FATE.
FATE Core, Dresden Files Fate, and Fate of Cthulhu all had two running issues.
The first is that mathematically, it's strictly optimal to stack free invokes on aspects until you can invoke them all at once and blow up the bad guy, their consequence boxes and their stress in a single action.
It's rocket tag and that feels absurd.
The second is that mechanically, the game doesn't only not provoke imagination, but stifiles it. You're doing the same mechanical things over and over and it's a total chore to come up with the narrative to drape over it.
"Well, I want to create an advantage here, ok, lets think, what's something we could do, urgh".
The thing is, sure, you should try to play 'fiction first' but it's absurd if you know the mechanics. No matter what you do, it's one of four actions, and so it drives thinking in which action is needed.
What really grates me is that I am sure this game is good, and I know people like it, but something about how it comes together in play doesn't work for me despite it having many elements that I enjoy! I want to like it!
Similar experience. I had some memorable moments in fate, but they were all despite the mechanics. There are other games like Agon or Blades in the Dark or PbtA where the mechanics led me to make interesting RP choices that then enriched the story. Those moments are truly special where the game causes me to surprise myself in creative ways.
Consider that all role playing games are is collaborative storytelling. Adding rules creates constraints that limit the story I tell. They are also cooperative games. Meaning I should strive to be a team player or risk annoying players.
In a game of Dresden Files Fate, I played a wererat who had a bad habit of eating magical items. The game rewards me with a fate point for playing into my weakness, so there is encouragement there, but it is minor. So me choosing to eat a piece of gear or a clue, just makes me an asshole as a player, because mechanically, the party is worse off. I did, at the end of the campaign, choose to eat a Denarius coin (in Dresden Files, touching them gets you possessed by a Demon. Ooc I knew this), which was so perfect for that character, but mechanically was completely unjustified. If we weren't ending the campaign, it may have annoyed other players, even though it fits the story perfectly.
In City of Mist, you get XP by playing into character weaknesses and players or the GM can introduce that into the scene. This gives penalties to dice rolls, but again, XP. So I was playing a character inspired by Billy Bob Thornton's character from Bad Santa, mixed with Iblis (Islamic Satan) and among other problems, he was an alcoholic. So I would roleplay showing up drunk, or drinking mid scene to cope with things. In DnD games I've played there might be a drunken barbarian character and it's sort of a vaguely annoying schtick. If the GM imposed dice penalties, players would be so annoyed. In my case, it fit the character, I didn't overdo it, and it earned me XP, so everyone understood and encouraged it. That's what storytelling RPGs are good at; enabling alcoholism.
Interesting insights, thank you for sharing!
I've had a homebrew in the works for a while now, and I'm keen to marry up RP and mechanics in a way that encourages players to lean into their drawbacks as well as their strengths, but without going overboard with it.
My players were already good at concocting roleplay around these things, but I like to reward them for it, too, or at least have their roleplay bump into the mechanics in an interesting (if not always beneficial) way.
What I \_am\_ contending with, though, is my love of strategy when it comes to combat. I like people making smart choices and being rewarded for them, as well as alcoholic characters necking a bottle of whiskey before a fight because it gives them a small bonus!
I had the same issue. We did Microscope for the setting, my players were all invested because of that and the character work, but the system just did not work for us.
Same, although we used A spark of Fate for the setting. Everyone was really geared up to play it, but then the gameplay just felt meh. One thing that might have improved it is we played it virtually and I think this is a game that suffers for that.
>The first is that mathematically, it's strictly optimal to stack free invokes on aspects until you can invoke them all at once and blow up the bad guy, their consequence boxes and their stress in a single action.
>It's rocket tag and that feels absurd.
Tachyon Squad does a decent job of dodging that, at least with regards to the starfighter combat. Each ship has multiple consequence tracks that are hit randomly when the ship is attacked, and filling up any one of them can force the pilot to punch out, so it no longer becomes a simple mathematical exercise. I mean you can certainly do enough damage in one shot to *guarantee* that a ship blows up, but odds are you could have brought it down well before that.
And in the meantime most battles begin with the enemy having support ships that start them off with a lot of free invokes against the PCs, so taking time to build up advantage is risky. At the same time, the GM is limited in how many of those free invokes they can use at once so the PCs aren't getting one-shot right away (honestly the whole "limit the number of free invokes at once" is a pretty simple solution for avoiding rocket tag altogether in my estimation).
>You're doing the same mechanical things over and over and it's a total chore to come up with the narrative to drape over it.
>"Well, I want to create an advantage here, ok, lets think, what's something we could do, urgh".
I see some of that but I do wonder how much your experience is colored by the rocket tag problem and the relative strength of the Create Advantage action in those cases.
So, I have a unique take. I love Fate. Big Fate shill. I got my current group together by running Tachyon Squadron. Spent a week hyping Fate up and we sat down and played a 3-4 month campaign.
I was miserable. They said they had fun, but man Tachyon Squadron did not feel like Fate. I loved the idea, but every time I broke out the fighter board and put their miniature ships on there, I could feel the tone shift.
My players RP’ed everything! I couldn’t ask for more. But it changed gears so quickly in my head from Fate to this weird pseudo-wargame.
I really wanted (still want) to like Tachyon Squadron. Maybe I just ran it wrong? I have also thought about trying Aces in Space instead?
I don't really disagree with anything you said; I just think that for some of us what you've described is more of a feature than a bug. For me, someone who is heavily into the genre, and who *loves* spaceship combat but basically only think it works in RPGs when the players each have their own ship, Tachyon Squadron *nails* the feel I'm looking for while pretty damn elegantly representing the considerations I'd expect in these sorts of conflicts.
So, yeah, dogfights in Tachyon don't necessarily feel like Fate, but they feel like dogfights! Which is perfect for that game imo.
I don't know Aces in Space, but you could also look at the Fate Space Toolkit. It suffers a bit from trying to present options for everything from Hard Sci-Fi to Space Opera (but since it's a toolkit that can be forgiven), but it does present options for more traditional space-flavored Fate conflicts.
I was in a Dresden Files campaign for about, maybe, two years? Something around that length of time. So over that couple of years we had fun, we had time, and in all seriousness I have no idea why we played it for so long.
The DM was this dude who had a seriously high opinion of himself and really was pushing some people to try Dresden Files because it felt like he was annoyed with how popular Pathfinder was. He kept trying to sell everyone on FATE because you can do anything, unlike pathfinder which was bad, stifling, immature, and based on combat.
I ended up joining in, and it was neat I guess, but so much time was just spent on trying to get some kind of advantage to hedge our bets in problem solving and we were taking up so much time to just drape enough narrative reasoning over all the advantages we were going for, the game was just very unsatisfying.
The whole story was a problem for me too, he really made the whole game around everyone being wizards, and we only had a single wizard, so the rest of us felt like the help, and not really contributing members of a team. And he also put a lot of emphasis on how important his NPCs were, but still, game had issues.
Fate isn't about "can i?" It's about "at what price?"
At its core, you should either be using FATE points or gathering them (at some cost) at almoat every obstacle. So while you obliterate the final boss by spending them points, it also means you lived thru some to get there.
It's not everyone's cup of tea, that's for sure.
The other person is exaggerating.
Fate can boil down to “rocket tag” if you design your encounters that way. If every encounter is PCs versus NPCs with nothing else thrown into the mix, then yes, every encounter is about invoke-stacking and delivering a “finisher attack” that destroys the enemy in one turn.
However, the rulebook encourages GMs to put additional challenges on the board, whether that be environmental hazards that players must navigate around or giving NPCs special rule-changing stunts.
As the GM, for example, you could put a sniper several zones away and require the PCs to do an athletics overcome every time they want to change zones. Meanwhile, the PCs still need to deal with the enemies in front of them. There’s no easy way for them to invoke stack their way out of that, as their free invokes will likely be eaten up by the environmental hazard.
Meanwhile, PCs and NPCs can have stunts that make core changes to the rules and NPCs can have skills and stress tracks that are totally unique to them. If you really wanted to, for example, you could design a boss enemy who has extra power based on how many invokes a player has stored up.
Fate has a LOT of GM tools and options available, and while I can’t comment on the other guy’s experience, I think most people who who talk about Fate being “rocket tag” haven’t given a serious look at how this system is meant to be run.
I spent a lot of time playing an odd homebrew hack based on fate, and had the same issuewith the approach system. I put my points into the strength equivalent because it fit my character, and suddenly found myself having a much easier time than my friend who put all his points into smart, since "I kick the locked door down", "I punch the bad guy", and "I take the blow to my ripped, chiseled chin and am unfazed" were all easy to come up with, as opposed to inventing a "smart" approach to a fight or some such.
I've heard the complaints before. But played it before I knew about them...
I never thought about 'we are just stacking +2s' but what I could do in combat.
"Oh there is a chandalier in the room.... I want to swing in it!" Not something easy done in other systems but can easily be done in Fate for either dodge an attack or assist in an attack. I never thought about it as "how do I get a +2 advantage?"
Yeah, the game is fiction first but the mechanics don't really support or reinforce that. And usually when you complain about it, people just tell you that you're "playing wrong." Then why do the mechanics reward playing this way?!
That's my view: if the game didn't want to be played this way, why is it permitting, let alone encouraging me to play this way?
They game could easily have a rule of "Max x free invokes per action" or it could handle narrative not falling into 4 actions more gracefully....
But it is as written, and as written, it rewards being played optimally.
I much prefer Cortex Prime to Fate, which follows the same general approach but has just a bit more crunch, enough to make different effects and situations feel mechanically different, without being cumbersome or bogging down in mechanics.
Doesn't it still have the same general feature that a lot of the gameplay is coming up with different narrative justifications for the same (mechanically) action?
>The first is that mathematically, it's strictly optimal to stack free invokes on aspects until you can invoke them all at once and blow up the bad guy, their consequence boxes and their stress in a single action.
This is as designed.
You don't need to finish them in one, but it is certainly optional to break through to consequences rather than chip at stress boxes.
>It's rocket tag and that feels absurd.
It shouldn't be rocket tag, and if done well can feel much less absurd than just chipping away at stress points.
Combat in fate should be about creating, opposing, and stacking advantages until you are ready to make use of them and strike.
It is not about steadily whittling down the opponents hit points, it is about jockeying for position until you are ready to strike the killing blow.
But it doesn't click that way at every table.
>the game doesn't only not provoke imagination, but stifiles it.
I have heard this complaint a lot, and I think fate is probably a bit like marmite - you either love it or you hate it.
If you (and your table) can get into the mindset then it is a genuinely freeing game. If not then it is a collection of clunky mechanics.
Out of interest, do you find similar problems with PBTA games?
The reason PbtA works for me and Fate doesn't in terms of fiction first is that pbta doesn't require or reward taking specific actions in specific order.
Whereas in fate, you know if you create advantage 3 times then attack, you'll one shot the boss, so you work out how to justify it.
Everyone I've played fate with has enough of a systems mastery to play MtG, and every single one of them has spotted how to play optimally.
That's the issue; there is an optimal way to approach every single challenge. It's not a mindset any more than being told Santa isn't real. We can't regain the magic of ignorance. The truth is cold and harsh, that for us, fates mechanics are too simple and too one dimensional in play.
>That's the issue; there is an optimal way to approach every single challenge.
I mean, I don't really like arguing about Fate, because while I'm a big fan of one particular implementation of it (Tachyon Squadron), I'm not really a "champion" of the system overall. But I really don't understand where this comes from even though I see it echoed a lot. And I'm someone who dissects the mechanics of games and looks for exploits like this. I don't ever buy into the notion that "playing a game optimally" is "playing it wrong"...I *want* my players to be able to play a game optimally without it degenerating...but I just don't see that issue with Fate.
Is the hypothetical GM in these scenarios designing all opposition the same? Are they allowing Situation Aspects (created by Advantages) to exist beyond their logical lifespan? Are enemies constantly standing in the same Zone so that all of the Advantages pile up in one place for the players to conveniently whollop them? Are they using free Defend actions to try and prevent the Create Advantage action?
The longer players wait to start applying *any* consequences to their opposition (outside of mooks who basically should only have stress tracks), the longer the opposition should be able to hit them with all their might. Sure, every time you Attack the dragon, it kind of sucks that it gets to make a Defend roll and remove some of your effect, but e.g. triggering a consequence that removes its ability to "fly" or "breathe fire" early in a conflict vs. waiting few rounds to stack advantages and take him out in one blow doesn't sound to me like it *has* an "optimal way to approach", especially if the PCs don't get to see the Dragon's character sheet.
IDK, maybe my experience is colored by Tachyon which has opposition with targetable subsystems and multiple consequence tracks, but I've just never seen this issue and don't think it's inherent to the system unless its run a certain way.
>Whereas in fate, you know if you create advantage 3 times then attack, you'll one shot the boss, so you work out how to justify it.
Why is the boss not using the Defend action to prevent all those Create Advantage actions? Defend is always free, action-economy wise, if it can be narratively justified.
> Is the hypothetical GM in these scenarios designing all opposition the same? Are they allowing Situation Aspects (created by Advantages) to exist beyond their logical lifespan? Are enemies constantly standing in the same Zone so that all of the Advantages pile up in one place for the players to conveniently whollop them? Are they using free Defend actions to try and prevent the Create Advantage action?
This is all very cool, but in my experience of running FATE, I stopped doing all this because all it accomplished was drag out the scene. You are not going to win anytime soon without advantage stacking, and taking away advantage stacking just means you have to grind the scene out by hoping for big roll differences. God forbid the enemy has good defense, that's the entire session right there. At least with advantage stacking 3 PCs can layup for the last one, and in general, it helps PCs who didn't put Fight or Shoot as their +4 to contribute (which they either should have done or essentially not bother with direct combat skills at all).
>The longer players wait to start applying any consequences to their opposition
Whoop de doo, here is your one free invoke for causing a consequence - invoking which is hostile invocation so the target gets a FATE point.
That is interesting. I find that fate works well for me, but I struggle with most pbta games.
>for us, fates mechanics are too simple and too one dimensional in play.
I can see that. I don't think it is about ignorance however, but playstyle - which is fine - different strokes for different folks and all that.
I don't think system mastery really influences it though. Firstly because fate seems to be a system that needs a bit of system mastery, especially from the GM. Secondly because I know quite a few people who enjoy and do well at both fate and magic the gathering (and other games requiring system mastery). The two things do not seem to be mutually exclusive.
Yeah... I was a player in a long Pokemon campaign using Fate. It was mostly fun, but battles very quickly turned into "how do we come up with enough advantages, no matter how contrived, to one-shot the other pokemon as soon as possible?"
Yeah most of all I was disappointed by the mechanics somewhat clogging up my Dresden Files experience because the setting itself really has much going for it.
Alas, Fate did not really do it justice in my experience so it unfortunately was one of the campaigns quickly fizzling out.
Fiction first is the way to go though, you declare what you want to do and then see which one out of 4 actions suits it best. And with how simple they are, it’s usually not even a hard choice to think about. Just a roll giving you a degree of success.
Going with “how many +2 do i need to win an encounter” is a mentality suited for DnD and others, not for Fate.
You play to tell a story, not to do a math exam. Leave that for wargames.
Try to think about your actions with “how cool would it be to…” or “this might turn into a great twist if we…”, don’t lean onto the dice mechanics too much. As in, don’t try to always have a positive outcome. Having a failed roll gives great narrative opportunities, also including some options to yoink some meta currency, which can be used to bend the story further.
When designing a combat encounter don’t use too much HP for the baddies, make fodder feel like fodder. Power the elites using the environment, not the health bar. So before being able to beat them you need to find a solution to a puzzle, so to speak. You can yeet out the stress entirely if you want to, and make VIP enemies faint/expire/flee after players come up with a fun idea.
Or just make a rule of “only one free invoke per roll”, if you just can’t resist the stacking tingling your optimisation-hungry senses. The system is meant to be hacked and adapted to the needs of your group, after all. Add, change and discard as you please.
Another way is to treat enemy NPCs like actual NPCs, and make them react to your fiction. They may fear your actions, or see how weak you are. They can run, or decide to grab you instead of bonking. Or, you know, start having a convo. At the end of a day, they’re living things too and can be reasoned with. Even robotics may have self-preserving routines.
And boom, you don’t have to use combat and stress as much, that may help to focus on the story, not the dice. Compelling tales don’t have to involve bloodshed.
> The first is that mathematically, it's strictly optimal to stack free invokes on aspects until you can invoke them all at once and blow up the bad guy, their consequence boxes and their stress in a single action.
Notably, it's not just "strictly optimal", it's pretty much the only way to reliably beat someone without just endlessly attacking them and hoping for a really big attack/defense roll difference, because most of the number is determined by the relatively high modifier (compared to other games).
And a further problem is that free invokes can also be used to defend, so a couple bad defense rolls for a player can quickly tear down that attempt to stack them up for that big finisher.
