mine is delta green
My favorite TTRPG is the homebrew system I made myself!
But besides that I’ve played D&D 3, 3.5, 4, 5, 5.5, Pathfinder 1 and 2, CoC, GURPS, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Traveler, Star Wars 5e, and Mini Six. I’m familiar with a lot of others through podcasts, like Paranoia, Toon, VtM, Fate Core, Fiasco, and Over The Edge.
I was very happy to see both my faves on this list! Lancer and Delta Green! Ive only ran them (one of the Forever GM’s in my group) but the systems are so cool and rich for my kind of storytelling!
Very hard decision, I mean the one I played most and still play with a few friends is in fact “Shadowrun” (2e - 6e), but I have to confess, I never joked about Cyberpunk players, I even played Cyberpunk, sometimes both on the same weekend (weird, right).
Here are the three that I remember having the most fun with:
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“Magna Veritas” and “In Nomine Satanis” (originally from France, iirc), where you played Angels vs Daemons (think “Good Omens” just even more absurd).
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There was one called “Plüsch, Power und Plunder” where you played living plushies, and had to hide the fact that you’re alive from humans.
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“Paranoia”, a game where just surviving was the adventure in a dystopian social credit system, that executed you immediately with killer drones, when you got demoted to the lowest level “Infrared”, but you could just use a new clone and start again.
The most rounded rule system I ever expierienced is ERPS, no levels, no experience, just using the skills/attributes give you a change of increasing that particular attribute or skill (this is also free, but only available in German iirc).
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How could they not include EotW series?
Other than my various flavors of homebrew over the years, it was probably Empire of the Petal Throne.
Second to that would be the Albedo TTRPG.
I guess D&D, but we never went beyond 2.5e. No critical role (or youtube) at that point.
We also played VtM and I think ran a couple other campaigns in the WoD (Mage and Changeling maybe? It’s been 25 years at this point). I was a theater kid, but didn’t really call into the rest.
I’m hard pressed to say what my personal favorite system is, but currently I’m saying Fabula Ultima.
Honey Heists or Roll for Shoes anyone?
Pathfinder is awesome, haters gonna hate
I’m considering becoming a professional GM, some of the more interesting games I’ve come across while planning out my game options include Knave, Ironsworn, Twilight 2000, and Dungeons & Kittens
Let’s not forget
…just to name a few legends adjacent to your listed gems. 🤘🏼
p.s. Pathfinder was, in its early days, a welcome alternative to D&D —for those that accepted a simple streamlining of the TSR/WotC SoP… Though millions of us OGs saw what it was aiming for: D&D in a LBD, but the underlying cray’s just better dressed. 🥲
My selection process was “this one sounds pretty neat”, I had no clue that I was picking legends! I’ll have to take a look at those games!
Love to hear it! 🤩🖖🏼
FWIW:
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Starforged is essentially Ironsworn 2.0 + scifi, as it fine-tuned most of what hindered Ironsworn 1.0 (the actual 2.0 came after, and even learned from Starforged in the process! 🤘🏼)
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PbtA & BitD have spawned dozens of distinct variants, to their credit. (pardon the latter’s redderp link)
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and ISDYSSM is an incredibly accessible game revolving around the group creation of a location, and I love using it as a Session 0 icebreaker to then incorporate said city/grove/etc. in the main game itself —now that the group (of any experience level) feels a personal stake in the story to come!
p.s. Honorable mention for those more interested in roleplay over roll-play:
- Worlds Without Number, and Stars Without Number, by Sine Nomine
- Numenara, Ptolus, Cypher, and Invisible Sun, by the amazing Monte Cook,
- Daggerheart, by Darrington Press of Critical Role fame
Just to name a few more of the absolutely 👨🏼🍳💋👌🏼 indie systems out these days. 🥰
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Where Paranoia?
You dare talking about this in public???
Hah! Like anyone goes to jail in Paranoia. You’ll be shot dead by your fellow troubleshooters before you ever see the inside of a cell.
So you know how stuff works in Paranoia…. Curious….
Just to note, “indie company” and “2nd biggest game on the market” aren’t mutually exclusive. This isn’t a big market, and most of it is D&D.
Ya, they are an order of magnitude smaller than D&D but also an order of magnitude larger than the #3
Agreed. But they’re still indie. This whole genre is a niche.
TTRPG systems may be well-known and famous to us nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person has probably only heard of D&D and a few WoDs. And Pathfinder, of course.
Of course.
Daggerheart: “Theatre Kid (derogatory)” lmao
This list is actually hilarious
Not to be confused with “theater kid (extremely derogatory)” for Vampire The Masquerade.
