Different RPG systems

[Zuras]

Question for GMs out there who have experience with multiple systems.

Are there any particular systems that you've used that you felt gave you a completely different viewpoint on how RPGs work? I've been playing a lot of Fate over the last year, and the way it pares down the system gave me a much better sense when the story was dragging or when there were pacing problems. Now when I'm running my D&D 5e games, I have a much higher comfort level with my players improv--not because I ever disliked giving them narrative freedom, but after a year of playing Fate, I have much greater confidence in my feel for when the story is veering from our collective reality narrative.

What games have opened your eyes the most to new possibilities? I'm asking because I'm not familiar with exactly how different other games like the Storyteller System, HERO, and others are from D&D--I've played GURPS before too, and I happily mine it for mechanical ideas at times, but it didn't really change my perspective on D&D, the way Fate did.

[Telok]

Running supers games put me more in tune with keeping an eye on player expectations and style.

Specifically there are people who learned on D&D and can't seem to set aside certain D&D-isms, like "kill & loot = success, all else is failure" or "we need a tank & healer or we can't play". Leading them to try to play all games as though they were D&D, even after months of regular play in a different system.

Unfortunately I don't have a solution for it beyond not playing non-D&D with those people.

[NichG]

Nobilis is just very different than anything else I know of. There are a lot of assumptions or frameworks that other games build around, such as the role of randomness, resolution systems, balance, keeping things grounded or realistic, being specific about what characters can and cannot do, etc ideas which all just go out the window with Nobilis, and yet it works.

[Wraith]

Playing Mouseguard was a revelation for me, and my TTRPG-ing career. I started out in AD&D, played a lot of 3rd Edition, and V:tM, and SLA Industries, and Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, and the thing that all of those systems have in common is that the intent is to roll big numbers on the dice until the baddies stop rolling dice back at you - this is 'victory'.

Mouseguard has a very, very different system that requires the players to determine not just "I win" but to determine a compromise between differing goals. For example, if my goal is "kill the guy" and their goal is "to kill me", we roll dice and play cards and THEN compare each player's result to determine an outcome depending on whether it was a narrow victory (or loss) or an overwhelming one.

For example, if "kill you vs kill me" ends with me winning 7/10 rounds, drawing 1/10 and losing 2/10, that is a convincing victory but not an utterly unresisted one - I don't kill the opponent (that would require 10/10 successes), but perhaps I severely wound them and have them at my mercy. Compare this to 4 wins, 2 draw, 4 loses, and the fight ends in a stalemate where both of us are battered but neither has a clear advantage.
The intention of the system is to drive a story - you state your goal, your opponent states theirs, and then you work out something like a compromise to decide how the story ends, based on how close the conflict was.

I like this a lot. It reframed everything I knew about conflict and how to end fights - or even just verbal arguments, as Mouseguard uses the same system to end all of it's conflicts, just with different stats involved - in a way that was more interesting than just "everybody dies or runs away". I mean, I *knew* you could do that while playing D&D, but to see it as a core element of a game really drilled it in and inspired me to think of new, less linear ways to run and play games.

[Max_Killjoy]

Question for GMs out there who have experience with multiple systems.

Are there any particular systems that you've used that you felt gave you a completely different viewpoint on how RPGs work? I've been playing a lot of Fate over the last year, and the way it pares down the system gave me a much better sense when the story was dragging or when there were pacing problems. Now when I'm running my D&D 5e games, I have a much higher comfort level with my players improv--not because I ever disliked giving them narrative freedom, but after a year of playing Fate, I have much greater confidence in my feel for when the story is veering from our collective reality narrative.

What games have opened your eyes the most to new possibilities? I'm asking because I'm not familiar with exactly how different other games like the Storyteller System, HERO, and others are from D&D--I've played GURPS before too, and I happily mine it for mechanical ideas at times, but it didn't really change my perspective on D&D, the way Fate did.

Playing WEG d6 Star Wars and HERO/Champions fairly early in my gaming "career" really blew up the notion that things like levels, classes, etc were necessary or even good.

[Zuras]

Playing WEG d6 Star Wars and HERO/Champions fairly early in my gaming "career" really blew up the notion that things like levels, classes, etc were necessary or even good.

How so? My experiences with entirely skill based systems definitely showed me how strict the limitations of class and level systems are, but also gave me more appreciation for character classes as a concept to facilitate teamwork and ensuring every character has a useful role they understand. The analysis paralysis new players hit when trying to build a new GURPS character can be a significant issue (especially for finding new players). It’s comparatively much easier for a 12 year old playing their first D&D game to understand what they’re supposed to do with their barbarian.

Did you run into those sorts of issues in your HERO and d6 games, or did your groups have a solid grasp on party building dynamics and character roles from the beginning?

[Anonymouswizard]

Playing WEG d6 Star Wars and HERO/Champions fairly early in my gaming "career" really blew up the notion that things like levels, classes, etc were necessary or even good.

