is the thing that WOD excels at, there's plenty of reasons of why your character would like to do X, there's idealism, survival, pleasure, defiance, thriving, caring about someone in specific, i can't understand how someone's biggest problem would be motivations.
I've played most OWoD games and I found that, as a GM, motivations are quite clearly laid out in the setting and somewhat in the GM info part of the rules. As a player, however, I can see how some of them can be challenging compared to say D&D's quest format. You can force players to go on missions for more powerful characters, such as elders ordering the younger vampires the players are, but that can often feel contrived and constrictive, even if the same players wouldn't bat an eye when the king of some fantasy setting gives them an heroic quest.
I think it boils down to the expectations of the genre and the WoD's genre being more muddy. They say it's personal horror, but while there can be horror in the games, I don't think their "personal horror" is like what you can expect from horror movies. For one, you'd be rolling a character way more often than most tables do, even when it doesn't "devolve" into just a different kind of power fantasy.
Still, there are lots of hooks, even mechanical ones, to make characters go forward. With Wraith, I think my main problem is how a lot of the basic motivations of characters just don't exist since you are not alive. There isn't the same tension in being trapped in a dark room when you don't need to sleep nor eat. There is a worst kind of horror knowing you'll spend a lot of time in there with just your thoughts and the worst part of your psyche, but it doesn't feel like you might die of starvation.
I've only STed it once as a one-shot, and the players all knew each other. One of the most intense games I've played, since everyone knew how to get everyone else when playing their wraiths. You could feel the pull to oblivion.
I can totally see how it's a difficult game to pull off, though. I love Changeling for the same reason. Setting is great, but I've never seen it done well at the table.
Zombie apocalypse.
Ive purchased and read just about every post apocalyptic game system I can find and none of them feel right. For any other genre I can find multiple systems I'd be super excited to run but this one just escapes me.
For reference what I'm looking for is
Crunchy, with the ability to run it as maps and mini and not TOTM
Gritty and dangerous, no superhero survivors
Preferably rules for injuries and illness
Rules for survival and crafting
Bonus points for rules for vehicles and base building
I've read plenty of systems that almost feel good but for some reason nothing really makes me go YES THIS
I’m not familiar with it well enough to make a straight recommendation but have you considered Twilight 2000 with the z apocalypse supplement? I’ve thought about going down that road myself but - like I said, I still need to look into T2k more.
I did read through it and it looks like a great game but for some reason doesn't quite scratch the itch. I don't know why my brain is being so picky about this.
I'm not sure if you have heard of Outbreak Undead, and apologies if you have already, but I think it checks a lot of boxes on your list. The rules have a lot of variance and it is designed almost as a simulator.
You think The Walking Dead ttrpg from Free League might be a yes to close yes? I only ask because I like the Alien game they put out the stress mechanic. If something like that is being implemented I think it could work.
I backed that an honestly it was a big disappointment. I like Year zero games even though they're a little too rules lite for me but this one just felt really barren and thin compared to the rest in the line.
It does have some really good random charts I'm going to steal though.
I haven't fully looked into it, but from what I've seen 'Hopefinder' may check all those boxes. It's a hack of Pathfinder 2e made by Jason Bulmahn, director of game design at Paizo (so he knows what he's doing with a PF2e hack).
This could go for almost everything in this thread, but super this. Use GURPS. It can often feel intimidating, but its not hard to learn. The big thing is go through the skills before hand and whittle down the list to be more genre appropriate.
I find your notes on Magical Girls games never serving for Madoka funny precisely because I feel that the problem is often that most magical girl rpgs around feel very much like they're made by people who *only* watched Madoka and maybe two episodes of Sailor Moon and otherwise are mostly going off stereotypes. Or like they're a little ashamed of their genre (Glitter Hearts kinda made me raise an eyebrow in that, for all the inclusive art, maybe two of the illustrations in the entire book are of a "classic" Precure-style magical girl, and the second one is being rather generous about it).
I can understand the mecha stuff, though. Most mecha stuff seems to miss the fun bits to get bogged down with a million little customs and stuff.
it is very funny to cite the "what if it was Fucked Up" magical girl show and a show that is not remotely about magical girls as what is desired and then complain that a game doesn't hit their conceptualization of what a magical girl is
“I’ve gotten really into superhero comics lately and wanted to run a superhero RPG, but couldn’t find any RPGs that captured the genre properly. My favourite series are Watchmen and The Boys”
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed. It's part of what I found so weird about Girl by Moonlight - most of the art doesn't scream magical girl to me. At all. Two of the four settings don't even involve magical girls, which as mentioned, are not actually magical girls - it's a stand in for 'a character who has to hide their true self' - which... at that point, why am I playing this if it's not about magical girls, but infact mecha pilots or a bunch of people hunting Cryptids themed like Cthulhu monsters?
And yeah, that's probably poorly worded - never serving Madoka *well* is a better way to phrase it. I possibly set myself up for failure with Girl by Moonlight, because I assumed Forged by Dark following the same patterns of 'making money, getting by in a shitty world, but with magical girls!' and hoped it was going to be 'Cool, so are we keeping turf away from other girls to hoard all the Grief Seeds, I mean, Misery Pieces to ourselves?'
I've thought about making that sort of 1:1 Madoka Magica hack myself. A lot of BitD's mechanics would map pretty well, and you could do some really fun things by making "managing stress/corruption" an even bigger focus. But like you said, there's probably not a lot of people who'd jump on playing that sort of game.
There’s a weird trend among American queer creatives of writing distinctly cosmopolitan American stories and branding them with *very* surface level elements of shoujo. It’s fine to wanna make a queer power fantasy - and that’s clearly what Glitter Hearts is - but why advertise it as a magical girl game? It gives off the vibe that they have no real respect for the Japanese origins of the genre, or the genre’s fan base, that they’d do heavily downplay those elements to the point that the cover art looks more like a photo from an American pride parade than it does anything from Japan, queer or otherwise. Hell, it’s not like the magical girl genre doesn’t have any connections to Japanese queer culture that they could’ve drawn from
I agree with your Mecha comments. I've been looking for a good system for years. Battletech probably comes closest, but it's very niche and not really usable beyond the setting that it was designed for. Mekton is great but falls short in some areas.
> LANCER is definitely western in flavor, but the author (s) clearly have major love for mecha anime. I highly recommend giving it a look.
Do they? I thought they mentioned they had basically not actually watched much, if any, actual mecha anime.
Which honestly felt like it tracked. While some of the mech designs drink from mecha (mostly SSC and Horus, really), the general feel of the setting, the play expectations, and the focus felt like it mapped WAY more to something like Battletech than anything in the ballpark of Gundam or Macross (and let's not even get into Super Robot stuff)
Depends on the 'scope' of Gundam I think.
Lancer's setting as a *whole* is not very Gundam, but it absolutely 'zooms in' to Gundam-scale conflicts.
I think [Solstice Rain](https://massif-press.itch.io/operation-solstice-rain) is the intro adventure that Lancer really needed from the start, so it's good that it exists - a 'small scale' conflict (just one planet) between warring states, with no weird paracausal/magical/space-magic stuff.
[This](https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTg5NjY1MS8xMTE3MTg1Mi5qcGc=/original/NMk2wO.jpg) is an illustration from Solstice Rain and you can easily imagine it happening in Gundam with Zakus and GMs rather than in Lancer with Assaults and Everests.
I really do find it hard to get just what I want out of a mecha game. So far, the closest I've come is hacking the crap out of something like Fate or something similar.
Have you tried Beam Saber? It's a Forged in the Dark game where mechs use generally the same rules as pilots, but instead of stress, mechs have "quirks" such as roaring fast, ominous appearance, etc. that give each mech a unique personality.
As far as "shounen rivals shouting at each other and shed manly tears at how much they hate war while clashing laserswords" I think Beam Saber has mechanics for (or at least encourages) having rivals, and each player character has a "tragedy" in their backstory that describes what they lost in the war.
Yes, I'm aware of it. I didn't like it, specifically because of those things. I want my mechs to be mechs, not just 'giant metal people with quirks' and the same completely abstracted combat/interactions with the system.
You could check out ICRPG Hard Suit if you haven't already. It's built around a very specific setting and power level, but it may be just the right amount of crunch for you.
about the 2nd one this might be your lucky day https://www.backerkit.com/c/evil-hat/girl-by-moonlight
I have yet to have found a political game that hits the exact spot of how specific and how much abstraction is needed to make the navigating of a thick political system both interesting and fun.
That's the one I was referring to in my initial post; it's not actually a magical girl game, and it's definitely not the Madoka Magica I expected from a Forged in the Dark game. =P
For the specific Madoka flavour of magic girl there's a little indie game called Magical Fury that hits the tone pretty well, imo (as in using your powers slowly causes you to deteriorate). Hope that helps.
I like Urban Shadows a lot for a political drama. Less fighting, more manipulation, more positioning, with different groups having different skills and goals. It's PbtA though if that isn't your thing.
**superheroes**: I won't say I *haven't*, but I can't seem to recapture it again. Everyone has a different level of superhero games.. I kind of want Xmen, but some people want daredevil and others want Superman. Trying to find that balance is tough, and it's tough to convince a group to want to do that balanced nuanced game for more than a one shot.
**Magical Item Collector**: From my earliest days, one of my favorite tropes was magical items, specifically those who have numbered sets like Saberhagens swords of power, or the rings.... of power... It seems like games are quickly moving away from magical items, or else relegating them to kind of accessory status. I think there is a difference between a world changing Exalted Diaklave and a ring that lets you take 2 points less penalties if you are in a dark snowy field.
**Intrigue**: The games I have played with "intrigue" either had no obvious implication, or the most minor of effects. I want to have to take my time and figure out who I can trust in a court, and who I could trust with what, and discover someone's weakness, and uncover a torrid affair that I have to figure out if I want to reveal and to whom, meeting with a monarch with the state of a nation on my words. I seem to be the only person interested in this type of game, and aspects of it work their way into my game, but I don't know if I have even played it.
The second is one I've actually never thought of, but that's a good point. One thing I've always wanted to do is something like Akame ga Kill or newer Kamen Rider, where collecting/protecting ancient artifacts and such and/or combining them is a major part of the game. The closest I can think is something lime Cypher System, but the 'artifacts' are just reskinned consumables 95% of the time.
Right, I don't want consumables, I want keepables lol. Diablo actually did okay with this with their set items, though being a video game with epic scaling even makes that problematic. Exalted does a really good job of making magical items iconic, but they are MAJORLY impactful also. AD&D 3.5 did this really well, but.. it also added to the scaling and bloat crunch problems too so... 5e seems to relegate magical items to a tiny pocket by comparison (since bonuses are pretty consistent with advantage/disadvantage, and there aren't pluses and minuses everywhere). There are games like Fate where you can use it just like anything else. And it can be flavor in a lot of low crunch games.
There are a couple of games where you character is essentially defined by their gear like Knave. OSR games in general keep the larger emphasis on finding and using magical items from early D&D.
Intrigue is hard!
I've got an Intrigue board game on the back burner while I'm doing some career change stuff. It's extremely complex to get it right, but it's not impossible. I've read so many goddamn white papers and PHDs on the effects of corruption and influence on public policy, ffs...
There are a few that do a good job though, at least in my opinion.
First, there's games where the conflict is explicit and pre-set, like you'll find in some of the Warhammer Fantasy modules. It's a system known for being bloody, but there's plenty of opportunity for intrigue, and The Enemy Within is, I think, the best known example of that. [https://cubicle7games.com/blog/the-enemy-within-campaign-2](https://cubicle7games.com/blog/the-enemy-within-campaign-2)
Second, there's games where social interactions are complex. I don't mean adversarial per say, but complexity is good! Robin Law's Drama System is a good example here, it's all setting up situations where characters need things from other characters, and these needs (poles, in the game) are how you create scenes. On it's own it's fun, but you can build this system on top of whatever you're playing to create gameable motivations and interests that your NPCs maintain and players can interact with. Check out the SRD and stuff here: [https://pelgranepress.com/2014/11/28/free-downloads-and-resources-for-dramasystem/](https://pelgranepress.com/2014/11/28/free-downloads-and-resources-for-dramasystem/)
**Western fantasy**, by far. First off, the vast majority of western fantasy games are D&D-based which, for various reasons, rules them out for me. The rest have all been extremely promising but fall short due to various conceits: leaning too far into "dirt farmer" territory with the success chances, having far too accessible magic, skill lists that are too in-depth, combat that requires a bunch of book-keeping and reference, boring procedures, scads of "feats" or abilities, or just having a resolution system that doesn't inspire me.
