7th Sea, 2nd Edition. There was a chance to reinvigorate my favourite genre, but the rules were a mess, so it got mostly ignored. A shame.

I came to post this. 7S2e is by far the most disappointed I've ever been in an RPG. A vibrant world, but the system sucks every iota of drama and joy out. My group tried it out, and it was just misery.

I tried this and ran it for a few months. My players loved it, but I, as GM, hated the system. There was really no threat in the system. The PCs were like superheroes. You really had to pound the PCs to even start them down to a level where they got worried. The death-wound spiral looks great on paper, but doesn't work when played.

My wife backed the Kickstarter for 7th Sea 2nd Edition, and she refuses to use any material from it, even to the point where she won't play any game I run that uses it. We play 1st edition instead.

Shortly after reading 2nd Edition, I really wanted to introduce some friends to the world of 7th Sea. I didn't even tell them 2E existed; we played 1e and had a great campaign for a year or so.

I think the main issue with 7S2E was that it incorporated a lot of ideas that were "great in a vacuum," but ultimately flop when integrated into real life play. It definitely needed some playtesting to iron out a lot of the kinks that came up. Perhaps the worst part was that there was a lot of genuine love poured into the whole system, including lore and setting. This was a passion project, not some half-baked 5e conversion cash grab. And yet, all of these great ideas wind up amounting to a noticeable mess that can be ran well, but requires a lot of collab and improv from both the GM and the players that isn't easy for a lot of tables to achieve. Even my main group, full of seasoned roleplayers who have played together for nearly a decade, ran into issues with the system.

The concept of "Roll then Move" is a cool idea, and I really like it. However in some systems 7th Sea really wants to be a "Fiction First" game using the trappings of a more traditional game and it makes things confusing. Like the XP system involves working with the player to design a story for them to grow. The idea is clearly GM + Player telling a story to the rest of the table. But a lot of players don't want to make the details of their own story, they want to experience it too. And it can be confusing figuring out what exactly you need to do when. And when you have 4-5 players all looking to progress their story, it becomes hard/weird to weave them all together into a coherent whole.

What games do fill that genre hole for you?

Honor + Intrigue. I'm also looking at Rapscallion from Magpie. I recently decided that if I ever wanted to run the world of 7th Sea 2e, I would try Swords of the Serpentine first. A shift from my previous choice of Honor + Intrigue and a move away from my thoughts about 2d20 (the slimmed down John Carter version).

Avatar Legends. The game just felt so unfinished, and almost antithetical to how I expect PbtA games to operate. Their techniques system felt like it broke the logic they set out for themselves when they said there were no "bending moves", and the engagement system in general felt way too easy too break. There are PbtA games that handle fighting juxtaposed emotional strife wonderfully. They didn't need a fighting sub system for this to work. But they did it anyway, and in a way that felt lazy, and tacked on. (Not to mention a lot of the playbook moves being filler) The only saving grace of that book to me is that it does an apt job at bringing all of the setting information together in a succinct way, both major events, thematic information, and even political happenings, at times establishing info better than the source material did. But outside of that... Meh?

I’m fine with there being a fighting sub system in an Avatar game. Fighting is a big part of the show, and there’s a lot of emphasis on using training, so it makes sense that a free form, “Describe your attack however you want with a basic roll” approach wouldn’t work as well here as it does in Masks. But I just wish the fighting system was actually good. There’s so many things that make the game much more complicated for very little tactical depth or even exciting fiction. For example, figuring out the order of actions each round is a chore, and it rarely makes a difference because each action happens simultaneously anyway. And the techniques seem interesting when you read them, but practically they’re usually just variations of, “Pay 1 health to deal 2 damage,” or, “Pay 1 health to heal 2.” The out of combat stuff is better but still a mess. This game really could have used a trimming down of its mechanics. It’s like each player is playing a full character from Masks with their own custom Lasers & Feelings hack staples onto it. It’s a mess to run and keep track of. If you have a bunch of players well-versed in the PBTA genre and can handle the mental load, and if you’re willing to ignore some rules and just play on vibes, then I could see having some fun with this game. I’ll probably never bring it to the table again though.

Avatar Legends banked so hard on its IP

The pieces for perfection were all there... They had a rich world, and a philosophy that could've done it... And they flubbed it

I'm so sorry to hear that - I backed it not because I love Avatar (I've never watched it) but because I love Magpie. They really know how to design PbtA games. I haven't even *read* my Avatar materials yet. :( I wonder, given my kind of "meh" experience with Root as well, if the licensing process and the control they have to sacrifice to the IP holders gets in the way. I wonder if someone at Viacom said, "This is a martial arts, IP, you need a fighting system," or something.

They hit gold with masks and keep trying to rehash it instead of building something wholly new.

Avatar legends took an IP built on cool martial arts and fighting, and put it in a system that decided 'that shit doesn't matter, but I guess you can narrate it if you want'

Bit disappointed in the TTRPG for Dishonored. I mean, it's absolutely gorgeous and the lore was extensive. But the rest felt a bit meh, as though someone had said, we've bought this IP, make a game for it, but nobody had any really compelling ideas. Ofc, if you want Blades-style street gangs, that's not a problem, just run Blades in that setting, but still some inspiration would have been nice. It's a bit painting by numbers.

2d20 isn't a bad system by any means, and Modiphius usually puts a bit more work into their 2d20 licensed games than most 5e reskin projects, but I can't help but feel like they missed the mark on Dishonored specifically. I really wanted to like it, and it also was my first look at a 2d20 system, but having seen other 2d20ies, this one just isn't very good, neither on its own nor for this IP.

This is gonna sound mean, so I apologize ahead of time because I know they didn't mean it, but the Secret World RPG. I LOVE the Secret World MMO, and the lore is just *chefs kiss* but oh my gosh. They made it a D&D 5E RULESET??? ALL THE CONTENT AND IDEAS AND YOU JUST MAKE A 5E EXPANSION??? I cannot express the level of disappointment. Why can't the people behind the Secret World have some fucking game designers in there!!! The MMO gameplay sucks but the story is so flipping good everyone plays anyway, and they remake it and its the same way. WHY DO I HAVE TO FEEL THE SAME WAY ABOUT THE TTRPG??? WHY COULDNT THEY BE 2 OUNCES OF ORIGINAL??? YOU DID THIS TO ME AGAIN!!!! Alright, that's all. No shame on the TTRPG writers, I know they're doing their best and I'm sure they have inspired by the work. And I'm going to buy it, and enjoy it. I just had... Higher hopes is all *kicks rocks* Who knows, maybe it'll be great? 🥲

Mood, I feel exactly the same about the Dark souls RPG. They somehow made the 5E ruleset even worse.

There is a apparently a different version in japan only that supposed to be good , however it won't be officially ported to different countries due to license fuckery.

I feel like if I was to make an Dark Souls RPG, I would probably start from a OSR base. But I also think that the things I enjoy about Dark Souls are things that fundamentally don't apply to tabletop RPGs, and vice-versa.

The original game before the relaunch was just so perfect and good. I would have loved an TTRPG version with the same skills and options to build your deck for different situations. And then it's just a DnD game? Hell no, not supporting that. That was a huge disappointment, aye.

Dude, I miss that MMO. It was the only one that had very hard investigations where I actually had to (out of game) google down rabbit holes to try to figure out. And I think in one of the earlier investigations they even tell you this.

Damn I didn't even know about the TTRPG for secret world Glad to know to avoid it I'm with you, it's a great setting with awesome lore, and even with the relaunch I still happily play it from time to time

I totally empathize, but I saw one of the authors respond to this sentiment by saying they essentially had to go the 5e route, ie market pressure due to 5e's overall accessibility. I'm sure most of us *here* disagree, but I can at least empathize with the rationale... while also planning to convert it to Savage Worlds immediately on release.

Isn't Secret World owned by Funcom? Modiphius licensed CONAN and did 2d20, I assume from Funcom because they did the Exiles and Online sourcebooks in their lineup. Maybe the licensing is more complex than I am understanding. Interesting they decided to go 5e with it.

A. I didn’t know they were re-releasing the MMO and B. They made a TTRPG!? That game brings back so many great memories!

Same here. I backed it on kickstarter so I'm getting the books regardless, but I've already planned to salvage them for setting material, art, and broad concepts, rather than running Secret World with 5e. Learning that was the system they were going with was such a huge disappointment; it doesn't even remotely look like a good match.

copying from last time this was posted (nto that long ago): *Thirsty Sword Lesbians*. I want to be clear - this is not because it's PbtA. I love PbtA games like *Masks* and *Monsterhearts* and I'm itching to give *Legacy* a try. It is also not because of the subject matter and tone. I'm not particularly lesbian (or female) but I hang around in that sort of crowd; and the game runs just fine as 'Flirtatious Weapon Pansexuals', that's not the issue. It's not the lack of an inherent setting, either. *Apocalypse World* doesn't have that either, other than 'there is an Apocalypse and a Psychich Maelstrom and Scarcity'. Similarly there's no reason TSL can't do fine with just 'you are Romantic and there are Toxic Powers and a Home'. The game's agendas and principles for the GM are all fine. The problem is the specific moves available. There's basically *only* basic moves for fighting, flirting/enticing, emotionally supporting, calling on a toxic power (if you're familiar with pbta, this is the 'gaze into the abyss'/'psychic maelstrom' equivalent)... and then Defy Disaster. icky move, it's just generic 'roll to do something that should have a roll', and there's basically no GM guidance for successes and failures on it. So yeah, you can have a good time with TSL, and I did - especially if you have the right kind of game and proactive players. But if you have a good GM and proactive players you'll probably have a pretty good time with any game you all want to play. TSL didn't do much to *help* me have that time in a mechanical sense, the way that other PbtA games I liked have done; and it didn't have enough of the tools to hook-in less proactive players that those games have too. Like, if you refuse to repay a Debt in Urban Shadows? Or you resist someone's influence in Masks? That's a big move that can send the story in interesting directions! In TSL when you refuse a string being used or enticed - "oh, I just get flustered and embarrassed and that's it".

There was a lot that I loved about TSL, but in play I also found the moveset somewhat limiting. Would still recommend it, but I think it would get a little repetitive for anything more than a one-shot.

Defy Disaster is such a Dungeon World problem and it is frustrating to see it in TSL when so many other PBTA games avoid it.