Personally for me it was Savage Worlds followed by Unknown Armies 2e that killed the appeal of classes for me. M&M didn't do it because of a mixture of character creation being fairly in depth mechanically and the GM not actually bothering to learn some things like how PL limits actually work (which led to characters being very samey). But UA with it's simple haracter creation more focused on what makes your character tick (with the focus only being stronger in 3e), plus it's really strong flavour and down to earth feel made me reconsider a lot of what I found important

Never had a problem with party building, most groups I've played with grasped 'build different archetypes' very quickly. I've had more problems with interchangeable dwarven fighters in D&D than I've had with role overlap in point build systems.

As a side note, Dark Heresy is what made me more accepting of randomness in character creation, but only when it's actually player choice and you're not compelled into it with bonus XP or Fate Points. I'd still be against random stat rolls in any other setting, but I'm now more willing to randomly determine class/career and race/background bgefore assigning stats (even though DH did it the other way round).

Oh, Unknown Armies followed by Fate also managed to kick me out of the 'more rules is good rules' mentality. The fewer exceptions I find in your game the better, justt give me some broad mechanics that apply to everything

[Vahnavoi]

I've done freeform play-by-post almost as long as I've done tabletop - no game master, no dice, no party, no mechanical conflict resolution. The differences between various tabletop rulesets are fairly pedestrian in comparison.

I've also done live-action roleplaying and escape rooms - conflict resolution by actual physical action. Again, differences between various tabletop rulesets are fairly pedestrian in comparison.

I've seen some tabletop players argue those are not roleplaying games. Those players are wrong. They are roleplaying games allright - but they are different hobbies. If that's confusing, consider: would you consider football and handball to be the same hobby? I wouldn't.

One thing this has taught me: there are tabletop players who say they want less rules, less dice, less GM interference - as if that is the key to achieving roleplaying nirvana. It isn't. Indeed, I'm convinced these people haven't actually done freeform, if they had, they'd shut up about it.

On the tabletop side, I started with Cyberpunk 2020, then moved to Basic and Expert D&D, then Middle-Earth Roleplaying Game, then Praedor, then CODA Lord of the Rings, then Lamentations of the Flame Princess... interspersed with dozens of games using homemade systems by myself and others, a dozen smaller local publications and I don't care to name, and a good number of bigger publications that I read through but didn't play much (d6 Star Wars, Twilight 2000, Paranoia etc.).

What this has taught me that even if you stay within a very traditional set of tabletop rules - say, Basic D&D versus Lamentations of the Flame Princess - you can get wildly different games exploring different themes and genres just by changing how the game is run on the GM's side. There are tabletop players who say you can't do low magic with D&D, or can't do horror with D&D, can't do player-versus-player in D&D - those people are wrong. Or rather: they are fixating on completely wrong parts of the rules for their argument.

Related, lot of game design even in published tabletop products is a combination of uncritically derivative combined with naive attempts to dodge past failures. I haven't personally played them, but everything I've heard of White Wolf games (Vampire, Werewolf etc.) from people who did peg them as posterboy examples for this. The game designers didn't want dice and math-head min-maxers ruining their narrative of personal horror... so what did they do? Remove dice and ability scores? Or make a dice pool system that only the math-head min-maxers really understood? The LARP crowd did more innovative and interesting things with Vampire than the tabletop crowd ever did.

I've played my share of FATE derivatives and Powered-by-the-Apocalypse at conventions and all I can say about them is that they offered nothing groundbreaking or particularly innovative to me. I seriously do not get the people who tout these things as the best thing since sliced bread.

[Cluedrew]

I started with free-form role-playing, from that I have learned that you don't need any rules to play. Roll for Shoes also convinced me that you don't have to have a lot of rules once you have some.

The biggest single revelation though is when I played a Powered by the Apocalypse game (back when they were Apocalypse World hacks) for the first time. And it was run (and written) by someone who really understood it. It was my first introduction to a truly different role-playing paradigm. Not sold on the entire package but there are some things I really do like and there are bits and bobs I have definitely carried forward. It did take me a while to unpack everything even to really understand how the underlying design had really shifted.

Nothing else really had the same impact because that sparked a search for other paradigms. I did find some, the other example that comes to mind is the toolbox system.

Specifically there are people who learned on D&D and can't seem to set aside certain D&D-isms,

Stuff like this is why D&D came up in the worst role-playing games thread for its effect on the hobby. D&D's effect probably isn't quite a net negative but there are days where I see where that is coming from.

[Zuras]

I've played my share of FATE derivatives and Powered-by-the-Apocalypse at conventions and all I can say about them is that they offered nothing groundbreaking or particularly innovative to me. I seriously do not get the people who tout these things as the best thing since sliced bread.

First off, as a Fate fan I must remind you that Fate is the best RPG system since *sandwiches*, not sliced bread, as indeed for folks like us it provides the perfect amount of rules “bread” to contain the meat of the story, unlike you freeform savages who let all that narrative slop around like a bowl of delicious Wendy’s chili.