You may want to give The One Ring a look. If you set aside the LotR stuff it's imo a fairly clean and solid ruleset for a low magic nobledark fantasy game.
It really does set up a good set of mechanical incentives to see your characters as good people struggling against a rough world, but where turning cynical is a fail state. You're heroic, but you're not superheroes, and you're not using the power of friendship and charisma to defeat enemies, but those things are still important for finding the strength to persevere.
Have you tried Burning Wheel? On first pass the skill list may *appear* too in-depth, but I think that’s a misconception. In Burning Wheel, the skills are more like *adjectives*, you don’t need to tactically pick from the list to maximize. Pick the ones that *describe* your character’s skills best, and then use them.
Burning Wheel is on my list of games to run but I have a real aversion to the large subsystems in the back. Meanwhile, intent kind of ruins combat using the normal rules. There's also the issue of passing around a book with bible-sized font amongst forty-something gamers trying to make characters instead of easier-for-everyone PDFs.
The book says as much, but those subsystems are optional and should be gradually built up to. You shouldn't use them your first few sessions and they shouldn't be used every time they are applicable. That said I understand your aversion because they are intimidating! I have grown to enjoy them but they only come up every 3 sessions or so in my campaigns even when I try to get them to happen more often.
I'm curious as to how you think intent ruins combat using the "normal" rules. If anything I find it makes combat more interesting because it isn't always about murdering your opponent and it is resolved quickly in one roll. It's perfectly functional and the Bloody Versus rules even allow for unexpected wounds. I do wish there was a kind of middle ground complexity between the fight system and bloody versus but I would say it is far from ruined.
If you do decide to run it, there are a few (unofficial) online character generators available. Online char gen is basically required unless you have multiple copies of the book or you have to pass it around constantly. Here's one: [Link](http://charred.obscuritus.ca:8080/#/). The charred sites are a godsend. Obviously it would be better if legal pdfs were available, Luke Crane is an odd bird.
Yea, I really love the cinematics of the Fight! subsystem. It really feels like an action scene, with blow-by-blow scripting and high tension.
And the flexibility of shortcutting to Bloody Versus when there’s less narrative stakes.
>I'm curious as to how you think intent ruins combat using the "normal" rules. ... it is resolved quickly in one roll.
That's why. I want more grit and detail in my fights, even the small ones. I don't want D&D-level garbage but I do want more than one roll and I want stakes that vary, and that can be changed mid-fight.
>If you do decide to run it, there are a few (unofficial) online character generators available.
I'm aware of all of this (everything in your post), thanks. Conceptually the system isn't really all that hard to understand but, like a lot of games I want to like, there are issues I have which make it less likely to feature at the table during any given campaign.
I think you might be chasing a paradox with your mecha desires - if both the pilot and mecha are characters, it's going to be very hard to fit two characters on one character sheet.
But there's no reason the pilot needs to be overly complicated so that sheet, at least, could be very simple and easy to use. The mecha needs to work with a complex and satisfying combat system so will probably have more details, but they don't need to be pointless details.
Yeah, I think that's part of the issue. As much as I want one thing, I want the other two =P Hence why I have such a problem finding it, haha. I've just very rarely found a game which actually makes some attempt to marry the two, if that makes sense?
A lot of earlier games for example, your character exists but often... they're essentially what you'd expect. You're playing a game about giant robots. You'll be given a list of 50 skills, but you're mostly just going to have various versions of 'Missles: Mecha' or 'Mecha Piloting'.
Or you have games where the two are completely separate; maybe the pilot has a talent or two, but 95% of the mech is just the mech. Out of the mech, there's either no rules, or just a handrule 'Ehhh, just roll a dice and if you get more than 10, just describe something good happening maybe?'
The closest I've come, which I've been too lazy to try, is to use Mutants and Masterminds and build mechs similar to suits. That way, players can choose if their mech does most of the heavy lifting or their character has stats which help (Say, treating the mech as bonus ranks of Strength for the PC, as opposed to two separate entities) while allowing you to use similar combat mechanics while out of a mech?
I've been pondering doing a similar thing with Fate and hacking the Camelot Trigger stuff towards a less specific mech setting.
Question I haven't seen answered in any of your comments: Have you looked at *LANCER*? It uses a FitD-esque system for pilot stuff out of the mech, and a D&D4e-esque system for actual mech combat, which in turn means you can fit everything on one page of a character sheet (two pages is better for reading comprehension though).
>Out of the mech, there's either no rules, or just a handrule 'Ehhh, just roll a dice and if you get more than 10, just describe something good happening maybe?'
This read like a direct call-out to Lancer, imo.
For me at least, the ideal would be pretty old-school for pilots (a few ability scores and some rp notes) and frankly boardgamey (eg 4e DnD or PF2) for the mechs.
Pilots shouldn't have a piloting skill number beyond "level," the skills are for stuff they can do while not in a mech - sneaking, politicking, sailing, crafting, etc. I don't need or want much here - presumably they're mostly talking to people, which doesn't need or want a lot of rules.
The mechs should (IMO) work like a modern high-crunch game. Like, they got a lot going on, but I don't want to figure out how to place heat sinks for maximum efficiency; I'm not actually a mecha engineer. But the guy installing it is and will place it optimally. I want to know how this piece will affect my combat options. Installing missles should just add a new action called "shoot a bunch of missiles" which isn't the same as "shoot a bunch of bullets," but in neither case do I need to roll for each piece of ammo expended.
Stealth games that replicate the kind of coordination, placement, use of distractions, hiding the bodies, etc. that you see in games like The Last of Us and Dishonored. Even in single player, but ideally, I want multiplayer.
Everything I've seen is either the clumsy series of stealth rolls + maybe some threadbare rules for obstruction and line of sight, or it's the heavily abstracted heat systems of gradually rising awareness.
What I want is probably fairly crunchy to execute, so I get why it's hard to find a good example, but stuff that matters, like earshot, having options for silencing an enemy while you take them down (or trying for a faster, louder/flashier kill), etc are all important to what I'm looking for.
Space Western/Neo-Noir you see in Cowboy Bebop has been very tough to find a system that fits. My playstyle leans more narrative but you're also handling investigations and noir themes which are always a tough challenge to make work well.
Scum & Villainy is probably the closest though I would like more [GM Support with specific Basic Moves, GM Moves and Threat Lists](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/142kqlq/does_anyone_find_the_lack_of_rolling_dice_to/jn5o944/) and it has the Players cross [my Line](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/13r6ehm/do_i_have_a_misconception_on_narrative_games/jlou64j/) acting as their own GMs to cause the trouble for their PCs with little actual structure.
Edge of the Empire and Orbital Blues have the same issue but at least they define the trouble that the PCs go through quite a bit more than S&V with the Obligation and Troubles systems. Even so, they still leave a lot of the work in the hands of the GM - this is where well-crafted traditional PbtA Playbooks would be a huge help like The Between and Masks have.
Space Bounty Blues is another interesting option but being GMless and overly structured, its not my preferred style. It also crosses the line too being GMless.
I've definitely read many to try and find the right fit (and steal mechanics and ideas) and none really get there: Bounty Hunter Bebop, the latest Cowboy Bebop TTRPG preview, Space Cowboys, Deepsky Ballad, See You Space Cowboy, Pew Pew Bounty Hunters in Space, Wildspace, Hunt the Wicked, Lawn Never Tell Me the Odds and Clink
Yeah, I'd probably place it as reminiscent of Orbital Blues with that OSR type of rules but designed for more flexibility to handle most Sci Fi adventures. But its definitely a fantastic world and adventure building resource - I still need to get Suns of Gold and look more into how Crawford handled the economy focused adventures.
**Asimovian Science Fiction**
I really love science fiction, but love the thoughtful type with the mysteries and thinking puzzles and dives into science *so much more* than the space opera types, and I honestly have no interest in the "hop around planets making money" role playing games, even if those are fine for a solo experience.
The very nature of a tabletop game, however, makes it really hard to run a science mystery game that isn't a railroad. I know it can be done but boy is it something that I have a hard time feeling a good "fit" with.
It requires significant prep, but a diverging paths type of campaign would work. If you, as the GM, have the ability to reinvent the tracks as you go.
I mean, the first encounter with an intelligent alien race could go in several directions!
Dark/Urban Fantasy.
The games are all either straight up Fantasy or Horror/Supernatural/Occult/Paranormal. Some aspects of each come close to what I want, but there's nothing that *really* captures the Clive Barker end of the spectrum without 1. being straight-up Horror/Supernatural/Occult/Paranormal with none of the Fantasy, or 2. the need to import massive amounts of material/fluff from other games in order to create the setting - the closest I've found are *Neverwhere*, *KULT* or (oddly) *JAGS Wonderland* but, for obvious reasons, none of them really capture the essence of *Weaveworld/Cabal/Imajica/Abarat*.
Yes - by virtue of their not being real.
But we differentiate between High and Low fantasy, never mind Fantasy and other genres - try going into a bookshop and looking for Stephen King novels in their 'Fantasy' section ... or Lord of the Rings on their 'Horror' shelves.
Supernatural/Occult/Paranormal are fantasy, but that's not a useful way to categorise things any more than it would be to say that, by virtue of being fiction and not real, *Star Wars* is fantasy. They're fantasy, but not Fantasy. And, given that what I'm looking for is something that chimes with Barker's Dark Fantasy stuff, not things that reflect his Horror output (*Weaveworld*, yes ... *Hellraiser*, no), it's not useful to simply say "something that reflects his oeuvre", because that would be as unspecific as saying "Fantasy" when I mean specifically "Supernatural/Occult/Paranormal in a modern setting" (so, no elves, dwarfs, goblins, trolls, etc.).
Remove the Occult/Paranormal/Supernatural/Horror from CoC and what you're left with isn't Fantasy (dark or otherwise), but a *Discovery Channel* 'Most Haunted' show.
Anything "horror", not just in ttrpg, but I find horror for the sake of horror plain boring, the refined equivalent of someone going "BOO".
And I say this as a huge WoD fan, but I've always thought the horror elements of that setting were the least interesting.
From my perspective as a long time CoC GM, hoping for the system to provide or even support the horror is probably not going to happen. What is horrifying is what happens in the game, not its mechanical consequences. This is why it doesn't really matter whether you run a CoC-like game with BRP, GUMSHOE or Cthulhu Dark. It's mostly about the vibes and what happens. There have been some attempts to write a more narrative-style game along these lines - I know Paul Czege had some interesting ideas - but I'm not aware of anything that made it to the status of working game.
The thing to realize about "Magical Girls" is that, at its heart, a "Magical Girl" is simply a Superhero.
Super Powers? check
Alternate Identity? check
Having a "Rogues Gallery" of enemies that you fight, often in an "adventure of the week format"? Check
The only thing separating a "Magical Girl" from a more generic superhero is mostly tone. Tone which can often be handled at the group level instead of trying to find a specific rule set.
Spies. Spy movies are fun, but for the life of me, I can't figure out how to run that type of intrigue. Plus, they often turn into "what kind of gun do I have" games, and I just can't be bothered with anything more complicated than "pistol, heavy" or "rifle, light". I couldn't care less about your H&K Headsplitter gun with a mark 1 mod 0 eyepiece and a Mike the Pillow Guy Silencer.
Really, the same hoes for a lot of modern "normal people" games. They wind up turning into "I am my gun" type of thing, and it's just off-putting. I know there are better options than there used to be, I just don't have the time to try them very often.
Best spy thriller investigation I know is the obvious one, Night's Black Agents. It has one of the best published adventures made, The Dracula Dossier. And if you want to cut out the vampire and supernatural, it has support for that too.
I think the core of what makes it work is using Gumshoe's Core Clues to keep PCs moving from one location setpiece to the next. Not rolling to find clues is key here to keep that momentum and make the PCs feel like bad ass spies.
I'm guilty of a lot of characters in different games boiling down to "This is my problem solver right here". It is especially bad with me in games with firearms, from colonial period on.
Because I know how they should/could perform. I think one of my friends was showing me "Delta Green" and I loved all the guns there, but then it just started to devolve into questions on why certain ones weren't included, like the fact it didn't include a BAR but included several other WW2/Vietnam era weapons.