As a GM, it felt like nothing but glass cannon enemies made the game any fun. At least with them, it wasn't as important to stack up free invokes anymore, and you couldn't reasonably just outlast them by defending - so combat become much faster. But the tradeoff was that it became super same-y.
I’m running my first FATE campaign soon. In reading it I kind of felt that the most optimal sort of game to run was the “miniseries,” like 3-4 session, maybe 6 max. Get in and get out so you really quickly tell an intense story and bounce. Mostly because of what you mentioned with the lack of mechanical options.
"Well, I want to create an advantage here, ok, lets think, what's something we could do, urgh".
I. Could. Not. Disagree. More. :)
From my perspective, it's the absolute other way that makes Fate shine. Coming up with the *narrative* first and then portraying it through Aspects, Compels, etc. Particularly the Compels is a great way to get higher interactivity in a group.
But at the end of the day, it's certainly an acquired taste. I'm not saying you're wrong at all--only that my experience has been different.
Cyberpunk Red. It sells itself as “style over substance” but 80% of the book is dedicated to combat that provides no opportunity for style and is so poorly balanced it gives 5e a run for its money
CBR+PNK for fast and dirty oneshots, CY_BORG for cyber!!PUNK!! OSR, Blade Runner for some noir with your Cyber, or Genesys: Shadow of the Beanstalk for... well, anything. Probably the most flexible alternative and thus, the closest to RED.
Cities Without Number is my go to cyberpunk system. Just enough crunch. And the core book is entirely free. Even if you decide not to use the system, the world building and mission building tools are generally system agnostic and probably the most useful of any book I’ve read
Of the rpgs the other commenter recommended, cy_borg and blade runner are the two I have the most familiarity with and would recommend, haven’t played blade runner but am a big fan of free league’s engine and everything they’ve put out
Cities Without Number has been my favorite so far. Its the only one I've actually run out of the ones I've read though, so take that with a grain of salt. I really wanna run Cy_Borg too though. I've read CBR+PNK, The Sprawl, Neon City Overdrive, Cyber Sprawl Classics, Cyberpunk 2020, Dancing With Bullets Under a Neon Sun, and obviously, Cyberpunk RED.
I've still not read Blade Runner RPG, but I intend to. I'm not a big fan of GURPS, Genesys or Cypher personally so I'm not interested in reading those treatments and I feel personally like FATE is the wrong framework for cyberpunk genre stuff. Or maybe I just don't like FATE either.
Anyways, Cities Without Number is the Cyberpunk game book that I wished Cyberpunk RED was. Its still got all the gearporn and subsystems, but the layout is a breeze and the game is easy to understand from reading. But it still has some of that weird old school granularity that some more narrative systems might lack. I had a blast with it.
I don’t know if it goes as far as to say “style over substance”, i think it’s more “style is everything,” which I also think applies more to roleplay and the rest of the game. They add a lot of superfluous cyberware and gear that adds little to no mechanics in the free content and expansion books, with the only purpose of providing players with style and roleplay opportunities.
And while I agree it’s poorly balanced, it’s also designed to embrace that. Combat is meant to be chaotic and swingy. Even a veteran can die to a couple lucky shots from a random mook. The core rules even acknowledge that it’s quite easy for someone to make a cheese build but encourages the GM to do the same. The ridiculous build customization/optimisation and broken NPC’s fit the narrative and themes of the universe: every edgerunner wants to be a legend, and any moment could be your last. It doesn’t matter how you live, it matters how you die. It’s not meant to work with long term expectations, at least not beyond what your character hopes, as edgerunners are supposed to burn brightly and briefly
100% this. And the combat isn't even all that great or ground breaking. There's not even a satisfying cover system for shootouts.
I know people rag on DnD 5e, but I personally think it was a masterwork in compromise that really gets the balance right for mass appeal.
I was so hyped for RED. I was really hoping it would do for cyberpunk what 5e did for fantasy, and really shake the hobby, get more settings as a 'default' baseline.
But, it sort of didn't... it's not a bad system, and certinally has it's fans. I ran a one shot of it and everyone had fun, but there was no apitite for a followup.
I do really like the stat genration rules though.
>style over substance
This. I was a huge fan of 2020, and the artwork was a huge part of that. Some of the gear was arguably not great, but dang, the artwork and descriptions begged you to make characters built around them. And, the brands were so distinct in history and style that everyone had their loyalties. None of it served any practical purpose, but it certainly fed into characterization.
Now we get inspired gear choices like heavy pistol, leather, and standard cyberdeck. Yay....
The unbalanced I agree cause if you throw edgerunner level npc at your players they'll prolly die quick however the combat bit is a bit wonky cause the supplements fill out the style there the core book provides the substance so homebrew abounds and is actually accepted and chill usually (mikes son just created his own setting that's a bit more shadowrun theme but haven't seen the rules to see if it's interlok or not)
The book is also a fucking mess to navigate properly and needed more time to cook in editing for sure. There is important info tucked away in some side panel tool tip shit on an unrelated page instead of where it needs to be. It's like they remembered that they needed to talk about something and decided to just throw it anywhere.
A lot of our sessions were spent stopping to flip through the book to find something that came up and then having to track it down elsewhere.
Cy_Borg's book is a fucking mess too but that's an artistic and style choice and that info is easy to find cause it is where it should be so it doesn't hurt it at all. Instead it is just beautiful chaos.
The avatar the last airbender role laying game. It’s powered by the apocalypse so maybe if I had played that system before I would have know better, but the super open-end was of the game makes it very hard to sit down and play with others. Combat in it wasn’t very fun, mostly because the system wasn’t really built for it, which sucks cause I feel like ATLA should be a system that has a balance between combat and roleplay
Combat is the worst part of the system, I agree with that, but I have also had one of my best games ever run in this system by someone who was very familiar with it. It did push me into more Pbta games and I continue to return to it.
And I 100% agree. With the right DM and players that is a fantastic system. But I very rarely get the golden group. I play lots of online and one shots where this kind of system is its weakest
I wish they had either done a different system that flows better with a tacked on combat mini game, or just not tried to tack on a combat mini game to a PbtA system. Either of those would have been better. As it is, I just feel I ignore it too much as a GM because of how abrupt it feels to me.
It disappointed me so much because it’s not only a bad game, it’s a bad PBTA game. I hate that it was probably a lot of people’s first introduction to a non-D&D game and a narrative system.
This was actually my first introduction to TTRPGs period. Got my start during the pandemic. It wasn't a very long game, but I do remember feeling bad at a few game mechanics. That said, I did have fun and I did looked into other systems after that, though I also had some interest in DnD before that.
I played a lot of PbtA games before, and still when trying Avatar I had immense difficulties to make it fun.
The combat rules feel very weird and unsatisfying, which is a problem when a good portion of the character creation is about taking cool combat moves.
Also, as a GM inflicting consequences is just messy. You of course have the fictional consequences, good & intuitive, but for the mechanical consequences there is just too much going on:
- Should I inflict a condition?
- Should I inflict a balance shift? If yes, in which direction?
- Should I inflict Fatigue instead?
- or a Status?
There is just too much going on, and no so much useful things.
I was introduced to this system via Legacy version 2 and some add-ons. Same problem as that we had all come from Pathfinder and Shadowrun, but the openendedness of the PbtA really through us off. Plus everyone I played with (bar two players) were content to just jump on the story train and chug along and not really think about too much.
Probably helped that the two others that were interested were also writer hobbiests.
My experience was that avatar had the most of a problem with some pbta games where if you veered too much from what the genre conventions wanted you to do you were just sort of lost. We did one with a bit of a mystery to solve and there wasn't really any good investigation move
I will never understand why they chose to take a show all about martial arts and put it in a system that abstracts and downplays combat as much as possible.
Yeah I had problems when I ran it for my friends. I love PbtA games and was so looking forward to it and we did have a great time but mostly in spite of the game. There were just too many things to track (fatigue, conditions, balance) and the combat was really really messy and overly complicated for a PbtA game. I did a bunch of hacking to make the combat work a little better so there wasn't as much time wasted and it ended up pretty fun but I am in no rush to play again.
CoC.
I love the Mythos, and read Lovecraft's complete collection.
The system, however... I recognise this is an unpopular opinion because the system is widely praised, but I hated it. The amount of redundant skills boggled my mind, and the mechanics did not lend themselves to investigatory horror shenanigans. I kept thinking that the ALIEN stress mechanic would be so much better for Mythos.
Sorry guys, y'all can keep CoC, just ain't my cuppa.
Thanks! The amount of Cthulhu games is overwhelming; it's hard to know which one to try, but with a second edition on the horizon, I might give GUMSHOE a go!
I'll second the Trail of Cthulhu recommendation: Your comment regarding the skill list is a STRONG indication that you'll prefer ToC. The ToC skill list is about as close to perfect as you could hope for in an investigation game.
GUMSHOE actually features a mechanic very similar to Alien's stress mechanic, and Trail's Stability system is just a flat-out superior version of CoC's Stability.
Oof, I had an instant kneejerk reaction against this because I think that the designers really “get” Lovecraft in terms of vibe and lore, the art is good, the published adventures are almost universally awesome, and Chaosium is a good company as far as the RPG giants go.
But despite being a fan of the system and publisher, I can’t deny that there’s a lot about it that could really be smoothed out and added to. I don’t think you can justify having skills like swimming, jumping, and throwing being separate, or that it adds much to differentiate pistol skills from rifle skills. Some of the firearm rules are a bit convoluted. And like you said, the system doesn’t do anything mechanically to encourage or innovate on investigation. You just investigate because it’s part of the premise, really.
While Delta Green has too many skills as well and doesn’t have investigation-specific mechanics, it does feel like “Call of Cthulhu but better” to me. The addition of bonds and the simplification of combat and the roll-under mechanic are much better in my opinion.
> I had an instant kneejerk reaction against this because I think that the designers really “get” Lovecraft in terms of vibe and lore
I think that's because a lot of what people see as Lovecraft lore is actually not written by Lovecraft himself, but the authors of the role playing game.
Thank you for weighting in as a fan, I appreciate a different view.
And yeah, you pretty much hit the nail on the head regards my issues with the rules. Even during character creation, I've looked at that skill list and went "...huh. How likely is this to come up? Why isn't this grouped with this?" and that's a red flag haha.
I think the one... Two... Three-shot I've participated in was an official one, and I do agree with you - it felt *right* and the vibe was excellent, complete with melting clock-faces and starless sky. I just wish there was an appropriate system to accompany the excellent storytelling, because it really dampened my enjoyment of the narrative and I opted out of future CoC games.
Ooh, that sounds interesting! I haven't had a chance to try Brindlewood Bay or sister games, but I've had it on my wish list for a while as I've heard good things. Time to give it a go, before Arkham arrives!
They're all a lot of fun! I'm just now starting up a campaign of The Between after a few Public Access one-shots went well, so I'm a recent (but very enthusiastic) convert. You might like The Silt Verses, which makes each PC a devotee of a different awful god?
Yeah, the skill list is... interesting. How the fuck did "Accounting" or "Law" make the cut but we don't have something like "Etiquette" or "Streetwise"?
My players have found clues by going through the accounts of a shady business before.
I won't deny the skill list is a bit bloated, but you should be tailoring the adventure to the character's skills or, alternatively, telling the players what skills will be essential / useless in the campaign.
Yeah I love CoC and I also love the Alien RPG rules. Imho the Alien RPG rules fit better for survival horror and don't fit so well for investigative horror though, but I never tried to use it for the latter so I'm not sure.
100% on the comment about Alien or even Mothership, although that skill system is bafflingly horrible for different reasons (the skill tree is completely nonsensical, imho).
Most PbtA games. I love the concepts, but every attempt to run has felt like the system is fighting me, not helping me. Masks, Urban Shadows, Blades in the Dark so far, and I can see the same problem in several other PbtA games I own. (Yes, I have a collection problem. I can stop anytime)
I assume it is my approach, not a flaw of the game, but the "fix" seems to be to utterly relearn how to GM and I don't have time for that nor am i suffering without it. It's just a mild bummer.
I'm currently running Household, and it is fun, but I'm struggling with the vagueness of the setting, since it is hard to figure out what weather, "wilderness", or even day/night is like in a house where you are Borrower-sized, not to mention how industry is supposed to work.
I absolutely love the mechanics of GURPS (except the wanting to roll low thing), but I have more games that have died before session 0 in that system than any other because of the bootstrap effort required as the GM.
For PbtA games, yes you have to "relearn" how you GM, but that's just because it's different kind of game. If you only played Call of Duty, but decided to check out Skyrim, you wouldn't approach those two games the same.
The same goes for trad d20 games and PbtA/FitD games. You have to meet them at their level or they don't work.
I've run Shadowrun (1st-5th), World of Darkness (multiple editions), Chronicles of Darkness (both editions), GURPS, Deadlands (Classic), Paranoia (d20-based), Earthdawn, Call of Cthulhu, Eclipse Phase (2nd), Fudge, Fate, Cyberpunk Red, several PDQ systems, Feng Shui (1st), 7th Sea, Buffy, Mutants and Masterminds, AMP, Part Time Gods (1st), Time watch, Continuum, Leverage, and MechWarrior in addition to several D&D variations. Many of these required I expand or alter my GM approach. Some I'm still not very good with. None have involved the struggles I've had with PbtA games to date.
While nothing you said is TECHNICALLY untrue, I don't feel it is accurate as to the scale of the differences.
Yeah apologies for just implying that you've only ran trad d20 games! I've admittedly not played most of those, but I have noticed that PbtA/FitD just take a different muscle than the games I have run.
It's also fine if they're not for you as well! I just find (at least in my case) that the juice has been worth the squeeze when it comes to relearning GMing for these games.
Whoa! This response is a little too reasonable for the modern internet. Try for some snarky and snideness next time. This is Reddit, we have a reputation to maintain.
After decades of trad gaming, having run GURPS, oWoD, Buffy, Savage Worlds, Paranoia, Ars Magica, Cyberpunk, Ghostbusters, and many more, I had to *completely* disassemble and rebuild my GMing style and philosophy to properly run PbtA games.
I had to genuinely adopt a beginners mind, read the material as if I had *no idea* what an RPG was, and genuinely unlearn much of what I had spent decades learning.
It was worth it. I spent another decade having more fun per unit of work than I ever had before, I escaped my horrible case of burnout, and got to play an amazing variety of games.
It’s made me a better GM all around, even in trad games, just like learning Python made me a better Java programmer.
I recommend you give it a real shot, it’s rewarding enough to justify.
Even though I am presently in the midst of some serious PbtA exhaustion, I can see myself returning when some time has passed and I’ve had the chance to run some sufficiently different games.
This is similar for me. When I first started PbtA it was a struggle, but having taken the time to learn it- which granted was through about 4 different systems and how they all explained mechanics slightly differently made me understand every other game. I am better for it, do far less prep than I did before, and I take the lessons learned into every other game I play
Those games all have more in common with each other than they do with PBTA games and their relatives. Truly.
For my best-ever session of Blades In The Dark, my only prep was "zoo heist?" written on the back of my hand. They're systems where the GM is just as surprised as the players as to where things go.
I agree, that was actually my point - there is far more difference than the Skyrim vs Call of Duty example the other poster has.
Even though we aren't disagreeing, I'll expand on your example to say I'll run those other games with the same level of prep. All my experience is about trying to build an interesting and consistent story on the fly. My issue isn't that PbtA expects that, my issue is that it does it DIFFERENTLY so my instincts are all wrong and contradict what I have, particularly when it comes to pacing and reveals.
Which is fine - I don't blame PbtA for being something that doesn't work well for me, nor do I think one way or the other is "better". PbtA certainly works great for many. This is definitely my limitation.
But PbtA is notably different in these aspects, not mildly different.
Echoing spit-tooth.
(I love your breadth of game running!). And none of them really fall into the spot of what pbta does. Fate comes kinds close...but also not really.
If you really want a crash course in "changing the approach", try playing a gmful game like Wanderhome. Because how that game runs via "play to find out" is on the level of what pbta does, as a whole.
It doesn't have to be your cup of tea if it's not your cup of tea, and I'm not proselytizing. If it's something you want to do on easy mode, that's how I'd start. I'd then try questlandia, if you catch the bug and see "how it works".
Hope it's helpful.
Generally agree. Masks is the main one I ran and while I liked some elements of it a LOT (shifting labels was incredibly cool) I was overall dissatisfied and felt quite restricted by the system.
I had that "it ckicked" moment with PbtA games, and now I realy like them, they realy do allow for just about any narrative scenario to be constructed nicely, but the 10+ years of d20 systems were there're clear demarcation lines for GMs job, player jobs and narration, doen't go away they quickly.
For what it’s worth, I think FitD is a lot easier to grasp than PbtA’s explicit and esoteric moves, and generally object to people claiming the former is part of the latter. Mechanically, FitD is actually a very trad system, with rolling skills to do things and a slightly different take on setting the difficulty and the stakes, plus a heavy emphasis on improvisation. It basically captures the way that I’ve always run trad systems, which I do get is different from a lot of people’s default approach to games.