More seriously, there are lots of people out there who want to run games but need a structure for it. Games like Fate give you a much lighter structure than D&D, but most people need that structure. It’s like meetings—not every group needs to follow Robert’s Rules of Order, but you need some rules detailing how you take turns talking and how decisions are made unless it’s an extremely chill group or there is a lone supreme facilitator with dictatorial powers.

I can’t disagree that Fate is often underwhelming at conventions, though—I don’t think any game like that really starts cooking till everyone is comfortable with the narrative conventions/operating space in the game, which usually takes more than one session to get going.

[Max_Killjoy]

How so? My experiences with entirely skill based systems definitely showed me how strict the limitations of class and level systems are, but also gave me more appreciation for character classes as a concept to facilitate teamwork and ensuring every character has a useful role they understand. The analysis paralysis new players hit when trying to build a new GURPS character can be a significant issue (especially for finding new players). It’s comparatively much easier for a 12 year old playing their first D&D game to understand what they’re supposed to do with their barbarian.

Did you run into those sorts of issues in your HERO and d6 games, or did your groups have a solid grasp on party building dynamics and character roles from the beginning?

First, I don't agree with the idea that "character roles" or "niches" are important. Restricted roles and protected niches won't foster teamwork, just attempts to solve the task at hand with the tools each character has, IME. I care far more that each player is invested in and having fun with their character, and that all characters are competent in at least some of the things that the campaign will deal with. D&D and its wargame and dungeon crawl history, to a large degree is as much the source of this idea that classes and defined roles are needed, as it is the classes themselves. If you're not engaged in tactical, tile-based, front-row-back-row combat in a confined space as a central feature of the gaming, a lot of these assumptions don't hold up.

(Big point of disagreement with some other gamers, I actively hate the "just a guy" who gets dragged along and never becomes anything but "just a guy" -- give us a reason why the rest of the PCs haven't dropped you at a village or roadside inn or the last spaceport... don't try to be the permanent bystander or plucky sidekick or damsel in distress or "I just want to go home to my bakery" character, that only works in fiction.)

Second, WEG d6 at least is a simple enough system that it doesn't require a ton of player experience to build characters -- plus it comes with archetypes for beginners if they don't want to build from scratch.

Third, a ton of this comes down to the GM being willing to help with builds, you don't just slide the book across the table to a new player and say "first session next Saturday, make a character".

[Jason]

Legend of the Five Rings showed me that a game can still be great despite weak mechanics if the setting is compelling enough.

Traveller convinced me that random character generation (including possibly dying during character generation) can be a lot of fun even in serious games.

FFG's Star Wars finally convinced me that terrible mechanics can in fact ruin a game even if I really like the setting and the people I'm playing with.

[Zuras]

First, I don't agree with the idea that "character roles" or "niches" are important. Restricted roles and protected niches won't foster teamwork, just attempts to solve the task at hand with the tools each character has, IME. I care far more that each player is invested in and having fun with their character, and that all characters are competent in at least some of the things that the campaign will deal with. D&D and its wargame and dungeon crawl history, to a large degree is as much the source of this idea that classes and defined roles are needed, as it is the classes themselves. If you're not engaged in tactical, tile-based, front-row-back-row combat in a confined space as a central feature of the gaming, a lot of these assumptions don't hold up.

(Big point of disagreement with some other gamers, I actively hate the "just a guy" who gets dragged along and never becomes anything but "just a guy" -- give us a reason why the rest of the PCs haven't dropped you at a village or roadside inn or the last spaceport... don't try to be the permanent bystander or plucky sidekick or damsel in distress or "I just want to go home to my bakery" character, that only works in fiction.)

Second, WEG d6 at least is a simple enough system that it doesn't require a ton of player experience to build characters -- plus it comes with archetypes for beginners if they don't want to build from scratch.

Third, a ton of this comes down to the GM being willing to help with builds, you don't just slide the book across the table to a new player and say "first session next Saturday, make a character".

I wouldn’t say roles or niches have to be important, but I definitely find there is a very common sort of player out there whose first response to the GM informing them there is something in the game world to interact with is to look at their character sheet for the appropriate tool/skill. For those players stuff like classes or archetypes (in GURPS they’re called templates) are extremely helpful.

I’m totally on board with your point that no game rules are going to help situations where some of the players don’t want to participate with the narrative conventions. Why do so many people want to play quirky unicyclist jugglers rolling through the dungeons of doom?

[Anonymouswizard]

Stuff like this is why D&D came up in the worst role-playing games thread for its effect on the hobby. D&D's effect probably isn't quite a net negative but there are days where I see where that is coming from.

Huh. I think I was one of the ones who's nominated it for that exact reason. Also about how it makes it hard torun Unknown Armies or whatever happens to be the thing I want to run this year.