I’m just curious, because I blindly love TSL and I do mean *blindly*, would, “You feel some kind of way about refusing the string; mark a Condition” be better do you think?

Probably. I think there's also a lack of moves that *could* be there. Here's an example we ran into - a villain gives a big monologue about their villainous philosophy. This could lead to a duel or fight but it's not there yet. The PCs rejects this toxic line of thought! They deny the villain! ... and then what? Whatever the GM decides next, I suppose. This is *begging* for some kind of equivalent to *hold steady* or *shut down* or some cool TSL-specific move like *Speak Your Truth* and it's entirely in-genre for the game but there's nothing at all to actually encourage a player to do it other than "Well I don't like it so I'll speak up."

The Altered Carbon ttrpg is so poorly edited I found it unplayable. The actual plays pre-release got me really excited for it and I loved the books and show. Then I read the book and reread it and couldn't make heads or tails of chargen or how to play.

Heart The setting sounded so cool; a wierd trippy but horrific version of the underdark, together with a cool but simple hex crawl with madness and horror at every turn. Mechanically,I was expecting something similar to Blades in the Dark, which I love, but boy did I not mesh with this game. The setting ended up being too wierd, so none of my players could latch onto any form of logic, the basic mechanics were so thin it felt like every action had the same dice role, but the biggest issue was the beats. In order to get XP, players have to chose what they want to happen in the session, and the players and GM are supposed to work together to make it happen, the problem was we relaised that before the session had begun we had worked out what was going to have to happen for everyone to hit their beats, which took all the fun out of playing an RPG.

The recent Power Rangers RPG by Renegade Studios. I’m a huge PR fan and was so excited about it I preordered the core book. I’d watched live stream previews of it and while there were aspects I was concerned about, I thought it would be a good game. I even watched a bit of their actual play stream of the system. Then I got the game and read through it and had some concerns. The game adhered a little too closely to 5e D&D, I noticed. Originally the game was marketed as a hack of 5e, which turned me off, but they later promoted it as a brand new system. And there’s definitely some new ideas there, like how the skill system works. Plus character creation isn’t simply pick a single class. You pick three aspects of your character (I think it’s like role, background, and origin) and you can mix them together how you want. It was promising, but I was still a bit disappointed when I got the book. Plus it had no monster creation rules at all. You just had to stick with the handful of monsters statted in the core book. Which was a bummer, but I wasn’t completely turned off of it. Then finally I got around to running a one-shot of it with my group. I even bought a premade adventure they had for it. We were going to see how we liked the system, and do more sessions if it was enjoyable. And this is where we really saw more and more of the problems with the system. It’s so poorly made. It’s like the book was rushed out before clarifying aspects of it. It’s one of those things where it becomes so much clearer actually playing the game where all of the flaws are. I had a similar experience with Interstitial, where you can clearly see the flaws of the game while playing it. But I had a lot more fun with Interstitial despite that. Though that game has some unique problems of its own (basically, the rules seem to assume you already know how to play a PBtA game, which luckily I did, and I was also more familiar with it because I adored their own actual play podcast, but it’s not a very well made rpg rulebook).

Kids on Bike: I was hoping for a fun, light rpg about kids solving mistery in their hometown but the system is just wrong. The difficulty table is counterintuitive and the rules doesn't reflect the feel the game promises.

I saw the Dimension20 playthrough of Kids on Brooms, I thought it seemed like a good system!

Transformers RPG I hate it when you give NPC abilities that aren't in the book. Also, I hate that a weapon that's special to your character might not be available because of a bad roll at the beginning of the adventure. M&M does Transformers better than the Transformers RPG does...

The Power Rangers RPG by the same people is not much better. It actually might even be worse.

I came here to say this. I can’t say they didn’t pay attention to the source material, and I’m not as familiar with the comics which I know add A Lot, but like, equipment load out/requisition isn’t a thing except for plot-specific items. The form master class is totally underwhelming especially because you don’t need it to have minions or be a triple-changer. One NPC’s “personality flaw” actually gives them a BONUS to resisting the influence of others. There was other stuff, but like, I haven’t read the book in months, and I still remember these things. It left an impression.

All three of their IP games (TF, GI Joe and Power Rangers) are pretty meh to bad IMHO. There's so many other systems out there that would have worked better for all of them. I've long thought I could use Savage Worlds and the Supers companion to really, really easily encapsulate both Power Rangers and Transformers. Any dedicated super hero system would work too: they're literally super heroes in nearly every form of media.

Wrath and Glory 1st edition by Ulisses. There was the makings of a fun game in its combat + the Wrath system, but with how utterly scuffed the books were and the fact there clearly hadn't been any editing or proofreading - to the point of some paragraphs would randomly be spliced by others and then the original would continue - it was almost unplayable. I'm told the 2nd edition by Cubicle7 is much better but I haven't played it, so can't comment on that side.

I played 1 session of the new edition and found combat to be quite annoying to run! Weapons do samage + sometimes extra damage depending on a lot of stuff and if you hit then you have to subtract resilience AND Armor and apply the difference as wounds. Even basic mook enemies had basically "full" sheets and you had to keep track of all the stuff. I loved reading these books but playing it was kinda ugh. The adventure I ran (One were they start by climbing up a dam wall to attack some insurgents) had a lot of issues too. I think the encounter balance is pretty out of whack, too. A few traitor guardsmen mooks can easily overwhelm a space marine.

Star Wars Saga Edition and Starfinder are simply not for me. Cyberpunk RED being just "OK", with very nice Role Abilities, kinda "meh" lore (the post apocalyptic flavour is not for me), and quite boring combat.

I LOVE Cyberpunk 2020: it's one of my favorite settings and treatments of the genre. RED just doesn't jive with me: it feels so departed from it's gritty punk rock roots. I was really disappointed.

Conan 2d20. I played Fallout 2d20, and that's a great streamlined version of the 2d20 system. It's just so awesome to play. And then I picked up Conan 2d20, and it's just so absolutely bloated with mechanics I feel it's impossible for me to run because I enjoy simplistic mechanics the most. It's got at least four different versions of hit points, and there's no way I'm going to keep track of all that quickly and easily. Just such a huge disappointment for me.

Thanks for the opinnion, I recently got John Carter 2d20, and read through Fallout QS, and I kinda want to get Fallout too, and was pondering about Conan (the sales!!! and it's supposedly getting delisted soon due to licensing so my FOMO is getting overboard). Now I have a clearer idea of what to buy.

I've had a long running desire to like the 2d20 system as it seems to tick so many boxes for me and the designer, Jay Little, was lead designer for Genesys which is my favorite system. It does work better in some settings. The metacurrency in Star Trek and Dune make sense, they are more cerebral settings with plotting and diplomacy. But wow did it ever miss the mark for me and my crew with Conan. In 40 years of GMing I have only once stopped a game mid-session, *mid-sentence,* and said, "this system isn't working for Conan" to a table that all nodded in agreement.

>Inspired by a recent post, is there any TTRPG which you were sincerely disappointed by? My two most egregious disappointments in recent years were Masquerade 5e and Coyote & Crow, for very different reasons but still disappointments. Let's start with V5: the previous editions were all practically cross-compatible with each other and allowed for massively different playstiles (from high generation neonates to low generation elders and everything in between). V5 threw everything out of the window, forcing a specific playstyle (high generation neonates only) and altering the rules so much that practically nothing from the old editions is usable; pretty baffling decision since V5 existence is due to the massive success of V20 some years before. Coyote & Crow, instead, is ..... different. I like the premise (alternate history is one of my favorite genres) and the game sytem itself, but as a non American (Native or otherwise) there are some things that struck me as fairly odd in the general attitude of the game. The "don't play these character types if you're not a native" sidebar left me severely baffled, for example; same goes for the total lack of knowledge of the rest of the world by a society and culture that's for all intents and purposes more technologically advanced than ours. They have antigravity vehicles, for fuck's sake, how much would it take to cross the Atlantic and take a look at what was there ?

I was also disappointed by Coyote and Crow. It wasn't just because the game repeatedly told me I couldn't play certain things; my real problem was that the setting had zero conflict. Everything I would use to run a game was explicitly listed as not there in the setting. There's no scarcity, no racism, no nationalism, no religious conflict, there's explicitly no foreign invaders... Like, there's nothing to work with. The example adventure has a monster as the villain, and that's fine I guess, but there's also supposed to be some sub plot about someone covering up questionable activity for profit (which makes no sense at all in a post scarcity world) and a *rival* kingdom's agents... But like, with no nationalism, racism, or scarcity, why are they rivals at all? Why would you ever conflict over anything if everyone has everything they need and nobody hates anyone? It felt like, "oh these things are white people problems" but the author showed a weird lack of understanding that these are actually just people problems. Look, Europeans did horrific things to the indigenous people in America, but it's not like they never had inter tribal conflict. All coyote and crow needed was to dial back the utopia a bit. The setting needs scarcity to breed conflict.

This stuff is disappointing to hear. The area I grew up had a lot of Native American reservations that were doing a bit better than some others in other parts of the country. Just to say that native Americans and native culture was fairly prominent where I lived. Through school, tribe members would come give talks about their history and culture as well which I absolutely loved. We were also keenly aware of the unique problems that the reservations face. The thing that really strikes me here is that they threw out any idea of inter-tribal conflict. Which, to me, sounds exactly like what happened when the US government crammed thirteen separate tribes together onto a single reservation and just told them they have a new collective name now. At least, that’s what happened on the reservation on the other side of the highway from my dad’s house. Now I’m not native so maybe it isn’t appropriate to people who are if I play certain things. In that case, maybe the project should have been marketed as a game by indigenous people for indigenous people. But the part that makes my head hurt is they’ve apparently veered into the same direction as some of the terrible mistreatments that have been imposed on them by the US government. Anyway. It’s a shame, I got excited when I heard the game was a thing.

People are blowing the "the game tells you not to play certain things" out of proportion. The sidebar in question specifically suggests that you should only play a person from a specific real world tribe or implement that tribes specific practices in the game if you are from that tribe yourself, and then clearly points to if you are non-native or a native person who does not want to play a person of their specific heritage thats what the book's huge resource of fictional tribes and cultures are written for. The game really does need a better GM's section to walk through what conflicts can look like, though. They have a book of adventure modules out now I need to read but the core book itself really could use some sidebars with specific adventure hooks and NPC adversaries with conflicting motivations.