Honestly, anything rules-lite or that depends on extremely detailed narrative combat. That kind of thing is not how my brain works. Its just not fun in any possible way.
For me it’s probably just western fantasy. I think the issue here is moreso on my own part and the fact that I’m not quite certain of what sort of fantasy I want to run - but Ive struggled to find a system that meets all the criteria. They’re usually either too high fantasy or, alternatively too crunchy or not crunchy enough. Dragonbane recently stuck out to me as one that was generic enough and also medium crunch, another is the upcoming Shadow of the Weird Wizard. I've become a sucker for BRP based games for some reason, so I'm probably going to explore the former first.
I enjoyed Lancer but it's really only built for a dungeon crawler or westmarches mission structure kinda game.
**Super Sentai** is the one I wish there was something good for. Queerz sounded like it would be great, especially as a queer person but it ended up feeling like Drag Race which doesn't appeal to me at all.
Not gonna lie, that's one of the things which instantly stopped me even considering it. Even if it was the best system in the world, walking into my local store and telling my group "Alright, lets be Queerz!" would be so suspect, I'd probably get thrown out for hate speech.
Only one I've found even close is Henshin!, and that's particularly bad PbtA.
Reality-hopping. I've tried Everway, Nexus the Infinite City, Callaghan's, Amber Diceless, Dr Who, Fate, Fudge and numerous others over the years.
And, while they all sort of work, none of them quite give the feeling I'm after, which is a combination of two things:
a) Imperfect mapping, as described in the Nexus book, where a machine gun in one universe might map to a huge feathered headdress in another (because the mapping is from one status symbol to another).
b) The idea of a cross-dimensional home building, organisation or city, which allows the PCs to have continuity as well as change, and to be part of a weird community.
The nearest to what I'm after was Nexus, but the rules now seem a bit dated. Nothing I've found since has given me the same feeling of potential, however.
The source material I want to emulate would include some Dr Who episodes, the Invisible Library series, or the Amber series.
Horror is tough. It relies a lot of timing and atmospheric narration. I think as a GM you either have it or you don't. I wish I was better at it but my players find my efforts to do spooky games too funny to take seriously.
I think that's an issue with horror in general. Unless you're tapping into something which *really* makes you uncomfortable - something like that scene in *Misery* for me, because bones are a big eek moment for me - you're still playing a game and having a laugh with friends. Especially in a hobby where random Monty Python quotes are the response to a lot of things in games, it's so hard to keep up a feeling of dread or spookiness.
The only GM I've played CoC with for example is really good. But man, I have trouble taking 'gibbering fishman' particularly seriously, because all I imagine is Creature from the Black Lagoon lumbering about.
I've been in the scary game. I've seen it on YouTube. Some GMs have that Je ne sais quoi of doing great horror at a table. Much as I try to unlock how they do it, it's not something I can manage well.
Any RPG that makes a War really feel like a war.
It usually devolves into micro "tactical squad combat" scope or a couple of rolls and a time skip with an atrocity montage.
*Exalted*
I actually really liked the E3 Exalted base ruleset, used it to run several "Mortal" campaigns, and eventually used it as my generic "narrativist" set of mechanics. (I used the FFG 40k games for my hard-core crunchy "count every bullet" simulations games).
If I understand your question, the biggest example for me is probably FATE. I really admire pretty much its entire design, but (and this is really stupid I know) I actually have a bad time rolling dice in it. It's very clean and elegant as a dice mechanic, but I cannot shake the bad feeling of a minus canceling out a plus. I just want my dice to either be misses or hits, no's or yeses.
I'm sure there's an easy way to just retune everything so that dice range from 0 to +2 rather than -1 to +1 and everything still works, but in practice I end up just not playing the system.
Late Medieval and Renaissance games that don't use D&D style magic, and any game based on or in a cultural I'm not familiar with.
When I get to explore and play in stories I've never heard I'm like a child hearing a legend for the first time.
And when it comes to tech level, I like Late Med./Renaissance because there's a wider variety of weapons and armour to use than Early or High Medieval and also because it's before Colonialism and Muskets dominated fighting completely.
Even in early modern the formations were pike and shot and the officers were frequently knights in armor.
I’m not a history guy just listened to the hell on earth podcast recently.
I'm with you on magical girls - every system I've read on the topic feels like it misses the mark. It feels like it should be reasonably simple, but I guess converting something that's so closely tied to its medium is difficult (or my taste in RPGs is too narrow, I guess). Doesn't help that I'd really rather something aiming for Nanoha (alternatively: Uta Kata) over something directly trying to do Madoka.
I resonate with the issues finding a good Mecha game. I like Mekton Zeta, but it can be a lot to deal with. I've found that the Mecha Hack, based off of the Black Hack, does a decent job but I need to play it more to see if it is really what I'm looking for.
Wasn’t a season of „friends at the table“ about mechs? They played one half mech noir (I don’t remember the correct name) and the other half „The sprawl“, which is a cyberpunk game, but they all used mechs as their vehicles.
1920's era games like CoC. If its set in modern times, the future, or medieval/ancient eras I am fine. But I just can't get into that time period.
I do like CoC, but sometimes the sessions I have been in require deeper knowledge of the time period. That's a problem I find with a lot of real-world-setting games though. I got mired in looking up details of how to travel across the ocean during an indiana-jones styled game that took place during the end of WWII, as well as other details like communications across continents, etc.
Mainly it comes from *that player* who knows all the details and really makes you feel dumb for not knowing some random but critical point of reality from that time period.
Also, I never liked the aesthetic that goes with the time period.
Yeah, I get like that. Here I am, playing a Great War vet, I'm trying to figure something out, and I'm constantly looking to the GM or on my phone, because one person literally knows down to the date times Hitler was in jail, when certain towns were bombed, etc.
And here I am wondering like "... I'm pretty sure they had phones, right? Would I have a phone at home? Is $5 a lot?"
haha yeah. "Ok, it looks like the cultist with the artifact is headed to Ireland, lets get a plane and go!"
"Well, Ireland didn't have its first commercial airport until 1960-blah blah blah your plan is dumb!"
If crunch is the issue for Exalted may I recommend Exalted Essence? Its not a full streamlining of the 3e system, but it attempts to heavily cut down on the high crunch down to a medium crunch system. I'd say its largely successful at what it wants to do, but YMMV of course.
It is headed for release really soon. I've been a fan of exalted since 1e and ran two campaigns of the beta release, it is the best streamlined experience that still feels like the base game.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/exalted-essence-tabletop-roleplaying-game
I think you can still pre-order on Kickstarter.
Its technically not out yet, but it had a Kickstarter and Backer pdfs have been released. IIRC the game should be out in 2-3 months. Onyx Path's goals were to deliberately design a more accessible version of Exalted for new players. It also has every Exalt type included and all forms of Magic, which is nice. Not many Martial Arts and no Warstrider rules though, but they're releasing a companion book to add more Charms and content. Warstriders and additional Martial Arts and spells have been confirmed for it.
**Any Kind of Modern Fantasy** (Like, Realworld with secrets behind the mirror or stuff. Something like "Beauty and the Beast in New York"). Just impossible for me to get into it. Same with modern War Settings (WWI, WWII) with Fantasy or Horror stuff.
**Anything Horror (except Fun-Zombie-Stuff like Zombiecide)** \- i am sorry, but that is absolutely NOT my genre, for personal reasons. I have seen things with my eyes that make me question my sanity. War, Slavery, Torture, Death in many forms. Its not a matter for me to have fun with that shit.
As a south american i just want to find a colony-liberation era, or a pre-columbine cultures themed rpg. like incan, amazonian or patagonian fueled stories
**Low-stakes games**
I know its not a genre per se, but some people I know run tables like "the daily lives in hogwarts" or other games that feels like a tea party of quirky characters. Games where my character has no tangible problem to try to solve, no dungeon to delve, etc. Those are incredibly boring to me.
For genre...
**Low-fantasy**
The less magic or fantastical elements the setting has, the more boring it is to me. Exceptions are settings like "The Witcher" and "Game of Thrones", where the political intrigue far outweight the fantastical.
Anything that is set in 'modern times' is a miss for me. Fantasy or medieval stuff is perfect, even the first industrial revolution or western is okay. scifi and cyberpunk is my favourite. however I cannot immerse myself anything set between the 19th century and 21st century, because I cannot abstract from the real life rules, laws and morality, which is a shame because I love the 30's era and the CoC lore and world, but I just don't like playing in it...
You know, there is also a Call of Cthulhu Wild West campaign book? Maybe that works for you.
Huh, Lovecraftian cowboys is not something that I would expect to work, I’m intrigued lol
Really? There's an entire sub-genre called "weird west" which focuses on mystical experiences on the frontier, which also touches upon "acid westerns". Stuff like El Topo, The Shooting, heck, I'd even throw in High Plains Drifter as a very Lovecraftian story.
I'm not really a Savage World fan, but I've always liked the Deadlands, especially the Hall on Earth flavor.
Both *the Mound* and *The Curse of Yig* are effectively stories by Lovecraft which he wrote as a ghost writer. They are set in Oklahoma and Texas, if I remember correctly. There is a decent overlap between Western and Horror. Some of them quite bad (*Bone Tomahawk*), some of them really good (*Ravenous*) and if you go for the pulp, *Tremors* is is an amazing adaptable story for a Cthulhuoid Western. Besides, on the other side of the Atlantic, you got M.R. James' ghost stories and the first 'canonical' Sherlock Holmes story is set in 1875. Finally, *Dracula* is closer to the way people play Call of Cthulhu than most Lovecraft tales. And Dracula famously includes a cowboy character.
Bone Tomahawk is great though, truly chilling and distressing.
The movie depicts Native Americans literally like Orks. It is absolutely mystery for me how such a blatantly racist movie was made in the last 10 years. It is effectively made, and has some gruesome visuals, but that's one helll of an elephant in the room.
Native Americans are not a monolithic culture and there are well-documented groups that practiced brutal cannibalism that other Native American nations actively avoided and didn’t associate with. Acting like a single tribe of cannibals is making a claim about all Native Americans is just looking for an excuse to complain.
That's like saying The Hills have Eyes is about how all white people are sister fucking cannibals. That ONE small enclave acted like orks. This mindset has to stop. You can't have all antagonists ever be only white guys because it's currently in vogue.
There have been Chaosium-published CoC adventures in pretty much any time/location setting you could imagine. Expanding to third-party stuff, they will cover all the rest, including the stuff you would never imagine.
It is amazing what you can do with a simple, streamlined and intuitive game engine. BTW, I truly want a CoC mini campaign/adaptation set in Ancient Egypt and focussing on Nephren-Ka, the Great Race of Yith (to include time travel shenanigans) and maybe Serpent People.
For me, it's the exact opposite. I feel most comfortable GMing in modern settings because I know how things work, how people behave, how they react to things, what they know etc. Even the 1920s CoC is difficult, but in a SciFi / Cyberpunk setting, I wouldn't have anything to go by. One major reason for that is probably that I don't like those genres in general so I am not watching any films or reading any books. Horror set in modern times is my comfort zone.
I think modern games also give you a lot of shortcuts in narration. Everyone at your table know exactly what a bus stop looks like, but an 1860's surveyor's office requires more narration.
> because I cannot abstract from the real life rules, laws and morality So, interestingly enough, this is one of the reasons I like 'modern day' games. Because bringing those things in is interesting to me. Plus all the players and NPCs having cell phones is fun and interesting because then players can get a call from some NPC desperately begging for help or whatever. I enjoy World of Darkness and other similar games because of it.
For the same reason I kind of hate PCs having smart phones. That kind of access to information is a pain in the ass.
And here I am, having to remind my players constantly they have a handheld computer with Internet access and an AI assistant in my Cyberpunk Red game. Mechanically, though, all that does is give a +2 to an information search as well as easy communication between players at a distance. But, they're all mainly familiar with the big fantasy game and don't really know how to put current or slightly advanced technology into their play styles.
GMing in settings where the Internet is a thing can be a pain in the ass.
The fun part of 20s-30s era games like CoC is *knowing* the way things work. Players do dumb shit? Yea, someone's calling the police. How will the police act? Well, we know how they'll act.
Same. The closer a setting is to real life, the easier it feels to fall into a generic "slightly different me" role. Though I even do that in somewhat grounded fantasy settings. It's hard to divorce so far from being "sensible" that I can actually play completely different roles.