(Big point of disagreement with some other gamers, I actively hate the "just a guy" who gets dragged along and never becomes anything but "just a guy" -- give us a reason why the rest of the PCs haven't dropped you at a village or roadside inn or the last spaceport... don't try to be the permanent bystander or plucky sidekick or damsel in distress or "I just want to go home to my bakery" character, that only works in fiction.)

Agreed. Also the 'wandering barbarian with no tribe, no ancestral axe, and no bethrothed' deal. I want characters who have reasons to drag the party to places I haven't dangled a BBEG in front of.Sure I've done it myself, but it led to my worst characters.

I now start every session 0 by creating a relationship map. Every PC must be connected to atr minimum two other PCs and one NPC or organisation. It makes the world feel alive and gives met a lot more characters to play with.

I wouldn’t say roles or niches have to be important, but I definitely find there is a very common sort of player out there whose first response to the GM informing them there is something in the game world to interact with is to look at their character sheet for the appropriate tool/skill. For those players stuff like classes or archetypes (in GURPS they’re called templates) are extremely helpful.

I’m totally on board with your point that no game rules are going to help situations where some of the players don’t want to participate with the narrative conventions. Why do so many people want to play quirky unicyclist jugglers rolling through the dungeons of doom?

I'd argue that even here simpler enough character creation makes it a nonissue. Plus as the number of tools decreases their applicability increases, I find having the tool be 'fire magic' instead of 'firebolt/fireball/meteor swarm' actually helps with picking the tool as it moves from being a screwdriver to being a screwdriver set.

[kyoryu]

GURPS.

Burning Wheel

Fate

PbtA games

I've seen some tabletop players argue those are not roleplaying games. Those players are wrong. They are roleplaying games allright - but they are different hobbies. If that's confusing, consider: would you consider football and handball to be the same hobby? I wouldn't.

I draw the "roleplaying game" line very widely.

One thing this has taught me: there are tabletop players who say they want less rules, less dice, less GM interference - as if that is the key to achieving roleplaying nirvana. It isn't. Indeed, I'm convinced these people haven't actually done freeform, if they had, they'd shut up about it.

I think that there's an ideal amount of structure for most people. Or more like an ideal band of it.

I think there's also some key binary differences - whether the rules act as the "physics engine" of the game, or whether they're there to help resolve ambiguity (physics engines games *also* resolve ambiguity, of course). So I think people say things like "rules light" when they mean a slightly different way of approaching how you run games at all.

What this has taught me that even if you stay within a very traditional set of tabletop rules - say, Basic D&D versus Lamentations of the Flame Princess - you can get wildly different games exploring different themes and genres just by changing how the game is run on the GM's side. There are tabletop players who say you can't do low magic with D&D, or can't do horror with D&D, can't do player-versus-player in D&D - those people are wrong. Or rather: they are fixating on completely wrong parts of the rules for their argument.

While this is true, most games aim themselves at a certain set of experiences. They do those well. You can change how that comes off with presentation, and you can houserule when that's insufficient. But at the end of the day, while any system can do anything, there's going to be some things that require more tinkering.

I've played my share of FATE derivatives and Powered-by-the-Apocalypse at conventions and all I can say about them is that they offered nothing groundbreaking or particularly innovative to me. I seriously do not get the people who tout these things as the best thing since sliced bread.

I'd be happy to run a game for you.

I don't know that they're necessarily groundbreaking, overall. I think they're very well put together packages of some things that hit specific targets pretty well. PbtA is interesting to me in how it puts the conversation at the table squarely in the center of the game design. Unlike a lot of games where the rules are the underpinning of the game, and you talk about what's happening as a secondary activity, in PbtA the rules are centered on the conversation itself. It's the driver.

Fate is similar in a lot of ways, but one of the interesting things to me about Fate is how it pushes the idea of "what do you care about?" front and center, and also how it often prompts for creativity and cool moments.

More seriously, there are lots of people out there who want to run games but need a structure for it. Games like Fate give you a much lighter structure than D&D, but most people need that structure. It’s like meetings—not every group needs to follow Robert’s Rules of Order, but you need some rules detailing how you take turns talking and how decisions are made unless it’s an extremely chill group or there is a lone supreme facilitator with dictatorial powers.

I think this is a reasonable statement. I think that a lot of more traditional games (and, uh, i started playing around '82 so I'm not pointing my fingers at them and making disapproving noises) were facilitated by that "one person" model. I wouldn't go so far as dictatorial because of the connotations, though.

I can’t disagree that Fate is often underwhelming at conventions, though—I don’t think any game like that really starts cooking till everyone is comfortable with the narrative conventions/operating space in the game, which usually takes more than one session to get going.

I've had pretty good results with one shots, myself.

[Zuras]

I'd argue that even here simpler enough character creation makes it a nonissue. Plus as the number of tools decreases their applicability increases, I find having the tool be 'fire magic' instead of 'firebolt/fireball/meteor swarm' actually helps with picking the tool as it moves from being a screwdriver to being a screwdriver set.