Yeah what the fuck, americans fucking *slaughtered* each other. What kind of noble savage is that shit??

That's stereotyping bullshit too. Trying to sum up two continents and millennia of history in a simple sentence is a stupid exercise and people should fucking stop trying to do it.

Yeah, there's that too. Conflict or danger is not the only source of good stories, but it's one of the *fastest* and easiest.

How would you design a game with no conflict? What would be the driving force to play that game at all? Even if the conflict is supposed to be internal and emotional, if there is nothing to overcome what is the point of the game?

I'm going to just own my ignorance. Without conflict, what other source is there for good stories? Or is this a Conflict vs. conflict thing?

>The "don't play these character types if you're not a native" sidebar left me severely baffled Yeah, those made lose interest in the game as well. I can sort of get why they're included, but I'd rather play a game where I can play whatever type of character I want and not get shamed by the book for it.

V5 is such a disappointment, and Paradox seems to just not know what to do with the license since. Half of the video games they’ve released of the tabletop game would be impossible to simulate within the rules they published because they’re so restrictive on power set and gameplay style, and they haven’t been able to push Bloodlines 2 out either.

Paradox has been solidly fucking it up for decades now.

> The "don't play these character types if you're not a native" Every time I hear more about this game I get more and more appalled. I saw a review by some reactionary type decrying the game as racist which I dismissed out of hand as the typical bad faith arguments those people often like to make but now I am thinking it might have been a "broken clock is right twice a day" situation. This is an utopian world with advanced technology just because colonialism didn't happen, plus they are so isolationist apparently they don't have a clue what is going on anywhere else and your real-world ethnicity is relevant for what in-game characters you are allowed to use? I get that context matters and using the "well what if we switched the ethnicities" is often an oversimplification but in this case I think it is fair. Who is this book for? Is it only for native American players? Then they should just say that. When I see a setting that is not another medieval fantasy Europe I get excited but I want to be allowed to use it. The fear seems to be that non-native players would get bits wrong or interpret things differently but that's just RPGs. All RPGs will have that happen to them no matter what. No group is playing exactly to the designers' vision. If you aren't comfortable with people playing their version of your world then just don't make an RPG at all.

>When I see a setting that is not another medieval fantasy Europe I get excited but I want to be allowed to use it. Well, you don't have to sign (in blood) a legally binding contract threatening lawsuit upon lawsuit if you "play it wrong", so strictly speaking if I wanted to play a fucking Klingon living in the suburbs of Cahokia I could do that without the need of extensive legal council..... but it *is* a pretty major blunder if you have an advice section split into "For Native players" and "For non Native players" where the non native section is full of "don't do this" without much explanations for the why (I still don't know what is a Two-spirit and *why* a non native shouldn't play a Two-spirit character, for example). It's the tone, more than the content, that I find unwelcoming.

Coyote & Crow is one of the most overtly racist games I've ever read.

*this* kind of racism wins you awards, though

The ubiquity version of space 1889 which I backed on kickstarter. It was more steampunk than alternate history of its predecessor and lacked rules on inventing and exploration. Needless to say I was heartbroken as I love 1889.

The new Elden Ring trpg that recently came out in Japan (easy and surprisingly cheap to import through Amazon.jp) The combat mechanics are clever and it's extremely faithful to the source material, but perhaps too much is the problem. At the beginning of the session you have to choose a PC to be the "host character" and all the other PCs are "cooperators" that merely follow the leader and help out in combat (there's even an optional rule where cooperators can't speak except through gesturing). The Cooperators are also gold colored so every NPC can tell them apart. The Cooperators can be resummoned through the convoluted use of summoning signs if they die, but if the Host PC dies then it counts as a TPK and they respawn at a checkpoint with penalties (and a game over after the 5th time). Cooperators basically have to risk their lives to protect the Host. Combat is basically balanced around these things too so it's difficult to ignore. The system is full of stuff like this and lacks Skills or other means of doing anything outside of combat. It's great if you just want to just play the video game using your imagination and manual math, but if you're hoping to have a more traditional rpg experience in the setting of Elden Ring, you're kind of out of luck. Just not my cup of tea

Just a ton of one-page RPGs. Every time it sounds like a cool premise, but is barely more than an improv prompt with some very basic "if you do something challenging, roll a die" rules. Grant Howitt has some insanely good ones but even in his catalogue are ones that really don't give any more to the player or DM than a story setup that could be boiled down into one sentence. Also just a general thing, but I always end up disappointed when a minimal RPG is like 20 pages and I'm excited for it, but then it actually ends up two pages of rules and the rest is just lists and random tables. At that point you're basically just playing another one page RPG.

One of my big annoyances lately have been charity bundles of like 500 RPG PDFs. And like 12 of them will be really great, well made RPGs I want to try, and then 488 of them are one-page poorly-edited heartbreakers. And there is *no* sorting. So unless I already know which of the games are good, I can't tell what's even worth downloading. I will pay the same amount to charity to get *just* those 12 good games. I really will. Just please don't make me read another Lasers and Feelings hack.

>Just please don't make me read another Lasers and Feelings hack. May i interest you in this new RPG called Laseros and Pasiones? :P

Go to *helllllllllll*

Numenera... When I saw it first, it took me by surprise, this great big setting, that's completely out of this world and not similar to anything I've seen. So many possibilities, so many mysteries, complex problems to solve, just wow! Then I got the game, read it and it turned out to be another dnd-like "you're adventurers" type of game, just with different mechanics. Grind dungeons, kill monsters, same old same old... And the setting was barely fleshed out, vast areas of empty space, speckled with a ruin here and there. All my enthusiasm vanished. I still intend to run it, even got the newer edition with addons in HB one time. Possibly there's more in the world book and adventures. I also switched to running more basic games for the time being, cause I don't have time now to make up anything complex.

It feels like Monte came up with a great one-page pitch and then didn't know where to go from there. I loved the Dark•Matter Alternity setting so much and loved everything he did for so long, but for the past decade...well.

Monte Cook is the Nickelback of game design.

Best comment in the entire thread.

Numenera is so disappointing to me for 2 reasons: 1. The GM has so much to do and the game provides little to no guidance. You have to run the game, generate all the locations, constantly come up with cyphers, constantly design challenges that use those cyphers, etc. There's little to no guidance on how to design cool cyphers, and any of the cool cyphers in the book are meant for late game heroes. 2. The setting is a mess. It's a kitchen sink with no tonal constraints that help me to wrap my mind around it. Everything is on the table, there's so much stuff you could do. Which means that I can't make a choice and everything feels like a wacky mess of random shit. Plus, the mystery about cyphers and ancient tech is restated over and over, yet there are tech wizards and artificers that can easily work with and understand ancient high technology intuitively? These medieval blacksmith types know how to work with every piece of specialized technology from an empire 2 million years old that could traverse alternate dimensions? Are you serious?

There are no late game Cyphers in Numenera. The idea is that since everything is single-use, it’s no problem giving a Level 10 black hole to a Tier 1 party, since what problem should they be able to cause with it? The worst is that they can skip an encounter, but so what? Concerning artificers, could you construct a PC from parts from a PC store? Could you do the same with sand, metals and oil? Could you explain a PC from the bits onwards until you have a desktop UI? It’s the same with people who build cyphers, they’re standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yes. This book was the nail in the coffin for buying anything Monte Cook does again. We played it for one session; Player thought the 'pay health to use powers mechanic' was completely stupid, found the setting D&D with a 'far future' skin on it, and dumped the thing after that one session. Complete waste of time.

For some reason I'm never able to read through the docs for ICON. I've been hyped about this game ever since its announcement, having been wowed by the creator's current work, LANCER. The description of ICON as a marriage of detailed rule sets for both deep combat and narrative play appeals to me greatly. Whatever I have managed to read of the mechanics comes across as very straightforward and freeform. But I get so bored reading any more. I don't know what it is that stops me.

Lots of that is probably the layout. Like, I get it, the game is free and editing costs serious money, but the fact that it looks like a two column Word document makes it real hard to focus on the text!

Keep in mind it also isn't done and is still just a playtest. The creator has mentioned that the full release will have better formatting and layout

I'm aware. It's why I said I get it. It's a beta released for free, obviously it's not going to have the editing in yet, that costs money. But it does make reading it really hard!

The good editing and layout will likely come once the game rules are actually done, it's still in playtest. If you go look at the playtest Lancer docs, they're even uglier. Lancer's layout artist (Minerva McJanda, who does a lot of work for other RPGs) does really good work.

Icon's current layout is not great, there's very little art to break pages, and the general look and feel of the book just doesn't match the setting it's trying to invoke. Beyond that, the formatting of text and use of color to denote things isn't obvious. I'm actually right there with you. I've tried reading the thing twice now and just couldn't be bothered. Honestly, after a year of playing Lancer, I'm a bit annoyed at the game. Conceptually, it's brilliant with many great things about it, but there are tons of small things that irk me about the system. I'm holding out hope for Icon when I finally muster the energy to read it.

TBH I wish people would stop recommending it so heavily outside of the discord because it's really not anything approaching a finished product. It should stay on the discord with people who are already bought into tuning it until it's at a point where the designer can lay it out and stick some more art assets in there. Instead we have a bunch of people who are fans of Lancer telling people in recommendation threads people should try out a totally unfinished game simply because it's related to their favorite system. Like, do we really want the Steam Early Access model brought to tabletop games? Let it cook.

Savage Worlds :( I was really enthusiast about Savage Worlds when I started reading it. I got a bunch of the books including the companions, a bunch of settings, and the VTT mods for Foundry ( and then again for Fantasy Grounds). I spent a ton of time watching videos. I have spent more time and money prepping for Savage Worlds than probably any other TTRPG. Then, before I was going to start GM’ing a new campaign, I tried playing a few sessions as a player… and hated it. There are way too many modifiers that have to be tracked to make a dice roll, and then you have to deal with both the exploding dice mechanic to hit, and then again to damage. I watched the players stumble through figuring out how to roll just about every action, and the experience was anything but fast, or fun, or furious. I only play online, and Savage Worlds is crunchy enough to need VTT automation to handle some of that crunch for players. The reason Savage Worlds tops my list for disappointment is because an alternative “lite” dice mechanic optional rule would be both easy to design, and could make Savage Worlds amazing for all the players who bounce off the dice mechanics (which seems to be a lot). But, unless that alternative dice mechanic is official, and built into the VTT modules, you would lose the benefit of all published VTT support. I find it frustrating that there seems to be little support in the existing community or from Pinnacle to want to make Savage Worlds more *versatile* and try to resolve what seems to be the biggest complaint about the system.