Damn somebody knows a Pathfinder player they don’t like huh
GURPS. The “Overcomplicated” part stems from 4channers deciding an optional rule that the majority of people will never actually encounter in a game means you have to do calculus all the time. The actual majority of the game is roll 3 dice, try to get under the number next to your skill plus modifiers.
As someone who’s played countless hours of GURPS, back in the 90s, I will point out that the general saltiness at its unrepentant chonk was always a thing, and long before “4channers” existed. (even before most of those backbirths were even zygotes)
Also, your perspective seems to ignore the unconscionable levels of inelegant bullshit that every GM had to slog through just to run a damn session, let alone a campaign.
Oh, "campaigns"...
The original geek addiction that makes MtG/WH/etc. look like amateurs. That sweet, timeless, fantasy of an ongoing, regularly-attended group weave of arcs that’s hooked deep each NIB “forever-DM” right in their inner kid… le sigh. 🥲
My perspective might be a bit more biased on that first point since I only got into the system in the late 00’s.
But I disagree with the second point. I almost exclusively GM for my group, and I’d hardly consider anything I had to do to run the game a “slog”. There’s about as much prep and rules checking as any other system. Maybe a bit more front loading if you want to make a custom race available, but that didn’t take too much more time that doing the same in Pathfinder 1e or DnD 3.5 did.
FWIW, one of the major issues that all of them still share is the baked-in gatekeeping —especially damaging to their longevity now, with the recent (~20yrs = recent?) influx of brand new players across the world and barrier-crumbling access to DMs & gaming groups via the internet.
TSR, WotC, Palladium, et al are seemingly resolute in their shared nosedive as indie systems become legion around them. (often inspired by their staunchly dino fuckery)
I mean, play what grabs you, hands down! I’m not here to yuck your yum, fellow anon, and genuinely wish the best for you and your group. Those that it doesn’t though, tend to agree on why —and the list of irreconcilable grievances among them is quite long, but almost congruent.
There’s a lot to be said about how GURPS is clunky - and it is, even when you’re not digging into the insane optional rules - but I think its biggest flaw, by far, was that it had very little appreciation for genre. GURPS was built on the notion that a single system could tell any story, but what that meant in practice was that a single system could tell a story with different trappings. GURPS was set dressing applied to a core system that ultimately imposes certain genre constraints on anything you tried to run with it. This is true of all systems, but GURPS tries to act like it isn’t.
That’s not to say that it’s universally bad. A lot of the settings for it do fit well in the mold it offers. Alpha Centauri is fantastic in GURPS, and it’s a wonderful system for the huge line of historical settings it offers, if you’re looking for a more grounded, simulationist take. But there are also plenty that don’t. Illuminati University is brilliant but has no business being a GURPS setting. That game desperately wants to be PbtA. Ditto Discworld. Star Trek makes no sense; that game probably wants to be running on something like Cortex, the relationship engine would work beautifully with Trek’s tone and themes.
God help you if you actually think the WoD conversions are a good idea. And who in their right mind ever thought it was the right system for Hellboy?
No system can ever be universal, because roleplaying games are stories, not historical re-enactments. That matters.
We’re in agreement, most certainly. 🖖🏼
I mean, character creation takes longer because you have total control over everything, but that’s basically a mini-game in itself. Honestly I find it much easier to get up to speed running a GURPS game than D&D. The books are better organized, the mechanics are more consistent, descriptions are more clear, everything is better cross referenced, character creation programs include page numbers with your traits for easy reference.
All you really need to know as a GM is how the success roll works, and you can basically look up or wing everything else as you need it. Maybe if you try to learn how everything works, it can seem like “inelegant bullshit”, but not even the books recommended you do that. GURPS works best when you treat it as modular, adding things in as your players or world demand. All the mechanics you definitely need fit easily on a single sheet of paper.
GURPS char gen was to the 90s what Skyrim modding has been to the last 15yrs. ☝🏼
One of my favorite actual play podcasts, The Film Reroll, uses GURPS in all of their campaigns and they play fairly rules-light. The most complicated it usually gets is remembering what an untrained skill defaults off of (and it’s usually a -4 modifier).
I’d totally play some GURPS.
I chuckled at a lot of this, but have qualms with a fair few others. Some don’t say anything about the player at all, entirely dodging the premise of the meme. For example, Pathfinder “their game is just D&D without commitment” says nothing about the player, it’s just a direct critique of the game. Starfinder “just pathfinder in space” also does not comment on the player at all. GURPS sounding like a disease has nothing to do with the player. There’s examples like this in most of the games.