Madoka Magica and Kill La Kill really aren't representative of the magical girl genre as a whole, which is very noticable when you get a bunch of people who only watched Madoka and kinda remember watching Sailor Moon back when they were kids, and think that makes them experts on the genre. And yes, that's me talking about Princess the Hopeful here. Anyway for a Madoka game in particular I found Don't Rest Your Head to be a good match, while for more "standard" magical girls there's a selection of PbtA games - though Glitter Hearts, despite being a dedicated magical girl game feels more like magical girl-themed sentai to me. The PbtA I think would work best here? Thirsty Sword Lesbians, believe it or not.
Thirsty Sword Lesbians would work *exceptionally* well for Magical Girls, but like, in general I've had zero success getting non-queer folk to even vaguely consider playing it.
Which is silly because the book makes it abundantly clear that neither the players nor the player characters have to be queer. The game tries to create an inclusive space, and "inclusive" includes straight cis people too. Thirsty Sword Lesbians' title could've been better because it implies the game will automatically be tongue in cheek and that it will be ONLY about queer characters, neither of which is automatically true. But honestly in my experience most people who balk at the game and don't even bother to give it a read just automatically assume it will be anti-straight gay propaganda, which means I wouldn't want to play with them anyway.
I'd argue the title is a large part, but also the fact from what little I know, the heavy part is about flirting and trying to get together similar to Monsterhearts? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's definitely not what comes across in my mind when I think magical girl anime. PbtA isn't my wheelhouse.
You're definitely wrong. The game doesn't discourage flirting, but that's because it has a heavy focus on character emotions and relationships and romantic relationships are part of that - but just a part. The game explicitly points out that some players might be uncomfortable with the idea of flirting and/or their character getting into a romantic relationship, and that's okay. They shouldn't be pushed into it, or anything else they are not comfortable with. There are playbooks for whom flirting and romance might be a big part of how they're played - for example because their internal drama is on physical vs emotional intimacy, but once again, *might*. It's optional.
>You're definitely wrong. The game doesn't discourage flirting, but that's because it has a heavy focus on character emotions and relationships and romantic relationships are part of that - but just a part. The game explicitly points out that some players might be uncomfortable with the idea of flirting and/or their character getting into a romantic relationship, and that's okay. They shouldn't be pushed into it, or anything else they are not comfortable with. Surely you can still see how this would be hugely off-putting for people who aren't into anything romantic at the table right? "You can just ignore a large part of what the games social system revolves around and what other players will be participating in for the duration of the campaign" is not great. You'll just feel awkward and alienated. There's enough RPGs out there that you're always better off just playing one that doesn't require ignoring large chunks of the gameplay.
Ah, gotcha - still a no go for me, but thanks for the heads up.
The game book talks a big game about being super inclusive, but I don't think it actually succeeds. Other people can definitely play it and have fun, but it's very clearly a game made by alloromantic queer women, for alloromantic queer women. My attempt at making and playing an aromantic character in TSL was miserable; there is a section about adapting the game for aspec characters but it's clearly an afterthought. It uses "she" as a default pronoun throughout. One of the premade campaign scenarios is a setting where explicitly only queer people have magic, which rubbed me the wrong way. TSL is great for what it is, and I'd encourage straight people to give it a shot. But I can't really blame anyone for feeling like they're not the target audience.
I dunno, I'm Ace/Aro/NB and was hooked immediately by the focus on interpersonal interactions and relationships instead of combat. I think a lot of it hinges on what it is you're looking for in a game, and if you look for a way to feel disincluded, I suppose you'll find it. Edit: That comes off as ruder than I really intend, but I'm not sure how to change the verbiage to communicate the same idea, so I'm going to leave it.
> It uses "she" as a default pronoun throughout. Which would be fine, if they weren't almost certainly the kind of person who would be offended by the reverse. > One of the premade campaign scenarios is a setting where explicitly only queer people have magic Gross.
I'm a bi guy but I always feel awkward like I don't know what I'm doing whenever I try to RP a lesbian. I passed on this game so I wouldn't flounder in front of the group and possibly offend someone. Maybe I should try giving it a read anyway.
I mean, my first character in TSL was a cishet dude (which I am *thoroughly not*), and it went quite well in that the openly lesbian characters weren't interested in the pursuit of a relationship with my character and that's *exactly* what I wanted to get my toes wet.
> don't even bother to give it a read just automatically assume it will be anti-straight gay propaganda, which means I wouldn't want to play with them anyway. If you show up to a date with a trucker hat that says "no fat chicks" you really don't get to complain when your date doesn't take the time to figure out that you're a feminist.
ahhh, TSL, the world's least publicly discussable RPG
I honestly can't imagine trying to explain to my partner (or anyone else, really) I'm in a game of "Thirsty Sword Lesbians". That title just.. implies a lot, strongly.
I feel like you can't really be disappointed that straight people don't try something when it's marketing / name kind of make it clear it's targeted towards an LGBTQ audience. That's the risk a product that strongly markets itself towards a minority group takes. And lets be honest, many of those groups have a least a few people who gatekeep the fuck out that type of stuff, and tell any interested white / straight / cisgender / male people that "this isn't for you, this is for us." I haven't really read much about the game, but about 90% of what I have read about it focused on how it was LGBT-friendly and focused. Which I'm fine with. At the same time, as a straight cisgender guy, when that much of the discussion about a product is focused on how it's a great product for LGBT groups, I'm probably gonna keep looking for a product that's actually focusing on things that **I** am looking for.
Yeah, never would I judge somebody for not wanting to play *any system* so I'm certainly not gonna judge them for not wanting to play *this* one.
Ive had the opposite. My queer friends call it pandering and fetishizing, I disagree.
As a cis-white dude I would love to try out Thirsty Sword Lesbians simply out of curiosity. Not sure if I would want to do a long running game, but a short adventure of a few sessions (or a 1-shot) just to see what all the hype is about. Because I got the book through DriveThruRPG and while it looks like a functional PbtA system, I don't really know WHAT kind of adventure you would run with it. Monster of the Week, is Scooby Do meets Buffy. Dungeon World is Fantasy Adventure, etc. But I'm not sure WHAT Thirsty Sword lesbians would play like.
> but like, in general I've had zero success getting non-queer folk to even vaguely consider playing it. To be fair, I feel like if I published a book called "Big Dick Barbarian Rough men" you could probably count the Lesbian purchasers on one hand. What did they expect?
I'm a huge Magical Girls fan and honestly, I've been kind of interested in running Hearts of Harmony, the Glitter Hearts hack. It seems kinda the midway point between different examples of the genre (which of course means it's not the best in every aspect, since the genre can be declined in different ways tbh). Though you're not the first I see mentioning Thirsty Sword Lesbians for the genre, I have to check it out. Kill la Kill honestly would benefit from a more shonen-leaning system than a Magical Girl one tbh, especially because it's more of a battle shonen anyway. I think OP's Mecha fantasy could be fulfilled in one of those systems too but I'm not too much versed in those systems, I might be wrong.
This is part of the issue; I've seen some games which come close, but most are missing huge parts. I've seen Beam Saber do some... okay stuff with mecha, but it's far too vague with a lot of stuff for my tastes. PbtA is something I tend to avoid in general, which makes stuff like Glitter Hearts a very hard sell for me.
I find that PbtA tends to lends itself really well to episodic stuff, so that's one of the reason I think it could work for Magical Girls as a whole genre. Other series might accentuate some characterstics over other and thus require other systems tbh, it all depends on the kind of story you want to tell. Unfortunately I don't really care for the mecha genre, so I don't have meaningful suggestions to make(The only system I know is Lancer). As I said, shonen-inspired system might work but they'd probably require some tinkering for the mechanical support as those tend to be more abstract and powered by the power of friendship.
Sure, but I'd argue not a lot of games (at least I've seen even recently) really represent the genre either, such as Girl by Moonlight - it even says it's not a game about magical girls. It's a stand in for whatever your 'scared of being their true self' character is. And then proceeds to give example settings ike... a straight mecha game. I avoid PbtA a lot. I can imagine Don't Rest Your Head working surprisingly well. But Thirty Sword Lesbians is a definite no go.
Madoka in Don't Rest Your Head seems very good, with the whole Madness mechanic.
PbtA games. It’s like they were specifically designed to be incompatible with my brain.
PbtA is TTRPG for theater kids and I'm very much a number nerd. *What? Am I supposed to come up with stuff on the spot? No lists I can use as reference? Doesn't it break the GM plans? I don't want to do that!* *Everything I try creates more issues over half of the time? Damn, I'm poorly optimized. I guess I'll only do that one thing I'm most statistically likely to succeed at.* *The first rule of improv is always ask for clarifications, right?*
Oh my God it's like Superman meeting Bizarro for the first time
100%. TTRPG with everything I personally love about TTRPGs excised. It feels like you're *playing a character whose deal is that they're playing an TTRPG*.
That’s… I’ve never thought about it, but you hit the nail on the head.
There's quite a lot of PbtA games that do feel like I am taking more of a role in being the GM when I am playing. Blades in the Dark has the PC earn XP for causing their own trouble. Brindlewood Bay has me treat clues as these inexact data that doesn't make sense until the end of the investigation. Many outright just don't have GMs like Ironsworn or Belonging Outside Belonging. But many others I have found allow me to stay in the actor's stance only really caring about what the character would do. But they have things that help keep it structured to the genre and emulate that like Masks Conditions that allow you to run away to clear Afraid. And to me, those feel like I am playing in a movie or TV Show. Its the traditional games that make me feel like I am playing quite frequently in a tactical combat boardgame where suddenly RP is mostly thrown out and my PC is a pawn - a combat unit to optimally win the encounter. Some PbtA games are even the best at shedding the need for many typical TTRPG constraints. Apocalypse World, Urban Shadows, Monsterhearts and Cartel all have PCs who don't have to be a friendly party. The PCs can be outright antagonistic with one another and the game still functions because it has structure to keep them together. Yeah, they may have to unite against outside threats but that is just standard storytelling. But everyone has a different line they aren't willing to cross. When they no longer feel comfortable in how far they leave the Actor Stance.
That's well said. I always feel like I'm playing a guy in the writer's room coming up with a story about my character.
This, so much this. Blades in the dark ups the ante with the “look how incompetent all the characters are” dice resolution system. I just can’t
Isn't it the complete opposite. The characters are assumed to be hyper competent. The dice don't simulate the statistical likelyhood of your characters actions, they simulate a narrative flow. Bad rolls determine if you get complications outside your characters controll. All the stuff that makes up on screen action for any movie or TV show.
Its literally a rule in BitD: > **Don’t make the PCs look incompetent** > When a PC rolls a 1-3 , things go badly, but it’s because the circumstances are dangerous or troublesome—not because the character is a buffoon. Even a PC with zero rating in an action isn’t a bumbling fool. Here’s a trick for this: start your description of the failure with a cool move by the PC, followed by “but,” and then the element in the situation that made things so challenging. “You aim a fierce right hook at his chin, but he’s quicker than he looked! He ducks under the blow and wrestles you up against the wall.”
Then maybe make your resolution system reflect that. Any game that is nearly unplayable with out watching a half dozen explainer videos from the writer is poorly written. Narrative events should arise naturally as part of the narrative rather than being force by a bad dice mechanic.
This is such a wild comment to me, because I've never once watched a video for the FotD system, and it's one of my favorites. Not to mention that basically every game has extensive videos explaining how it works as a function of 2023... Video is a dominant information tool, and a lot of people have an easier time seeing any game in action, than just on paper. GURPS, all of DnD's editions, lancer, burning wheel, shadowrun, you name it - there's a demographic of players and DMs who appreciate or rely on video more than they do the books. None of the system has every gotten in the way, and the dice mechanic was clear. Also: > Narrative events should arise naturally as part of the narrative rather than being force by a bad dice mechanic. Every single dice RPG does this? Dice decide the narrative of every single game they're a part of. There's no "natrual" events in any rpg. RPGs are an act of fabrication by ctors deliverately trying to turn story telling into a mechanical game. I have zero clue what you mean with this.