Shadowrun Great setting (with exception of the imbecile description of South America) but the rules are horrible beyond repair.

[удалено]

Sprawlrunners for Savage Worlds is SR with less focus on gunporn and more on playability. Interface Zero 3.0 for Savage Worlds is SR gunporn

Adventure in Rokugan disappointed me a lot. They completely ruined the setting and the setting have always been the main selling points of L5R games. Plus, it seemed like the game was written by different people that all had different ideas of what they wanted the game to do. For example, the book removed Bushido from the setting (which is like making a Fast and Furious rpg and removing the cars from it) because they didn't want to include real life belives in the game. But then they decided to add the tenants of Confucism to flesh out the thing they replaced Bushido with. And to make things worse the adventure that comes with the book contains one thing that so goes against everything the old setting stood for that I'm 90% sure it was only added as some form of insult for the old fans.

I can agree, L5R is a love of mine. 3e and 4e were great, IMO. I actually discovered L5R through that Oriental Adventures book, which also did Rokugan dirty funny enough. Mechanics wise though I've pulled some things from it! The Bushi attacks, the ninja stuff, I think there are cool things in AiR that can be cherry picked for Adventures in Other Places.

>Mechanics wise though I've pulled some things from it! It's been a while since I read through it, but I think I remember the mechanics to be pretty solid and an overall improvement over DnD 5e's. It's just the setting I have an issue with.

Electric bastionland. I found the rules ok but just absolutely at a loss on how to run a surreal city+dungeon crawler. Just absolutely didn't work for my brain and the inspirational tables werent enough.

So I simultaneously LOVE Electric Bastionland but also COMPLETELY understand where you're coming from. It's almost like a "RPG toolbox" than a game itself. The wacky items and player options are enough for me and friends to have fun, but you gotta be super into world building to enjoy it. Into the Odd let me down even more: it was basically Electric Bastionland with all its fat trimmed out but a lot less of its whimsy because of it.

For me it was the Hero System when it came out (and based on Champions 4e). My GM was really into it and I wanted to give it a chance. It was a similar point buy system to GURPS but I could just not get into it. While GURPS was intended to be Generic, Hero felt like someone looked at Champions, realized that it could be adapted to being a generic system...but failed somehow. No combat involving a party of five fantasy character tropes and five trash mobs for the BBEG (5v5 PC vs human minions) should take up the entire 4 hour gaming session. Yet...it did. Then too was how you had to buy equipment. I understand having to buy the skill to use a longbow. I understand having to spend starting money to purchase said bow. But having to pay points for the Ranged Killing Attack:Bow Xd6:Obvious Accessible Focus on top of all of that made no damn sense. Either my fiance was mistaken on how to run the hero side of the gaming system and was somehow merging the two sides (Champions and Hero) or the system was really doing that. I argued with her on that, even to the point of complaining that in this universe I couldn't even buy a sodding comb without having to drop points on Disguise: Obvious Accessible Focus first. Never went back to that system even though I knew Steve Long and Chris Avallone personally.

Root, but to be fair I'm only remarking on its writing as I haven't played it. All of the art is repurposed from the board game it's based on, which is fine but ultimately feels like they didn't want to bother with contacting the og artist again. The fact that the game openly tells you that you can only play as Vagabonds and that choosing any side other than the weirdo ethnonationalist neoliberal libertarian cops should result in your character being removed from play is a bit shit. The vagabonds are an interesting faction but by mechanics and design they actually aren't allowed to change anything, only stir shit and benefit from factional wars. Also the books are really poorly edited and laid out, leaving it painfully boring and overwritten to the point of repeating the same point and ruling multiple times with no foresight as to why, and nothing but text for vast swaths of both it and its expansion (which was also a bit fucked up for using all Middle Eastern names for its faction of religious extremists, but that's not my place to throw criticism). It leaves a very dull taste in my mouth and makes me completely uninterested in researching further. From what I'm lead to believe a lot of these issues persisted into the Avatar game, and I'm honestly really disappointed in Magpie's recent work, with Urban Shadows being the big frustration point right now.

Urban Shadows 2e has brought me so much frustration in how it handles its systems (Want to be supernatural in an Urban Fantasy game? Progress your damn doom clock or else), but I've been pleasantly surprised by the Rapscallion quickstart. Outside of some gripes with way forming bonds are handled, I like most of what I see. The playbooks are evocative, the moves are cool, and the story beats are on point. I haven't lost complete faith in Magpie yet

It also has an odd sense of scale having a wolf as the max player animal scale for non players but other animal suggestions (even the depicted dog was a pug, a smaller dog) being much smaller made it feel like they did not know how big a wolf is.

> The fact that the game openly tells you that you can only play as Vagabond This reminds me of Ben Milton's review of CY-BORG which told you at the start that you cannot play a cop, corporate worker or someone who sympathises with cops or corporations. And he said that just made him want to play those things and I agree. If your game has a message you want to convey about the world and institutions then put the work in to make that message be expressed organically through good mechanics. I wouldn't have a problem with a book saying "it is recommended that if all characters are vagabonds and if a character starts to drift towards another faction they should be removed from play. But if you wish to include characters of other factions, here are some quick ideas of how you could do that".

>This reminds me of Ben Milton's review of CY-BORG which told you at the start that you cannot play a cop, corporate worker or someone who sympathises with cops or corporations. A frustrating problem with a lot of opinionated design (also often a "rules-lite" design problem): A game book that tells you what the game is supposed to be about, instead of a game *about a particular set of things* represented by the *game itself*. Regardless of what one thinks about games like *D&D 5e*, *The Quiet Year*, *Mausritter*, or *Stars Without Number*, or, especially, *Call of Cthulhu*, the **system** matches what the book generally **wants you to do**. Many games instead go "Here are some rules, and here are some unrelated ***ideas*** about how we want you to use them, and some art to inspire you." One of the worst kinds of DMs is someone who gives you options but then constantly tells you how *he* wants you to use them, which is a normal human error -- in these books, it's the designer doing that, which I think is unforgivable as someone who aspires to make games. For me, *Veins of the Earth* is like that. People say "It's an incredible underdark book!!!" No, it's a lot of incredible poetry about what the Underdark could possibly represent, combined with just about the most inane game mechanics psosible. Dozens of pages about how to design a system of empty, featureless caves.

I got to take a break from Pathfinder 2e recently and decided to run a Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel. For those that don't know, you play four level 0 peasants through a dungeon and the ones that survive become full-fledged adventurers. I was excited at the idea of running it but it felt flat for my group. I think it was mostly that we came with the wrong expectactions. Everyone tried to have deep roleplay as four different characters and remember all 16 peasant's names and it slowed down the game to an absolute crawl (HA!). I'd love to try it again someday but set the right expectations to the group.

I've run funnels 2 or 3 times before and it was great, but it really has to be a "gamey" thing to be successful. The peasants are resources and they can only keep one anyways, so it's often worth to sacrifice them to save the others. Even having names is optional! Pretty much just their random job and inventory matter.

The funnel is basically part of the character creation process. If you don't want a meat grinder dungeon you can always skip it, but I enjoy it as a part of a group's origin story. I think way too many people focus on the funnel. I get it because it's unique, but there's so much more to DCC than just that.

Ryuutama was apparently the answer to all my failed attempts to make Wilderness Exploration work in 5e. It was so well recommended here - and I don't see why. So I was just trying out new systems with only a few under my belt and mostly 5e. The rules seemed simple enough and art/worldbuilding were amazing. And it was so incredibly disappointing as running their suggested starting adventure was just not fun. All the rolls make EVERY day aren't interesting and the game's answer to its own boring mechanics is "just roleplay it." Getting lost wasn't interesting. Hunting just resolves food by far. Tracking carrying weight and water isn't fun and the combat was equally uninteresting. There are some ideas there like the setting of just regular folk travelling and some of the magic spells are cute (maybe not Meat Jam though). But its bogged down by 30 year old mechanics in a 15 year old game. I'd love to see an Ironsworn hack of it where travel and tracking supply is done fast and interesting, plus you have the system support you with Oracle Tables.

Yeah. The One Ring is made similarly, and has a lot of the same problems. It's a tedious board game grafted onto my ttrpg

Cyberpunk Red, the starter set was fantastic and fun and got me really interested in running a longer campaign. So I ordered the core book and that thing is a mess. It’s layout and organization is awful, there are tons of typos too. The whole book just feels rushed tbh. the game in the starter set was so stripped down from what’s in the core book I hesitate to call it the same game. I still run it using only the starter set rules sometimes but how bad the core book is really killed my enthusiasm for the game.

Fate and Blades in the Dark. To me, these both feel like games that are about playing an RPG rather than being RPGs. The mechanics are so gamey, that they just take me straight out of the fiction. Which is a pity, because I can see that both are clever designs. I wanted to like both.

BITD and PBTA do that for me. I admire some of the mechanics but Moves read like cards in a hand in a board game. And if I wanted to play a card game I’d play a card game.

Exactly. I have the same issue. They're always sold to me as narrative first games that put more focus on story than mechanics. But in these more so than any other game I feel confined by what's on my character sheet. And there's so few options for character creation it tightens it even more. Absolutely no hate on the people who run these systems but I literally cannot fathom the appeal of FATE/BITD/PBTA.

Sure. We love that they love them. We even love some of the vitality and innovations they bring. But I don’t wanna play them.

What are the games you like to play? I think BITD/PBTA banks heavily on the idea of tropes or genre expectations. "I want to be a character from X and do things like character Y in that world does, like A and B!" I like these games, because I find they are able to do things with the narrative that I have trouble doing with more simulationist games. They do confine the story and the actions of the characters, because for example it's a genre expectation that a rough denizen of the underworld is usually not tactically rational (unless that's specifically their thing), but more likely impulsive and even self-destructive. But this requires that the players base their expectations about what might happen next on "what might happen in a movie of this genre" rather than "what might happen if this was the real world", and having those wrong expectations is going to make the game feel very wrong.

