Recommend a table-top pencil-and-paper role-playing game

The Game Room
41

The important thing to remember about Fate is that while it is genre agnostic, it still pushes play back towards relatively pulp-styled, larger than life heroes who will tend to suffer interesting setbacks more than gruesome failures. It does a good job of emulating a lot of media as a result, but it would probably do poorly as a system for grittier, meaner sorts of play.

I think the most important thing you need to identify when picking an RPG system is: Do you want this to be a game about characters, or a game about overcoming challenges? Because most systems focus on one or the other – maybe with a minor in whichever one they didn’t pick, but there’s a clear focus.

D&D is a game about overcoming challenges. It doesn’t give a damn about your “character” except for a few weak nods from the Inspiration system in 5e; Forgot to check that chest for traps? Well, that’s on you, Mr. Playerperson – you didn’t play the game well enough and now your character is dead. You can have a character, but fundamentally the most important thing is NOT DYING.

On the other hand, you have games more like Fate, which, fundamentally are NOT about overcoming challenges. The expectation in Fate is that your characters will most likely eventually succeed – they’re extremely, vanishingly unlikely to meet their end because you, the player, did something “wrong”. But the game CARES about who they are. If your character is a mad scientist, the game is going to be constantly tempting you with opportunities to get into trouble by doing mad scientist stuff. With the expectation that, more often than not, you will embrace that trouble because it’s fun and interesting and by making a character who is a mad scientist, you are signaling that you want to do stuff like morally questionable experiments in the name of science, that you, the player, know probably won’t end well. There isn’t a sense of challenge.

Another way to view this dichotomy is “games that encourage you to avoid trouble” and “games that encourage you to embrace trouble.”

All that said, you may find yourself struggling to find “pre-written adventures” for many systems – especially the non-challenge based kind. It’s relatively easy to write a dungeon that half a dozen more-or-less interchangeable people looking to get rich while avoiding death can explore. It’s much harder to put together a generic “story” that will engage a bunch of non-interchangeable people.

The GOOD news is that there are a HEAPTON of RPGs out there for VERY modest investment ($10 or less for a PDF kind of thing) some of which are very good. I suggest creating an account on DriveThruRPG.com, because it’s basically the Steam of digital RPG media. Here are a few interesting things you can nab:

Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures – Kindof a weird love letter to old D&D. Will feel very familiar if you’ve ever played earlier D&D editions, but comes with a really interesting collaborative village generator which helps get everyone onboard, and it DOES have a good collection of FREE adventures. Challenge based, a minor in character.

Mindjammer – Not actually a system, but a sci-fi setting for Fate. I THINK it contains all the rules though.

Masks: A New Generation – Superheroes, but in a VERY specific vein. It’s basically intended to create the feel of a young supers team with lots of sometimes awkward interpersonal drama, ala Teen Titans or Young Justice. Cares less about what your character’s powers are and more about what their self image is. Super unique and clever, but may not hit the notes you’re looking for if you really want to know who wins in a punching match between Thor and The Hulk. All about the characters.

Tenra Bansho Zero – Honorable mention shoutout to my favorite RPG. Over the top anime action and drama. Was entirely groundbreaking for me. Mechanically will feel at least a little bit familiar to people from traditional RPG backgrounds, but has a lot of stuff that encourages people to be over the top and to not worry about death. Does have a few pre made scenarios available.

42

Yeah, I’ve bought PDFs from Paizo and some other publishers. I’d buy from some WotC if they offered any. Otherwise, they’re missing out on sales to me.

43

WotC does not offer PDFs for any currently published games. They do sell “classics” PDFs for material from AD&D and BECMI. However, if you sign up for D&D Beyond, you can purchase access to all current 5E material online. However however, I believe the price is the same (or nearly so) as the deadtree version, and you don’t get a downloadable PDF - you just get access through the D&D Beyond portal. Plus you have to pay a subscription fee to D&D Beyond. On the other other other hand, it does come with campaign and character management software. The frogurt is also cursed.