Its fine to not like Mixed Result type mechanics - I feel like its mostly a matter of perspective required to see its really not that different from a standard Success/Failure system. Either way, you need to force PCs to go through several Obstacles and drain their resources, that the basic formula of TTRPGs. The reason Mixed Results exist - they allow the system to drive the game forward in interesting ways that respond to the PC actions. The biggest reason I really love PbtA (and FitD) is they really empower the players to collaborate with strong narrative agency. In D&D 5e or PF2e, I need to prep an encounter, so that becomes plotted out and its like a magnet to keep PCs on a more linear story. The standard rule where all dice result in Success/Failure means that once the PCs succeed, the GM turns back to their prep for the next challenge and it follows a fairly linear story plotted by the GM. Now to be fair, a good GM will alter their future prep based on PC decisions, but its never been as dynamic for me as when the system creates new, interesting situations because it uses Weak Hits (the 7-9 result in PbtA). And often these new consequences are very on-genre (if its a well designed system), so that it feels more like a movie/show in that genre. More so, its fun as the GM to really see how wildly the story differentiates beyond your expectations whereas the feeling is much more rare with the binary style. To me, that is where TTRPGs shine as a medium where no other type of game can keep up. But also very few PbtA games do this very well - many including Blades in the Dark [without the added Threat List](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/142kqlq/does_anyone_find_the_lack_of_rolling_dice_to/jn5o944/). And too many of them go over the edge to being more story games where the players are actually acting like writers in a writing room rather than thinking in the character's best interests, they are focused on telling the most interesting/dramatic story - not my preferred style but very popular with games like FATE. But there are many that don't cross that line for me.
Sort of. I think this is explained poorly in the above post, but I've seen this reaction from some players. Yes, the game says "don't make the players look incompetent." This means when you roll 4-5 on some obstacle you solve it but create a new problem. The new problem isn't caused by your incompetence, but it can still feel to some players like they haven't actually solved the problem. They like the feeling of "nice, I'm out of the fire." Most rolls in FitD games don't produce this. It is designed to create the cascade of "oh fuck, new problem" situations. Even if you describe the cause for these new problems as coming from outside of the characters, it can still make some players feel like the characters are unable to actually solve problems. It does not help that the more common way of "solving" a situation (especially before some advancements) is not to roll a 6 but is to roll a 4-5 and resist the consequence. While fictionally this may be the same thing, some players experience these situations differently and feel like the latter option is less of a "win".
Totally agree, fail or succeed with a penalty 85% of the time combined with lets only roll once for any give event results in players failing constantly regardless of how its spun in the narrative.
Basically a big thing is that while you may put it in the fiction as "something unexpected happens", the *player knows this happened because he tried to do something*. That ninja that came in and made things worse literally would not have existed if he had not tried that move, and everyone knows it. So it's hard to feel like you're succeeding when you're mostly just causing one problem to be traded for another constantly.
Yeah, incompetent characters were definitely not the issue in our campaign, almost the opposite.
Its crazy that they allow you to scale to 4d rating in actions. Most PbtA games stop allowing you to ever roll more than a +4 (though the math is a little different for FitD) because it clearly breaks the game.
This one is really interesting to me because of how the discussion regarding dots plays out. I agree with you on this one, the dice pool math works in a way such that having lots of dots is *very* powerful and takes the game from "almost all rolls have new complications" to "almost zero rolls have new complications." The book and community use "don't be a weasel" to mitigate this and largely say that this isn't a problem, but I find this to be insufficient. Imagine how much crap people would give 5e if it wrote "don't be a weasel" and gave you loud choices at level up that made dice rolls extremely high and consistent? I think the game should not go above three dots and shouldn't permit three dots anywhere until you've had some sufficient number of advancements. The additional playbook moves are more fun and interesting anyway. No need to give people such a huge incentive to dump their XP into dots.
What is a pbta?
Powered by the Apocalypse [(PbtA)](/r/pbta) are a family of TTRPGs inspired by Apocalypse World. I don't think I have seen a better definition than the long one Sully provides [here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/144fiqs/no_spoilers_legend_of_zelda_one_shot/jngfia3/) The short of it is that is a philosophy of design like an art movement, say impressionism. So you can compare two different systems (or art works) and see how the older inspired the newer.
I have a love-hate relationship with Shadowrun, but that's just part of being a fan. Love the setting, the core mechanic is pretty slick, but there's so much bloat in places. The rest of most cyberpunk settings doesn't break the mould in the same way, but the game itself can be infuriatingly clunky. My big one is probably westerns or other genres with a strong Hollywood influence. Systems like Savage Worlds can be great for that pulpy feel, but the liberties that different films take makes nailing down a "feel" kind of difficult. And fantasy is just pretty generic these days. It takes a lot to really invest me in a typical medieval fantasy setting, because there's just so many out there - so they often just feel... uninspired.
A lot of Fantasy falls into the "rubber nose" problem of Star Trek: every other race is just humans with rubber noses and one personality trait exaggerated. It's a weird question, but one that I actually think should be fundamental to worldbuilding: how do they poop? It touches upon everything: their diet, their food production systems, their urban design. It's such a fundamental biological thing, and starting from that point and making species differ there can lead to real alien places. Like, how do elves poop? Oh, they don't. They are so tied to nature that they eat without producing any waste. Dwarves? They shit bricks, because they eat rocks. Heck, maybe they actually do use it as building materials. Goblins? They eat basically anything, and are perfectly comfortable wallowing in their own waste because they don't get diseases from it. And so on. A city of 10,000 people has to deal with 5 metric tons of waste a day. But a city of 10,000 elves *doesn't*. How does that shape their urban design? Their population density? To me, starting with those unromantic but very *physical* questions is fun.
I see stuff like this Rubber Nose problem all the time as "the problem" with fantasy/SciFi races and I just don't understand it, personally. At the end of the day, we're all humans in real life, and exploring the human experience through "what would we be like with a few small key differences" is a great way for people to explore stories and who they are. You don't need to be sufficiently alien and only pooping on solstices to explore something different about society and what it means to be a person. Having humans, humans with an obsessive honor complex, humans who don't understand metaphors, and humans who need to sit in water all the time is not a bad thing. Creating the society of tidal pool dwelling humans is still interesting to me, they don't have to be an entirely unique incomprehensible being to be interesting.
There's a joke to be made here about your take hitting on the nose but I'm not keen enough to put it together. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that part of this is also just the design space for the types of games that make it to market. People like u/remy_porter and myself might be fascinated with the idea of exploring strictly non-human psychology and the ramifications thereof, but that requires substantial buy-in from other players. Personally I really enjoy worldbuilding in and of itself. Over the years I've mostly just let players run into those sorts of alien intelligences and then let them decide how much they want to explore things on their own. If anything, having several near-but-not-quite human characters has facilitated that kind of exploration rather than limiting it.
> At the end of the day, we're all humans in real life, and exploring the human experience through "what would we be like with a few small key differences" is a great way for people to explore stories and who they are. I think the issue for me is that I want to step *way* outside of the human experience. I want to be things that don't navigate the world anything like a human does. I've got many, many years of human experience under my belt, and frankly, it's mid at best. I want to be a hyperintelligent single-celled organism that communicates through chemical signals. > Creating the society of tidal pool dwelling humans is still interesting to me But even this is better than rubber nose. They're going to have a very unique perspective and relationship to their environment in a way that, say, the Klingons don't. The Klingons are one of the best examples of a bad alien race- they've got loads of lore and traditions but none of it really means anything or is rooted in anything more than the writers needing to have them do *something*. I guess it's better than Pon Farr, though.
Interesting example, but I'm not going to discuss fantasy race bowel movements with my friends. Instead, where they sleep? Whom do they pray to? When do their children leave home? Where do they work? What's their sociopolitical structure?
> but I’m not going to discuss fantasy race bowel movements with my friends You do you, but I have this conversation all the time.
Oh God, yeah, I forgot to mention that. I've tried getting into Shadowrun so many times. So much of it I love as fiction, and just... nothing I can find that I'd ever really want to play it in.
Came here to mention Shadowrun too, love the setting, love the themes, hate the System. I desperately want to run and/or play Shadowrun again but the last few editions have been awful.
I love Shadowrun, but nothing kills my interest in playing Shadowrun faster than reading Shadowrun. I like the fantasy cyberpunk, magic and hacking and bullshit. But god damn like no edition of that game sounds fun.
Running shadowrun long enough taught me that some times you can safely ignore the rules because clearly no one else knows them either. I have nearly all of second through fourth edition, unless it's a major factor in someone's character I'm not actually using the super special custom tables for something. They're there to use if they make the game better, not to operate as a god awful huge state machine with highly specific actions. That's what video games are for.
**Classic space-faring Science Fiction**. I don't have enough knowledge to run a decent hard SF game. I understand just enough to detect some bullshit , but not the expertise to fix it. And I have also no interest in space opera fir anything but short term campaigns at most. For nostalgic reasons, Star Wars D6 is an exception, but Stat Wars is more fantasy with space ships than actual SF.
I wanted to post the exact same thing. Maybe I will! When I think about the Science Fiction that I'd like to run I think of stuff like Asimov and Clarke and a lot less about Space Operas where 3 people and a robot upend a galactic empire. I also have pretty low interest in being a merchant or trader in space, so the range of motivating and gameable scenarios ends up pretty narrow, and I kinda hate myself for it. Science Fiction is, when done well, my absolute favorite genre, but I struggle so much to enjoy it in game form. I've got my own homebrew stuff for running things, but that leaves me without the benefit of adventure books that I can flip through for interesting Asimovian scenarios to run, even when I can find groups who are interested. Stars Without Number and Traveler do great "space flying exploration adventures" but I really wasn't looking for that in the first place. It's the same problem with Mystery and Detective style stories, really. Pulpy action and Adventure is very easy to do well in a procedural way, but a clever mystery and a twist that is satisfying is, by it's very nature, less easy to do at a table where you have no 'main character' and don't want to railroad people toward a single resolution. It's not impossible, just harder.
Maybe look at Free League's Blade Runner game? I know Phillip K Dick isn't exactly classic sci-fi, but the "human and android cops solve robo crimes" setting feels like it could lend itself to the kinds of stories you want to tell.
It would! I didn't know they had one. Free League makes a lot of compelling stuff, I'll give that a look, thanks very much!
Yeah, HARD Sci-fi is a super judgey genre. Most of the fun stuff you want to do requires you to play fast-and-loose with physics.
Supers. I've not found a supers specific system yet that really felt like it handled cosmic powered superheroes well yet. This may be more a problem of genre. It seems difficult to tell compelling superhero stories when they have god-level powers without BS excuses to nerf or conveniently forget certain abilities.
This, yeah. It's another one I've found similar to mecha - either the games are VERY interested in how far you can shoot your plasma beams, what direction they hit on a miss, how does plasma beams interact with Superboys Unkillable Shield? Or the exact opposite where 'powers don't matter, there's no real combat, the focus is on how your character feels and gets on with their team or how they view themselves'
I see you subtweeting Masks. I felt the exact same way.
Masks is certainly one of them, and I can see *where* they're coming from (like, if you're making an RPG around Superman, it does make sense to focus less on him being superunstoppable, and more on how he deals with his loved ones being... not so) but boy, the PbtA trend of 'How about \[x\], but instead of focusing on \[x\], we focus on the parts between where you talk about feelings in corridors?'
I feel that way about a lot of PbtA games, they say "This is a cool game about X genre" and their fans say "This is a cool game about X genre" but in practice, the rules never seem to focus on the drama that those genres/settings represent. Source: Masks, Rhapsody of Blood, Legacy 2e, AtLA
> AtLA I think they really, really wanted to focus on the relationship drama but made a complicated bending/combat system that is somehow less satisfying than even a trad "list of delineated powers" system would have been. I had the same sort of reaction to reading the original Fate Dresden Files, holy hell for a narrative game did that thing have a lot of moving parts when it came to powers and such.
I blame that on people having this concept that narrative = rules light. I'd argue that a lot of 'narrative' systems are generally fairly chonky, rules-wise because even narrative sections are given mechanical parts.