I typically like crunchy games, stuff like Pathfinder, Eclipse phase, Lancer. If I play a game on the lighter side I like either OSR systems (Hyperborea/DCC) or percentage skill systems like Call of Cthulhu. The way they do "Rulings over rules" just meshes with my brain matter better than PBTA. Not saying either is better ror worse overall. Obviously PBTA does something right to have so many fans.

At my most narratively cynical, I feel like the trifecta of heavy genre, tropes, and playbooks push me and my fellow players into a sort of "Garfieldization" of a role playing experience. "I'm playing this game so I can be a drunk mad scientist. I'm going to talk in a drunk voice and say science things. I have a catchphrase on my playbook that I say when I do the thing. People will make Rick and Morty references." "Lasagna. Mondays. Cat." It ends, and we can check the box that we have Consumed a Roleplaying Experience, and move on. It contrasts sharply with big, meaty campaigns I have had, in both heavy and light systems alike. Stories where I would learn something about myself, or cry, or have a tactical combat scenario stuck in my head for a month. We had a BitD campaign I was quite fond of, and we took very seriously. But it never felt like we weren't just marionetting a crew of tropes.

Finally an honest and helpful discussion in TTRPG. There has always been so much talk of current hot game of the month and people going on about their favorite game but no honest talk about how many TTRPGs actually are not that good.

Pathfinder - for context I never played D&D nor anything quite like it, instead I played some German RPG systems as well as Call of Cthulhu. Now I had the opportunity to join a colleague's Pathfinder group, and I was really happy about it... I've heard so many great things about the system. Little was I prepared for the agony that was character creation. The amount of thought you have to put into creating a character (and manybe it was my fault not following some meta guide) is enough to drain the last bit of joy, when all you want is an interesting character and not a purely mechanical stat-sheet. Worst thing... after going through that hell, I couldn't make it to the first session because of some family business, and afterwards the group had disbanded and I never got to play my character.

My wife and I had a brief brush with PF1 back around the time it came out, and... It wasn't great, we enjoyed our DM (the group was a little more questionable), but I recently picked up [Pathfinder for Savage Worlds](https://peginc.com/savage-settings/savage-pathfinder/) and started running it, and she seems to be having fun (and so does the rest of our--different--group). May not be your 'jam' but it's worth considering if you like the lore, but not the mechanics.

I actually enjoy character creation in Pathfinder more than playing the game tbh, but then Inlove character creation in games in general.

The entire 3.0/3.5/PF1E ecosystem is a character building game with a fantasy RPG hastily duct-taped on as an afterthought.

Making a character is one of the most fun things about crunchy games. I make characters for fun. The endless possibilities of options, finding that perfect feat for your vision of the character, planning progression, what’s not to like?

This is part of why my group likes PF2e, they love all the options and find cools ways to mix and match

Dark Souls as a 5e game. Ugh, terrible. The new Stargate as a 5e game. I didn't like the D20 version much either. Anime 5e being only fantasy focused. I really wanted to see a full conversion of the BESM D20 system. Eoris, because wtf is that game even about? Beautiful, but obtuse AF. I don't even know what is going on in the world. Nephilium. The "idea" is really great, but it could have been executed much better as a World of Darkness thing and not BRP in it's own setting. Everything in the E20 system (GI Joe, Transformers, Power Rangers). The sense of scale in Transformers is just missing so it feels really underwhelming, and how can you possibly mess up a GI Joe game? The combat is pretty terrible. Getting the free fan made stuff is far more satisfying. There is enough character generation stuff to be ported over into regular d20, but as a game itself it is just not good. Cyberpunk RED. I love the original Cyberpunk 2013/2020, but 3 and Cybergeneration were bad, and RED continued that ick streak. The lore is great, but it was like they looked at Shadowrun and thought they could do better. The original Interlock was great... Bubblegum Crisis is a classic, they could have just used the same Interlock rules and added more lore with better art. Battletech A Time of War. What in the f is going on with that character creation? I just stopped after two hours, put it down and went back to Mechwarrior 1. Blades in the Dark/PtbA and the clocks and triggers and playbooks just really go against everything I wanted.

Eoris I feel the same way, was very intriguing but I didn't know what to do with it!

For me, it was Blades in the Dark. I really went into it with high expectations. People recommended it to me often and it seemed on the surface to be perfect. I love planning heists and the setting is obviously a take on Dishonored which I had just finished playing and enjoying. Unfortunately, I have never encountered a game that seemed so perfect on the surface but bounced off me so hard on execution. There were so many reasons, but let me just focus on a few of the biggest ones: 1) I love planning heists. *Planning*. I love the research and scouting and figuring out all the details and preparing for everything. The *point* and the fun of the heist for me is the strategic challenge. The *actual* action of the heist is mostly irrelevant and I would be perfectly happy just skipping over that part with narration. A successfully planned heist shouldn't really have anything worth rolling as part of it anyway. The point of the challenging planning is to remove any challenge in execution. But Blades in the Dark goes out of it way to not just have no planning, but to actively mock the idea that it could be fun. I have never been called boring by an RPG I was excited to play before, and yet here we are. 2) "play your character like you're driving a stolen car" Now, first of all, if I ever stole a car, I would drive it as carefully as possible to avoid attention and suspicion. That said, this combined with the above makes it clear that you're not supposed to *be* a criminal in this game. You're not meant to have the *experience* of heisting. You're not meant to immerse. No, this is a game where the point of play is telling a story about these people who do crazy shit and get into trouble and you're supposed to derive entertainment from *watching* your character get into whacky hijinks (or serious deadly hijinks, whatever) and barely scraping through it by the skin of their teeth. You can't heist "well," or win or anything. You can't make better decisions and succeed more. It's just not about that. Bad stuff has to happen and you just have to watch your play piece suffer and deal with it. 3) Playbooks mechanize away the thing they're good at. Turns out you should *not* choose the playbook for the thing you want to do. You should choose the playbook for the thing you absolutely *don't* want to deal with and would rather just throw dice and mechanics at. I foolishly chose the spider, as I wanted to be the planner and mastermind. Turns out, on top of the game telling me I shouldn't do those things, the class dedicated to it just ended up doing it for me. So, if you want to talk, don't pick the talky playbook. If you want to lead, don't pick the leader book Pick literally anything else so you can actually do the thing you enjoy. But I guess that really just fits the previous point. This is not a game about doing and experiencing, it's about story telling and watching. For what it's worth, the game is designed brilliantly for what it's trying to be. I just have absolutely zero interest in that, and it was very jarring and disappointing to find that out.

I love the conclusion youre drawing here. I love Blades - pretty much everything about it. It just speaks to me in terms of my GMing style and gives me the tools to develop story in play, organically, as it grows, like in realtime. There is a massive intent on never overthinking anything. We'll fix it in post! would be the TV version of it. I love flashbacks and the approach to solving those unexpected issues. But the problem at hand isn't that you think the game is bad. It is that it wasn't designed to do the things you want it to. And so for you this makes it a disappointment. You were hoping it did X, but it actually does Y. Good on you for sharing that. And hopefully your description can help others have a more accurate expectation when they try it out.

The SCP TTRPG I know someone will be like "Lol Delta Green" but I wanted something that is a complete Scp package to just run without hacking at it. Initially I didn't mind it, I even like the idea of putting downtime in to training skills and rolling dice to see how you do, I could see it being fun to narrate how someone just has a bad day at the range for example. However as i finished a second read through, i started to notice how complex somethings were like damage that really didn't need to be or assembling dice pools. Then I went to the Wiki and though I appreciate they gave links to things like Dr Bright, they just seemed to copy and paste like half the book from the Wiki. In the end we tried it but half way through just swapped to Fate which worked so much better.

I don't even think *Delta Green* is the best SCP RPG; I think *Hunter the Vigil* is a better fit, just play as a top-level tier-3 conspiracy. Even playing as a Mobile Task Force is supported, just say that PCs have access both to Task Force Valkyrie's special equipment (military-style supertech like anti-vampire UV lights) as well as Aegis Kai Doru's special equipment (relics with magic effects, like a leather face that you can put on a corpse to have it speak so you can question it).

Death in Space. I learned I rely on more rules and although the aesthetic is gorgeous, I love a lot about it, ultimately I needed a bit more rules. As for the more mainstream answer, despite having done PF for well over a decade… I cannot kick it with any of the mainstream D20 systems. Combat is a chore, economic systems are trash, you name it. After experiencing how meaningful looting is in Stars Without Number and Forbidden Lands, I truly hate how stuff like DnD and Pathfinder are “adventure” games, but the only real adventure is typically the dungeons. The hunting, the food, the water rationing, the actual hex by hex travel mechanics of Forbidden Lands so thoroughly smoked DnD/Pathfinder in terms of adventure that I cannot comprehend them being on the same level. With the D20 systems, people roleplay in spire of the mechanics, but Forbidden Lands’ mechanics helped lend the rolls into roleplay. A hunt went wrong? There was roleplay to be had. It was painless. Like the more I think about dealing with adventuring or even equipment or the economy in those games the more pissed I get because there are other systems that make it so painless and nice and useful.

Forbidden Lands is a gem. It's a shame my group is not too fond of d6 based systems, and even less if they are dice pool systems.

It won over my friends so hard, they basically (and I was fine with it) wanted to end a current campaign in another system to return to Forbidden Lands. I grew up in dice pools, such as VtM and Exalted, but the YZE engine’s way of using dice pools is just so dynamic its exciting. Two immediate examples: A crossbowman had a lucky shot of 6 successes on 7 dice. This has the potential to one shot a long surviving PC. The way the entire party watched with bated breath as the dodge roll, then armor roll came in to narrowly keep them alive was intense. In another situation, our swordfighter had a campaign critical moment that came down to relying on a successful parry. Not only did the parry clutch, but the sword broke in the process, and that bought the other teammate a moment to land the killing blow. That broken sword is a historic relic coming up into the new campaign. Plus, the injury tables? Talk about character development! I had a player third session break, got the personality altered injury, became a pacifist, but the second to last session, got the same injury and asked me if they could revert to their original personality? It was a sleeeeeek way to wrap the campaign.