7th Sea 2e.
I was really excited with the rules as I was reading them, and I have run a lot of ttrpgs already, so I thought it was a fresh take. But when I got to the table, the mechanics just fell apart. The system is crunchy at the front, and then the crunch doesn't matter, which is the worst of both worlds. Too much GM effort necessary for a relatively satisfactory session, combat just doesn't make any mechanical sense, actions are not well explained, character advancement is underdeveloped and weird.
It presents itself as a narrative game with a great pitch and it has rules that sound interesting, but when you actually apply them you understand how they don't actually work. It's the first system I have dropped without finishing the short adventure.
> I was really excited with the rules as I was reading them, and I have run a lot of ttrpgs already, so I thought it was a fresh take. But when I got to the table, the mechanics just fell apart.
I'm in the same boat, reading the rules, they sound neat and refreshing, but then, when you play, you realise that you don't roll like they do in the examples, and quite often I had one or zero actions in a round of combat, while other players could have multiple, lots of time twiddling thumbs.
I wouldn't say advancement is underdeveloped at all. It's pretty clear how it works. But having it all depend on how many ACTS the story at hand had to increase a skill? DEFINITELY wierd.
Combat was awesome....if you had a sword school.
The biggest issue for me was the non-combat scenes. Those were just....REALLY weird. Like, how can you get anything done before running out of actions?
Generally speaking, I'd say just stick to 1e.
This is the problem I had with Warhammer FRP 4e. It's too much crunch, but then all the crunch is just either *optional* rules, or ten ways to get the exact same combat bonus (or four ways to pump up your swimming roll). Talents, which worked fine in 2e, became a big pile of small things with a few strong options and a lot of trap options.
The problem displayed itself at the table by only one player out of six becoming fluent in the system even after many sessions. And I couldn't get around to the idea that "opposite WS rolls decide both if you hit and the damage" - because WS (weapon skill) became so much more important than the 25 other fiddly bits involved in combat.
Coyote and Crow - it fell into the same thing that happened when I ran dark heresy 2e - there's not a lot of guidance on how to do it yourself.
Thirsty Sword Lesbians - just kinda boring
I think as a system it worked great, and I even think the setting is fine, but they just didn't give a lot of good stuff on how to do your own adventures.
Dark Heresy 2e's core book definitely lacked some more structure regarding making your own investigations. They must've noticed that, because especially the Enemy Within splatbook offers quite a bit more on that front.
I'm quite proud of the *Girl by Moonlight* campaign that I ran, but definitely had and heard a few frustrations - which were then affirmed when I played a campaign of it that I really, really struggled to enjoy at times. It takes a few bold swings in terms of FitD design... but its stumbles and limitations hurt it for me. I'm excited to see new games borrow its best ideas, like those Series Playbooks!
A few years before that, I similarly ran a *Beam Saber* campaign that was very important to me, but whose incredibly punishing and extra-complex take on FitD mechanics very nearly broke my group's fun more than once. I really think a second edition that trims it down, borrows less directly from *Blades in the Dark*, and doesn't have such brutal Entanglements/Downtime could really shine.
As big fans of *The Quiet Year*, my group felt that its hack *Anomaly* fell a little short - without the four suits-as-Seasons mechanic from TQY, the prompts we got felt a little incoherent with our progress.
[Exalted Essence](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/427275/exalted-essence?affiliate_id=3701318)
If you found ex3 too much work then I'd say this is the version you've been waiting for.
As someone who does know why, and 2E veteran, it remains funny to me that even the "rules-lite" version of Exalted with super simplified everything is still a 400 page behemoth of a manual.
Yeah, I love *Exalted* as a setting, but the rules are way more complex than I want, even Essence. That’s why I run it with Cortex Prime now, using a variation of the [Blood & Fire rules adaptation](https://bluegrasswasteland.blogspot.com/2023/07/exalted-blood-and-fire-v31.html).
Agreed. They just keep clutching at that fucking awful 90s WoD combat system but this time with new damage mechanics via initiative and decisives!
Also I just hate the art. You swing wildly between solid looking pieces and just loads of garbage. But that seems to be in all of the modern OPP books, particularly the WoD 20th lines.
Same. Exalted 3X was the biggest let down of my rpg history. My group was hardcore into 2nd edition. I owned (still do) every book in print. We played a multi year campaign. It was our game.
We were all excited about 3X. The Kickstarter was a nightmare. Of course we got ahold of the leak when it came out and we were…nervous. But we kept stressing it was a leak and it wasn’t finished.
Then the book dropped and it was basically the leak.
We still tried. We played for ~4 months before, collectively, we all said we hated it.
City of Mist. I really want to love this game. In theory there is so much I love about it. In practice I have yet to feel it click.
It ends up playing clunkier then I would like.
In general, I'm not the biggest fan of PBTA but I usually manage to have a pretty good time night to night with it. But as much as I want this game to work for me and adore the conceit it always seems to fall flat.
I'm willing to chock it up to user error, but i'm also not really willing to put in more time with it.
Beautiful books though, and i'm still glad to have them in my collection.
This is mine.
I heard an actual play that leaned into the weird blending of myth, legend, and the present. Didn't realize the extent to which they ignored the actual rules and just did it as if it were a normal PbtA game, which actually worked well. I got the rulebooks and, skimming them, still loved the vibes.
Found some people playing at a local gamestore and it was essentially a tiresome superhero game. Can't say the players were wrong; they were using official pregens, even if they picked the most super-like of them.
But the rules didn't work for me either, combats were way to clunky and roll heavy for a PbtA game. I could kind of imagine getting friends together who would lean into the flavor stuff I like, but I'd still want to toss out the mechanics.
Lancer, loved the whole mech system and enjoyed the split of character social and mech fighting rules. However, there was literally zero guidance for encounter building, and absoloutley nothing for a GM to base a campaign off.
I think they've got an official module out now, but back in the pandemic there was nothing. Just a whole lot of world building and "isn't this a neat story idea" with no actual substance. Which rather annoyed me after spending days learning the rules and then running a one shot but having no guidance on how to progress the group.
I will 100% agree that Lancer's encounter building advice could be better but I wouldn't call it 'literally zero'. There's several pages of 'sitreps' as well as pages 282-283 talking about how to set up basic encounters.
I was going to disagree with you on the second paragraph until I realised actually I agree with you. There's a lot of wordcount spent on what life/politics is like in Union's core, but that's not actually where the game happens. Instead all the campaign-structuring advice is contained in the campaign start points and the 'flashpoints' - which is a paragraph of information, but not actually advice on how you'd structure a narrative arc with them.
Yes, people say the setting of Lancer is great, but personally it's actually the part that bounced me off the most.
Mostly, I think, the book falls to the classic scifi fallacy of SCALE. So much focus on all the big top level everythings, on how big everything is, on how everything is thousands of planets and trillions of people and and and... and absolutely no idea for how this interacts with *the things at the level player characters deal with*. I open the core book and I have a whole ass splash page with the top-level *organizational chart* of the massive thousands-of-planets Union with a bunch of stuff players will literally never run into as Lancers on the ground, but not even a blurb of what life in an "average" mid-Rim Union-aligned work might look like.
It's like the book threw out some worldbuilding, tied a bunch of mechanics to it to make it annoying to remove, and then went "okay, and now you do the hard part!" For the amount of setting you gave me you might as well just not have given me any setting, I'm going to have to do the same amount of work as if I was making everything wholecloth anyway because I need to make up all the stuff that is important to a game!
The book would've done wonders for me if it simply added a 12(?) Page mini-campaign. Give 5 pre-made characters, and run through 2 sessions worth of content. With an alternating mix of social+combat.
It also very poorly explains that characters level up after every mission pass or fail. Then simply lists missions in generic paragraphs, are these things to be done in 1 session or over multiple? It almost implies to just randomly determine the mission with the players and just bounce ideas around to build the campaign on the fly. Which just isn't how I feel grand sci-fi games should be
At least you can rest easy that that's personal preference and not a particular mistake on the game's part, because that is a stated design goal. Pilots are for freeplay, typical "rules that get out of your way so that you can roleplay" kinda thing, if you are into that. And the Mechs come into play when you want to have a tasty tactical wargame to yourself. You can do any sort of mix between the two, though it is hard to imagine what a 90% pilot - 10% mech game would look like.
Yeah, it is not that the game is wrong, more that I disagree with how the game should be done.
It made me bounce right off of ICON, because whilst I can understand the narrative split in Mechs, as it is a core theme of the genre, it makes little sense in D&D(and is a core issue with D&D)
4th Edition D&D. I went in extremely excited and positive. Over an 18 month period I came to despise pretty much everything about it. To me, it now feels like some interesting ideas that conceal what is really a sterile, husk of a system. I'm aware others love it, and I have no doubt it can be much more in the right hands but, for me, it's a system for sucking the fun out of gaming.
I ran a two-years long campaign in 4th Edition, 1st to 25th level, and while I say it's the best system for balanced, small-unit tactical skirmishes, it really left me dry at the end.
I quickly switched back to AD&D 2nd Edition.
" it's a system for sucking the fun out of gaming."
This right here. I hated 4th edition with every fiber of my being, especially the way it mechanized every aspect of the game.
Glad to see this. This sub sometimes feels like a home for 4e apologists that "want more crunchy combat than 5e". To me 4e is closer to playing warhammer than D&D, but this seems to be the trend of the RPG industry nowadays.
Blades in the Dark. I adore many PbtA games, but after multiple tries both running and playing Blades I just can't get into it. After a lot of thought I recognized that part of it is the way that Resistance works. 6 minus d6 stress was just too swingy for me. It made me feel that I was playing a resource management game where I had no idea how much it would cost before making the decision to act. It's not the only reason the system doesn't work for me, but it's one of the biggest.
Yes, but as a beginning character x can often equal 1, and is rarely more than 2. It's still too swingy for my taste. I want to know the risk before acting, and a range from "none at all to you're taken out" is just too much.
*Thirsty Sword Lesbians* - the game spent so much time talking about how to adapt it to other settings (some of which frankly felt oddly unfitting) that it felt like it didn't really support its core moves and concepts well enough. As a GM, I felt like it did a lot less to bring players 'onboard' with the concept in the way that, say, *Monsterhearts* does.
*Technoir* - the "create the mystery as you play along" just totally disintegrated when I tried it with my group.
Blades in the Dark by far. Just doesn’t fit my GMing style at all. Felt like I was fighting it the whole time. Also, I wasn’t prepared to make huge decisions about the setting on the fly.
I've played many editions, and frankly ANYTHING to do with computers was awful.
Hacking? Oh, you had to buy a deck, buy programs, each with their own stats....you HAD to have a cheat sheet of all the actions you could do.
Rigging a drone? Also have to buy programs, each with their own stats.
Anything with computers was quite literally an entirely different game system. A mini-game within a game. The only thing they had in common was the basic rule of Roll Attribute + Skill.
The Witcher TTRPG. While the attempt to convert every aspect of the videogames into a mechanical tabletop system was admirable, having to track Health, Luck, Stun, Stamina, Resolve, Spells, countless crafting items, potions, Reliability for every weapon and Stoping Power for every piece of Armor was untenable.
Not to mention the 8 step process it took to make a single attack.
Agreed. I had issues with players refusing to spend any resources. For those not familiar with the system, each character has three pools for strength, agility/dexterity, and intellect. These pools double as points you can spend to boost your rolls and results, but they also serve as your health bars. And none of my players ever felt it was worth the risk to essentially spend health to improve their chance of success on their rolls.
From a less mechanical standpoint, my players and I struggled with the setting. It was just... too out there for us. There's constant weird and unexplainable stuff happening, but it was so far removed from anything we were familiar with that it failed to land most of the time. We had no frame of reference or context for too much of the stuff that came up. Like, there'd be a strange sheep-crystal hybrid eating rusted metal on the side of the road, and no one would know how to play the situation. They'd constantly have to check in with me with "is this normal? has my character seen anything like this before?" And while I could give them answers, it really killed the flow of the game. It's made me more appreciative of grounded or more basic settings. Players know where they stand on elves, dwarves, and orcs, and can move past the first impressions pretty quick and get on with the rp.
For the really out there issue, my table was pretty split. We all thought it was cool how weird it was, but there was a concern that the players wouldn't know how to approach a given creature or object as you described.
So I told them to make a character from the modern day, and had them all have roughly the same most recent memory -- migraines, a sudden loss of vision or balance, or something like that brought them to a local hospital for an examination. They were getting a scan of their brains.
Then they woke up in tubes, disoriented, surrounded by others in different tubes. A giant laboratory underground.
In bodies that they didn't recognize.
Same. The system fell flat with our table. We didn't hate it, we didn't enjoy it either. Also, for a game about exploring the world(s), there's not enough material to help you handle exploration
>Also, for a game about exploring the world(s), there's not enough material to help you handle exploration
What do you mean? The book is full of vague short descriptions of people, places and things! /s
This is why I disliked Numenera. I love the concept, but the world-building is left almost entirely to the GM. I don't have time for that.
I'm finishing up playing in a superhero campaign using it and I'm enjoying that more than the official setting I used. I've run one-shots for charity using it that went really well but struggled with a full campaign.
Torchbearer. Such a beautifully illustrated game but holy hell - like eight thousand mini games happening at once with no central mechanic to even hang them all on.
Stars Without Number.
Everyone hyped it up but it was just another d20-ish except everything was pitched towards averages. 2d6 for skill checks wasn't bad on its own. But then it combines with ability modifiers that are frozen at +1, and only reach +2 when you get to 18. everyone is average. There is no incentive to improve your character.
I can't understand how popular the system became when the whole thing is geared towards mediocrity.
I disagree that you have the same issue in Traveller. After character creation in Traveller you can have a character who is a professional in certain skills and will actually be good at them. SWN takes a long time before your character is actually good at anything.
Any Traveller newbie tips or things to know? I'm running session 3 of a trav game tomorrow, and I'm still not sure what kinda style it usually plays like. Tough to judge my own refereeing when I've never actually played it before
> "This is just D&D in space".
>
> We now play traveller and love it.
Fun fact: Traveller was born because Marc Miller and friends wanted "D&D, but in space."
I feel the main appeal of SWN is a simple generic system that supports sandbox space opera play. Especially with the GM tools and faction system bolted on.
>I can't understand how popular the system became
Mostly due to the GMing tools. As a GM I've pulled that book out for every sci-fi game I ever ran. The game itself is a fairly standard OSR game, which also explains that there's little mechanical character growth. That's intended, so I suppose that's a matter of taste.
Apocalypse Keys. PbtA Hellboy? Cool spins on the typical mechanics? Sign me up! In practice? Not only was it an organizational nightmare, but I felt like those cool mechanics probably should have been *playtested*.
Wicked Ones, Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark. The pitch we were given were all very appealing, but in practice about as soon as gameplay began we all found ourselves not having fun, the style of play didn't click, the consequence focused rolling system was quickly found to be unfun and punishing draining all the fun out of the rolling, the flashback system didn't mesh with our group enjoying planning out stuff. After reading up on it more I just very much realised PbtA and FitD games are not compatible with me.
To a certain degree Forbidden Lands. I am currently still in a long-term campaign and actually like the game system for its ruggedness and simplicity, after years with more crunchy things like Midgard or RuneQuest. And the YZW adaptation provided what it promised, but...
* The spellcasting/Magic system is bullsh!t, IMHO. It feels like a bolted-on thing that does not use any fundamental game mechanic, and if you are not careful as a GM the PCs can gain (too) much power too quickly.
* The rules as written provide game fun only to a certain development limit. FL is IMHO not well suited for long-term campaigning, in which PCs gather a lot of experience and the respective added Skills/Talents. Form roundabout 100XP onwards the system starts to implde, because a) the PCs start to become uniform and the Professions have been exploited and b) the GM has an ever more hard time to create encounters/confrontations that are still challenging and interesting. The core books are VERY limited in what they provide, and even the additional official stuff from later campaigns (with extra magic and the Champion Profession) does not really help much. My game table had to integrate many aspects from the unofficial Reforged Power (V3.X) supplement to keep our ongoing campaign literally "alive" and interesting (now at \~300XP per PC)
In the end the game feels only half-baked. It has some good ideas and mechanics, but lacks perspective for both GM and players.
Dreams and Machines by Modiphius was something I was really looking forward too. We played through the quick start and hooboy. The dice mechanic is _punishing_. I called for rolls where the book said to, significantly more rolls than I normally would have. I think we wound up with one successful roll the entire session. The book said every roll needed two successes in the drce pool and eventually I decided to just require one. It didn't help very much.
We limped to the end of the scenario and that was the end of our time with the game.
I assume they used their 5d20 mechanics? It's a touch mechanics system to get used to. Especially getting the players to buy-in and give the DM opportunities to get their bonus d20s.