I agree that vague skill descriptions work better as tools in the hands of experienced players, but haven’t you run into players who just aren’t able to quickly access their mental supply of tropes to come up with concrete ideas for solutions, or alternately, have option paralysis?

In my experience there are plenty of players who will just make giant boxing gloves even if you give them a green lantern power ring and tell them it can create anything.

I've had pretty good results with one shots, myself.

Did you do anything specific in terms of nailing down genre conventions or the narrative space beforehand? I don’t doubt that it’s possible to get everyone on the same page without a session zero, but I would think there was significant prep ahead of time to make that happen.

Or maybe the people you meet at cons are just all awesome? That’s not even snark, as every new person I’ve ever DMed for at cons was awesome and receptive to the the experience, so I could definitely see players just rolling with the experience.

[Anonymouswizard]

I agree that vague skill descriptions work better as tools in the hands of experienced players, but haven’t you run into players who just aren’t able to quickly access their mental supply of tropes to come up with concrete ideas for solutions, or alternately, have option paralysis?

Yes, and I tend to find that reducing options help-s. It's why I hate playing D&D, either I'm a mundane with too few tools or a magician with too many narrowly defined tools. For most players there's a sweet spot in number and breadth that reduces decision paralysis, and IME that tends to be on the 'fewer, more versatile' end.

In my experience there are plenty of players who will just make giant boxing gloves even if you give them a green lantern power ring and tell them it can create anything.

So what? If I let a player have fire magic I have no problem if all they do is throw fire around instead of using it to inflame passions or whatever. Plus I'm not arguing for 'do anything' limits encourage creativity, I'm just arguing that players should be looking at three or four fields of magic they can access rather than forty prepared spells.

It's the exact reason that D&D has been going for a smaller list of skills, and I think it works well when applied to powers. Sure, freeform powers lead to more in-play adjudication, but also leads to fewer problems with the player not being able to decide which of thirty six different spells they want to cast.


Plus it makes character creation faster. I don't have three hours to dedicate to an individual character any more (even in a session zero, there's other things I'll want to be establishing).

[Max_Killjoy]

I agree that vague skill descriptions work better as tools in the hands of experienced players, but haven’t you run into players who just aren’t able to quickly access their mental supply of tropes to come up with concrete ideas for solutions, or alternately, have option paralysis?

In my experience there are plenty of players who will just make giant boxing gloves even if you give them a green lantern power ring and tell them it can create anything.

At least for me, I don't have an internal supply of tropes, so it often throws me off when people try to solve in-game problems with stuff that works in fiction. For me, it's always "how would this character solve this problem given their mentality and their abilities".

And IME when playing, option paralysis is far less of a problem than "man I could use _____ on this character right now".

[Zuras]

At least for me, I don't have an internal supply of tropes, so it often throws me off when people try to solve in-game problems with stuff that works in fiction. For me, it's always "how would this character solve this problem given their mentality and their abilities".

And IME when playing, option paralysis is far less of a problem than "man I could use _____ on this character right now".

I’m probably projecting a bit there, then. I play mad gadgeteer and summoner characters quite a bit. I spout plausible sounding technobabble at the drop of a hat, and have to rein myself in quite a bit in more freeform systems, usually. Don’t ever let me near nanites or a holodeck.

Actually had a touching character moment in the last game I played when I finally made the Hunter/Killer droid on the team the disintegration ray he had been asking for all year right before the final showdown.

[Theoboldi]

I've seen some tabletop players argue those are not roleplaying games. Those players are wrong. They are roleplaying games allright - but they are different hobbies. If that's confusing, consider: would you consider football and handball to be the same hobby? I wouldn't.

This is something I find myself agreeing with more and more over the years. There's many different games I've read and played at this point, from D&D to Fate to PbtA, and weird experimental things like Mythender, and they often felt distinct enough that I genuinely could not call them the same kind of hobby except for in the very broadest of strokes. They are all roleplaying alright, but the details of what kind of aspects they emphasize and where the fun is supposed to be found are so different at times that it cannot be called the same hobby between two people with different preferences. In that way, roleplaying games have reached a level of diversity similar to other mediums like sports or video games or movies.

Which is also why I get very frustrated whenever somebody declares the first game they find that they prefer over D&D to be the pinnacle of game design. And which all of their friends should now also get excited over.

What's weird, I think, is that I have also picked up a greater admiration for games that are less tightly designed. The ones that might have a theme, but the rules aren't completely focused on making it happen. I've come to really enjoy the level of customizeability and freedom to pick and adjust where the game will go next that comes with them, especially if they are made to be generic. It's something that's made me go back to D&D lately, and even encouraged me to homebrew my own system for my own games.

The most eye-opening experience for me personally, was oddly enough with an MLP fangame I ran somewhere around ten years ago. Mostly because NPCs and anything else did not have any stats in that system beyond Difficulty Targets for individual checks that I decided on in the moment. While I didn't think each and every random side character needed to be statted out before that, the idea of PCs and NPCs not needing to work by the same rules was incredible. It allowed me to focus my preparation completely differently, and made me feel much more flexible when running the game than I had expected to be. Likewise, it also helped me put my focus more firmly on the player characters, as the rules simply no longer asked me to put the same kind of attention on both sides of the GM screen. To this day, that has stayed a definitive goal of mine when running games, to give the players proper feedback and clear results to what they are doing.