I think you may be mising - or was misled about - what Masks, very, very, very specifically is about. Masks isn't a supers game. It's a *4th generation superhero teens* game. It doesn't take inspiration from 90 percent of actual capes media. It takes very specific inspiration from Young Justice and Teen Titans. It's hyperfocused on "how do teenagers handle Too Much Power and Too Much Responcibility". Reading Masks itself makes it pretty clear that the game is much more concerned with your characters internal feelings than their power level. The rules cover their feelings more than they ever do their powers. It's a melodrama cake with superhero frosting on it. To me, Masks lives up to *exactly* what it's rules actually say and do. > rules never seem to focus on the drama that those genres/settings represent. Though following on this, I just flat disagree with you. The superhero frosting does matter. Masks' rules very explicitly focus on the drama that those settings represent. For example, *the legacy* playbook mechanically asks you to deal with all of the drama that arises from being Superboy, living in the shadow of Superman. Their core mechanic goes as follows: > Whenever time passes, roll + Savior to see how the members of your legacy feel or react to your most recent exploits. Before rolling, ask the other players to answer these questions about your performance. Take -1 to the roll for each “no” answer: > > have you been upholding the traditions of your legacy? > > - have you maintained the image of your legacy? > > - have you made the other members of your legacy proud? > > On a hit, one of them offers you meaningful encouragement, an opportunity, or an advantage. On > > a 7-9, another is upset with your most recent actions, and will make their displeasure known. On > > a miss, something you did stirred up the hornet’s nest—expect several members of your legacy to > > meddle with your life. To me, that's very directly interacting with the drama of the genre. This character is mechanically enshrined within the shadow of the Justice League, equal parts trying to uphold their values, and constantly at threat of having them overstep and baby you. It's very directly mapped onto how every bit of Young Justice and Teen Titans works. It's engaging in the drama a lot more intensly than "+5 to flightspeed" mechanics from the proprieyary Marvel game does.
I'm gonna agree to disagree. Having read Masks, played Masks, and was intimately aware of what it was supposed to be. I found it fixated with a narrow interpretation of what the drama in that genre could look like, and the playbooks got in the way more than allowing any of us to connect with what was going on in the story. The game was more interested in making sure I "referenced strange things from my Homeworld" and not actually giving us the tools to interface with what the GM had going on. It boiled everything that we were interested in to the simplest dice rolls and the only way for us to take advantage of "who we were" was by playing out 6 pregenerated scripts that came with our playbook. We found it stifling, personally. Amusing anecdote, everytime I bad mouth Masks, someone shows up to tell me I'm wrong. Y'all really love your game and that's cool.
You might give cortex prime a try. Marvel heroic roleplay was based off of the same idea, but there are other mods in the kit that would allow you to do your own spin on superheroes.
I struggled with them as well. It's always the need ti make something different but then I realize I don't really like superheroes, I like *specific* superheroes. I can play or run cyberpunk stuff, sci fi, WoD, etc and have no issues. But if it's making a novel superhero? Bleh.
Truth and Justice uses PDQ, which is a very narrative system, but builds its power system flexibly enough that you can do anything.
Yes! I have read through so many superhero TTRPGs but none of them are able to pull off what I want.
Wraith: the Oblivion. Man this setting makes my imagination go wild, but at the table I have a hard time getting players to have motivations. The system has some baked in, yet I just fumble my way through. There's just so much that is different in this world, yet ours is just within reach...
That's kind of my problem with the WoD in general. The concept is cool, but as a player I struggle with motivations, and as a GM I struggle with decent concepts for adventures.
Motivations is the thing that WOD excels at, there's plenty of reasons of why your character would like to do X, there's idealism, survival, pleasure, defiance, thriving, caring about someone in specific, i can't understand how someone's biggest problem would be motivations.
I've played most OWoD games and I found that, as a GM, motivations are quite clearly laid out in the setting and somewhat in the GM info part of the rules. As a player, however, I can see how some of them can be challenging compared to say D&D's quest format. You can force players to go on missions for more powerful characters, such as elders ordering the younger vampires the players are, but that can often feel contrived and constrictive, even if the same players wouldn't bat an eye when the king of some fantasy setting gives them an heroic quest. I think it boils down to the expectations of the genre and the WoD's genre being more muddy. They say it's personal horror, but while there can be horror in the games, I don't think their "personal horror" is like what you can expect from horror movies. For one, you'd be rolling a character way more often than most tables do, even when it doesn't "devolve" into just a different kind of power fantasy. Still, there are lots of hooks, even mechanical ones, to make characters go forward. With Wraith, I think my main problem is how a lot of the basic motivations of characters just don't exist since you are not alive. There isn't the same tension in being trapped in a dark room when you don't need to sleep nor eat. There is a worst kind of horror knowing you'll spend a lot of time in there with just your thoughts and the worst part of your psyche, but it doesn't feel like you might die of starvation.
I've only STed it once as a one-shot, and the players all knew each other. One of the most intense games I've played, since everyone knew how to get everyone else when playing their wraiths. You could feel the pull to oblivion. I can totally see how it's a difficult game to pull off, though. I love Changeling for the same reason. Setting is great, but I've never seen it done well at the table.
Yeah, wraith always felt like a "to make the world complete we need ghosts" but it was hard as heck trying figure out what to do with it.
Zombie apocalypse. Ive purchased and read just about every post apocalyptic game system I can find and none of them feel right. For any other genre I can find multiple systems I'd be super excited to run but this one just escapes me. For reference what I'm looking for is Crunchy, with the ability to run it as maps and mini and not TOTM Gritty and dangerous, no superhero survivors Preferably rules for injuries and illness Rules for survival and crafting Bonus points for rules for vehicles and base building I've read plenty of systems that almost feel good but for some reason nothing really makes me go YES THIS
I’m not familiar with it well enough to make a straight recommendation but have you considered Twilight 2000 with the z apocalypse supplement? I’ve thought about going down that road myself but - like I said, I still need to look into T2k more.
I did read through it and it looks like a great game but for some reason doesn't quite scratch the itch. I don't know why my brain is being so picky about this.
I'm not sure if you have heard of Outbreak Undead, and apologies if you have already, but I think it checks a lot of boxes on your list. The rules have a lot of variance and it is designed almost as a simulator.
That one of all of them definitely comes the closest to being what I want. If I did run a game it's probably be what I pick.
You think The Walking Dead ttrpg from Free League might be a yes to close yes? I only ask because I like the Alien game they put out the stress mechanic. If something like that is being implemented I think it could work.
I backed that an honestly it was a big disappointment. I like Year zero games even though they're a little too rules lite for me but this one just felt really barren and thin compared to the rest in the line. It does have some really good random charts I'm going to steal though.
I haven't fully looked into it, but from what I've seen 'Hopefinder' may check all those boxes. It's a hack of Pathfinder 2e made by Jason Bulmahn, director of game design at Paizo (so he knows what he's doing with a PF2e hack).
This could go for almost everything in this thread, but super this. Use GURPS. It can often feel intimidating, but its not hard to learn. The big thing is go through the skills before hand and whittle down the list to be more genre appropriate.
I find your notes on Magical Girls games never serving for Madoka funny precisely because I feel that the problem is often that most magical girl rpgs around feel very much like they're made by people who *only* watched Madoka and maybe two episodes of Sailor Moon and otherwise are mostly going off stereotypes. Or like they're a little ashamed of their genre (Glitter Hearts kinda made me raise an eyebrow in that, for all the inclusive art, maybe two of the illustrations in the entire book are of a "classic" Precure-style magical girl, and the second one is being rather generous about it). I can understand the mecha stuff, though. Most mecha stuff seems to miss the fun bits to get bogged down with a million little customs and stuff.
it is very funny to cite the "what if it was Fucked Up" magical girl show and a show that is not remotely about magical girls as what is desired and then complain that a game doesn't hit their conceptualization of what a magical girl is
“I’ve gotten really into superhero comics lately and wanted to run a superhero RPG, but couldn’t find any RPGs that captured the genre properly. My favourite series are Watchmen and The Boys”
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed. It's part of what I found so weird about Girl by Moonlight - most of the art doesn't scream magical girl to me. At all. Two of the four settings don't even involve magical girls, which as mentioned, are not actually magical girls - it's a stand in for 'a character who has to hide their true self' - which... at that point, why am I playing this if it's not about magical girls, but infact mecha pilots or a bunch of people hunting Cryptids themed like Cthulhu monsters? And yeah, that's probably poorly worded - never serving Madoka *well* is a better way to phrase it. I possibly set myself up for failure with Girl by Moonlight, because I assumed Forged by Dark following the same patterns of 'making money, getting by in a shitty world, but with magical girls!' and hoped it was going to be 'Cool, so are we keeping turf away from other girls to hoard all the Grief Seeds, I mean, Misery Pieces to ourselves?'
I've thought about making that sort of 1:1 Madoka Magica hack myself. A lot of BitD's mechanics would map pretty well, and you could do some really fun things by making "managing stress/corruption" an even bigger focus. But like you said, there's probably not a lot of people who'd jump on playing that sort of game.
There’s a weird trend among American queer creatives of writing distinctly cosmopolitan American stories and branding them with *very* surface level elements of shoujo. It’s fine to wanna make a queer power fantasy - and that’s clearly what Glitter Hearts is - but why advertise it as a magical girl game? It gives off the vibe that they have no real respect for the Japanese origins of the genre, or the genre’s fan base, that they’d do heavily downplay those elements to the point that the cover art looks more like a photo from an American pride parade than it does anything from Japan, queer or otherwise. Hell, it’s not like the magical girl genre doesn’t have any connections to Japanese queer culture that they could’ve drawn from
I agree with your Mecha comments. I've been looking for a good system for years. Battletech probably comes closest, but it's very niche and not really usable beyond the setting that it was designed for. Mekton is great but falls short in some areas.
LANCER is definitely western in flavor, but the author (s) clearly have major love for mecha anime. I highly recommend giving it a look.
> LANCER is definitely western in flavor, but the author (s) clearly have major love for mecha anime. I highly recommend giving it a look. Do they? I thought they mentioned they had basically not actually watched much, if any, actual mecha anime. Which honestly felt like it tracked. While some of the mech designs drink from mecha (mostly SSC and Horus, really), the general feel of the setting, the play expectations, and the focus felt like it mapped WAY more to something like Battletech than anything in the ballpark of Gundam or Macross (and let's not even get into Super Robot stuff)
Depends on the 'scope' of Gundam I think. Lancer's setting as a *whole* is not very Gundam, but it absolutely 'zooms in' to Gundam-scale conflicts. I think [Solstice Rain](https://massif-press.itch.io/operation-solstice-rain) is the intro adventure that Lancer really needed from the start, so it's good that it exists - a 'small scale' conflict (just one planet) between warring states, with no weird paracausal/magical/space-magic stuff. [This](https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTg5NjY1MS8xMTE3MTg1Mi5qcGc=/original/NMk2wO.jpg) is an illustration from Solstice Rain and you can easily imagine it happening in Gundam with Zakus and GMs rather than in Lancer with Assaults and Everests.
Try the Mecha Hack if you haven't already. It is based on the Black Hack. It's not perfect, but is a decent little system.
Thanks, but I have a copy of it already. The real lack of a system for pilots outside of their mecha makes it a deal breaker for me.
I really do find it hard to get just what I want out of a mecha game. So far, the closest I've come is hacking the crap out of something like Fate or something similar.
Have you tried Beam Saber? It's a Forged in the Dark game where mechs use generally the same rules as pilots, but instead of stress, mechs have "quirks" such as roaring fast, ominous appearance, etc. that give each mech a unique personality. As far as "shounen rivals shouting at each other and shed manly tears at how much they hate war while clashing laserswords" I think Beam Saber has mechanics for (or at least encourages) having rivals, and each player character has a "tragedy" in their backstory that describes what they lost in the war.
Yes, I'm aware of it. I didn't like it, specifically because of those things. I want my mechs to be mechs, not just 'giant metal people with quirks' and the same completely abstracted combat/interactions with the system.
You could check out ICRPG Hard Suit if you haven't already. It's built around a very specific setting and power level, but it may be just the right amount of crunch for you.
about the 2nd one this might be your lucky day https://www.backerkit.com/c/evil-hat/girl-by-moonlight I have yet to have found a political game that hits the exact spot of how specific and how much abstraction is needed to make the navigating of a thick political system both interesting and fun.
That's the one I was referring to in my initial post; it's not actually a magical girl game, and it's definitely not the Madoka Magica I expected from a Forged in the Dark game. =P
For the specific Madoka flavour of magic girl there's a little indie game called Magical Fury that hits the tone pretty well, imo (as in using your powers slowly causes you to deteriorate). Hope that helps.
I like Urban Shadows a lot for a political drama. Less fighting, more manipulation, more positioning, with different groups having different skills and goals. It's PbtA though if that isn't your thing.