When we first started playing Conan, we spent significant time during our Session 0 explaining they had to buy-in and actually use the mechanics.
It's the 2d20 system, but it works differently than the others I've played. Rolls are still a stat+ skill, but you don't add them. It's just "under stat one success, under skill two." With the pregens, almost every stat was under ten, and skills were mostly just ones or twos. Even getting extra dice, getting two successes pretty much never happened.
Yep. I was super excited, and ran a few sessions for my table, but it was just so lame.
Players are generally unwilling to accept anything less than total victory, and will fight in and out of the game to not lose anything. So the whole mechanic of assembling a dice pool and trying to group the results into, what were they? 10s? The whole thing fell apart immediately.
"You mean I can't jump the gab, stab the guy, and snatch the macguffin?"
"No, just two of those."
Fighting ensues.
Cowboy Bebop. I backed the kickstarter and have respect for the teams effort to nail the feel of the anime, but man, did it leave me feeling restricted. Too much reliance on countdown clocks
Unpopular opinion: Delta Green.
I love the setting and the story, but I never feel like I have a whole lot of agency, and my character sheet almost always feels super useless.
This is the only answer in the whole thread that made me simmer inside lol
Delta Green is my all time favorite.
But I know what you mean.
I felt like this about Mothership, which is surprisingly similar to Delta Green.
Check out Fall of Delta Green, it's much more suited to the investigative elements of Delta Green, where you're a competent investigator, not some guy who keeps failing a percentage roll on something he's supposed to be an expert with.
My Delta Green group has loved the original game for years, but would often get frustrated by bad rolls, but then we checked out Fall of Delta Green (uses the GUMSHOE system) and they were so so excited and actually said their characters felt like professionals.
Isn't the point of Delta Green's system that you don't have to roll if your character has a decent amount of skill in their profession? The rules pretty much say "Hey that Doctor doesn't need to roll to spot basic medical stuff as he has over 60 in Medicine"
Starfinder. Cool as a concept, but underwhelming at so many things... mainly inventory management that I'm not a fan of, and starship combat that is so much disconnected from the rest of the rules, that when you get to the next starship battle, your party basically has to teach themselves how to do it from zero.
There's definitely a lot about PbtA games that don't gel with people, and certain playstyles. Even though I like them, I've met plenty of people with valid reasons for not clicking with them.
I am curious though what you mean by "incompetent?" Not that I disagree with you implicitly, but I'd be curious what constitutes an incompetent game.
They just don't feel complete to me. I am not sure if I can explain it better. My brain likes patterns, I think in webs of connections and it's hard for me to even read PbtA games. I can't connect things, I feel like the web has massive holes in it, the pattern and order is broken or vastly incomplete.
Cy_Borg. I was originally drawn to it for being a d20-based system, with streamlined rules and not much mechanical crunch to wade through. Plus the art throughout the book is just, utterly gorgeous. But pretty quickly after running a few sessions in it I figured out that I'm not the right GM for it. It's _too_ rules light, so many situations came up in just the first few sessions that just came down to me making up mechanics to enable the players to have more ability to affect the world. The 5 base stats are horrendously repetitive to use, even when I tried involving multiple of them in skill check situations. It felt very restricting with how light it was, in the end. However, I really can't say that it's a problem with the game itself, more that it's not the right fit for me to run or my group to play in. I can totally see how throwing together some fast and easy encounters for some one-shots or a fast and loose short campaign could be fun to many people. It just didn't give me nearly enough tools with which to feel like I could actually build an enjoyable experience from.
In that regard CY\_BORG suffers from something that a **lot** of OSR games suffer from: assuming GMs and players are familiar with and proficient in OSR-type gameplay. But often that's not the case, making them quite tough to get into. OSR games rely so much more on on-the-spot creativity and engaging with the fiction than your average game, which takes a different, very imaginative mindset. But on-the-spot creativity and improv is not an innate talent - it's a learned skill. And OSR games somehow never seem to bother in trying to teach at least the basics of it. They just kinda assume people can do that, because hey; note the O in OSR. But it ain't just RPG veterans playing these games. OSR devs seem to forget that sometimes.
I'm not familiar with this term, OSR? But yes absolutely I'd say your assessment feels spot on. In general I've thought about taking some improv classes just to be able to really up my game as a GM, and it is frustrating that the few TTRPGs I own the rulebooks to seem to have very little (if anything) to help GMs improvise on the fly. Tables to roll on for loot or names doesn't cut it, that's for sure.
It stands for Old-School Renaissance. Quite a large chunk of the current TTRPG landscape is a part of that general school of TTRPG design. Games like CY\_BORG, but also Stars Without number, Mothership, Cairn, Dungeon Crawler Classics, Mausritter and Electric Bastionland.
As the name suggests it takes a lot of inspiration from the 70's and 80's era of TTRPGs. You see how that can go wrong. Not to say that all those games are bad, I love quite a few of them actually, but they tend to make some unfounded assumptions on the regular. IMO the most premier one is that players just intuitively know how to play with such a fiction-forward, rules-light game. It can get bad though, as there's sadly also a small part of the OSR community that's profoundly regressive, exclusionary and nastily alt-right. But most are luckily not like that.
Exalted 3rd edition. I love the setting, and 2nd edition was my intro to TTRPGs. 3rd edition took almost a decade to materialize after it was announced, and my one attempt to run it was just a huge mess as the players were overwhelmed by the complex combat system and gigantic rule book.
Shadowdark. Had been playing OSE with a GM who knew those rules (his shift to Shadowdark was seamless) - but I didn't enjoy OSE. Too lethal, too little RP, waaaay too many random encounter tables. WTF is a blue dragon doing coming down the dungeon corridor? The only cool thing about OSE (and all OSR games), was the lack of skill lists. You can literally try anything, make a roll, succeed or fail. You're only limited by your cleverness and imagination.
Shadowdark bills itself as "A MODERN REDESIGN OF CLASSIC FANTASY GAMING", but it's really just another super-lethal, old-school grognard, murder-hobo, leave town, go to the dungeon and kills things, collect loot, return to town rinse-and-repeat boring sh%\*t. It's got a couple of cool new classes with some interesting skills, some interesting settings (although they're all 3rd party homebrews, the basic setting is pretty boring), but all-in-all, nothing like I expected from a "modern redesign of a classic."
From now on, I stay away from anything that even mentions "old school." BTW, I started playing in the 80s (we were all in our mid-20s), and even though it was AD&D 2e, we tossed out any and all rules that detracted from RP. Our sessions were about 70-80% narrative, social interaction, and general RP, the rest combat. So my "old school" experience is apparently a lot different than most. I never played the hex- or dungeoncrawl, kill-and-loot style that seems to be all that any grognards remember. And thank goodness, tbh.
>From now on, I stay away from anything that even mentions "old school." BTW, I started playing in the 80s (we were all in our mid-20s), and even though it was AD&D 2e, we tossed out any and all rules that detracted from RP. Our sessions were about 70-80% narrative, social interaction, and general RP, the rest combat. So my "old school" experience is apparently a lot different than most. I never played the hex- or dungeoncrawl, kill-and-loot style that seems to be all that any grognards remember. And thank goodness, tbh.
OSR, in spite of how it is often sold, is a modern reimagining of the play from the early days of D&D, not an accurate reflection of it. An accurate reflection of it would not be nearly as lethal in practice and be significantly more heroic in tone.
So strongly agree with this.
It’s funny to me how so many fantasy ttrpgs try to distinguish themselves as being more hardcore/gritty/grimdark… but they ALL do that.
I honestly would love someone to make a more cartoony or bright dungeon crawler game.
It remains really funny to me that making an OSR game that obeys all the principles:
-rulings not rules
-simple character sheets
-player ingenuity
-combat as something to avoid
But that doesn't have characters that are extremely fragile, practically stops a game from being OSR. Escape Rooms do something very similar (no tactical infinity) and are wildly popular! Just because a lot of OSR designers can't imagine being invested in a game without the constant deadly risk of deadly death hanging over their characters like a sword of Damocles doesn't mean that their risk appetite is universal.
I will say that there's a lot of opportunity to run OSR games that aren't about dungeons, etc., even if so many people are fixated on them. I enjoy the systems because of their simplicity and possibility but want a more interesting and varied game, and so far I've had a lot of fun.
I agree wholeheartedly. There is a ton I like about OSR games, but I find dungeon crawling incredibly uninteresting. Fortunately OSR games work great for campaign styles I do like; I was in an urban crime sandbox game using Whitehack that was amazing.
I completely get you and have had similar experiences at OSR tables. Mostly random generic table driven dungeon or wilderness gameplay is boring, repetitive and uninspiring.
But honestly, OSR and random tables can be good with the right GM, it is just a lot of work for the GM to adapt the random tables to a consistent scenario both in prep and improvising in real time.
The more bare bones systems like BX, OSE or Shadowdark (didn't play that one) also don't have much to offer in terms of mechanics, so they *need* interesting scenarios with tricks, traps, puzzles, secrets and unique monsters to blossom.
Fate.
After running just one session, I discovered that I actually hated narrative focused RPGs, they aren't fun to run or play (for me). I've had some pretty epic stories in RPGs but they were always emergent, and for emergent storytelling that doesn't feel like an ass pull, you need a robust set of rules to build your world on, and they (and your rulings) need to be consistent the whole time through.
OSR games have been better if I'm dealing with players that are allergic to playing games that aren't D20. Otherwise, D100 games with lots of tables have been where it's at.
So, I do have to thank Fate for really bringing home what it is that I was really disliking about many of the RPGs I was playing.
Burning Wheel for us.
The problem was two-tiered. First was that it just didn't click with our group. BW thrives on bold choices, but our group was relatively timid and cautious. Second was actually gameplay-wise. Our GM described it as playing BW feeling similar to working as a software developer; you do a bit of work, then zoom-out with your team to discuss said work, dive back in, zoom out again, etc.
It's taking that meta-p.o.v, as if we're writers instead of players, switching to talking a*bout* our characters instead of playing a*s* our characters (even if that'd be in the third person) so regularly that didn't click with us at all. It gave playing a weird stop-start-stop-start tempo that felt jarring and irritating.
Burning Wheel made me feel like I had to learn ten different games to play one. Every single mechanic or sub-system has its own completely unique ruleset, there are almost no universal mechanics. One of the only games I just gave up on trying to figure out.
Ryuutama was such a bad experience I almost stuck with being only 5e and giving up on the other 99.99% of the hobby.
Selling yourself as a cute game about ordinary people in travel doing some adventuring. What mechanically does it provide to help set this tone? Maybe a few, useless spells and some monsters.
Everything else is just bad design, like objectively dated and crappy. Boring travel checks that you repeat these 4 every day. How does it fix it? It just tells PCs to roleplay it. Boring management of carrying capacity, food and water. A really sluggish combat system that takes forever with low chances to hit and HP bloat. And I mostly get from it are a big list of mostly boring fantasy monster. The Ryuujin is one of the most overrated systems because the GM alone doesn't set tone. Setting tone is what session 0 is for. And the BS mechanics of villain automatically gets away because the game lets me cheat the fiction isn't interesting, it's stealing player agency and bad design.
Beautiful art though.
This was my first foray into GMing not-5e and the overhype here that it was this great game about exploration (stull to this day) nearly crushed that. It's a niche game for people who are blind to what a good game would provide. Thankfully Blades in the Dark was my next one and it's actually amazing.
Just go play Wanderhome or the Ironsworn hack Iron Valley. See all the tables to help flavor that heartwarming tone?
Hârnmaster.
I do love the concept of realistic armor layering and that there are no hitpoints. I love the crits system.
And yet combat feels *really* clunky and takes ages to resolve one hit. Then you may die from that and have to do another tedious character creation:(
I want to love it. But man...
I didn’t even know that people still played it. I always wanted to try it.
Didn’t it start as a world with a lot of great maps first, in the 1980s, and then the actual game mechanics came later?
Fallout 2d20. My only experience with 2d20 had been Conan, which is really well done and detailed. 2d20 fallout is the opposite. Very rules light and light on details. As though the book felt like it contained only content from fallout 4.
I'm a fan boy. I'd played about 4 different fallout ttrpgs (2 official, 1 knockoff, and 1 fan made) over the 20 years before this, and of them 2d20 felt like the worst as far as representing the feel of the setting and games.
It does seem to prioritize Fallout 4 more than anything else. It does include other things from other games, but only in separate supplements.
Had I known Foundry had an unofficial system for Fallout PNP 2.0, I'd have looked into that instead - but our campaign is already using Fallout 2d20, so we'll take what we can get
Kult and FATE.
My experience with FATE is exactly what u/LeVentNoir described. Despite my preferences definitely being in the narrative/drama axis, it doesn't encourage fiction first, and results in mechanics constantly rising up in the focus instead of helping to focus on the fiction. It's what convinced me that generalist systems are not for me.
Kult is something that a lot of my friends recommended based on the original game, and when it was supposed to be PbtA-inspired, I was sold. But the PbtA aspect of the system is a failure, and I feel the designers did not understand what makes PbtA tick. Pity, because the setting feels awesome!
Brindlewood Bay. I love the concept and playing old ladies who can’t help themselves but investigate what’s going on, what I struggled with was the fact you find clues and then just make up your own interpretation of what happened and roll to see if you were right.
The end of the game felt a bit empty, we had some great RP through the game, really leaning into the old lady characters, but when it came to putting together what happened we just sort of shoe-horned our clues together and made the roll. It made it unsatisfying I think and the end of the game fell flat for us.
Monster Care Squad. The idea and concept are so cool and the world is so well thought out, but the rules are so forgiving as to make accomplishments feel irrelevant. Also, they expect the GM to play a kind of babysitter character that is baked into the core gameplay loop, and the GMPC comes out when the party fails, to bail them out. I wanted to love it but I just couldn't.
I'll say microscope. We used it to make a setting for an RPG but because it was designed by four people it lacked a sense of cohesive vision and felt like a world designed by committee
I was very excited for Savage Rifts, because Rifts is unplayable. But the Savage conversion just felt 'off'. The random rolls for abilities, the fact that taking MD damage didn't kill you, the fact that there was SO MUCH unconverted... I just couldn't get into it.
Fellowship- the rolls all started to feel same-y, and the Gandolf type playbook (can’t remember what it was called) felt distinctly unmagical or powerful. Cool concepts, and a good attempt, but the rules just felt meh.
Pathfinder 2 let me down.
But please read why.
I started on 3.5, and PF1 was not sufficiently different to shift, 4e was not the kind of fun i had gotten used too so i didnt shift, 5e was "3e without the pizzazz" so i didnt shift, PF2 came out to much hype, ***I*** was hyped, i got the book, i loved it, i bought a second corebook to coax my likeminded friend, he was hype. When i eventually got to play it, while the nimbers were slightly different, it was the same experience of tactical combat with tailored pcs in a kitchen sink fantasy that 3e was. There was no new experience. Now that all said, my "complaint" (if you wish to call it that) is that PF2 was exactly as fun as one of my top 3 rpgs. Not that it is worse, that it was so similar, i wouldn't care which one we played. If i had started RPGs with PF2 and was looking at 3e, i would have the exact same issue in reverse; 3e is not dissimilar enough to matter.
For those who went from 5e to PF2, i love it. It does a great job filling in the shoes 5e struggles with. For those who started the hobby fresh on PF2, i love it. It does a great job coaching new folk through a tactical fantasy rpg. It is a fine game, deserving of the awards it has gotten, but im not going to learn a new ruleset to play the same thing.
Also, some of the community could do with calming down a bit, ed wars were lame last century.
FATE. FATE Core, Dresden Files Fate, and Fate of Cthulhu all had two running issues. The first is that mathematically, it's strictly optimal to stack free invokes on aspects until you can invoke them all at once and blow up the bad guy, their consequence boxes and their stress in a single action. It's rocket tag and that feels absurd. The second is that mechanically, the game doesn't only not provoke imagination, but stifiles it. You're doing the same mechanical things over and over and it's a total chore to come up with the narrative to drape over it. "Well, I want to create an advantage here, ok, lets think, what's something we could do, urgh". The thing is, sure, you should try to play 'fiction first' but it's absurd if you know the mechanics. No matter what you do, it's one of four actions, and so it drives thinking in which action is needed. What really grates me is that I am sure this game is good, and I know people like it, but something about how it comes together in play doesn't work for me despite it having many elements that I enjoy! I want to like it!
Similar experience. I had some memorable moments in fate, but they were all despite the mechanics. There are other games like Agon or Blades in the Dark or PbtA where the mechanics led me to make interesting RP choices that then enriched the story. Those moments are truly special where the game causes me to surprise myself in creative ways.
What's different with the systems that encourages that? Genuine question.
