PDA

View Full Version : Good indie games



ThiagoMartell
2012-12-17, 12:36 AM
Recently, I've been reading a lot of indie games. Many of them were suggested by playgrounders, so I wanted to make sure other people got to know them. Many of the games I'm listing here are relatively well-known, but since I had not heard about them until recently, I imagine many people have not as well.

Thrash (http://dsg.neko-machi.com/thrash.html) is probably my favorite indie game. Anime martial arts with heavy fighting game influence. Somewhat narrativist. Ewen Cluney is a great guy overall and a very good game designer. While Thrash is my favorite game by him, Magical Burst is also great and seems to be a lot more popular. His blog (http://yarukizero.wordpress.com/) is a very good resource for anyone that plans about writing a game or even homebrewing something.

Anima Prime (http://www.animaprimerpg.com). A game for you Final Fantasy and Avatar: the Last Airbender needs. Simple, fast and quite interesting, it's a narrativist system which focus on having rules for action scenes and guidelines for everything else. There is a free version in the site and you can get the full version (only adds arts) for 10 dollars. The art is gorgeous. It won an ENNIE. I like it very much, I'm even running a pbp with it. I'll try it in a RL one-shot next week.

Danger Patrol (http://www.dangerpatrol.com/) is a simple and fast game about 50s science fiction. It's Flash Gordon and pulp without the sexism. It's lighthearted, it's fast and it's awesome. It's also free. You can't customize much about your character, but it's still very good.

Fight! (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/79179/Fight!-The-Fighting-Game-RPG) suffers from quite a generic title that makes finding information about it kind of hard. It's all about fighting games. The mechanics represent the source material very well, and the art is very good (though also very sparse). It is very customizable, but I think it goes too much that way - creating a characters seems like it would take forever since there are so many options. Combat is also highly tactical and seems very interesting (I haven't tried playing it yet) but also kinda complicated. It's only 10 dollars right now, so I'd grab it soon. Looks like it's selling reasonably well in DriveThruRPG.

Panty Explosion Perfect (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/108156/Panty-Explosion-Perfect) has the weirdest title I've ever seen, probably looking for a kind of Engrish feel, since it's based on manga. It's a narrativist game with some interesting mechanics. For example, you have more chance to succeed in something the more popular you are and this is decided by a vote at the beginning of the session. You have quirks you can use, somewhat similar to FATE aspects, but different.
The game is about schoolgirls with psychic powers and hoe they interact with other. The layout is surprisingly good. It's probably the best game by Atarashi Games and it's also very cheap right now.
I'd avoid GxB (and I think BxB is pretty much the same) as it's basically Breaking the Ice with set characters and multiplayer.

What about you guys? Any favorites?

Grinner
2012-12-17, 01:37 AM
Violence (http://www.costik.com/Violence%20RPG1.pdf): It wasn't exactly indie when it came out, but it might as well be anymore. Violence was designed as a commentary on the archetypal dungeon crawl, but since the proliferation of the indie RPG scene, it's sort of been outmoded. Still hilarious though.

Wushu (http://files.pcode.nl/temp/wushuopen_final.pdf): In my mind, Wushu is one of the most elegant systems ever created. In fact, it's really not so much a game as it is a method of narrative resolution. On the other hand, some find its lack of concrete conflict resolution a little unnerving, and not unduly so; its simplicity makes gritty games difficult to achieve.

scarmiglionne4
2012-12-17, 09:46 PM
The Riddle of Steel. Never got to play it, wanted to real bad. I still do so much so I have bee trying to incorporate elements from it in my D&D 3.5 game so people will actually play it.

Craft (Cheese)
2012-12-17, 10:12 PM
GHOST/ECHO (http://www.onesevendesign.com/ghostecho/) - The hell did I just play? Was it good?

In A Wicked Age... (http://lumpley.com/wicked.html) - An even more freeform version of Dogs in the Vineyard, essentially. It suffers from a waaaaaaay overcomplicated conflict resolution mechanic and some ridiculously poor choices in presentation, but buried under that are some great ideas.

All the others I could say are pretty well-known, it would seem.

ThiagoMartell
2012-12-18, 02:46 AM
All the others I could say are pretty well-known, it would seem.

Share them with us anyway! :smallbiggrin:
I was surprised how much good stuff there was around that I had never even heard about... but that was also very popular.

Craft (Cheese)
2012-12-18, 12:52 PM
Share them with us anyway! :smallbiggrin:
I was surprised how much good stuff there was around that I had never even heard about... but that was also very popular.

Alright... Just listing off all the indie RPGs I've read that haven't already been named (not gonna bother fishing for links as there are just too many):

Agon - A "sword and sandal" game of heroes in greek mythology. The players and the GM are explicitly competitors and the GM has strict limits on the types of challenges they can throw at the players and how they're supposed to present these challenges.

Bliss Stage - A vaguely shonen-esque game where you play teenagers fighting in a war against aliens. Notable in that it mechanically tracks romantic relationships and penalizes you for screwing them up.

Burning Wheel - Needs no introduction, I don't think. Notable for an extremely convoluted chargen system and being just fun to read. One of the few RPG books where reading the rules is pleasurable in and of itself instead of just work trying to understand how the game is supposed to work.