I've not always managed it, but I do try.

[Lacco]

There were several eye-openers for me. Incidentally, the first one was D&D (we played locally created systems similar to the oD&D, so 3.5 was actually second or third system that I found out):

I like the tropes/aesthetic/overall style a lot more than I like the game. Also: it reads much different than it plays.

The other one was Mouse Guard. When you come to the table with wrong expectations and the GM has a different set of expectations, you'll have to work twice as hard to get a good game. However, the part I loved the most was the thing I expected to dislike - solving an IC discussion with social combat mechanics. I enjoyed it too much.

Now, for those that know my gushings about Riddle of Steel, you may pass the next part.

My biggest eye opener was my favourite: Riddle of Steel. It had the same "feature" that D&D had: it read much different than it plays. It reads as a hell of a clunky system, with too many moving parts. Too complex to work at a table, too complicated to remember anything, too much tables to be able to pull off a round in less than ten minutes. I wanted to give it a try, because I wanted something more than D&D could offer, and I got it.

Also: it runs too good for how it reads.

The double-blind initiative mechanic will provide a jolt of chaos, and will put you on edge from the start. The combat pool mechanic together with me maneuvers will give you enough tactical choices and will put you right into your characters' shoes. The combat is mostly 1st person view - no battlemats, no "all-seeing player syndrome" - you can get a overview about what the others are doing, but you'll be most probably locked into your own 1 on 1 fight and will be trying to survive, so you'll check on your companions only after your foe was downed. A microcosmos of violence, just for you and your enemy. Or two. The death spiral is there, but with enough player skill can be managed. With a good GM, you'll learn the basics of the system in two or three combats, and once you get there, you'll see there's much more to it. The combat system makes melee combatants into the best thing you can play.

The best part was - the mechanics supported the fast, chaotic style of play, that comes with fighting for your life. It also supported teamwork (you helped each other, because that's how you survive, and you got rewarded for actions like that), tactics (you could win or lose the whole combat before first throw of dice), but was also fast, quite intuitive (after you got the basics down) and was exhilarating - combat was both a risk and a reward in itself.

For me, the best thing was to be able to switch my players' brains to a different mental setup. That was not only due to the game itself - it was mainly the possibility due to switching to a different game + different expectations.

[Vahnavoi]

I think that there's an ideal amount of structure for most people. Or more like an ideal band of it.

I, personally, find this to be a truism. That is: it's trivially true, but not useful. Why? Because type of structure matters more than amount. Granted, you touched on that with the difference you made between physics engines and simple conflict resolution.

While this is true, most games aim themselves at a certain set of experiences. They do those well. You can change how that comes off with presentation, and you can houserule when that's insufficient. But at the end of the day, while any system can do anything, there's going to be some things that require more tinkering.

I disagree with the idea that any system can do anything - I find it trivially false, and that's not what my point is about. My point is more that people often have somewhat petty ideas about what set of experiences can be done well. A lot of that comes down to mistaken ideas about rule priority. On a general level: Pareto's principle often applies to rules. 20% of rules cover 80% of game situations. Failure to understand this leads to naive arguments about what a game is for, based on just how much page count is spent on some silly thing.

For example: since AD&D days, majority of printed rules in D&D have been spell descriptions, magic item descriptions and monster descriptions. You can just forget 95% of those rules exist for purposes of making and running a scenario, and indeed, that is the practical way to run D&D games. Yet some poor bastard came up with the idea that since those rules are printed, they ought to feature in games, which leads to overstuffed games and settings.

This is at the root of claims like "D&D can't do horror" or "D&D can't do low magic". You "can't do horror", somehow, despite the books having every classic horror monster in them. Why? Because somewhere in the books, there's also a way to beat those monsters. How about, uh, just not having both in the same game? Similarly: you "can't do low magic" because you need magic items to defeat some of the monsters! How about, uh, not having those monsters in the low magic game? Or, if this is that horror scenario, having those monsters present without having the means to defeat them be present could very well be the damn point. You don't have to change the functional, core rules that you use for 80% of the actual playtime to do any of this. All it takes is for the DM to be prudent in cherry-picking what content they use for a scenario, which is what the rules advise the DM to do anyway!

Second example: "Don't split the party". What is this rule about? It's chiefly about tactics. It's a soft rule for situations where characters need to stick together to proceed in a scenario. Failure to heed that rule only needs to lead to characters losing that type a scenario. It doesn't need to be enforced on a metagame level by a game master! You don't have to make every scenario into one where characters need to sleep, eat and crap together to survive. Now, you may counter: "But holding separate turns for players is extra effort!" That's true, but it is only extra effort. Again, you don't need to change the functional, core rules you use to cover 80% of the play time to do it.