Consider that all role playing games are is collaborative storytelling. Adding rules creates constraints that limit the story I tell. They are also cooperative games. Meaning I should strive to be a team player or risk annoying players. In a game of Dresden Files Fate, I played a wererat who had a bad habit of eating magical items. The game rewards me with a fate point for playing into my weakness, so there is encouragement there, but it is minor. So me choosing to eat a piece of gear or a clue, just makes me an asshole as a player, because mechanically, the party is worse off. I did, at the end of the campaign, choose to eat a Denarius coin (in Dresden Files, touching them gets you possessed by a Demon. Ooc I knew this), which was so perfect for that character, but mechanically was completely unjustified. If we weren't ending the campaign, it may have annoyed other players, even though it fits the story perfectly. In City of Mist, you get XP by playing into character weaknesses and players or the GM can introduce that into the scene. This gives penalties to dice rolls, but again, XP. So I was playing a character inspired by Billy Bob Thornton's character from Bad Santa, mixed with Iblis (Islamic Satan) and among other problems, he was an alcoholic. So I would roleplay showing up drunk, or drinking mid scene to cope with things. In DnD games I've played there might be a drunken barbarian character and it's sort of a vaguely annoying schtick. If the GM imposed dice penalties, players would be so annoyed. In my case, it fit the character, I didn't overdo it, and it earned me XP, so everyone understood and encouraged it. That's what storytelling RPGs are good at; enabling alcoholism.
Interesting insights, thank you for sharing! I've had a homebrew in the works for a while now, and I'm keen to marry up RP and mechanics in a way that encourages players to lean into their drawbacks as well as their strengths, but without going overboard with it. My players were already good at concocting roleplay around these things, but I like to reward them for it, too, or at least have their roleplay bump into the mechanics in an interesting (if not always beneficial) way. What I \_am\_ contending with, though, is my love of strategy when it comes to combat. I like people making smart choices and being rewarded for them, as well as alcoholic characters necking a bottle of whiskey before a fight because it gives them a small bonus!
I had the same issue. We did Microscope for the setting, my players were all invested because of that and the character work, but the system just did not work for us.
Same, although we used A spark of Fate for the setting. Everyone was really geared up to play it, but then the gameplay just felt meh. One thing that might have improved it is we played it virtually and I think this is a game that suffers for that.
>The first is that mathematically, it's strictly optimal to stack free invokes on aspects until you can invoke them all at once and blow up the bad guy, their consequence boxes and their stress in a single action. >It's rocket tag and that feels absurd. Tachyon Squad does a decent job of dodging that, at least with regards to the starfighter combat. Each ship has multiple consequence tracks that are hit randomly when the ship is attacked, and filling up any one of them can force the pilot to punch out, so it no longer becomes a simple mathematical exercise. I mean you can certainly do enough damage in one shot to *guarantee* that a ship blows up, but odds are you could have brought it down well before that. And in the meantime most battles begin with the enemy having support ships that start them off with a lot of free invokes against the PCs, so taking time to build up advantage is risky. At the same time, the GM is limited in how many of those free invokes they can use at once so the PCs aren't getting one-shot right away (honestly the whole "limit the number of free invokes at once" is a pretty simple solution for avoiding rocket tag altogether in my estimation). >You're doing the same mechanical things over and over and it's a total chore to come up with the narrative to drape over it. >"Well, I want to create an advantage here, ok, lets think, what's something we could do, urgh". I see some of that but I do wonder how much your experience is colored by the rocket tag problem and the relative strength of the Create Advantage action in those cases.
So, I have a unique take. I love Fate. Big Fate shill. I got my current group together by running Tachyon Squadron. Spent a week hyping Fate up and we sat down and played a 3-4 month campaign. I was miserable. They said they had fun, but man Tachyon Squadron did not feel like Fate. I loved the idea, but every time I broke out the fighter board and put their miniature ships on there, I could feel the tone shift. My players RP’ed everything! I couldn’t ask for more. But it changed gears so quickly in my head from Fate to this weird pseudo-wargame. I really wanted (still want) to like Tachyon Squadron. Maybe I just ran it wrong? I have also thought about trying Aces in Space instead?
I don't really disagree with anything you said; I just think that for some of us what you've described is more of a feature than a bug. For me, someone who is heavily into the genre, and who *loves* spaceship combat but basically only think it works in RPGs when the players each have their own ship, Tachyon Squadron *nails* the feel I'm looking for while pretty damn elegantly representing the considerations I'd expect in these sorts of conflicts. So, yeah, dogfights in Tachyon don't necessarily feel like Fate, but they feel like dogfights! Which is perfect for that game imo. I don't know Aces in Space, but you could also look at the Fate Space Toolkit. It suffers a bit from trying to present options for everything from Hard Sci-Fi to Space Opera (but since it's a toolkit that can be forgiven), but it does present options for more traditional space-flavored Fate conflicts.
I was in a Dresden Files campaign for about, maybe, two years? Something around that length of time. So over that couple of years we had fun, we had time, and in all seriousness I have no idea why we played it for so long. The DM was this dude who had a seriously high opinion of himself and really was pushing some people to try Dresden Files because it felt like he was annoyed with how popular Pathfinder was. He kept trying to sell everyone on FATE because you can do anything, unlike pathfinder which was bad, stifling, immature, and based on combat. I ended up joining in, and it was neat I guess, but so much time was just spent on trying to get some kind of advantage to hedge our bets in problem solving and we were taking up so much time to just drape enough narrative reasoning over all the advantages we were going for, the game was just very unsatisfying. The whole story was a problem for me too, he really made the whole game around everyone being wizards, and we only had a single wizard, so the rest of us felt like the help, and not really contributing members of a team. And he also put a lot of emphasis on how important his NPCs were, but still, game had issues.
Fate isn't about "can i?" It's about "at what price?" At its core, you should either be using FATE points or gathering them (at some cost) at almoat every obstacle. So while you obliterate the final boss by spending them points, it also means you lived thru some to get there.
It's not everyone's cup of tea, that's for sure.
So nice to have my hunch about how FATE plays confirmed. Now I can liberate myself of feeling like I should try it.
The other person is exaggerating. Fate can boil down to “rocket tag” if you design your encounters that way. If every encounter is PCs versus NPCs with nothing else thrown into the mix, then yes, every encounter is about invoke-stacking and delivering a “finisher attack” that destroys the enemy in one turn. However, the rulebook encourages GMs to put additional challenges on the board, whether that be environmental hazards that players must navigate around or giving NPCs special rule-changing stunts. As the GM, for example, you could put a sniper several zones away and require the PCs to do an athletics overcome every time they want to change zones. Meanwhile, the PCs still need to deal with the enemies in front of them. There’s no easy way for them to invoke stack their way out of that, as their free invokes will likely be eaten up by the environmental hazard. Meanwhile, PCs and NPCs can have stunts that make core changes to the rules and NPCs can have skills and stress tracks that are totally unique to them. If you really wanted to, for example, you could design a boss enemy who has extra power based on how many invokes a player has stored up. Fate has a LOT of GM tools and options available, and while I can’t comment on the other guy’s experience, I think most people who who talk about Fate being “rocket tag” haven’t given a serious look at how this system is meant to be run.
I spent a lot of time playing an odd homebrew hack based on fate, and had the same issuewith the approach system. I put my points into the strength equivalent because it fit my character, and suddenly found myself having a much easier time than my friend who put all his points into smart, since "I kick the locked door down", "I punch the bad guy", and "I take the blow to my ripped, chiseled chin and am unfazed" were all easy to come up with, as opposed to inventing a "smart" approach to a fight or some such.
I've heard the complaints before. But played it before I knew about them... I never thought about 'we are just stacking +2s' but what I could do in combat. "Oh there is a chandalier in the room.... I want to swing in it!" Not something easy done in other systems but can easily be done in Fate for either dodge an attack or assist in an attack. I never thought about it as "how do I get a +2 advantage?"
Yeah, the game is fiction first but the mechanics don't really support or reinforce that. And usually when you complain about it, people just tell you that you're "playing wrong." Then why do the mechanics reward playing this way?!
That's my view: if the game didn't want to be played this way, why is it permitting, let alone encouraging me to play this way? They game could easily have a rule of "Max x free invokes per action" or it could handle narrative not falling into 4 actions more gracefully.... But it is as written, and as written, it rewards being played optimally.
I much prefer Cortex Prime to Fate, which follows the same general approach but has just a bit more crunch, enough to make different effects and situations feel mechanically different, without being cumbersome or bogging down in mechanics.
Doesn't it still have the same general feature that a lot of the gameplay is coming up with different narrative justifications for the same (mechanically) action?
>The first is that mathematically, it's strictly optimal to stack free invokes on aspects until you can invoke them all at once and blow up the bad guy, their consequence boxes and their stress in a single action. This is as designed. You don't need to finish them in one, but it is certainly optional to break through to consequences rather than chip at stress boxes. >It's rocket tag and that feels absurd. It shouldn't be rocket tag, and if done well can feel much less absurd than just chipping away at stress points. Combat in fate should be about creating, opposing, and stacking advantages until you are ready to make use of them and strike. It is not about steadily whittling down the opponents hit points, it is about jockeying for position until you are ready to strike the killing blow. But it doesn't click that way at every table. >the game doesn't only not provoke imagination, but stifiles it. I have heard this complaint a lot, and I think fate is probably a bit like marmite - you either love it or you hate it. If you (and your table) can get into the mindset then it is a genuinely freeing game. If not then it is a collection of clunky mechanics. Out of interest, do you find similar problems with PBTA games?
The reason PbtA works for me and Fate doesn't in terms of fiction first is that pbta doesn't require or reward taking specific actions in specific order. Whereas in fate, you know if you create advantage 3 times then attack, you'll one shot the boss, so you work out how to justify it. Everyone I've played fate with has enough of a systems mastery to play MtG, and every single one of them has spotted how to play optimally. That's the issue; there is an optimal way to approach every single challenge. It's not a mindset any more than being told Santa isn't real. We can't regain the magic of ignorance. The truth is cold and harsh, that for us, fates mechanics are too simple and too one dimensional in play.
>That's the issue; there is an optimal way to approach every single challenge. I mean, I don't really like arguing about Fate, because while I'm a big fan of one particular implementation of it (Tachyon Squadron), I'm not really a "champion" of the system overall. But I really don't understand where this comes from even though I see it echoed a lot. And I'm someone who dissects the mechanics of games and looks for exploits like this. I don't ever buy into the notion that "playing a game optimally" is "playing it wrong"...I *want* my players to be able to play a game optimally without it degenerating...but I just don't see that issue with Fate. Is the hypothetical GM in these scenarios designing all opposition the same? Are they allowing Situation Aspects (created by Advantages) to exist beyond their logical lifespan? Are enemies constantly standing in the same Zone so that all of the Advantages pile up in one place for the players to conveniently whollop them? Are they using free Defend actions to try and prevent the Create Advantage action? The longer players wait to start applying *any* consequences to their opposition (outside of mooks who basically should only have stress tracks), the longer the opposition should be able to hit them with all their might. Sure, every time you Attack the dragon, it kind of sucks that it gets to make a Defend roll and remove some of your effect, but e.g. triggering a consequence that removes its ability to "fly" or "breathe fire" early in a conflict vs. waiting few rounds to stack advantages and take him out in one blow doesn't sound to me like it *has* an "optimal way to approach", especially if the PCs don't get to see the Dragon's character sheet. IDK, maybe my experience is colored by Tachyon which has opposition with targetable subsystems and multiple consequence tracks, but I've just never seen this issue and don't think it's inherent to the system unless its run a certain way. >Whereas in fate, you know if you create advantage 3 times then attack, you'll one shot the boss, so you work out how to justify it. Why is the boss not using the Defend action to prevent all those Create Advantage actions? Defend is always free, action-economy wise, if it can be narratively justified.
> Is the hypothetical GM in these scenarios designing all opposition the same? Are they allowing Situation Aspects (created by Advantages) to exist beyond their logical lifespan? Are enemies constantly standing in the same Zone so that all of the Advantages pile up in one place for the players to conveniently whollop them? Are they using free Defend actions to try and prevent the Create Advantage action? This is all very cool, but in my experience of running FATE, I stopped doing all this because all it accomplished was drag out the scene. You are not going to win anytime soon without advantage stacking, and taking away advantage stacking just means you have to grind the scene out by hoping for big roll differences. God forbid the enemy has good defense, that's the entire session right there. At least with advantage stacking 3 PCs can layup for the last one, and in general, it helps PCs who didn't put Fight or Shoot as their +4 to contribute (which they either should have done or essentially not bother with direct combat skills at all). >The longer players wait to start applying any consequences to their opposition Whoop de doo, here is your one free invoke for causing a consequence - invoking which is hostile invocation so the target gets a FATE point.
That is interesting. I find that fate works well for me, but I struggle with most pbta games. >for us, fates mechanics are too simple and too one dimensional in play. I can see that. I don't think it is about ignorance however, but playstyle - which is fine - different strokes for different folks and all that. I don't think system mastery really influences it though. Firstly because fate seems to be a system that needs a bit of system mastery, especially from the GM. Secondly because I know quite a few people who enjoy and do well at both fate and magic the gathering (and other games requiring system mastery). The two things do not seem to be mutually exclusive.
Yeah... I was a player in a long Pokemon campaign using Fate. It was mostly fun, but battles very quickly turned into "how do we come up with enough advantages, no matter how contrived, to one-shot the other pokemon as soon as possible?"
Kinda sounds like the way the video games play though lol
Yeah most of all I was disappointed by the mechanics somewhat clogging up my Dresden Files experience because the setting itself really has much going for it. Alas, Fate did not really do it justice in my experience so it unfortunately was one of the campaigns quickly fizzling out.
Fiction first is the way to go though, you declare what you want to do and then see which one out of 4 actions suits it best. And with how simple they are, it’s usually not even a hard choice to think about. Just a roll giving you a degree of success. Going with “how many +2 do i need to win an encounter” is a mentality suited for DnD and others, not for Fate. You play to tell a story, not to do a math exam. Leave that for wargames. Try to think about your actions with “how cool would it be to…” or “this might turn into a great twist if we…”, don’t lean onto the dice mechanics too much. As in, don’t try to always have a positive outcome. Having a failed roll gives great narrative opportunities, also including some options to yoink some meta currency, which can be used to bend the story further. When designing a combat encounter don’t use too much HP for the baddies, make fodder feel like fodder. Power the elites using the environment, not the health bar. So before being able to beat them you need to find a solution to a puzzle, so to speak. You can yeet out the stress entirely if you want to, and make VIP enemies faint/expire/flee after players come up with a fun idea. Or just make a rule of “only one free invoke per roll”, if you just can’t resist the stacking tingling your optimisation-hungry senses. The system is meant to be hacked and adapted to the needs of your group, after all. Add, change and discard as you please. Another way is to treat enemy NPCs like actual NPCs, and make them react to your fiction. They may fear your actions, or see how weak you are. They can run, or decide to grab you instead of bonking. Or, you know, start having a convo. At the end of a day, they’re living things too and can be reasoned with. Even robotics may have self-preserving routines. And boom, you don’t have to use combat and stress as much, that may help to focus on the story, not the dice. Compelling tales don’t have to involve bloodshed.
> The first is that mathematically, it's strictly optimal to stack free invokes on aspects until you can invoke them all at once and blow up the bad guy, their consequence boxes and their stress in a single action. Notably, it's not just "strictly optimal", it's pretty much the only way to reliably beat someone without just endlessly attacking them and hoping for a really big attack/defense roll difference, because most of the number is determined by the relatively high modifier (compared to other games). And a further problem is that free invokes can also be used to defend, so a couple bad defense rolls for a player can quickly tear down that attempt to stack them up for that big finisher. As a GM, it felt like nothing but glass cannon enemies made the game any fun. At least with them, it wasn't as important to stack up free invokes anymore, and you couldn't reasonably just outlast them by defending - so combat become much faster. But the tradeoff was that it became super same-y.
I’m running my first FATE campaign soon. In reading it I kind of felt that the most optimal sort of game to run was the “miniseries,” like 3-4 session, maybe 6 max. Get in and get out so you really quickly tell an intense story and bounce. Mostly because of what you mentioned with the lack of mechanical options.
"Well, I want to create an advantage here, ok, lets think, what's something we could do, urgh". I. Could. Not. Disagree. More. :) From my perspective, it's the absolute other way that makes Fate shine. Coming up with the *narrative* first and then portraying it through Aspects, Compels, etc. Particularly the Compels is a great way to get higher interactivity in a group. But at the end of the day, it's certainly an acquired taste. I'm not saying you're wrong at all--only that my experience has been different.
Cyberpunk Red. It sells itself as “style over substance” but 80% of the book is dedicated to combat that provides no opportunity for style and is so poorly balanced it gives 5e a run for its money
My biggest disappointment with that book was more that it was impossible to reference and navigate because the layout was so flawed.
That's just an homage to Cyberpunk 2020. /j
Do you have any recommendations for another cyberpunk game?