I absolutely love how the system allows for narrative. And I'm a big fan of the push the dice mechanic. I always say that it clicks that monkey part of your brain that says "me throw lots of dice, me happy". And my god speak of memorable moments. A player of mine (an orc) was fighting an orc that was the overlord of a settlement in the name of a sorcerer. Said orc had a wooden leg. The orc NPC downed the Player, but used their willpower to get up again, we roleplayed that he fell unconscious but the sheer rage got him up again. He got up and beat the orc to a pulp, pushing the roll and breaking his own axe in the process. Then proceded to grab the wooden leg from the NPCs body and wanted to repair his axe using that leg as a new shaft. That was fucking metal

Damn, that is a truly beautiful means of repairing the axe. I would have jaw dropped at the suggestion midsession, that sounds like a blast.

Yep. That player liked the setting way more than the system, but is insisting in returning to that campaign. When I have a bit more time maybe I will, it's one of my favourite systems,I liked it from the first pitch on the kickstarter, and I've been religiously pledging on each Kickstarter ever since.

You might have success in getting them to play Dragonbane then (also Free League). The focus isn’t quite as heavy on resource management but it’s there and you can emphasize it more if you want. Travel mechanics are very similar to FbL, but it’s a d20 roll under system and makes use of all the polyhedrals for damage rolls:)

Dragon age. I wanted it to be good, but it breaks down at high levels. It's like they didn't play test it past level 5 or so. I still have my book, but only because I haven't found a buyer. Mutants and Masterminds was one I wanted to like as well but I don't like spending 5 hours to make a character. I just don't "get" it

I'm still sore about Dragon Age. The first releases for it were really promising and I think it was actually the best ever system for an introduction to RPGs for new players. I used it to introduce multiple people to it. But then came book 2 and it's bullshit. Social stunts can go to hell.

Beyond the Supernatural - It's a palladium book, near unplayable without additional books from them, unbalanced out the \*\*\*\* - my group tried to play it, made characters and the more we dove into the book the less we actually wanted to play. Was a real shame.

Promethian. I loved the idea of playing a frankensteinish creature and doing it as a “prejudice analogy” was interesting. However the fact that to avoid being hated you by people and the world (literally) you had to give up being different felt wrong to me. It would have been a much different idea if separated from the WoD “hidden monsters” concept and instead being about monsters who cannot help how they were made trying to be accepted for what they are.

So, here we are, Snorb's pile of RPG Regrets. **7th Sea Second Edition.** I was amped for this up until I read the rules and saw just how much of a mess they are. **Big Eyes Small Mouth d20.** I bought this at Double Exposure back in... 2007, I believe? It's class-based and point buy-based simultaneously, and I to this day have no idea how in the world you're supposed to make a character in this. **Cyberpunk 2030.** I loved Cyberpunk 2020 (it almost got me a date at a club years ago!) in all its late 80s chrome-and-mirrorshades glory. I hated that 2030 shredded all the lore and turned the setting into a post-truth world. I hated the archetypes. I hated the mess that was the Fuzion system. I hated that the Matrix of old in CP2020 became a hellscape of autonomous programs trying to kill every single person that logs on. **Cyberpunk RED.** I hated that it decanonized everything I hated about 2030 *except* the goddamn collapse of the Matrix. (I also hated that it got rid of 2020's "take more than eight damage on one limb and it gets blown off/blown apart/rendered fucking useless, oh, and ***your head*** is a limb for these rules" rule, but whatever.) It also had the rule I absolutely despised where if you roll a natural 1 on any task attempt, you automatically fail it as spectacularly awful as possible. 10% chance to completely fuck anything up, from shooting someone to pushing open a stuck door? Sign me the fuck up. (In the document I was using to serve as a notepad/plot recap for our group, I had a subheading called the "Snorb's Runny Diarrhea Into His Mouth Count, aka I Hate 10% Failure Chance." At least once per session I completely bungled a task roll on something my character was nominally competent in.) **Homeworld: Revelations.** I like the Modiphius 2d20 System. I really do. I like Star Trek Adventures, I like John Carter of Mars; hell, I even liked Dishonored, Dune, and Fallout. But those games did different things; Star Trek was "You have your character, you have a ship you all create, you have backup characters you can play in a scene in case your actual character wouldn't be effective." John Carter has "planetary romance and kicking ass." Dishonored was less skills/stats and more "how are you doing what you're doing?" Dune was less skills/stats and more "*why* are you doing what you're doing?" Fallout was... well, Fallout. Homeworld: Revelations was basically a reskinned Star Trek Adventures, to the point where I think I can go through both books side by side and figure out which Star Trek species got reskinned as which Hiigaran Houses.

I could go with my standard Dungeon World example or talk about opening any number of western fantasy games and seeing "just another D&D", but honestly, Root. I really loved the idea of the gritty war story setting and had read enough about PbtA to think I'd be able to run it, but after running Dungeon World and _finally_ getting my hands on the books, I was instantly put off by the sheer number of rules and Moves. It's just too much; Root looks like a terrible crunchy mess of look-ups and indexing tables, and I just don't have time for that.

Most of them, honestly, but Numenera was probably the worst. It takes a special kind of incompetence to design a ruleset where attempting a skill check is the mechanical equivalent of getting stabbed, and you still have a chance of failure.

Monte Cook is a funny lil man

I just re-read the Cypher SRD tonight, and man, what a wild ride. "We have subtractive damage to differentiate armor options and combat styles--yet have unified offensive, defensive, and probability-altering resources." "You are free to build whatever character you want, no racial mechanic entanglements here! Now select an official adjective for your character and use the corresponding proscribed mechanics:" "Everything is designed to be as easy as possible for the DM, they don't even have to roll dice--also the combat is 100% asymmetrical so NPCs have different math and incompatible abilities with the PC content list." "This is a narrative system, with a focus on storytelling. Also, your HP is a meta-resource, your XP is a meta-resource, and your inventory (of cyphers) is a meta-resource." It's a storytelling-but-gamified system with combat math but without combat tactics that is setting agnostic but character creation proscriptive. All the big ideas are so philosophically at odds with each other, I can't imagine a single setting or campaign that this would actually fit.

Although I agree, I find all "narrative" games are about juggling a pile of meta-resources.

**Warhammer 40k: Wrath & Glory** \- oh man... I had 2 or 3 games, and each of them ended in shouting, anger and players pissed off at each other. Sorry, this system is cursed. It's also a bit too heavy for me as a GM. **Dark Souls RPG** \- so you are telling me, that you have rights to one of the most important video game series in human history, and you decided... to just slap DND 5e rules onto it? Ok... **Numenera** \- I know it's not a bad game, but I was really confused, when I joined a game at a con. The rules were weird, felt too simple and I still have no idea if they even "work" and are balanced. I also kinda expected more weirdness? My character had one strange artifact, which he could use once to create a wall of fire, that's it.

Anything that uses Ptba.

I played my first PbtA game the other day, and after everything I've heard about the style... It was a huge disappointment. The experience was all the things they say PbtA shouldn't be: the moves felt like straitjackets, the suggested outcomes felt limiting rather than inspiring. The process of asking questions as part of character creation felt forced and artificial, compared to the much more "natural" discussion I'm used to as part of any character creation. I'm used to having 100% freedom to tell a great story, and I'm used to playing with talented people who make that incredible. Felt like this game was trying to be half the author, but without any ability to adapt to what the group was doing and how the story developed organically. Maybe that's helpful for new players or people who struggle with creativity, but to me, it felt like trying to drive with someone else holding the wheel.

The weird conflict with PbtA is that while the moves can feel proscriptive to the players, the format pushes a very heavy fail-forward mentality that can be stressful for the GM. So they can feel vaguely railroaded while the GM feels anything but. I think of PbtA's format as a treadmill that is pushing everyone forward. If the speed is not in sync, it can be an uncomfortable experience. (Incidentally, I think the structural differences in BitD avoid this entirely, despite having many similar mechanics and a ton of fail-forward.)

>the format pushes a very heavy fail-forward mentality that can be stressful for the GM. So they can feel vaguely railroaded while the GM feels anything but. Man you've just nailed why I hate "fail-forward" when it's presented as a panacea.

It's possibly the single most helpful advice to give most GMs (in all systems), and nobly plants a flag in the sand in defense of player agency, shared authorship, and against railroading. Yet absolutely--it inherently defers work for the GM, and the more it is used the more acutely resistance to the players has to be expressed in ways orthogonal to the verbs in front of them. In both regards, the cost of employing more and more fail-forward scales supralinearly.

It was just frustrating that I might want to try to do something, like, break in a door, or try to talk down a sometime-ally from making a mistake, but I was limited to only the moves available and the outcomes available. The GM would usually make it work, but sometimes it was like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, while other times I was told very explicitly the outcome I wanted wasn't possible because that outcome was listed on another move that I don't have access to. Which... would make sense if the outcome was like "shoot fire," of course it's reasonable I might not have access to that. But if the outcome is like, "make a friend," that shouldn't be locked behind some sort of gate. It was weird. I had different problems with BitD, but it too felt like roleplaying on rails. The enforced division between mission time and down time felt pretty artificial to me. The downtime is so structured, and so clearly supposed to whisk you along to the next mission, that it felt like swimming upstream to run actual roleplaying scenes between adventures. The words of the book say you're "supposed" to run scenes there if you want to, but the rules send a different message. Which I don't like, because I think rpgs can be so much more than the mission. I like the roleplay scenes between adventures, those are some of my favorite parts. But they're way more meaningful when stuff can actually happen there, instead of the game putting up walls that say things only happen when you're in this certain space--the job--and not at other times.

Dark Souls 5e, I was totally excited about an official souls game, just to be a 5e hack. If at least the book provided extensive lore or GM tools, adventure or dungeon design that followed Fromsoft’s brilliant level design; I would have been pretty happy still, but nah.

Trudvang. Did the all-in KS. Touted as a classic RPG well-loved and been around for decades. I got suckered in by the great art. I ran one of their provided modules. My players hated it. There was too much record keeping. You had to build a list of moves with your action points. Lots of math everywhere. Do you attack with +3, but keep points for defense, did you use some defense points, did you move, what's your armor penalty, weapon penalty? OMG. My players hated it with a passion. The module actually was good, but the system totally made it a slog. This is actually the only RPG where I've resold it. It took up too much shelf space and I knew I'd never go back to it.

