I Want To Play A Different RPG That Isn't D&D And Pathfinder

[Bartmanhomer]

Hey everybody. It's been awhile since I posted here. I'm looking a different RPG that isn't D&D and Pathfinder. The type of game that I'm looking for is more roleplaying and less action and fighting. Can anyone recommend any games that's good for me please?

[Koo Rehtorb]

Can you be more specific?

[Bartmanhomer]

Can you be more specific?

Something that's is more dramatic or comedy. But with more roleplaying and little less fighting.

[Koo Rehtorb]

Play Poison'd.

[flond]

Something that's is more dramatic or comedy. But with more roleplaying and little less fighting.

That's a very broad category but...ok.

I'll throw in chuubos marvelous wish granting engine, which is a diceless game made in part for pastoral sort of play. It's designed to focus on a feelings and moments more than combat, and while it has cool powers tends to use them more for comedy or drama.

And I'll also throw in freemarket. A card based system set on a space station in the future, it's focused on building things, and due to future tech, killing someone is only useful if you're doing it as art or want them to forget the recent past.

[Lorsa]

Something that's is more dramatic or comedy. But with more roleplaying and little less fighting.

Do you mean that the rules have less combat mechanics, or that the play itself is less focused on fighting? Because any game can have a lot of fighting, or little, depending on the GM and the campaign.

I mean, the reason why you are asked to be more specific, is that there are tons of games that is "more roleplaying and less fighting" compared to D&D. The second biggest title, for example, World of Darkness, would fit that requirement (can also be played either for drama or comedy).

Then you also have games like Fate, or Cortex, or if you're looking for fantasy Burning Wheel, there's Eclipse Phase if you want transhumanist survival horror, you have Ars Magic for medieval wizards etc etc. There's so many RPGs out there that the phrase "more roleplaying and less fighting than D&D" basically describes every game other than D&D.

Maybe this can help you: https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-l...paper-rpg_s-v1

[Bartmanhomer]

Oh, I love the Vampire RPG Game. That sounds like a game that I want to try.

[Andor13]

7th Sea is a fun Swashbuckler and Sorcery system set in a quasi-historical pseudo-europe. Magic is specific to each country and restricted to nobility (and by-lows.) To the Vestenmayar will be working with runes, while an Avalonian employs glamour and a Vodacci Fate-Witch... well, you can probably figure that one out.

Ars Magica tends to be RP heavy, but maybe not so much comedy, although you can always sic the faries on any mage who takes themselves too seriously.

An anime system like Teenagers From Outer Space or Big Eyes Small Mouth might serve although campaign focus will heavily determine how much combat you see.

... I realizing that all my suggestions are old. It's been a while since I looked at the new game market.

[Anymage]

The various iterations of Vampire have a couple of important caveats. They define interesting settings with no way of encouraging the players to go along with that, and the rules engine can be a little clunky at times. On the upside, everybody does get magic powers, and which powers you invest your xp in does allow for more distinct feeling character builds. Ironically, the best version of the vampire ruleset I've seen is the current version of Exalted. Which is about mythic heroes, so does tend to involve a fair amount of adventuring and fighting.

If you want to take a giant leap in the other direction, Toon is nice for being easy to pick up and get into. You play cartoon characters. The rules openly encourage acting cartoonishly, so people tend to play along.

[Lorsa]

Oh, I love the Vampire RPG Game. That sounds like a game that I want to try.

The old Vampire: The Masquerade has issues with being... well, old (design wise), and is criticized for having a very heavy meta-story that tables are supposed to follow.

The new Vampire: The Requiem has issues with not being the old Vampire and is criticized for not having any meta-story to follow. The revised Requiem (Blood & Smoke or 2.0) is one that I consider the best one.

[Arbane]

Here's a whole bunch of suggestions, and they're all free or very cheap.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

If you like Vampire, look into Urban Shadows; it's a game about the politics of different supernatural creatures in a city, and the mechanics are snappy enough to make tons of intrigue happen in just a single session.

I got to play a hapless wannabe scriptwriter in LA who fell in with a werewolf pack leader and got menaced by mages, to the point where he ambushed the mage meeting and shot the lead mage in a fit of rage. It was glorious.

[Anonymouswizard]

I'm going to recommend Unknown Armies. It has an amazing setting (despite being yet another 'modern day+magick'), inventive magick (it's postmodern), and a combat section which begins by listing sic ways to avoid combat (because it's swingy and deadly). Oh and magic manages to skirt the line of being powerful enough to be useful and limited enough not to dominate the game even if one Adept class can generate five significant Charges a day.

Plus one type of Adept gets a Traffic Accident spell. What more could you want.

[kivzirrum]

I don't know if this is the sort of thing you're interested in, but Blades in the Dark is pretty cool.

[Bartmanhomer]

I don't know if this is the sort of thing you're interested in, but Blades in the Dark is pretty cool.

I'm very open with so many games. Tell me more about the Blades In The Dark.

[Manga Shoggoth]

If Toon! is still going it is great for very fast (and hilarious) games. Can be played with as much and as little combat as you want.

[Kaptin Keen]

Hey everybody. It's been awhile since I posted here. I'm looking a different RPG that isn't D&D and Pathfinder. The type of game that I'm looking for is more roleplaying and less action and fighting. Can anyone recommend any games that's good for me please?

My opinion: Every RPG has huge problems. The huge problems of D&D are well known, which is it's main advantage as a system.