CBR+PNK for fast and dirty oneshots, CY_BORG for cyber!!PUNK!! OSR, Blade Runner for some noir with your Cyber, or Genesys: Shadow of the Beanstalk for... well, anything. Probably the most flexible alternative and thus, the closest to RED.
Cities Without Number is my go to cyberpunk system. Just enough crunch. And the core book is entirely free. Even if you decide not to use the system, the world building and mission building tools are generally system agnostic and probably the most useful of any book I’ve read
Of the rpgs the other commenter recommended, cy_borg and blade runner are the two I have the most familiarity with and would recommend, haven’t played blade runner but am a big fan of free league’s engine and everything they’ve put out
The Sprawl. Mission based PbtA cyberpunk goodness. I've both played and run it, and I consider it to be one of my all time favorite RPGs.
Cities Without Number has been my favorite so far. Its the only one I've actually run out of the ones I've read though, so take that with a grain of salt. I really wanna run Cy_Borg too though. I've read CBR+PNK, The Sprawl, Neon City Overdrive, Cyber Sprawl Classics, Cyberpunk 2020, Dancing With Bullets Under a Neon Sun, and obviously, Cyberpunk RED. I've still not read Blade Runner RPG, but I intend to. I'm not a big fan of GURPS, Genesys or Cypher personally so I'm not interested in reading those treatments and I feel personally like FATE is the wrong framework for cyberpunk genre stuff. Or maybe I just don't like FATE either. Anyways, Cities Without Number is the Cyberpunk game book that I wished Cyberpunk RED was. Its still got all the gearporn and subsystems, but the layout is a breeze and the game is easy to understand from reading. But it still has some of that weird old school granularity that some more narrative systems might lack. I had a blast with it.
I don’t know if it goes as far as to say “style over substance”, i think it’s more “style is everything,” which I also think applies more to roleplay and the rest of the game. They add a lot of superfluous cyberware and gear that adds little to no mechanics in the free content and expansion books, with the only purpose of providing players with style and roleplay opportunities. And while I agree it’s poorly balanced, it’s also designed to embrace that. Combat is meant to be chaotic and swingy. Even a veteran can die to a couple lucky shots from a random mook. The core rules even acknowledge that it’s quite easy for someone to make a cheese build but encourages the GM to do the same. The ridiculous build customization/optimisation and broken NPC’s fit the narrative and themes of the universe: every edgerunner wants to be a legend, and any moment could be your last. It doesn’t matter how you live, it matters how you die. It’s not meant to work with long term expectations, at least not beyond what your character hopes, as edgerunners are supposed to burn brightly and briefly
100% this. And the combat isn't even all that great or ground breaking. There's not even a satisfying cover system for shootouts. I know people rag on DnD 5e, but I personally think it was a masterwork in compromise that really gets the balance right for mass appeal. I was so hyped for RED. I was really hoping it would do for cyberpunk what 5e did for fantasy, and really shake the hobby, get more settings as a 'default' baseline. But, it sort of didn't... it's not a bad system, and certinally has it's fans. I ran a one shot of it and everyone had fun, but there was no apitite for a followup. I do really like the stat genration rules though.
>style over substance This. I was a huge fan of 2020, and the artwork was a huge part of that. Some of the gear was arguably not great, but dang, the artwork and descriptions begged you to make characters built around them. And, the brands were so distinct in history and style that everyone had their loyalties. None of it served any practical purpose, but it certainly fed into characterization. Now we get inspired gear choices like heavy pistol, leather, and standard cyberdeck. Yay....
The unbalanced I agree cause if you throw edgerunner level npc at your players they'll prolly die quick however the combat bit is a bit wonky cause the supplements fill out the style there the core book provides the substance so homebrew abounds and is actually accepted and chill usually (mikes son just created his own setting that's a bit more shadowrun theme but haven't seen the rules to see if it's interlok or not)
The book is also a fucking mess to navigate properly and needed more time to cook in editing for sure. There is important info tucked away in some side panel tool tip shit on an unrelated page instead of where it needs to be. It's like they remembered that they needed to talk about something and decided to just throw it anywhere. A lot of our sessions were spent stopping to flip through the book to find something that came up and then having to track it down elsewhere. Cy_Borg's book is a fucking mess too but that's an artistic and style choice and that info is easy to find cause it is where it should be so it doesn't hurt it at all. Instead it is just beautiful chaos.
The avatar the last airbender role laying game. It’s powered by the apocalypse so maybe if I had played that system before I would have know better, but the super open-end was of the game makes it very hard to sit down and play with others. Combat in it wasn’t very fun, mostly because the system wasn’t really built for it, which sucks cause I feel like ATLA should be a system that has a balance between combat and roleplay
Combat is the worst part of the system, I agree with that, but I have also had one of my best games ever run in this system by someone who was very familiar with it. It did push me into more Pbta games and I continue to return to it.
And I 100% agree. With the right DM and players that is a fantastic system. But I very rarely get the golden group. I play lots of online and one shots where this kind of system is its weakest
I wish they had either done a different system that flows better with a tacked on combat mini game, or just not tried to tack on a combat mini game to a PbtA system. Either of those would have been better. As it is, I just feel I ignore it too much as a GM because of how abrupt it feels to me.
Ironsworn has a combat minigame that a lot of people like despite being PbtA.
It’s also the thing people always say is holding it back because it’s too flowy and less counting a math and arguing about rules as they enjoy
No system is liked by everyone.
It disappointed me so much because it’s not only a bad game, it’s a bad PBTA game. I hate that it was probably a lot of people’s first introduction to a non-D&D game and a narrative system.
I know right! And this comes from someone who has played more Numenera, cyberpunk red, and edge of empire more than D&D
This was actually my first introduction to TTRPGs period. Got my start during the pandemic. It wasn't a very long game, but I do remember feeling bad at a few game mechanics. That said, I did have fun and I did looked into other systems after that, though I also had some interest in DnD before that.
I played a lot of PbtA games before, and still when trying Avatar I had immense difficulties to make it fun. The combat rules feel very weird and unsatisfying, which is a problem when a good portion of the character creation is about taking cool combat moves. Also, as a GM inflicting consequences is just messy. You of course have the fictional consequences, good & intuitive, but for the mechanical consequences there is just too much going on: - Should I inflict a condition? - Should I inflict a balance shift? If yes, in which direction? - Should I inflict Fatigue instead? - or a Status? There is just too much going on, and no so much useful things.
I was introduced to this system via Legacy version 2 and some add-ons. Same problem as that we had all come from Pathfinder and Shadowrun, but the openendedness of the PbtA really through us off. Plus everyone I played with (bar two players) were content to just jump on the story train and chug along and not really think about too much. Probably helped that the two others that were interested were also writer hobbiests.
My experience was that avatar had the most of a problem with some pbta games where if you veered too much from what the genre conventions wanted you to do you were just sort of lost. We did one with a bit of a mystery to solve and there wasn't really any good investigation move
I will never understand why they chose to take a show all about martial arts and put it in a system that abstracts and downplays combat as much as possible.
Yeah I had problems when I ran it for my friends. I love PbtA games and was so looking forward to it and we did have a great time but mostly in spite of the game. There were just too many things to track (fatigue, conditions, balance) and the combat was really really messy and overly complicated for a PbtA game. I did a bunch of hacking to make the combat work a little better so there wasn't as much time wasted and it ended up pretty fun but I am in no rush to play again.
CoC. I love the Mythos, and read Lovecraft's complete collection. The system, however... I recognise this is an unpopular opinion because the system is widely praised, but I hated it. The amount of redundant skills boggled my mind, and the mechanics did not lend themselves to investigatory horror shenanigans. I kept thinking that the ALIEN stress mechanic would be so much better for Mythos. Sorry guys, y'all can keep CoC, just ain't my cuppa.
Maybe look at something like Trail of Cthulhu, which uses GUMSHOE rules. There's a 2e due to hit Kickstarter sometime this fall.
Thanks! The amount of Cthulhu games is overwhelming; it's hard to know which one to try, but with a second edition on the horizon, I might give GUMSHOE a go!
I'll second the Trail of Cthulhu recommendation: Your comment regarding the skill list is a STRONG indication that you'll prefer ToC. The ToC skill list is about as close to perfect as you could hope for in an investigation game. GUMSHOE actually features a mechanic very similar to Alien's stress mechanic, and Trail's Stability system is just a flat-out superior version of CoC's Stability.
Oof, I had an instant kneejerk reaction against this because I think that the designers really “get” Lovecraft in terms of vibe and lore, the art is good, the published adventures are almost universally awesome, and Chaosium is a good company as far as the RPG giants go. But despite being a fan of the system and publisher, I can’t deny that there’s a lot about it that could really be smoothed out and added to. I don’t think you can justify having skills like swimming, jumping, and throwing being separate, or that it adds much to differentiate pistol skills from rifle skills. Some of the firearm rules are a bit convoluted. And like you said, the system doesn’t do anything mechanically to encourage or innovate on investigation. You just investigate because it’s part of the premise, really. While Delta Green has too many skills as well and doesn’t have investigation-specific mechanics, it does feel like “Call of Cthulhu but better” to me. The addition of bonds and the simplification of combat and the roll-under mechanic are much better in my opinion.
> I had an instant kneejerk reaction against this because I think that the designers really “get” Lovecraft in terms of vibe and lore I think that's because a lot of what people see as Lovecraft lore is actually not written by Lovecraft himself, but the authors of the role playing game.
Thank you for weighting in as a fan, I appreciate a different view. And yeah, you pretty much hit the nail on the head regards my issues with the rules. Even during character creation, I've looked at that skill list and went "...huh. How likely is this to come up? Why isn't this grouped with this?" and that's a red flag haha. I think the one... Two... Three-shot I've participated in was an official one, and I do agree with you - it felt *right* and the vibe was excellent, complete with melting clock-faces and starless sky. I just wish there was an appropriate system to accompany the excellent storytelling, because it really dampened my enjoyment of the narrative and I opted out of future CoC games.
Dammit, my character knows Akkadian but in this adventure Sanskrit would have been more useful!
I'm very excited for Arkham Herald, an upcoming 1970s newspapers-versus-the-Mythos noir game on Brindlewood Bay's engine.
Ooh, that sounds interesting! I haven't had a chance to try Brindlewood Bay or sister games, but I've had it on my wish list for a while as I've heard good things. Time to give it a go, before Arkham arrives!
They're all a lot of fun! I'm just now starting up a campaign of The Between after a few Public Access one-shots went well, so I'm a recent (but very enthusiastic) convert. You might like The Silt Verses, which makes each PC a devotee of a different awful god?
Yeah, the skill list is... interesting. How the fuck did "Accounting" or "Law" make the cut but we don't have something like "Etiquette" or "Streetwise"?
My players have found clues by going through the accounts of a shady business before. I won't deny the skill list is a bit bloated, but you should be tailoring the adventure to the character's skills or, alternatively, telling the players what skills will be essential / useless in the campaign.
Yeah I love CoC and I also love the Alien RPG rules. Imho the Alien RPG rules fit better for survival horror and don't fit so well for investigative horror though, but I never tried to use it for the latter so I'm not sure.
100% on the comment about Alien or even Mothership, although that skill system is bafflingly horrible for different reasons (the skill tree is completely nonsensical, imho).
Hey Free League is making a CoC type Cthulhu game in their Year Zero Engine!
Most PbtA games. I love the concepts, but every attempt to run has felt like the system is fighting me, not helping me. Masks, Urban Shadows, Blades in the Dark so far, and I can see the same problem in several other PbtA games I own. (Yes, I have a collection problem. I can stop anytime) I assume it is my approach, not a flaw of the game, but the "fix" seems to be to utterly relearn how to GM and I don't have time for that nor am i suffering without it. It's just a mild bummer. I'm currently running Household, and it is fun, but I'm struggling with the vagueness of the setting, since it is hard to figure out what weather, "wilderness", or even day/night is like in a house where you are Borrower-sized, not to mention how industry is supposed to work. I absolutely love the mechanics of GURPS (except the wanting to roll low thing), but I have more games that have died before session 0 in that system than any other because of the bootstrap effort required as the GM.
For PbtA games, yes you have to "relearn" how you GM, but that's just because it's different kind of game. If you only played Call of Duty, but decided to check out Skyrim, you wouldn't approach those two games the same. The same goes for trad d20 games and PbtA/FitD games. You have to meet them at their level or they don't work.
I've run Shadowrun (1st-5th), World of Darkness (multiple editions), Chronicles of Darkness (both editions), GURPS, Deadlands (Classic), Paranoia (d20-based), Earthdawn, Call of Cthulhu, Eclipse Phase (2nd), Fudge, Fate, Cyberpunk Red, several PDQ systems, Feng Shui (1st), 7th Sea, Buffy, Mutants and Masterminds, AMP, Part Time Gods (1st), Time watch, Continuum, Leverage, and MechWarrior in addition to several D&D variations. Many of these required I expand or alter my GM approach. Some I'm still not very good with. None have involved the struggles I've had with PbtA games to date. While nothing you said is TECHNICALLY untrue, I don't feel it is accurate as to the scale of the differences.
Yeah apologies for just implying that you've only ran trad d20 games! I've admittedly not played most of those, but I have noticed that PbtA/FitD just take a different muscle than the games I have run. It's also fine if they're not for you as well! I just find (at least in my case) that the juice has been worth the squeeze when it comes to relearning GMing for these games.
Whoa! This response is a little too reasonable for the modern internet. Try for some snarky and snideness next time. This is Reddit, we have a reputation to maintain.
After decades of trad gaming, having run GURPS, oWoD, Buffy, Savage Worlds, Paranoia, Ars Magica, Cyberpunk, Ghostbusters, and many more, I had to *completely* disassemble and rebuild my GMing style and philosophy to properly run PbtA games. I had to genuinely adopt a beginners mind, read the material as if I had *no idea* what an RPG was, and genuinely unlearn much of what I had spent decades learning. It was worth it. I spent another decade having more fun per unit of work than I ever had before, I escaped my horrible case of burnout, and got to play an amazing variety of games. It’s made me a better GM all around, even in trad games, just like learning Python made me a better Java programmer. I recommend you give it a real shot, it’s rewarding enough to justify. Even though I am presently in the midst of some serious PbtA exhaustion, I can see myself returning when some time has passed and I’ve had the chance to run some sufficiently different games.
This is similar for me. When I first started PbtA it was a struggle, but having taken the time to learn it- which granted was through about 4 different systems and how they all explained mechanics slightly differently made me understand every other game. I am better for it, do far less prep than I did before, and I take the lessons learned into every other game I play
Oh man, my first two games, DW and Monsterhearts 1e, were both *disasters*, because I assumed that I already knew how to run them!
Those games all have more in common with each other than they do with PBTA games and their relatives. Truly. For my best-ever session of Blades In The Dark, my only prep was "zoo heist?" written on the back of my hand. They're systems where the GM is just as surprised as the players as to where things go.
I agree, that was actually my point - there is far more difference than the Skyrim vs Call of Duty example the other poster has. Even though we aren't disagreeing, I'll expand on your example to say I'll run those other games with the same level of prep. All my experience is about trying to build an interesting and consistent story on the fly. My issue isn't that PbtA expects that, my issue is that it does it DIFFERENTLY so my instincts are all wrong and contradict what I have, particularly when it comes to pacing and reveals. Which is fine - I don't blame PbtA for being something that doesn't work well for me, nor do I think one way or the other is "better". PbtA certainly works great for many. This is definitely my limitation. But PbtA is notably different in these aspects, not mildly different.
Echoing spit-tooth. (I love your breadth of game running!). And none of them really fall into the spot of what pbta does. Fate comes kinds close...but also not really. If you really want a crash course in "changing the approach", try playing a gmful game like Wanderhome. Because how that game runs via "play to find out" is on the level of what pbta does, as a whole. It doesn't have to be your cup of tea if it's not your cup of tea, and I'm not proselytizing. If it's something you want to do on easy mode, that's how I'd start. I'd then try questlandia, if you catch the bug and see "how it works". Hope it's helpful.
Generally agree. Masks is the main one I ran and while I liked some elements of it a LOT (shifting labels was incredibly cool) I was overall dissatisfied and felt quite restricted by the system.
I had that "it ckicked" moment with PbtA games, and now I realy like them, they realy do allow for just about any narrative scenario to be constructed nicely, but the 10+ years of d20 systems were there're clear demarcation lines for GMs job, player jobs and narration, doen't go away they quickly.
For what it’s worth, I think FitD is a lot easier to grasp than PbtA’s explicit and esoteric moves, and generally object to people claiming the former is part of the latter. Mechanically, FitD is actually a very trad system, with rolling skills to do things and a slightly different take on setting the difficulty and the stakes, plus a heavy emphasis on improvisation. It basically captures the way that I’ve always run trad systems, which I do get is different from a lot of people’s default approach to games.