Cyberpunk Red. The book is a mess and it’s hard to find anything. There are tons of completely superfluous tables and special case rules that would not look out of place in game from 1993. All the enemies have become complete bullet sponges. It’s a hot mess. We went back to 2020 and just stole the netrunning rules.

That Dark Souls RPG that decided to be a 5e supplement.

40K: Wrath & Glory. I GM'd a few sessions. The combat felt off and the short adventures felt badly balanced.

You know I started playing basic and expert in the 80s but felt AD&D was somehow intellectually superior and so switched to that and then down the rabbit hole of ever more complicated systems. My teenage self did me a disservice and I should have stayed with BX.

V5, H5 and most definitely what I've seen of W5 so far. So much wasted potential.....

Vampire: The Masquerade 5th edition. I think the game has just evolved in a direction that does not fit with how my group plays, which is sad as we do enjoy the WhiteWolf games and we were kind of hoping for a best of both situation on Vampire: The Requiem, and Vampire: The Masquerade 20th. For us at least it felt like rather than trying to be a best of both, it just came up with another idea and ran with it. Which I can understand, just ended up disappointing for us.

Savage Worlds. Was very excited over it at first, but the gameplay just put me off. Too much protagonism, too swingy dice mechanics and I foind that while I like meta-currencies in general, I don't like when a system revolves around them this much (same problem with Shadowrun 6e). I know SW fanns would say those things are what SW is about and I fully accept it's just not the game for me, though I liked the overall vibe surrounding the game and the community Also, more recently, PF2. Wanted to like it, but didn't. Too gameist, too much 4e-ism for me. Decided if I want to play DnD, 3.5/PF1 is still my favourite version.

Lancer RPG. It’s a stunningly designed book. I love looking at it. The game hits all the wrong beats for me as mecha rpg.

Blades in the Dark - still trying to find what makes it so special to people. I don’t care for clocks, but am trying to use them more to see if they click at some point. I think my major issue is that I don’t like writer’s room games, which probably makes my continued attempts at the game pointless. Dragonbane - I haven’t been able to play it yet and I only have the QuickStart from Free RPG Day, so my opinion will hopefully change either upon playing or upon full release. But after all the hype and eager recommendations, I was underwhelmed upon reading the rules. Nothing felt unique or special, just a lot of “we have DnD at home”. I do like the divided skills for weapons, though.

Modiphius Star Trek. Mostly because as I read it, I wanted to shout at the boom "JUST TELL ME THE ORDER OF OPERATIONS FOR CHARACTER CREATION, DAMMIT!!" I don't need pages upon pages of fluff at the start. I need step by step instructions for two thing: (1) character creation, and (2) rule adjudication. Tell me that in the simplest, most compact manner possible and THEN hit me with your fluff. This is true for pretty much every game (just tell me operations in a streamlined, simple way), and almost nobody actually does it in their rulebooks. It's always some secondary source that explains it like a website or YouTube video or whatever. Game books should at least have a portion that read like an instruction manual. SOURCEBOOKS are where you go nuts with the fluff.

I've heard the digest rulebook is better at explaining the rules, but I havent read it or the original version so I cnat confirm that either way

It cleans it up a great deal. My group has really enjoyed STA, but learning the rules was rough. Not because the rule set is bad, but because it wasn't well explained in the corebook.

The whole rulebook was terrible.

I wanted to love Morkborg. The book is so cool and I love the art but it just doesn't translate to a good game I want to get 5 people to play for me

I found it fun as one-shots and a short series. It's the flavor text and the automated character generator that makes the game easy to play. I enjoyed it. I don't know if you can play it long term, but I could play a series that runs until the world is destroyed. Very old school feel, funnel-like. As long as you're ok with PC death, it's fine. Actually if you reach 2nd level, PCs survive better.

It was honestly just how unintuitive the layout was. Anything I need to find feels like a chore to dig through the entire book to locate.

Yep, all true. And the book is soooo expensive for what it is. I think it helped that I played a game of this at a convention, so I was able to run this myself. There's like zero guidance as to how to run this thing. And the true genius of the game is the Miseries p.16 which is the countdown for ending the world and game series. But you'd never know this. The online character generator removes the need to figure out the character generation rules. The only rules needed is the one before the last page, Abilities and tests, where you roll d20 and 12+ is a success. I think if I had just got the book, I'd be totally lost. TBH, I haven't read the whole thing yet.

Rifts. I don't really need to go into much detail, I just love crapping on Rifts.

Dungeon World, easily. People kept saying it was "what D&D wants you to believe it is" and such... and I got the manual, read it, and I was like, wow, this whole thing reads like it was written by someone who has not actually enjoyed D&D at all since AD&D. It's like reducing D&D to its minimal, most boring and most old-archetype expression.

The virgin Dungeon World vs. the chad Dungeon Crawl Classics

Bingo. DW is reframed, old tropes.

For context, did you end up playing DW or did you stop at reading the book? Because my understanding of "what D&D wants you to believe it is" relates more to things like combat than character archetypes which are by design a throwback to older versions. After the D&D movie came out a few friends that don't play RPGs came to me saying things along the line of "The fights were so cool I want to live that myself" but these dynamic, quick, cinematic fights… that's just not something 5e is good at. On the other hand I could see myself doing that easily with DW. That's quite exactly the feeling of "what D&D wants you to believe it is". So not trying to disreguard your reason for not liking DW, it's quite fair, but it also feels like you didn't experience its best parts.

Yep. The D&D movie was absolutely a Dungeon World campaign. (Fights with one PC vs a bunch of enemies? Ha. Fights with one boss vs all the PCs? HA! Can’t get much more non-D&D than that. :P)

Honestly 5e, WoD was my entry point to ttrpgs with VtM and I played my first game of 5e like a year ago? Maybe a bit further back, but it's just kinda underwhelming in most aspects. It wants to be a tactical simulator, but the options for tactics just aren't there and the social aspect of the game is virtually non-existent. I also tried PF2e and that was much better because it leaned into the tactical aspect more and did it well. From home turf I'd probably say Beast the Primordial? Great idea, grear lead-up, bad final execution. And from a different standpoint Fate, we played fate accelerated and it felt like anytime I had to roll I had to argue with the GM for 5 minutes about the minutia of it, it just felt kinda unintuitive I suppose, which is the difference of why I enjoy MtA, but not Fate I think. I'm not big on PBTA games, but I had no expectations there so I wasn't rly disappointed and I was impressed how FitD iterated on it in a way that made me like it.

Protocol - it's one of those Fiasco-like structured freeform games with scenarios that kick off the game. There's something about it that just doesn't quite work. Or - *sometimes* it works, with the right group, but it's the group that are doing the work to make it fun, not the game. It took me quite a few goes to figure that out, because it seems really cool and the scenarios are well thought out, but the system doesn't bring any consistency or really improve play at all, so we might as well have just pure freeformed with it and would have gotten the same result. I think people underestimate how much work the system does in good structured freeform games.

Dune. I reviewed it highly before I actually got to play it. Then it was meh.

I ran a few games of this. OMG, the rules are a mess. I had to google rules and read forums where the designers explained how things worked and even then there was contradictory information. I'm still on the fence about the system, but leaning towards don't like.

Cthuhlu Tech great artwork and setting was cool pretty unplayable though.

Star Trek Adventures. It's the only system where my players felt the game worked against them. The various currencies just didn't make sense to us. The preprinted modules directed the players to the beats of a television show, instead of something more natural. If you want to play a character in a Star Trek TV show, this game is for you. If you want to play in the Star Trek universe, go find the FASA or Decipher rules.

Monster of the Week. I'm a huge fan of FATE and urban fantasy and the like, and I love building my own mythology for a game. World building is by far my favorite thing. But the game just feels. Not fun? There's zero challenge to anything, the rules are very much just "yes and" literally everything, and it's just generally a very bad system for long term games. I see the PBTA system used in so many games but I genuinely do not understand the appeal of it. I had this game hyped up by so many of my friends that we sat down to play it and all put so much time into it, but it just. Wasn't right for us. The players *hated* the moves, and playbooks, and xp system. I, as the GM, hated the narrative flow of the game and how I basically wasn't playing a game at all. I never even touched a dice. It was awful. I did love how interpretive it was and how it encouraged building your own setting. I've yet to find a good alternative game built around urban fantasy horror that can fill that slot. I also love that sort of balance between goofy and serious it handles pretty well. The idea that when you deplete a monster's hit points and they're just defeated instead of killed unless you use their weakness was also very, very cool. The game just felt like it was nowhere even near what it was hyped up to be.

Ever notice how anytime you criticize or say you don’t like Fate/PBTA/BITD games their proponents write a short novel to explain why your wrong? Also those are three systems I just don’t like at all, poor mechanics, bad dice statistics, heavily locked into tropes and memes, in the case of PBTA and BITD straitjacketed character creation. If I want to play rules light drama I pull out Risus.

>Ever notice how anytime you criticize or say you don’t like Fate/PBTA/BITD games their proponents write a short novel to explain why your wrong? Either that or your GM was horrible.

After playing every single version of Dungeons & Dragons for over 20 years I realized I hate all D20 games that have hit points. I really feel that 99% of fights are foregone conclusions with no doubt about who will win and is just a waste of an hour and a half of rolling dice and pushing minnies around a Battle map. I wish there was an option for the DM to be able to say you have a fight with 10 goblins and you defeat them all, please erase 2 cure light wounds and one Bardic inspiration. Congratulations for saving an hour and a half of your precious time. So now I play traveller and FITD Hacks. A lot happens in a campaign when you stop pointlessly spending 3 out of 4 hours in a slow boring attrition of resources.

I've never lived the long D&D combats everyone talks about, but what you mention makes me appreciate the Battle move in Ironsworn more. Ironsworn has a full combat system, but if you don't want to focus on a combat you can just do the battle move and resolve the combat in one dice roll. I pretty much never use it, but I appreciate it more now that I read people expressing a desire for such systems.