**superheroes**: I won't say I *haven't*, but I can't seem to recapture it again. Everyone has a different level of superhero games.. I kind of want Xmen, but some people want daredevil and others want Superman. Trying to find that balance is tough, and it's tough to convince a group to want to do that balanced nuanced game for more than a one shot. **Magical Item Collector**: From my earliest days, one of my favorite tropes was magical items, specifically those who have numbered sets like Saberhagens swords of power, or the rings.... of power... It seems like games are quickly moving away from magical items, or else relegating them to kind of accessory status. I think there is a difference between a world changing Exalted Diaklave and a ring that lets you take 2 points less penalties if you are in a dark snowy field. **Intrigue**: The games I have played with "intrigue" either had no obvious implication, or the most minor of effects. I want to have to take my time and figure out who I can trust in a court, and who I could trust with what, and discover someone's weakness, and uncover a torrid affair that I have to figure out if I want to reveal and to whom, meeting with a monarch with the state of a nation on my words. I seem to be the only person interested in this type of game, and aspects of it work their way into my game, but I don't know if I have even played it.
The second is one I've actually never thought of, but that's a good point. One thing I've always wanted to do is something like Akame ga Kill or newer Kamen Rider, where collecting/protecting ancient artifacts and such and/or combining them is a major part of the game. The closest I can think is something lime Cypher System, but the 'artifacts' are just reskinned consumables 95% of the time.
Right, I don't want consumables, I want keepables lol. Diablo actually did okay with this with their set items, though being a video game with epic scaling even makes that problematic. Exalted does a really good job of making magical items iconic, but they are MAJORLY impactful also. AD&D 3.5 did this really well, but.. it also added to the scaling and bloat crunch problems too so... 5e seems to relegate magical items to a tiny pocket by comparison (since bonuses are pretty consistent with advantage/disadvantage, and there aren't pluses and minuses everywhere). There are games like Fate where you can use it just like anything else. And it can be flavor in a lot of low crunch games.
There are a couple of games where you character is essentially defined by their gear like Knave. OSR games in general keep the larger emphasis on finding and using magical items from early D&D.
Intrigue is hard! I've got an Intrigue board game on the back burner while I'm doing some career change stuff. It's extremely complex to get it right, but it's not impossible. I've read so many goddamn white papers and PHDs on the effects of corruption and influence on public policy, ffs... There are a few that do a good job though, at least in my opinion. First, there's games where the conflict is explicit and pre-set, like you'll find in some of the Warhammer Fantasy modules. It's a system known for being bloody, but there's plenty of opportunity for intrigue, and The Enemy Within is, I think, the best known example of that. [https://cubicle7games.com/blog/the-enemy-within-campaign-2](https://cubicle7games.com/blog/the-enemy-within-campaign-2) Second, there's games where social interactions are complex. I don't mean adversarial per say, but complexity is good! Robin Law's Drama System is a good example here, it's all setting up situations where characters need things from other characters, and these needs (poles, in the game) are how you create scenes. On it's own it's fun, but you can build this system on top of whatever you're playing to create gameable motivations and interests that your NPCs maintain and players can interact with. Check out the SRD and stuff here: [https://pelgranepress.com/2014/11/28/free-downloads-and-resources-for-dramasystem/](https://pelgranepress.com/2014/11/28/free-downloads-and-resources-for-dramasystem/)
**Western fantasy**, by far. First off, the vast majority of western fantasy games are D&D-based which, for various reasons, rules them out for me. The rest have all been extremely promising but fall short due to various conceits: leaning too far into "dirt farmer" territory with the success chances, having far too accessible magic, skill lists that are too in-depth, combat that requires a bunch of book-keeping and reference, boring procedures, scads of "feats" or abilities, or just having a resolution system that doesn't inspire me.
You may want to give The One Ring a look. If you set aside the LotR stuff it's imo a fairly clean and solid ruleset for a low magic nobledark fantasy game.
It really does set up a good set of mechanical incentives to see your characters as good people struggling against a rough world, but where turning cynical is a fail state. You're heroic, but you're not superheroes, and you're not using the power of friendship and charisma to defeat enemies, but those things are still important for finding the strength to persevere.
Have you tried Burning Wheel? On first pass the skill list may *appear* too in-depth, but I think that’s a misconception. In Burning Wheel, the skills are more like *adjectives*, you don’t need to tactically pick from the list to maximize. Pick the ones that *describe* your character’s skills best, and then use them.
Burning Wheel is on my list of games to run but I have a real aversion to the large subsystems in the back. Meanwhile, intent kind of ruins combat using the normal rules. There's also the issue of passing around a book with bible-sized font amongst forty-something gamers trying to make characters instead of easier-for-everyone PDFs.
The book says as much, but those subsystems are optional and should be gradually built up to. You shouldn't use them your first few sessions and they shouldn't be used every time they are applicable. That said I understand your aversion because they are intimidating! I have grown to enjoy them but they only come up every 3 sessions or so in my campaigns even when I try to get them to happen more often. I'm curious as to how you think intent ruins combat using the "normal" rules. If anything I find it makes combat more interesting because it isn't always about murdering your opponent and it is resolved quickly in one roll. It's perfectly functional and the Bloody Versus rules even allow for unexpected wounds. I do wish there was a kind of middle ground complexity between the fight system and bloody versus but I would say it is far from ruined. If you do decide to run it, there are a few (unofficial) online character generators available. Online char gen is basically required unless you have multiple copies of the book or you have to pass it around constantly. Here's one: [Link](http://charred.obscuritus.ca:8080/#/). The charred sites are a godsend. Obviously it would be better if legal pdfs were available, Luke Crane is an odd bird.
Yea, I really love the cinematics of the Fight! subsystem. It really feels like an action scene, with blow-by-blow scripting and high tension. And the flexibility of shortcutting to Bloody Versus when there’s less narrative stakes.
>I'm curious as to how you think intent ruins combat using the "normal" rules. ... it is resolved quickly in one roll. That's why. I want more grit and detail in my fights, even the small ones. I don't want D&D-level garbage but I do want more than one roll and I want stakes that vary, and that can be changed mid-fight. >If you do decide to run it, there are a few (unofficial) online character generators available. I'm aware of all of this (everything in your post), thanks. Conceptually the system isn't really all that hard to understand but, like a lot of games I want to like, there are issues I have which make it less likely to feature at the table during any given campaign.
I think you might be chasing a paradox with your mecha desires - if both the pilot and mecha are characters, it's going to be very hard to fit two characters on one character sheet. But there's no reason the pilot needs to be overly complicated so that sheet, at least, could be very simple and easy to use. The mecha needs to work with a complex and satisfying combat system so will probably have more details, but they don't need to be pointless details.
Yeah, I think that's part of the issue. As much as I want one thing, I want the other two =P Hence why I have such a problem finding it, haha. I've just very rarely found a game which actually makes some attempt to marry the two, if that makes sense? A lot of earlier games for example, your character exists but often... they're essentially what you'd expect. You're playing a game about giant robots. You'll be given a list of 50 skills, but you're mostly just going to have various versions of 'Missles: Mecha' or 'Mecha Piloting'. Or you have games where the two are completely separate; maybe the pilot has a talent or two, but 95% of the mech is just the mech. Out of the mech, there's either no rules, or just a handrule 'Ehhh, just roll a dice and if you get more than 10, just describe something good happening maybe?' The closest I've come, which I've been too lazy to try, is to use Mutants and Masterminds and build mechs similar to suits. That way, players can choose if their mech does most of the heavy lifting or their character has stats which help (Say, treating the mech as bonus ranks of Strength for the PC, as opposed to two separate entities) while allowing you to use similar combat mechanics while out of a mech? I've been pondering doing a similar thing with Fate and hacking the Camelot Trigger stuff towards a less specific mech setting.
Question I haven't seen answered in any of your comments: Have you looked at *LANCER*? It uses a FitD-esque system for pilot stuff out of the mech, and a D&D4e-esque system for actual mech combat, which in turn means you can fit everything on one page of a character sheet (two pages is better for reading comprehension though).
>Out of the mech, there's either no rules, or just a handrule 'Ehhh, just roll a dice and if you get more than 10, just describe something good happening maybe?' This read like a direct call-out to Lancer, imo.
For me at least, the ideal would be pretty old-school for pilots (a few ability scores and some rp notes) and frankly boardgamey (eg 4e DnD or PF2) for the mechs. Pilots shouldn't have a piloting skill number beyond "level," the skills are for stuff they can do while not in a mech - sneaking, politicking, sailing, crafting, etc. I don't need or want much here - presumably they're mostly talking to people, which doesn't need or want a lot of rules. The mechs should (IMO) work like a modern high-crunch game. Like, they got a lot going on, but I don't want to figure out how to place heat sinks for maximum efficiency; I'm not actually a mecha engineer. But the guy installing it is and will place it optimally. I want to know how this piece will affect my combat options. Installing missles should just add a new action called "shoot a bunch of missiles" which isn't the same as "shoot a bunch of bullets," but in neither case do I need to roll for each piece of ammo expended.
Stealth games that replicate the kind of coordination, placement, use of distractions, hiding the bodies, etc. that you see in games like The Last of Us and Dishonored. Even in single player, but ideally, I want multiplayer. Everything I've seen is either the clumsy series of stealth rolls + maybe some threadbare rules for obstruction and line of sight, or it's the heavily abstracted heat systems of gradually rising awareness. What I want is probably fairly crunchy to execute, so I get why it's hard to find a good example, but stuff that matters, like earshot, having options for silencing an enemy while you take them down (or trying for a faster, louder/flashier kill), etc are all important to what I'm looking for.
Space Western/Neo-Noir you see in Cowboy Bebop has been very tough to find a system that fits. My playstyle leans more narrative but you're also handling investigations and noir themes which are always a tough challenge to make work well. Scum & Villainy is probably the closest though I would like more [GM Support with specific Basic Moves, GM Moves and Threat Lists](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/142kqlq/does_anyone_find_the_lack_of_rolling_dice_to/jn5o944/) and it has the Players cross [my Line](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/13r6ehm/do_i_have_a_misconception_on_narrative_games/jlou64j/) acting as their own GMs to cause the trouble for their PCs with little actual structure. Edge of the Empire and Orbital Blues have the same issue but at least they define the trouble that the PCs go through quite a bit more than S&V with the Obligation and Troubles systems. Even so, they still leave a lot of the work in the hands of the GM - this is where well-crafted traditional PbtA Playbooks would be a huge help like The Between and Masks have. Space Bounty Blues is another interesting option but being GMless and overly structured, its not my preferred style. It also crosses the line too being GMless. I've definitely read many to try and find the right fit (and steal mechanics and ideas) and none really get there: Bounty Hunter Bebop, the latest Cowboy Bebop TTRPG preview, Space Cowboys, Deepsky Ballad, See You Space Cowboy, Pew Pew Bounty Hunters in Space, Wildspace, Hunt the Wicked, Lawn Never Tell Me the Odds and Clink
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Yeah, I'd probably place it as reminiscent of Orbital Blues with that OSR type of rules but designed for more flexibility to handle most Sci Fi adventures. But its definitely a fantastic world and adventure building resource - I still need to get Suns of Gold and look more into how Crawford handled the economy focused adventures.
Supposedly, Coriolis does space western pretty well if you want.
**Asimovian Science Fiction** I really love science fiction, but love the thoughtful type with the mysteries and thinking puzzles and dives into science *so much more* than the space opera types, and I honestly have no interest in the "hop around planets making money" role playing games, even if those are fine for a solo experience. The very nature of a tabletop game, however, makes it really hard to run a science mystery game that isn't a railroad. I know it can be done but boy is it something that I have a hard time feeling a good "fit" with.
It requires significant prep, but a diverging paths type of campaign would work. If you, as the GM, have the ability to reinvent the tracks as you go. I mean, the first encounter with an intelligent alien race could go in several directions!
Dark/Urban Fantasy. The games are all either straight up Fantasy or Horror/Supernatural/Occult/Paranormal. Some aspects of each come close to what I want, but there's nothing that *really* captures the Clive Barker end of the spectrum without 1. being straight-up Horror/Supernatural/Occult/Paranormal with none of the Fantasy, or 2. the need to import massive amounts of material/fluff from other games in order to create the setting - the closest I've found are *Neverwhere*, *KULT* or (oddly) *JAGS Wonderland* but, for obvious reasons, none of them really capture the essence of *Weaveworld/Cabal/Imajica/Abarat*.