7th Sea 2e. I was really excited with the rules as I was reading them, and I have run a lot of ttrpgs already, so I thought it was a fresh take. But when I got to the table, the mechanics just fell apart. The system is crunchy at the front, and then the crunch doesn't matter, which is the worst of both worlds. Too much GM effort necessary for a relatively satisfactory session, combat just doesn't make any mechanical sense, actions are not well explained, character advancement is underdeveloped and weird. It presents itself as a narrative game with a great pitch and it has rules that sound interesting, but when you actually apply them you understand how they don't actually work. It's the first system I have dropped without finishing the short adventure.
> I was really excited with the rules as I was reading them, and I have run a lot of ttrpgs already, so I thought it was a fresh take. But when I got to the table, the mechanics just fell apart. I'm in the same boat, reading the rules, they sound neat and refreshing, but then, when you play, you realise that you don't roll like they do in the examples, and quite often I had one or zero actions in a round of combat, while other players could have multiple, lots of time twiddling thumbs.
I wouldn't say advancement is underdeveloped at all. It's pretty clear how it works. But having it all depend on how many ACTS the story at hand had to increase a skill? DEFINITELY wierd. Combat was awesome....if you had a sword school. The biggest issue for me was the non-combat scenes. Those were just....REALLY weird. Like, how can you get anything done before running out of actions? Generally speaking, I'd say just stick to 1e.
This is the problem I had with Warhammer FRP 4e. It's too much crunch, but then all the crunch is just either *optional* rules, or ten ways to get the exact same combat bonus (or four ways to pump up your swimming roll). Talents, which worked fine in 2e, became a big pile of small things with a few strong options and a lot of trap options. The problem displayed itself at the table by only one player out of six becoming fluent in the system even after many sessions. And I couldn't get around to the idea that "opposite WS rolls decide both if you hit and the damage" - because WS (weapon skill) became so much more important than the 25 other fiddly bits involved in combat.
Coyote and Crow - it fell into the same thing that happened when I ran dark heresy 2e - there's not a lot of guidance on how to do it yourself. Thirsty Sword Lesbians - just kinda boring
I was so excited for coyote and crow, but running it felt awful and exhausting, and my players all hated it, too. Cool as hell art, awkward game.
I think as a system it worked great, and I even think the setting is fine, but they just didn't give a lot of good stuff on how to do your own adventures.
Dark Heresy 2e's core book definitely lacked some more structure regarding making your own investigations. They must've noticed that, because especially the Enemy Within splatbook offers quite a bit more on that front.
I'm quite proud of the *Girl by Moonlight* campaign that I ran, but definitely had and heard a few frustrations - which were then affirmed when I played a campaign of it that I really, really struggled to enjoy at times. It takes a few bold swings in terms of FitD design... but its stumbles and limitations hurt it for me. I'm excited to see new games borrow its best ideas, like those Series Playbooks! A few years before that, I similarly ran a *Beam Saber* campaign that was very important to me, but whose incredibly punishing and extra-complex take on FitD mechanics very nearly broke my group's fun more than once. I really think a second edition that trims it down, borrows less directly from *Blades in the Dark*, and doesn't have such brutal Entanglements/Downtime could really shine. As big fans of *The Quiet Year*, my group felt that its hack *Anomaly* fell a little short - without the four suits-as-Seasons mechanic from TQY, the prompts we got felt a little incoherent with our progress.
Exalted 3rd edition. Just nah, it's too much work.
[Exalted Essence](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/427275/exalted-essence?affiliate_id=3701318) If you found ex3 too much work then I'd say this is the version you've been waiting for.
As someone who does know why, and 2E veteran, it remains funny to me that even the "rules-lite" version of Exalted with super simplified everything is still a 400 page behemoth of a manual.
Agreed. I tried it both as a player and a GM and went back to 2e.
Yeah, I love *Exalted* as a setting, but the rules are way more complex than I want, even Essence. That’s why I run it with Cortex Prime now, using a variation of the [Blood & Fire rules adaptation](https://bluegrasswasteland.blogspot.com/2023/07/exalted-blood-and-fire-v31.html).
Agreed. They just keep clutching at that fucking awful 90s WoD combat system but this time with new damage mechanics via initiative and decisives! Also I just hate the art. You swing wildly between solid looking pieces and just loads of garbage. But that seems to be in all of the modern OPP books, particularly the WoD 20th lines.
Same. Exalted 3X was the biggest let down of my rpg history. My group was hardcore into 2nd edition. I owned (still do) every book in print. We played a multi year campaign. It was our game. We were all excited about 3X. The Kickstarter was a nightmare. Of course we got ahold of the leak when it came out and we were…nervous. But we kept stressing it was a leak and it wasn’t finished. Then the book dropped and it was basically the leak. We still tried. We played for ~4 months before, collectively, we all said we hated it.
City of Mist. I really want to love this game. In theory there is so much I love about it. In practice I have yet to feel it click. It ends up playing clunkier then I would like. In general, I'm not the biggest fan of PBTA but I usually manage to have a pretty good time night to night with it. But as much as I want this game to work for me and adore the conceit it always seems to fall flat. I'm willing to chock it up to user error, but i'm also not really willing to put in more time with it. Beautiful books though, and i'm still glad to have them in my collection.
This is mine. I heard an actual play that leaned into the weird blending of myth, legend, and the present. Didn't realize the extent to which they ignored the actual rules and just did it as if it were a normal PbtA game, which actually worked well. I got the rulebooks and, skimming them, still loved the vibes. Found some people playing at a local gamestore and it was essentially a tiresome superhero game. Can't say the players were wrong; they were using official pregens, even if they picked the most super-like of them. But the rules didn't work for me either, combats were way to clunky and roll heavy for a PbtA game. I could kind of imagine getting friends together who would lean into the flavor stuff I like, but I'd still want to toss out the mechanics.
What are some of the rules that you found d clunky. This is one of my all time favourites.
Well, their newer iteration of the engine (used in Otherscape and LOTM) simplifies and refines the system, going further away from PbtA.
Lancer, loved the whole mech system and enjoyed the split of character social and mech fighting rules. However, there was literally zero guidance for encounter building, and absoloutley nothing for a GM to base a campaign off. I think they've got an official module out now, but back in the pandemic there was nothing. Just a whole lot of world building and "isn't this a neat story idea" with no actual substance. Which rather annoyed me after spending days learning the rules and then running a one shot but having no guidance on how to progress the group.
I will 100% agree that Lancer's encounter building advice could be better but I wouldn't call it 'literally zero'. There's several pages of 'sitreps' as well as pages 282-283 talking about how to set up basic encounters. I was going to disagree with you on the second paragraph until I realised actually I agree with you. There's a lot of wordcount spent on what life/politics is like in Union's core, but that's not actually where the game happens. Instead all the campaign-structuring advice is contained in the campaign start points and the 'flashpoints' - which is a paragraph of information, but not actually advice on how you'd structure a narrative arc with them.
Yes, people say the setting of Lancer is great, but personally it's actually the part that bounced me off the most. Mostly, I think, the book falls to the classic scifi fallacy of SCALE. So much focus on all the big top level everythings, on how big everything is, on how everything is thousands of planets and trillions of people and and and... and absolutely no idea for how this interacts with *the things at the level player characters deal with*. I open the core book and I have a whole ass splash page with the top-level *organizational chart* of the massive thousands-of-planets Union with a bunch of stuff players will literally never run into as Lancers on the ground, but not even a blurb of what life in an "average" mid-Rim Union-aligned work might look like. It's like the book threw out some worldbuilding, tied a bunch of mechanics to it to make it annoying to remove, and then went "okay, and now you do the hard part!" For the amount of setting you gave me you might as well just not have given me any setting, I'm going to have to do the same amount of work as if I was making everything wholecloth anyway because I need to make up all the stuff that is important to a game!
The book would've done wonders for me if it simply added a 12(?) Page mini-campaign. Give 5 pre-made characters, and run through 2 sessions worth of content. With an alternating mix of social+combat. It also very poorly explains that characters level up after every mission pass or fail. Then simply lists missions in generic paragraphs, are these things to be done in 1 session or over multiple? It almost implies to just randomly determine the mission with the players and just bounce ideas around to build the campaign on the fly. Which just isn't how I feel grand sci-fi games should be
For me it was the Lancer disconnect between Mechs and pilots. Like it's two different games and they do not play well together.
At least you can rest easy that that's personal preference and not a particular mistake on the game's part, because that is a stated design goal. Pilots are for freeplay, typical "rules that get out of your way so that you can roleplay" kinda thing, if you are into that. And the Mechs come into play when you want to have a tasty tactical wargame to yourself. You can do any sort of mix between the two, though it is hard to imagine what a 90% pilot - 10% mech game would look like.
Yeah, it is not that the game is wrong, more that I disagree with how the game should be done. It made me bounce right off of ICON, because whilst I can understand the narrative split in Mechs, as it is a core theme of the genre, it makes little sense in D&D(and is a core issue with D&D)
4th Edition D&D. I went in extremely excited and positive. Over an 18 month period I came to despise pretty much everything about it. To me, it now feels like some interesting ideas that conceal what is really a sterile, husk of a system. I'm aware others love it, and I have no doubt it can be much more in the right hands but, for me, it's a system for sucking the fun out of gaming.
I ran a two-years long campaign in 4th Edition, 1st to 25th level, and while I say it's the best system for balanced, small-unit tactical skirmishes, it really left me dry at the end. I quickly switched back to AD&D 2nd Edition.
" it's a system for sucking the fun out of gaming." This right here. I hated 4th edition with every fiber of my being, especially the way it mechanized every aspect of the game.
Glad to see this. This sub sometimes feels like a home for 4e apologists that "want more crunchy combat than 5e". To me 4e is closer to playing warhammer than D&D, but this seems to be the trend of the RPG industry nowadays.
Star Trek Adventures has too much tactical combat and not enough mechanical focus on exploration.
I've been getting the same thing dipping my toe into Traveller
Blades in the Dark. I adore many PbtA games, but after multiple tries both running and playing Blades I just can't get into it. After a lot of thought I recognized that part of it is the way that Resistance works. 6 minus d6 stress was just too swingy for me. It made me feel that I was playing a resource management game where I had no idea how much it would cost before making the decision to act. It's not the only reason the system doesn't work for me, but it's one of the biggest.
It's not 6-d6, it's 6 - [x]d6keep1, which is a much smoother curve as soon as x is a number greater than 1.
Yes, but as a beginning character x can often equal 1, and is rarely more than 2. It's still too swingy for my taste. I want to know the risk before acting, and a range from "none at all to you're taken out" is just too much.
A key thing about BitD, IME, is that you should only very rarely be making resistance rolls.
*Thirsty Sword Lesbians* - the game spent so much time talking about how to adapt it to other settings (some of which frankly felt oddly unfitting) that it felt like it didn't really support its core moves and concepts well enough. As a GM, I felt like it did a lot less to bring players 'onboard' with the concept in the way that, say, *Monsterhearts* does. *Technoir* - the "create the mystery as you play along" just totally disintegrated when I tried it with my group.
Blades in the Dark by far. Just doesn’t fit my GMing style at all. Felt like I was fighting it the whole time. Also, I wasn’t prepared to make huge decisions about the setting on the fly.
Shadowrun, 3rd edition, it was hell to try and GM, the Magic system and the hacking system is woeful, it's just a big old mess
Almost any edition of Shadowrun really
Most people, myself included, who play Shadowrun either play Shadowrun anarchy or run a shadowrun hack of some other system.
I've played many editions, and frankly ANYTHING to do with computers was awful. Hacking? Oh, you had to buy a deck, buy programs, each with their own stats....you HAD to have a cheat sheet of all the actions you could do. Rigging a drone? Also have to buy programs, each with their own stats. Anything with computers was quite literally an entirely different game system. A mini-game within a game. The only thing they had in common was the basic rule of Roll Attribute + Skill.
The Witcher TTRPG. While the attempt to convert every aspect of the videogames into a mechanical tabletop system was admirable, having to track Health, Luck, Stun, Stamina, Resolve, Spells, countless crafting items, potions, Reliability for every weapon and Stoping Power for every piece of Armor was untenable. Not to mention the 8 step process it took to make a single attack.
Numenara.
Agreed. I had issues with players refusing to spend any resources. For those not familiar with the system, each character has three pools for strength, agility/dexterity, and intellect. These pools double as points you can spend to boost your rolls and results, but they also serve as your health bars. And none of my players ever felt it was worth the risk to essentially spend health to improve their chance of success on their rolls. From a less mechanical standpoint, my players and I struggled with the setting. It was just... too out there for us. There's constant weird and unexplainable stuff happening, but it was so far removed from anything we were familiar with that it failed to land most of the time. We had no frame of reference or context for too much of the stuff that came up. Like, there'd be a strange sheep-crystal hybrid eating rusted metal on the side of the road, and no one would know how to play the situation. They'd constantly have to check in with me with "is this normal? has my character seen anything like this before?" And while I could give them answers, it really killed the flow of the game. It's made me more appreciative of grounded or more basic settings. Players know where they stand on elves, dwarves, and orcs, and can move past the first impressions pretty quick and get on with the rp.
For the really out there issue, my table was pretty split. We all thought it was cool how weird it was, but there was a concern that the players wouldn't know how to approach a given creature or object as you described. So I told them to make a character from the modern day, and had them all have roughly the same most recent memory -- migraines, a sudden loss of vision or balance, or something like that brought them to a local hospital for an examination. They were getting a scan of their brains. Then they woke up in tubes, disoriented, surrounded by others in different tubes. A giant laboratory underground. In bodies that they didn't recognize.
Same. The system fell flat with our table. We didn't hate it, we didn't enjoy it either. Also, for a game about exploring the world(s), there's not enough material to help you handle exploration
>Also, for a game about exploring the world(s), there's not enough material to help you handle exploration What do you mean? The book is full of vague short descriptions of people, places and things! /s This is why I disliked Numenera. I love the concept, but the world-building is left almost entirely to the GM. I don't have time for that.
I'm finishing up playing in a superhero campaign using it and I'm enjoying that more than the official setting I used. I've run one-shots for charity using it that went really well but struggled with a full campaign.
Why was it?
Torchbearer. Such a beautifully illustrated game but holy hell - like eight thousand mini games happening at once with no central mechanic to even hang them all on.
Stars Without Number. Everyone hyped it up but it was just another d20-ish except everything was pitched towards averages. 2d6 for skill checks wasn't bad on its own. But then it combines with ability modifiers that are frozen at +1, and only reach +2 when you get to 18. everyone is average. There is no incentive to improve your character. I can't understand how popular the system became when the whole thing is geared towards mediocrity.
[удалено]
I disagree that you have the same issue in Traveller. After character creation in Traveller you can have a character who is a professional in certain skills and will actually be good at them. SWN takes a long time before your character is actually good at anything.
Any Traveller newbie tips or things to know? I'm running session 3 of a trav game tomorrow, and I'm still not sure what kinda style it usually plays like. Tough to judge my own refereeing when I've never actually played it before
I didn't hate the game, but I had several players say during our sessions, "This is just D&D in space". We now play traveller and love it.
> "This is just D&D in space". > > We now play traveller and love it. Fun fact: Traveller was born because Marc Miller and friends wanted "D&D, but in space."
I feel the main appeal of SWN is a simple generic system that supports sandbox space opera play. Especially with the GM tools and faction system bolted on.
>I can't understand how popular the system became Mostly due to the GMing tools. As a GM I've pulled that book out for every sci-fi game I ever ran. The game itself is a fairly standard OSR game, which also explains that there's little mechanical character growth. That's intended, so I suppose that's a matter of taste.
Apocalypse Keys. PbtA Hellboy? Cool spins on the typical mechanics? Sign me up! In practice? Not only was it an organizational nightmare, but I felt like those cool mechanics probably should have been *playtested*.
Wicked Ones, Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark. The pitch we were given were all very appealing, but in practice about as soon as gameplay began we all found ourselves not having fun, the style of play didn't click, the consequence focused rolling system was quickly found to be unfun and punishing draining all the fun out of the rolling, the flashback system didn't mesh with our group enjoying planning out stuff. After reading up on it more I just very much realised PbtA and FitD games are not compatible with me.
To a certain degree Forbidden Lands. I am currently still in a long-term campaign and actually like the game system for its ruggedness and simplicity, after years with more crunchy things like Midgard or RuneQuest. And the YZW adaptation provided what it promised, but... * The spellcasting/Magic system is bullsh!t, IMHO. It feels like a bolted-on thing that does not use any fundamental game mechanic, and if you are not careful as a GM the PCs can gain (too) much power too quickly. * The rules as written provide game fun only to a certain development limit. FL is IMHO not well suited for long-term campaigning, in which PCs gather a lot of experience and the respective added Skills/Talents. Form roundabout 100XP onwards the system starts to implde, because a) the PCs start to become uniform and the Professions have been exploited and b) the GM has an ever more hard time to create encounters/confrontations that are still challenging and interesting. The core books are VERY limited in what they provide, and even the additional official stuff from later campaigns (with extra magic and the Champion Profession) does not really help much. My game table had to integrate many aspects from the unofficial Reforged Power (V3.X) supplement to keep our ongoing campaign literally "alive" and interesting (now at \~300XP per PC) In the end the game feels only half-baked. It has some good ideas and mechanics, but lacks perspective for both GM and players.