Third example: player versus player and uncertain co-operation. As above, this is mostly about tactics and the particular scenario the player characters are in. There's a situation that requires co-operation to solve, hence betrayal and adversarial play are undesired. Again, failure to co-operate only needs to lead to characters losing that type of a scenario. It doesn't need to be enforced on a metagame level by a game master. You don't need to kick players out of a group for playing poorly. You don't have to make every scenario into one requiring flawless co-operation. Again, you don't need to change the functional, core rules you use to cover 80% of play time to do this. Mostly you just need to abandon one, specific metagame conceit.

The joke about the second and third examples is that while they obviously originate from D&D, they have wormed their way to games that aren't D&D, even when tactical situations prevalent in D&D don't need to be included at all. Again, based on hearsay, White Wolf games, especially Vampire, strike me as a major offenders. So, they came up with a setting prominently featuring clan rivalries, and what did they do? Did they make the logical choice and base their game around backstabbery and keeping up appearances? Or did they bent over backwards to include a concept equivalent to a D&D party so that players would conveniently form vampire SWAT teams? You tell me.

I'd be happy to run a game for you.

Thanks for the offer, but I'm not looking for new games.

I don't know that they're necessarily groundbreaking, overall. I think they're very well put together packages of some things that hit specific targets pretty well. PbtA is interesting to me in how it puts the conversation at the table squarely in the center of the game design. Unlike a lot of games where the rules are the underpinning of the game, and you talk about what's happening as a secondary activity, in PbtA the rules are centered on the conversation itself. It's the driver.

Fate is similar in a lot of ways, but one of the interesting things to me about Fate is how it pushes the idea of "what do you care about?" front and center, and also how it often prompts for creativity and cool moments.

Against that background, it's easier for me to say why they didn't feel groundbreaking to me:

For PbtA games: In freeform, conversation of what's happening very often ends up being the meat of what's happening - literally. Since one player can't advance or describe a situation very far without input of another, yet short posts are often frowned upon, many players end up writing lots of dialogue and inner monologues. The end-result is games that are 95% talking heads. After years of that, I want games that inspire doing things more than talking about things.

For FATE: in non-structured freeform, where you have to come up with your character from whole-cloth, "what do I care about enough to spend time typing it?" is the guiding line for pretty much everything. Once you've done it enough, you don't lose the ability to ask that question in more structured games. So FATE putting that question front and center is kind of easy to miss - because it never left the center stage.

[KorvinStarmast]

There are tabletop players who say you can't do low magic with D&D, or can't do horror with D&D, can't do player-versus-player in D&D - those people are wrong. Or rather: they are fixating on completely wrong parts of the rules for their argument.

We did all three of those in OD&D before 1980, and certainly before the Forge was a glimmer in anyone's eye. We did a version of horror in Traveller, in terms of, un nameable monsters with tentacles and combat that was lethal. When I first saw the movie Alien, my brain went to "This is a traveller adventure!" (Original Traveller).

I started with free-form role-playing, from that I have learned that you don't need any rules to play.

We learned in OD&D that you don't need mechanics to role play. (But then, a lot of us had played Diplomacy before we played D&D).

Roll for Shoes also convinced me that you don't have to have a lot of rules once you have some.

Yes.

[I] Traveller convinced me that random character generation (including possibly dying during character generation) can be a lot of fun even in serious games.

Yep. It can also be a drinking game.

[Vahnavoi]

We did all three of those in OD&D before 1980, and certainly before the Forge was a glimmer in anyone's eye.

I wasn't talking about the Forge, you shouldn't be talking about the Forge, really, no-one should be talking about the Forge.

[kyoryu]

I wasn't talking about the Forge, you shouldn't be talking about the Forge, really, no-one should be talking about the Forge.

The Site That Shall Not Be Named

[kyoryu]

I, personally, find this to be a truism. That is: it's trivially true, but not useful. Why? Because type of structure matters more than amount. Granted, you touched on that with the difference you made between physics engines and simple conflict resolution.

It's useful to avoid the idea that you have to go to an extreme - people that want "rules light" don't want "rules lightest" and that's not better necessarily.

I also do think that "rules light" is a super vague term that's used to describe a slightly different fundamental model for resolving things.

I disagree with the idea that any system can do anything - I find it trivially false, and that's not what my point is about.

Sure it can. With enough hacking. But I mean, that's the Oberoni fallacy.

My point is more that people often have somewhat petty ideas about what set of experiences can be done well. A lot of that comes down to mistaken ideas about rule priority. On a general level: Pareto's principle often applies to rules. 20% of rules cover 80% of game situations. Failure to understand this leads to naive arguments about what a game is for, based on just how much page count is spent on some silly thing.

Oh, for sure. We can look at how applicable a given system is to a particular thing. And it's not going to be binary.