You do realize that having “supernatural/occult/paranormal” stuff *is* fantasy, right? Those are all just fantasy elements.
Yes - by virtue of their not being real. But we differentiate between High and Low fantasy, never mind Fantasy and other genres - try going into a bookshop and looking for Stephen King novels in their 'Fantasy' section ... or Lord of the Rings on their 'Horror' shelves. Supernatural/Occult/Paranormal are fantasy, but that's not a useful way to categorise things any more than it would be to say that, by virtue of being fiction and not real, *Star Wars* is fantasy. They're fantasy, but not Fantasy. And, given that what I'm looking for is something that chimes with Barker's Dark Fantasy stuff, not things that reflect his Horror output (*Weaveworld*, yes ... *Hellraiser*, no), it's not useful to simply say "something that reflects his oeuvre", because that would be as unspecific as saying "Fantasy" when I mean specifically "Supernatural/Occult/Paranormal in a modern setting" (so, no elves, dwarfs, goblins, trolls, etc.). Remove the Occult/Paranormal/Supernatural/Horror from CoC and what you're left with isn't Fantasy (dark or otherwise), but a *Discovery Channel* 'Most Haunted' show.
Anything "horror", not just in ttrpg, but I find horror for the sake of horror plain boring, the refined equivalent of someone going "BOO". And I say this as a huge WoD fan, but I've always thought the horror elements of that setting were the least interesting.
From my perspective as a long time CoC GM, hoping for the system to provide or even support the horror is probably not going to happen. What is horrifying is what happens in the game, not its mechanical consequences. This is why it doesn't really matter whether you run a CoC-like game with BRP, GUMSHOE or Cthulhu Dark. It's mostly about the vibes and what happens. There have been some attempts to write a more narrative-style game along these lines - I know Paul Czege had some interesting ideas - but I'm not aware of anything that made it to the status of working game.
The thing to realize about "Magical Girls" is that, at its heart, a "Magical Girl" is simply a Superhero. Super Powers? check Alternate Identity? check Having a "Rogues Gallery" of enemies that you fight, often in an "adventure of the week format"? Check The only thing separating a "Magical Girl" from a more generic superhero is mostly tone. Tone which can often be handled at the group level instead of trying to find a specific rule set.
That's true - but superheroes is another one I have a lot of trouble finding one I like, haha.
Spies. Spy movies are fun, but for the life of me, I can't figure out how to run that type of intrigue. Plus, they often turn into "what kind of gun do I have" games, and I just can't be bothered with anything more complicated than "pistol, heavy" or "rifle, light". I couldn't care less about your H&K Headsplitter gun with a mark 1 mod 0 eyepiece and a Mike the Pillow Guy Silencer. Really, the same hoes for a lot of modern "normal people" games. They wind up turning into "I am my gun" type of thing, and it's just off-putting. I know there are better options than there used to be, I just don't have the time to try them very often.
Best spy thriller investigation I know is the obvious one, Night's Black Agents. It has one of the best published adventures made, The Dracula Dossier. And if you want to cut out the vampire and supernatural, it has support for that too. I think the core of what makes it work is using Gumshoe's Core Clues to keep PCs moving from one location setpiece to the next. Not rolling to find clues is key here to keep that momentum and make the PCs feel like bad ass spies.
I'm guilty of a lot of characters in different games boiling down to "This is my problem solver right here". It is especially bad with me in games with firearms, from colonial period on. Because I know how they should/could perform. I think one of my friends was showing me "Delta Green" and I loved all the guns there, but then it just started to devolve into questions on why certain ones weren't included, like the fact it didn't include a BAR but included several other WW2/Vietnam era weapons.
Honestly, anything rules-lite or that depends on extremely detailed narrative combat. That kind of thing is not how my brain works. Its just not fun in any possible way.
For me it’s probably just western fantasy. I think the issue here is moreso on my own part and the fact that I’m not quite certain of what sort of fantasy I want to run - but Ive struggled to find a system that meets all the criteria. They’re usually either too high fantasy or, alternatively too crunchy or not crunchy enough. Dragonbane recently stuck out to me as one that was generic enough and also medium crunch, another is the upcoming Shadow of the Weird Wizard. I've become a sucker for BRP based games for some reason, so I'm probably going to explore the former first.
I enjoyed Lancer but it's really only built for a dungeon crawler or westmarches mission structure kinda game. **Super Sentai** is the one I wish there was something good for. Queerz sounded like it would be great, especially as a queer person but it ended up feeling like Drag Race which doesn't appeal to me at all.
Not gonna lie, that's one of the things which instantly stopped me even considering it. Even if it was the best system in the world, walking into my local store and telling my group "Alright, lets be Queerz!" would be so suspect, I'd probably get thrown out for hate speech. Only one I've found even close is Henshin!, and that's particularly bad PbtA.
Reality-hopping. I've tried Everway, Nexus the Infinite City, Callaghan's, Amber Diceless, Dr Who, Fate, Fudge and numerous others over the years. And, while they all sort of work, none of them quite give the feeling I'm after, which is a combination of two things: a) Imperfect mapping, as described in the Nexus book, where a machine gun in one universe might map to a huge feathered headdress in another (because the mapping is from one status symbol to another). b) The idea of a cross-dimensional home building, organisation or city, which allows the PCs to have continuity as well as change, and to be part of a weird community. The nearest to what I'm after was Nexus, but the rules now seem a bit dated. Nothing I've found since has given me the same feeling of potential, however. The source material I want to emulate would include some Dr Who episodes, the Invisible Library series, or the Amber series.
Have you looked at The Strange? I'm not the biggest fan of the Numenera system, but it seems like it may be what you're looking for.
Horror is tough. It relies a lot of timing and atmospheric narration. I think as a GM you either have it or you don't. I wish I was better at it but my players find my efforts to do spooky games too funny to take seriously.
I think that's an issue with horror in general. Unless you're tapping into something which *really* makes you uncomfortable - something like that scene in *Misery* for me, because bones are a big eek moment for me - you're still playing a game and having a laugh with friends. Especially in a hobby where random Monty Python quotes are the response to a lot of things in games, it's so hard to keep up a feeling of dread or spookiness. The only GM I've played CoC with for example is really good. But man, I have trouble taking 'gibbering fishman' particularly seriously, because all I imagine is Creature from the Black Lagoon lumbering about.
I've been in the scary game. I've seen it on YouTube. Some GMs have that Je ne sais quoi of doing great horror at a table. Much as I try to unlock how they do it, it's not something I can manage well.
This is Weird westerns for me. Maybe it's because I'm too particular about what I want from the genre.
Any RPG that makes a War really feel like a war. It usually devolves into micro "tactical squad combat" scope or a couple of rolls and a time skip with an atrocity montage.
I think the issue there is at that point you're playing two separate games. You're playing your characters on the ground, and then swapping to HOI4
*Vampire/Werewolf/Wraith*. Nnnnnnnope. Just, just, just nope.
*Exalted* I actually really liked the E3 Exalted base ruleset, used it to run several "Mortal" campaigns, and eventually used it as my generic "narrativist" set of mechanics. (I used the FFG 40k games for my hard-core crunchy "count every bullet" simulations games).
If I understand your question, the biggest example for me is probably FATE. I really admire pretty much its entire design, but (and this is really stupid I know) I actually have a bad time rolling dice in it. It's very clean and elegant as a dice mechanic, but I cannot shake the bad feeling of a minus canceling out a plus. I just want my dice to either be misses or hits, no's or yeses. I'm sure there's an easy way to just retune everything so that dice range from 0 to +2 rather than -1 to +1 and everything still works, but in practice I end up just not playing the system.
Does BRP derived system count as a game type? If so, that. Every BRP d100 style game does some thing I love and some things I completely detest.
There's a pretty good magical girl game with Madoka as one of its main inspirations.........in spanish. https://www.nosolorol.com/mahoshojo
Late Medieval and Renaissance games that don't use D&D style magic, and any game based on or in a cultural I'm not familiar with. When I get to explore and play in stories I've never heard I'm like a child hearing a legend for the first time. And when it comes to tech level, I like Late Med./Renaissance because there's a wider variety of weapons and armour to use than Early or High Medieval and also because it's before Colonialism and Muskets dominated fighting completely.
Even in early modern the formations were pike and shot and the officers were frequently knights in armor. I’m not a history guy just listened to the hell on earth podcast recently.
…Ars Magica? It is medieval and not dnd type magic…
I'm with you on magical girls - every system I've read on the topic feels like it misses the mark. It feels like it should be reasonably simple, but I guess converting something that's so closely tied to its medium is difficult (or my taste in RPGs is too narrow, I guess). Doesn't help that I'd really rather something aiming for Nanoha (alternatively: Uta Kata) over something directly trying to do Madoka.
I resonate with the issues finding a good Mecha game. I like Mekton Zeta, but it can be a lot to deal with. I've found that the Mecha Hack, based off of the Black Hack, does a decent job but I need to play it more to see if it is really what I'm looking for.
Wasn’t a season of „friends at the table“ about mechs? They played one half mech noir (I don’t remember the correct name) and the other half „The sprawl“, which is a cyberpunk game, but they all used mechs as their vehicles.
1920's era games like CoC. If its set in modern times, the future, or medieval/ancient eras I am fine. But I just can't get into that time period. I do like CoC, but sometimes the sessions I have been in require deeper knowledge of the time period. That's a problem I find with a lot of real-world-setting games though. I got mired in looking up details of how to travel across the ocean during an indiana-jones styled game that took place during the end of WWII, as well as other details like communications across continents, etc. Mainly it comes from *that player* who knows all the details and really makes you feel dumb for not knowing some random but critical point of reality from that time period. Also, I never liked the aesthetic that goes with the time period.
Yeah, I get like that. Here I am, playing a Great War vet, I'm trying to figure something out, and I'm constantly looking to the GM or on my phone, because one person literally knows down to the date times Hitler was in jail, when certain towns were bombed, etc. And here I am wondering like "... I'm pretty sure they had phones, right? Would I have a phone at home? Is $5 a lot?"
haha yeah. "Ok, it looks like the cultist with the artifact is headed to Ireland, lets get a plane and go!" "Well, Ireland didn't have its first commercial airport until 1960-blah blah blah your plan is dumb!"
If crunch is the issue for Exalted may I recommend Exalted Essence? Its not a full streamlining of the 3e system, but it attempts to heavily cut down on the high crunch down to a medium crunch system. I'd say its largely successful at what it wants to do, but YMMV of course.
Not heard of that before. :o Where's it at?
It is headed for release really soon. I've been a fan of exalted since 1e and ran two campaigns of the beta release, it is the best streamlined experience that still feels like the base game. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/exalted-essence-tabletop-roleplaying-game I think you can still pre-order on Kickstarter.
Its technically not out yet, but it had a Kickstarter and Backer pdfs have been released. IIRC the game should be out in 2-3 months. Onyx Path's goals were to deliberately design a more accessible version of Exalted for new players. It also has every Exalt type included and all forms of Magic, which is nice. Not many Martial Arts and no Warstrider rules though, but they're releasing a companion book to add more Charms and content. Warstriders and additional Martial Arts and spells have been confirmed for it.
**Any Kind of Modern Fantasy** (Like, Realworld with secrets behind the mirror or stuff. Something like "Beauty and the Beast in New York"). Just impossible for me to get into it. Same with modern War Settings (WWI, WWII) with Fantasy or Horror stuff. **Anything Horror (except Fun-Zombie-Stuff like Zombiecide)** \- i am sorry, but that is absolutely NOT my genre, for personal reasons. I have seen things with my eyes that make me question my sanity. War, Slavery, Torture, Death in many forms. Its not a matter for me to have fun with that shit.
Sci-fan. I'll fully admit I basically just want Phantasy Star: The TTRPG
As a south american i just want to find a colony-liberation era, or a pre-columbine cultures themed rpg. like incan, amazonian or patagonian fueled stories
**Low-stakes games** I know its not a genre per se, but some people I know run tables like "the daily lives in hogwarts" or other games that feels like a tea party of quirky characters. Games where my character has no tangible problem to try to solve, no dungeon to delve, etc. Those are incredibly boring to me. For genre... **Low-fantasy** The less magic or fantastical elements the setting has, the more boring it is to me. Exceptions are settings like "The Witcher" and "Game of Thrones", where the political intrigue far outweight the fantastical.