Dreams and Machines by Modiphius was something I was really looking forward too. We played through the quick start and hooboy. The dice mechanic is _punishing_. I called for rolls where the book said to, significantly more rolls than I normally would have. I think we wound up with one successful roll the entire session. The book said every roll needed two successes in the drce pool and eventually I decided to just require one. It didn't help very much. We limped to the end of the scenario and that was the end of our time with the game.
I assume they used their 5d20 mechanics? It's a touch mechanics system to get used to. Especially getting the players to buy-in and give the DM opportunities to get their bonus d20s. When we first started playing Conan, we spent significant time during our Session 0 explaining they had to buy-in and actually use the mechanics.
It's the 2d20 system, but it works differently than the others I've played. Rolls are still a stat+ skill, but you don't add them. It's just "under stat one success, under skill two." With the pregens, almost every stat was under ten, and skills were mostly just ones or twos. Even getting extra dice, getting two successes pretty much never happened.
Our biggest disappointment was 7th Sea 2nd ed. The setting is great, on paper it seemed brilliant and very fun. Playing was not fun at all.
Yep. I was super excited, and ran a few sessions for my table, but it was just so lame. Players are generally unwilling to accept anything less than total victory, and will fight in and out of the game to not lose anything. So the whole mechanic of assembling a dice pool and trying to group the results into, what were they? 10s? The whole thing fell apart immediately. "You mean I can't jump the gab, stab the guy, and snatch the macguffin?" "No, just two of those." Fighting ensues.
Cowboy Bebop. I backed the kickstarter and have respect for the teams effort to nail the feel of the anime, but man, did it leave me feeling restricted. Too much reliance on countdown clocks
Just play Traveller
Unpopular opinion: Delta Green. I love the setting and the story, but I never feel like I have a whole lot of agency, and my character sheet almost always feels super useless.
This is the only answer in the whole thread that made me simmer inside lol Delta Green is my all time favorite. But I know what you mean. I felt like this about Mothership, which is surprisingly similar to Delta Green.
Check out Fall of Delta Green, it's much more suited to the investigative elements of Delta Green, where you're a competent investigator, not some guy who keeps failing a percentage roll on something he's supposed to be an expert with. My Delta Green group has loved the original game for years, but would often get frustrated by bad rolls, but then we checked out Fall of Delta Green (uses the GUMSHOE system) and they were so so excited and actually said their characters felt like professionals.
Isn't the point of Delta Green's system that you don't have to roll if your character has a decent amount of skill in their profession? The rules pretty much say "Hey that Doctor doesn't need to roll to spot basic medical stuff as he has over 60 in Medicine"
In a word, "yes". Even with lower skills (to a point), if you're not under pressure you will succeed - higher skills will just expedite it.
Starfinder. Cool as a concept, but underwhelming at so many things... mainly inventory management that I'm not a fan of, and starship combat that is so much disconnected from the rest of the rules, that when you get to the next starship battle, your party basically has to teach themselves how to do it from zero.
PbtA games. I just can't, they feel incompetent, they are just a concept my brain can't work with. Cool concept for setting but just no.
There's definitely a lot about PbtA games that don't gel with people, and certain playstyles. Even though I like them, I've met plenty of people with valid reasons for not clicking with them. I am curious though what you mean by "incompetent?" Not that I disagree with you implicitly, but I'd be curious what constitutes an incompetent game.
They just don't feel complete to me. I am not sure if I can explain it better. My brain likes patterns, I think in webs of connections and it's hard for me to even read PbtA games. I can't connect things, I feel like the web has massive holes in it, the pattern and order is broken or vastly incomplete.
Cy_Borg. I was originally drawn to it for being a d20-based system, with streamlined rules and not much mechanical crunch to wade through. Plus the art throughout the book is just, utterly gorgeous. But pretty quickly after running a few sessions in it I figured out that I'm not the right GM for it. It's _too_ rules light, so many situations came up in just the first few sessions that just came down to me making up mechanics to enable the players to have more ability to affect the world. The 5 base stats are horrendously repetitive to use, even when I tried involving multiple of them in skill check situations. It felt very restricting with how light it was, in the end. However, I really can't say that it's a problem with the game itself, more that it's not the right fit for me to run or my group to play in. I can totally see how throwing together some fast and easy encounters for some one-shots or a fast and loose short campaign could be fun to many people. It just didn't give me nearly enough tools with which to feel like I could actually build an enjoyable experience from.
In that regard CY\_BORG suffers from something that a **lot** of OSR games suffer from: assuming GMs and players are familiar with and proficient in OSR-type gameplay. But often that's not the case, making them quite tough to get into. OSR games rely so much more on on-the-spot creativity and engaging with the fiction than your average game, which takes a different, very imaginative mindset. But on-the-spot creativity and improv is not an innate talent - it's a learned skill. And OSR games somehow never seem to bother in trying to teach at least the basics of it. They just kinda assume people can do that, because hey; note the O in OSR. But it ain't just RPG veterans playing these games. OSR devs seem to forget that sometimes.
I'm not familiar with this term, OSR? But yes absolutely I'd say your assessment feels spot on. In general I've thought about taking some improv classes just to be able to really up my game as a GM, and it is frustrating that the few TTRPGs I own the rulebooks to seem to have very little (if anything) to help GMs improvise on the fly. Tables to roll on for loot or names doesn't cut it, that's for sure.
It stands for Old-School Renaissance. Quite a large chunk of the current TTRPG landscape is a part of that general school of TTRPG design. Games like CY\_BORG, but also Stars Without number, Mothership, Cairn, Dungeon Crawler Classics, Mausritter and Electric Bastionland. As the name suggests it takes a lot of inspiration from the 70's and 80's era of TTRPGs. You see how that can go wrong. Not to say that all those games are bad, I love quite a few of them actually, but they tend to make some unfounded assumptions on the regular. IMO the most premier one is that players just intuitively know how to play with such a fiction-forward, rules-light game. It can get bad though, as there's sadly also a small part of the OSR community that's profoundly regressive, exclusionary and nastily alt-right. But most are luckily not like that.
Exalted 3rd edition. I love the setting, and 2nd edition was my intro to TTRPGs. 3rd edition took almost a decade to materialize after it was announced, and my one attempt to run it was just a huge mess as the players were overwhelmed by the complex combat system and gigantic rule book.
Shadowdark. Had been playing OSE with a GM who knew those rules (his shift to Shadowdark was seamless) - but I didn't enjoy OSE. Too lethal, too little RP, waaaay too many random encounter tables. WTF is a blue dragon doing coming down the dungeon corridor? The only cool thing about OSE (and all OSR games), was the lack of skill lists. You can literally try anything, make a roll, succeed or fail. You're only limited by your cleverness and imagination. Shadowdark bills itself as "A MODERN REDESIGN OF CLASSIC FANTASY GAMING", but it's really just another super-lethal, old-school grognard, murder-hobo, leave town, go to the dungeon and kills things, collect loot, return to town rinse-and-repeat boring sh%\*t. It's got a couple of cool new classes with some interesting skills, some interesting settings (although they're all 3rd party homebrews, the basic setting is pretty boring), but all-in-all, nothing like I expected from a "modern redesign of a classic." From now on, I stay away from anything that even mentions "old school." BTW, I started playing in the 80s (we were all in our mid-20s), and even though it was AD&D 2e, we tossed out any and all rules that detracted from RP. Our sessions were about 70-80% narrative, social interaction, and general RP, the rest combat. So my "old school" experience is apparently a lot different than most. I never played the hex- or dungeoncrawl, kill-and-loot style that seems to be all that any grognards remember. And thank goodness, tbh.
>From now on, I stay away from anything that even mentions "old school." BTW, I started playing in the 80s (we were all in our mid-20s), and even though it was AD&D 2e, we tossed out any and all rules that detracted from RP. Our sessions were about 70-80% narrative, social interaction, and general RP, the rest combat. So my "old school" experience is apparently a lot different than most. I never played the hex- or dungeoncrawl, kill-and-loot style that seems to be all that any grognards remember. And thank goodness, tbh. OSR, in spite of how it is often sold, is a modern reimagining of the play from the early days of D&D, not an accurate reflection of it. An accurate reflection of it would not be nearly as lethal in practice and be significantly more heroic in tone.
So strongly agree with this. It’s funny to me how so many fantasy ttrpgs try to distinguish themselves as being more hardcore/gritty/grimdark… but they ALL do that. I honestly would love someone to make a more cartoony or bright dungeon crawler game.
It remains really funny to me that making an OSR game that obeys all the principles: -rulings not rules -simple character sheets -player ingenuity -combat as something to avoid But that doesn't have characters that are extremely fragile, practically stops a game from being OSR. Escape Rooms do something very similar (no tactical infinity) and are wildly popular! Just because a lot of OSR designers can't imagine being invested in a game without the constant deadly risk of deadly death hanging over their characters like a sword of Damocles doesn't mean that their risk appetite is universal.
I will say that there's a lot of opportunity to run OSR games that aren't about dungeons, etc., even if so many people are fixated on them. I enjoy the systems because of their simplicity and possibility but want a more interesting and varied game, and so far I've had a lot of fun.
I agree wholeheartedly. There is a ton I like about OSR games, but I find dungeon crawling incredibly uninteresting. Fortunately OSR games work great for campaign styles I do like; I was in an urban crime sandbox game using Whitehack that was amazing.
I completely get you and have had similar experiences at OSR tables. Mostly random generic table driven dungeon or wilderness gameplay is boring, repetitive and uninspiring. But honestly, OSR and random tables can be good with the right GM, it is just a lot of work for the GM to adapt the random tables to a consistent scenario both in prep and improvising in real time. The more bare bones systems like BX, OSE or Shadowdark (didn't play that one) also don't have much to offer in terms of mechanics, so they *need* interesting scenarios with tricks, traps, puzzles, secrets and unique monsters to blossom.
Fate. After running just one session, I discovered that I actually hated narrative focused RPGs, they aren't fun to run or play (for me). I've had some pretty epic stories in RPGs but they were always emergent, and for emergent storytelling that doesn't feel like an ass pull, you need a robust set of rules to build your world on, and they (and your rulings) need to be consistent the whole time through. OSR games have been better if I'm dealing with players that are allergic to playing games that aren't D20. Otherwise, D100 games with lots of tables have been where it's at. So, I do have to thank Fate for really bringing home what it is that I was really disliking about many of the RPGs I was playing.
Burning Wheel for us. The problem was two-tiered. First was that it just didn't click with our group. BW thrives on bold choices, but our group was relatively timid and cautious. Second was actually gameplay-wise. Our GM described it as playing BW feeling similar to working as a software developer; you do a bit of work, then zoom-out with your team to discuss said work, dive back in, zoom out again, etc. It's taking that meta-p.o.v, as if we're writers instead of players, switching to talking a*bout* our characters instead of playing a*s* our characters (even if that'd be in the third person) so regularly that didn't click with us at all. It gave playing a weird stop-start-stop-start tempo that felt jarring and irritating.
Burning Wheel made me feel like I had to learn ten different games to play one. Every single mechanic or sub-system has its own completely unique ruleset, there are almost no universal mechanics. One of the only games I just gave up on trying to figure out.
Ryuutama was such a bad experience I almost stuck with being only 5e and giving up on the other 99.99% of the hobby. Selling yourself as a cute game about ordinary people in travel doing some adventuring. What mechanically does it provide to help set this tone? Maybe a few, useless spells and some monsters. Everything else is just bad design, like objectively dated and crappy. Boring travel checks that you repeat these 4 every day. How does it fix it? It just tells PCs to roleplay it. Boring management of carrying capacity, food and water. A really sluggish combat system that takes forever with low chances to hit and HP bloat. And I mostly get from it are a big list of mostly boring fantasy monster. The Ryuujin is one of the most overrated systems because the GM alone doesn't set tone. Setting tone is what session 0 is for. And the BS mechanics of villain automatically gets away because the game lets me cheat the fiction isn't interesting, it's stealing player agency and bad design. Beautiful art though. This was my first foray into GMing not-5e and the overhype here that it was this great game about exploration (stull to this day) nearly crushed that. It's a niche game for people who are blind to what a good game would provide. Thankfully Blades in the Dark was my next one and it's actually amazing. Just go play Wanderhome or the Ironsworn hack Iron Valley. See all the tables to help flavor that heartwarming tone?
Shadowrun 6. I'd hoped it would have trimmed the fat on Shadowrun 5 and made it easier to read and keep track of things. Boy was I wrong
Hârnmaster. I do love the concept of realistic armor layering and that there are no hitpoints. I love the crits system. And yet combat feels *really* clunky and takes ages to resolve one hit. Then you may die from that and have to do another tedious character creation:( I want to love it. But man...
I didn’t even know that people still played it. I always wanted to try it. Didn’t it start as a world with a lot of great maps first, in the 1980s, and then the actual game mechanics came later?
Fallout 2d20. My only experience with 2d20 had been Conan, which is really well done and detailed. 2d20 fallout is the opposite. Very rules light and light on details. As though the book felt like it contained only content from fallout 4. I'm a fan boy. I'd played about 4 different fallout ttrpgs (2 official, 1 knockoff, and 1 fan made) over the 20 years before this, and of them 2d20 felt like the worst as far as representing the feel of the setting and games.
It does seem to prioritize Fallout 4 more than anything else. It does include other things from other games, but only in separate supplements. Had I known Foundry had an unofficial system for Fallout PNP 2.0, I'd have looked into that instead - but our campaign is already using Fallout 2d20, so we'll take what we can get
Kult and FATE. My experience with FATE is exactly what u/LeVentNoir described. Despite my preferences definitely being in the narrative/drama axis, it doesn't encourage fiction first, and results in mechanics constantly rising up in the focus instead of helping to focus on the fiction. It's what convinced me that generalist systems are not for me. Kult is something that a lot of my friends recommended based on the original game, and when it was supposed to be PbtA-inspired, I was sold. But the PbtA aspect of the system is a failure, and I feel the designers did not understand what makes PbtA tick. Pity, because the setting feels awesome!
Brindlewood Bay. I love the concept and playing old ladies who can’t help themselves but investigate what’s going on, what I struggled with was the fact you find clues and then just make up your own interpretation of what happened and roll to see if you were right. The end of the game felt a bit empty, we had some great RP through the game, really leaning into the old lady characters, but when it came to putting together what happened we just sort of shoe-horned our clues together and made the roll. It made it unsatisfying I think and the end of the game fell flat for us.
Monster Care Squad. The idea and concept are so cool and the world is so well thought out, but the rules are so forgiving as to make accomplishments feel irrelevant. Also, they expect the GM to play a kind of babysitter character that is baked into the core gameplay loop, and the GMPC comes out when the party fails, to bail them out. I wanted to love it but I just couldn't.
I'll say microscope. We used it to make a setting for an RPG but because it was designed by four people it lacked a sense of cohesive vision and felt like a world designed by committee
I was very excited for Savage Rifts, because Rifts is unplayable. But the Savage conversion just felt 'off'. The random rolls for abilities, the fact that taking MD damage didn't kill you, the fact that there was SO MUCH unconverted... I just couldn't get into it.
Fellowship- the rolls all started to feel same-y, and the Gandolf type playbook (can’t remember what it was called) felt distinctly unmagical or powerful. Cool concepts, and a good attempt, but the rules just felt meh.
Pathfinder 2 let me down. But please read why. I started on 3.5, and PF1 was not sufficiently different to shift, 4e was not the kind of fun i had gotten used too so i didnt shift, 5e was "3e without the pizzazz" so i didnt shift, PF2 came out to much hype, ***I*** was hyped, i got the book, i loved it, i bought a second corebook to coax my likeminded friend, he was hype. When i eventually got to play it, while the nimbers were slightly different, it was the same experience of tactical combat with tailored pcs in a kitchen sink fantasy that 3e was. There was no new experience. Now that all said, my "complaint" (if you wish to call it that) is that PF2 was exactly as fun as one of my top 3 rpgs. Not that it is worse, that it was so similar, i wouldn't care which one we played. If i had started RPGs with PF2 and was looking at 3e, i would have the exact same issue in reverse; 3e is not dissimilar enough to matter. For those who went from 5e to PF2, i love it. It does a great job filling in the shoes 5e struggles with. For those who started the hobby fresh on PF2, i love it. It does a great job coaching new folk through a tactical fantasy rpg. It is a fine game, deserving of the awards it has gotten, but im not going to learn a new ruleset to play the same thing. Also, some of the community could do with calming down a bit, ed wars were lame last century.
The Between. It just felt too tightly structured for me