This is at the root of claims like "D&D can't do horror" or "D&D can't do low magic". You "can't do horror", somehow, despite the books having every classic horror monster in them. Why? Because somewhere in the books, there's also a way to beat those monsters. How about, uh, just not having both in the same game? Similarly: you "can't do low magic" because you need magic items to defeat some of the monsters! How about, uh, not having those monsters in the low magic game? Or, if this is that horror scenario, having those monsters present without having the means to defeat them be present could very well be the damn point. You don't have to change the functional, core rules that you use for 80% of the actual playtime to do any of this. All it takes is for the DM to be prudent in cherry-picking what content they use for a scenario, which is what the rules advise the DM to do anyway!

But sometimes it's a bit tougher. Like, I don't think D&D is great at low magic. It pretty much wants magic healing, lots of things are predicated on getting more magic stuff, the class progression stuff gives stronger spells. Sure, you can do something like E6 with 3.x or the equivalent for other editions, but you're doing some decent levels of hacking.

Second example: ...
Third example: ...

Yeah I'd agree with that. That said, the introduction of PvP changes the dynamics of the game significantly, so that's something that needs to be managed and session-zeroed. I think that "cooperate" is enough of an assumption in most games that it's reasonable to start with that. And if that's your goal, yeah, make sure you have a cohesive party up front.

Against that background, it's easier for me to say why they didn't feel groundbreaking to me:

For PbtA games: In freeform, conversation of what's happening very often ends up being the meat of what's happening - literally. Since one player can't advance or describe a situation very far without input of another, yet short posts are often frowned upon, many players end up writing lots of dialogue and inner monologues. The end-result is games that are 95% talking heads. After years of that, I want games that inspire doing things more than talking about things.

For FATE: in non-structured freeform, where you have to come up with your character from whole-cloth, "what do I care about enough to spend time typing it?" is the guiding line for pretty much everything. Once you've done it enough, you don't lose the ability to ask that question in more structured games. So FATE putting that question front and center is kind of easy to miss - because it never left the center stage.

I wonder how much PbP colors your perception of games.

[Max_Killjoy]

I wasn't talking about the Forge, you shouldn't be talking about the Forge, really, no-one should be talking about the Forge.

I still suffer from Forge-induced twitch...

[smcc360]

DC Heroes and Savage Worlds both have rules designed to emulate different genres, rather than trying to enforce one particular type of simulation for every style of game. This showed me I prefer games that give actual mechanical weight to story tropes, even at the expense of 'realism.'

[neonchameleon]

Question for GMs out there who have experience with multiple systems.

Are there any particular systems that you've used that you felt gave you a completely different viewpoint on how RPGs work? I've been playing a lot of Fate over the last year, and the way it pares down the system gave me a much better sense when the story was dragging or when there were pacing problems. Now when I'm running my D&D 5e games, I have a much higher comfort level with my players improv--not because I ever disliked giving them narrative freedom, but after a year of playing Fate, I have much greater confidence in my feel for when the story is veering from our collective reality narrative.

What games have opened your eyes the most to new possibilities? I'm asking because I'm not familiar with exactly how different other games like the Storyteller System, HERO, and others are from D&D--I've played GURPS before too, and I happily mine it for mechanical ideas at times, but it didn't really change my perspective on D&D, the way Fate did.

Off the top of my head other than Fate the three I'd really recommend are Dread (with the Jenga tower), Fiasco, and Apocalypse World.

Dread is a really interesting one-shot game that shows, more strongly than any other game I've played, just how much difference a resolution mechanic can make. The reason's simple; Dread is a horror game and the resolution system for hard actions is a Jenga tower. Knock it over and you die. This leads to bags of tension and shaking hands (sometimes even for the GM who never pulls).

Fiasco's a one shot that will create a Cohen Brothers movie in the time it would take to right one. Heavily structured for the story but GMless things are inherently not going to go smooth.

Apocalypse World (and Monsterhearts which I recommend looking at the pitch for and don't think it's suitable for most groups despite being amazing) is a clinic in things to do well.

• The GM is advised to go into the first session with nothing prepared; you make the world as part of character creation
• It has the rhythm of freeform and you roll when you'd hand over narration for minimal disruption
• Your class is your place in the world. The classes are anyone from the travelling loner Driver to the local town boss, the Hardholder.
• Many of those are leaders. But more people, more problems.
• The moves are simple and evocative
• The most likely result is Success With Consequences which makes everything more interesting and twistier, rendering plans fairly
• The NPCs never roll and basically have no stats. For that matter there are no dice roll modifiers
• One of the options you can take when you level up is to change your class and hence your place in the world
• One of the options you can take once when "life becomes untenable" is to change your class and hence your place in the world. (The other three are +1 Weird, -1 Hard, and dying).

It's fast playing, intense, and really different in some ways.

[Cluedrew]

I would throw in, if you don't like the look of Apocalypse World itself, consider trying one of the Powered by the Apocalypse systems. Although quality is not universal they do all organise themselves around different concepts, there is probably at least one to interest anyone. (For both reasons, ask around.)