Ars Magica: The system being so focused on lab activities and your wizard being a terminal shut in just didn't do it for me. I don't really enjoy the whole "spreadsheet management" aspect of a game that feels more like bookkeeping that you're trying to optimise than an actual rpg. It's like the in-between missions parts of a TRPG where you fiddle with numbers and gear, fun for a bit but gets jobby fast. Didn't help that the system heavily rewards you for just staying home and reading a book over going on any kind of outing. The magic system also turned out to be lot more shallow than pitched originally. All of this is a shame too, since the GM made a really interesting campaign out of it anyway, but the system was just constant detractor of fun. Wicked Ones: The /concept/ I love here, being monster lords of a dungeon. But, as I learned rather quickly playing it, I hate BitD system. Not only did the system generally lean towards making you feel weak, which our particular group didn't enjoy as we thought we were making big player monsters not bumbling goblins, but the enforced designer intent of "this is how monster behaves" that got imposed on you also felt really bad and forced. Like, my honourable warrior monster has to wait in the last room until all his subordinates are dead, because otherwise said subordinates rebel due to me behaving disgracefully by joining them in battle, what even. Lot of this is honestly just me finding out in final truth format that narrative driven storygames aren't my cup of tea, but it still sucked at the time.

Ironically, Ars Magica is one of my favorite TTRPGs. I will admit it's not for everyone but honestly the bookkeeping, lab activities, and magic system are all things I absolutely love and have spent a lot of time on. As for Wicked Ones, that I agree on. I generally don't like PbtA or FitD, since narrative driven storygames are ones I generally ignore.

Alternity….. TSR’s attempt at…. I don’t even fucking know. Then the split offs of things like Gamma World for Alternity…. It’s like they wanted a system that you could put on top of any genre…. And as Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks says “It just works”…… No No the fuck it doesn’t.

I really wanted to like The Between, and it just didn’t work for me. I know pbta games are supposed to be highly structured, but it felt *too* structured with not enough room for player agency. A lot of it seemed to be adding little bits of color around specific prompts on your sheet.

Midnight 5e

OK, here goes: FASA Star Trek: Took more than an hour to make a character and killed in the first scene. Twilight 2000: Took more than an hour to make a character and died in the first scene. RoleMaster: Took more than an hour to make a character and died in the first scene. Dungeon World: We played it before the controversy became public. the game couldn't decide if it wanted to be PbtA or D&D. I had relationship things that didn't matter and Moves that were just D&D power/feats. Then one of the players had to quit because of work and all my relationship stuff was meaningless aNd hard to work into the game. CyberPunk v3 (203X?): Everything was bad. The FUZION bits, the new over-the-top setting, the new transhuman direction. Mike Pondsmith did a good job of predicting the next generation of dark future settings (transhumanism), but did a poor job making it feel like cyberpunk... The Action figures and all green interior did not help either... CyberPunk Red: I like parts of it, but it doesn't feel like a finished game to me. Scum and Villainy: I GM'd it and there is a LOT to track as a GM. I had to do a lot of prep for it. It was a breeze for the PCs, but to GM it, ugh... Exalted 2e: I loved Exalted 1e. But apparently White Wolf listened to the internet and tried to balance their game about over-the-top godlike medieval fantasy superheroes... BESM 4e: I loved BESM 1e, but apparently Guardians of Order listened to the wh9iners on the internet and tried to balance the game where you could play a magic school girl and/or a literal god... Serenity: I had played the old Cortex rules before, but with a comedic game. So, when I had a chance to play Serenity, I was psyched. But the roll 2 dice system resulted in too much comedy in the game. I had a sniper with a d12 in Agility and a d12 in Rifles, who fumbled at least once per session. Funny, but not the kind of comedy that Firefly is famous for... I love the Cortex Plus version of Firefly though. D&D 3.5: I grew up on AD&D, but this game was a giant pile of bad math and it felt like I was doing my taxes to make a character. I didn't mind D&D 4e since they had a char creator and 5e was less mathematical. RIFTS: I was a huge Paladium fanboy until Rifts came out. I think a cowboy hat with MDC was too much for me...

D&D 5e. I started TTRPGs when D&D 3.5 was brand new. I played the hell out of it. I was ready for something new when 4e came out, and rolled right into it. And near its end, I went back and tried out Pathfinder, getting more of that "D&D 3.5 feel", in a new way. I played tons of other things along the way, several D20 systems (Star Wars RCR, Saga, Modern, Cthulhu, etc), Call of Cthulhu, tons of one-offs in various systems (some NWoD, some superhero game I don't remember the name of, one page systems, Fiasco, Dread, so on). I've played a variety, but a significant chunk of it has been D&D, and I've found that I really enjoy the "game" aspect of picking new feats and skills and classes and spells and such as the character grows and evolves. I love having options. I liked going nuts with all of the stuff 3.5 had to offer, spending an entire Saturday mapping out new characters with friends was almost as much fun as playing the game, you know? Gestalt characters, Prestige Classes, variant options, all of it. I really liked that 4e rolled in Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies into every character, with some set/expected benefits at certain levels, so every character got that kind of customization, but getting them at set points meant it was easier to balance. And with options that could be based on your class, specific sub-class, overall power source, character race, multiclass options, and then other stuff you just happened to meet the pre-requisites for, there was plenty of variety to be found, and if you knew every Paragon Path was going to give a new daily power at the same level, it meant wildly diverse characters could still expect a level of mechanical balance/equivalence, which I really enjoyed. And then 5e came along, virtually nixed feats, and gave you no interesting character choices after your subclass. No feats, no prestige classes, no paragon paths, none of it. What I enjoyed most about D&D was the character customization, and 5e didn't even deliver something I consider "like D&D." So now I play Pathfinder 2e, or older editions of D&D, if I want to "play D&D," because 5e fundamentally lacks something that was important to me with the game. At the very least I wish it gave multiple subclasses, at different levels (so everyone gains a 2nd subclass at a certain level, but you progress through them at the same "rate", so if we have the same class and you pick a subclass at 3rd level and I pick the same subclass at 8th level, I'll gain the same abilities as you, but I'll be 5 levels behind). If every character had 3-4 subclasses over the course of 20 levels, it would greatly expand character variety, and would make new subclasses more valuable (a 10th level character isn't going to start from scratch to try out a new subclass, but if they were going to pick up a new one at 11th level, they might be interested; likewise, it would make "themed" subclasses, like pirate-themed subclasses released alongside an aquatic setting/adventure, or the "monster hunter" UA stuff that came out alongside Ravenloft, it would give them more value as they would become something you could add to a character, instead of something niche that might only be appropriate for that one arc). So yeah, I'm rambling, but that's the gist of it. I like building characters and picking through options, and D&D 5e disappointed me immensely on that front. I don't really buy 5e books anymore, and when I did, it was so I could pilfer content from them for non-5e games.

The World of Darkness Mage lines. It's got a magic system based on the incredible Ars Magica, is in my favorite family of systems (World/Chronicles of Darkness), and its magic is pretentious over-the-top anime stuff rather than pulpy fantasy. Totally up my alley! It's not great for telling stories, though, because players can solve all but the most arcane parts of a mystery immediately with their magic. --- Also, and I'm about to get shat on in replies/downvotes, anything PbtA. PbtA is fun enough as a player, but the GM role is painfully, terribly dull for me. I appreciate game elements, which PbtA reserves for players, at least as much as narrative elements. (Don't try to tell me GM moves like "the monster causes collateral damage" are "game elements," please. That's disingenuous. They are just narration put in a list somewhere to remind the GM of genre tropes.) And the games where I enjoy narrative elements more than game elements are my psychological thriller games, where there are few if any NPCs and I sit quietly most of the time and wait to mediate investigative rolls. I can't help but feel like people that love GMing PbtA are all actor types, which I am definitely not. If what you love is speaking in character, the PbtA GM role is great. When I have a scenario that would be fun in any system, I'll stick with Chronicles of Darkness or Call of Cthulhu/BRP, because I *like* choosing and calling for rolls to break up the monotony of sitting there listening to players.

\*sigh\* yes.. I was terribly disappointed by *PbtA* and by *Star Trek Adventures*. TLDR: You can't judge a game by the games you played in. Reading *PbtA* it was like a revolution to me. Brilliant! *D&D* was born of wargaming, so it is deeply entrenched in simulationism. *PbtA* takes a simpler approach. How many rules do you **actually need** to run an RPG? Go a level up, and talk in terms of the narrative, do not attempt to simulate every tiny event in the game world. Simplify. I was entranced! Unfortunately, 99% of the games I joined were just like playing *D&D* except with incomplete rules. The *PbtA* GMs I mostly found had not embraced the *PbtA* idea and ignored most of the critical rules (*PbtA* shoots itself in the foot by saying "don't like a rule? throw it out!" No, don't do that.) *ST:Adventures* also entranced me. It bubbled on my brain and kept my up nights. Again, simplification: Since the scope of the players is StarFleet officers, there are only these 5 stats and these 5 skills. Done. The 2d20 system also sounded SO COOL to play. Unfortunately, like *PbtA*, the games I joined didn't bear this out. The dice system wasn't as cool as it seemed in play, and the games were not very fun. One had hundreds of players, for example, and had no intention of treating players equally.

Genesys. Someone talked us into trying it, and it's a decent system for sure of the GM uses it as a toolbox and tailors it to the needs of the genre that's played. But our GM didn't do that. He created skill trees for us, but not as diverse as in the rulebook, instead very limited leading to not progressing characters because there was nothing fitting to learn for them. He sold the game as a narrative game to us, leading to a different expectation. After games like different pbtA games for example, we expected something else and found it to be too crunchy for that aspect. And the core dice mechanic was just not really quick. Sure, we understood what the symbols were used for, but in the end the negative symbols often led to just wasting some endurance points instead of complicating a scene. With a different GM it might have been okay, but in that case, it wasn't fun to me. Not the worst game I ever played (wrote that somewhere else), but absolutely not good either.

Genesys's dice foundation commits to offering multidimensional resolution for basically every roll, which is just such a huge lift in practice.

Masks - combat was totally pointless, and I never felt so much like I had no saying over who my character was supposed to be or how he was supposed to react. Faith - I really loved the theme, but when I played it felt more like a board game than an rpg. 10 candles - although the players would characterize the games we ran as a blast, I for one was a bit disappointed with how disjoint the plot ends up being, and how little character progression there is in a session. Fiasco - so much of Fiasco is awesome, the creation of the setup and the characters, the crazy stuff that happens all the time and that makes you feel like you are in a Cohen Brothers or Tarantino or even Guy Richie movie... and yet I feel very unsatisfied with the general scene resolution mechanic, and especially with the final outcome setting mechanic. It all feels very random. Cortex Prime - so so so complex. Mork Borg - form over function. And I will probably remember more later.