Others have less well known problems, simply due to the system being known by fewer people/players. When I branch out from D&D, it feels like the problems of most other systems are more glaring than those of D&D. For that reason, I tend to prefer games that are either really good fluff and story wise - as in, the setting is enormously well written. Or games where the rules are more sort of loose guidelines.

The best games I've found are Shadowrun/Earthdawn, and Vampire: The Masquerade. All three are frankly somewhat awful, but still provide excellent, fun games. Despite the systems being, as I said, awful. Three quarters of Shadowrun is basically inplayable.

[Segev]

I am a big fan of Exalted, which is designed to be over-the-top and has lots of ways to use mechanics outside of combat (though how good those mechanics are is...variable and subjective).

BESM (3e is the best of the editions) is a good generic system. Built for anime, it really is more general than that. It is breakable, being a simple-ish points-based system, but it's flexible and no more breakable than 3e D&D or PF.

Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) is set in magic ancient China/Japan (China in size and its imperial house structure, Japan by its clan structure that rules most of the land), and while most of its mechanics focus around combat, it has at least some effort at mechanics for handling the high levels of social interaction and politics it is meant to enable.

IF you want very rules-lite, RISUS is a free system you can web search for by name and find. You give yourself a handful of traits and assign dice from your pool of 10 to them as your character generation. IIRC, it's dice pool/count successes based, and is more a quick resolution-of-conflict system for a nearly freeform sort of gameplay than it is a solid game system in and of itself.

[kivzirrum]

I'm very open with so many games. Tell me more about the Blades In The Dark.

You've got the right idea--I find that gaming is a much more enjoyable hobby when one keeps an open mind! Blades in the Dark is a sort of dark fantasy urban setting, where the players play as a gang of rogues/thieves/general scoundrels. The rules are heavily streamlined in that direction, but they emphasize roleplaying and have some pretty clever elements. The rules are based on a heavily modified version of PbtA, which is not usually my favorite system, but Blades is very much its own thing, and I think it's really fun.

[Friv]

Blades is phenomenal. I particularly like the way that its rules enhance faction politics and claiming turf for your gang; it's an aspect that is missing from a lot of things.

(I will also second Chuubo's, although I'll note that it can be a hella mess the first time you play it, especially if D&D and its derivatives are your only real RPG experience. It just comes at play from such a weird direction, and is written by someone for whom that direction was second nature and thus didn't need a lot of explanation, that it can take players a while to really get it.)

[comk59]

I'm very open with so many games. Tell me more about the Blades In The Dark.

If I had to sum it up in one sentence, I'd call Blades a grimdark Dishonored with a focus on building up your gang, your reputation, and planning heists.

I mean there's a LOT more to it than that, but it's how I'd pitch it to a friend in passing.

[Bohandas]

Something that's is more dramatic or comedy. But with more roleplaying and little less fighting.

Paranoia for comedy and drama, Toon for just comedy.

[Mutazoia]

Paranoia for comedy and drama, Toon for just comedy.

Don't forget Teenagers from Outer Space!

[Nifft]

You could always play 1e AD&... wait, no.

Okay, how about Starfind... nevermind.

There's always BECM... oh right.

Maybe take a look at Fourth Ed... uh, oops.

Damn, what games aren't D&D or Pathfinder?

[Berenger]

For more or less classic "adventurer party" fantasy: The Dark Eye (caveat: I'm german and use the original version, I don't know how extensive, well-made and available the english translations are).

Games by White Wolf Publishing in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_...g#RPG_Products). I personally played Vampire, Werewolf and Scion. The combat engine is a bit clunky and it is quite easy to min-max characters with extremely low or high combat efficiency if desired, but I think this is fine because the non-combat stuff tends to be the actual campaign focus instead of "filler" you have to get over with to get to the "action".

Shadowrun has an absolutely great setting if you are into a blend of magic and modern tech. The rules are... not bad, but extremely granular and complicated. You have to spend some serious time to get familiar with them, so I specifically do not recommend it if you just want a change of pace for a one shot or a few sessions.

[Blaede]

If you want to play something more dramatic, try Warhammer !

[comk59]

Something that's is more dramatic or comedy. But with more roleplaying and little less fighting.

Oh, I can't believe I forgot this, but Mouseguard is pretty great at both comedy and drama, and is all around an excellent system. Especially if you like Redwall.

[Yerok LliGcam]

7Dsytem.

it's an awesome dice system that's genre agnostic, so you can do vampire, star wars, D&D, or any other theme you can think of.

the thing about the rules is that the skills are all "build your own" type, so no classes, and no levels, you just get skills more... skilled. haha

but the thing i love about the game is that because the system doesn't focus on abilities that allow you to hit something harder, they encourage all sorts of stuff.

here's the base skills that branch out into literally whatever you and the DM decide falls into that category:

physical
mental
social
creative
senses
education
emotion
constitution

so for example, you might earn the two base ranks (through 5 successes) in education by all sorts of checks like remembering history, or how locks work, or how to help someone recover from a cold.

then you can branch out your education into all sorts of things

the art of assassination
the art of medicine
the art of _______

the character development in my experience DMing about 3 campaigns using this system now, encourage all sorts of flavor.

i still have my die hard run in swinging players enjoying the physcial and constitution trees
but i have one guy who LOVES the creative tree, where he's branched out into crafting and smithing and now makes traps that take down his enemies.

you can even watch me play a game of it on youtube where the creator ran a game for me (i'm one of his patrons on patreon) just look up oslo and the slitherers or 7dsystem on youtube.

enjoy!

[Mutazoia]

If you want comedy AND drama, you could always try this

[detritus]

Paranoia :)