Dawn of Worlds - More of a collaborative worldbuilding game than an RPG, the players are all Gods working to bring their chosen people to supremacy. You build the world using a point-by mechanic where the same thing costs differently depending on what phase the game is in.

Dogs in the Vineyard - The opening blurb describes the game better than I could: "The shopkeeper from back east? His wife ain't really his wife. He's the procurer and she's the available woman. Their marriage is a front. Your nephew is fourteen years old. He's been stealing money from his father to visit this woman. You brother's in a bitter rage, humiliated by his son's thievery and grieving his son's lost innocence. He's going to shoot her. What do you do?"

Dungeons: the Dragoning - Toss Planescape, WH40k, nWoD, and Exalted into a blender and what do you get? A little parody RPG. Others seem to like it though I personally don't see the appeal, but my sense of humor is more in-tune with fart jokes and surrealism than... whatever Dungeons the Dragoning is supposed to be. Mentioned for completeness.

Dungeon World - Far as I'm concerned, this is what DnD 5e is trying to be but desperately fails. If I ever decided to (seriously) run a dungeon crawling campaign again, it'd be either this or Lamentations of the Flame Princess (below).

FATAL - Yes, I said all the RPGs I've read. Including the bad ones. Needless to say, spare yourself the SAN loss.

FATE - Do I really need to explain this one? 2e is my go-to system for hacking and running.

Final Fantasy D6 - A love letter to the classic JRPG series. Made by someone in GITP's very own homebrew section, I believe. Captures the heart of the classic entries better than Squeenix themselves ever could, I think.

Fiasco - Do I need to explain this one too?

Heroes Against Darkness - The author describes it as a blend of ideas from D&D 3.5 and 4E, while improving upon both formulas. It seems to accomplish what it means to do well enough, but there are just so many D&D-likes out there vying for my attention that I've yet to give her a try.

Lady Blackbird - A stand-alone adventure module game, but the mechanics are solid enough (and general enough) to be easily adaptable. Though it's a hack of The Shadows of Yesterday, it's different enough to count as its own game, I think. (Traits and tags instead of skills, only 1 dice pool instead of 3, and keys are pretty different. Also, the task resolution mechanic's been completely gutted and replaced.)

Lamentations of the Flame Princess - Yet another AD&D retroclone, but it wins my affections through presentation, style, and tone where most of the other retroclones fall flat.

Legend (Rule of Cool) - Again, do I really need to explain this one here? It purports to be a D&D-like, but it's pretty radically different from what WotC does with the formula. But it's also a work in progress and you can see the negative space where things are missing, though it's fully playable as-is with a little improvisation work.

Microscope - Another collaborative worldbuilding game rather than an RPG proper, though pretty different from how Dawn of Worlds works. You build a timeline through a non-linear process (jumping back and forth in time to define events at will) instead of building up a map through a linear sequence of turns. Pretty fun.

The Mustang - ...What? Huh? What the heck is this? I've read the rules more times than I can count and I've even played it once, and I still have no clue what this is or what it's supposed to be. Unlike GHOST/ECHO though I don't really like it.

Myth & Magic - An AD&D 2e retroclone. It's a nice effort I guess, but yawn.

Old School Hack - Another AD&D retroclone, but this one takes things in a rather... different direction. Very, very rules-light and simple, and it replaces ability scores with bits of your character's personality like Committment, Daring, and Cunning. Makes that whole "Ability scores as roleplaying tool" crock actually make a smidgen of sense. My third-favorite such game, after Dungeon World and LotFP.

Risus - Simple, easy, but really I'd rather run Wushu for this sort of thing. It also claims to be a "comedy" game and yet it has no mechanics aside from task resolution, unless the encouragement to be silly helps.

Swords & Wizardry - Charts! Charts everywhere! Another D&D retroclone, this one being an utter copy/paste of all the worst aspects of OD&D with none charm, style, or common sense. Also, too many god damned charts everywhere. I swear there's not a single page in the book that doesn't see the need to have at least one chart on it.

Grinner
2012-12-18, 04:47 PM
Craft (Cheese), how are you so cool? :smallbiggrin:

Totally Guy
2012-12-19, 04:26 AM
In addition to Craft (Cheese)'s very good list:

InSpectres - A game that makes ghostbusters happen. When you succeed you say what happens. Implicatations of this are terrifying when the player tells the GM what clue they found and what it means!

Lacuna - The Inception RPG before Inception was wirtten. You dive into the minds of criminals to eliminate hostile parts of their personality. But can you be so sure this wasn't how you were made?

Poison'd - An adult game of pirates. The nasty kind. The character's stats are shaped by the the bad things they have done and the bad things that are done to them. The old captain has been killed by poison and the king's spy that did it was caught. Who'll be the new captain now?



(Gotta say that DW and LotFP are also my favourite games for the D&D kind of game.)

CarpeGuitarrem
2012-12-19, 10:54 AM
I haven't played it yet, but I've got Hollowpoint coming in the mail. A game of gritty ultraviolence based around Greg Stolze's One Roll Engine.

Speaking of which, A Dirty World strikes me as pretty indie, and it's quite good as well--film noir focused around how a character is beaten and worn down.