WotC has never been comfortable with online/digital/PDF work. During the 4E era, they sold PDFs of their books, but for full cover price. Meanwhile, Paizo was selling the PDF of the Pathfinder core book for only $9.95 (at the time, I think the print version was retailing for about $40 or $50). They had a specific bad experience with the release of 4E, as PDFs were leaked online a couple of days before their big public launch, spoiling the careful stage management of the debut they had been attempting. And don’t even get me started on 3E’s “E-Tools”…

44

Alternately, if you don’t want to buy Fudge dice, you can roll 4d3 and subtract 8 from the result. Same numeric distribution as Fudge dice. Most people have at least 4 six-siders lying around somewhere. Typically 1 or 2 on the six-sider is 1; 3 or 4 is 2; and 5 or 6 is 3. You can also assign -1, 0, 1 to these values as and treat them as if they are Fudge dice, but the 4d3 - 8 is a bit more intuitive. YMMV.

45

I’m definitely a fan of the 1-2=-1, 3-4=0, 5-6=+1 style. 4d3-8 always just makes me go :confused::confused::confused:

But whatever works for you. The point is definitely that you don’t need special dice. Not that they are hard to get or something, but you don’t NEED them. (Unlike, say, Fantasy Flight’s weird games, for which you DO need them.)

46

You actually don’t need them for FFG either - you can just as well make a table with the effects. It’s just a matter of time until you remeber 1-2 Fail, 3-4, Evade, 5-6 Focus, 7-8 Damage or whatever their distribution is. But I come from Battletech where you were memorizig Hit Zone Tables and Missile Hit Tables for breakfast :wink:

But nice comparison of the game philosophies in modern RPG - I may copy that for future discussion, because I sometimes struggle to explain the different approaches to new Players.

Also worth mentioning that Pathfinder is currently playtesting it’s V2, so you can download their Core Rulebook, Bestiary and a few adventures for free in PDF form. It’s a bit rough (that’s what a playtest is for).

As for prewritten adventures, Paizo is my absolute favourite. Between their modules, Adventure paths and Pathfinder Society Scenarios you have adventures for every Need from 4h oneshots to year-spanning campaigns. And their subject matter cover almost every Fantasy Scenario imaginable, from Giant Hunting to Piracy on the High Seas via Cthulhu Mythos to Underwater Exploration.

47

I’ve never actually done it, but this approach to turning regular 6 sided dice (the normal person kind, with dots) into Fudge dice with a Sharpie always struck me as pretty clever:

To the OP’s point about choosing a game… As a fellow “old” who returned to RPGs after being rather heavily into them in my youth, I found that I had a different set of criteria than I used to. Your situation could be different, of course, but what I found is that I had much less tolerance for anything that ate up free time outside of the game itself. Digging through sourcebooks, figuring out clever rule combinations, developing interesting dungeons or unique monsters – these are a younger man’s game. Getting a bunch of older people together with the distractions of kids and other responsibilities is hard. So I ended up gravitating toward RPGs that fit that model better.

Yes, you can use any set of rules to play any style of game, but there’s a difference between swimming upstream and swimming downstream.

So as I see it there are basically two routes toward cutting way, way down on prep time. First is to use a game that’s well supported by pre-written adventures, where you can get the basic rules down and just jump into the story. Pathfinder does seem to have very good support for this. Call of Cthulhu (and its variant rules, such as Trail of Cthulhu and Cthulhu Dark) has a slew of pre-made adventures that in general have aged well, if you’re into that specific genre. There are probably many other games to choose from along these lines, but I’m not familiar with a lot of them.

The second route is to pick a game that’s more improv-based, where the GM’s job is more along the lines of reacting to player input and playing the world and its NPC’s back at the players. These games also tend to be relatively rules-light. Because of the structure of play there’s not much point in putting together elaborate room-by-room ‘dungeons’, and because of the rules-light nature there’s no ability to design complicated ‘monsters’. All of the Powered by the Apocalypse games are like this (Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, MASKS, Dungeon World, etc.)

Some of the games in this second category work well for long-running campaigns, while others are better for a single session or a mini-campaign of 2 or 3 sessions. I find this fits better into my scheduling anyway, but again your mileage may vary. Some of them, like Fiasco, really kind of push the limit of what you might think of as a typical RPG. There’s no GM, for example.

The downside of this second category is that it kind of exercises different GM muscles, and until you’ve got some practice with it it can be a little off-putting. There’s a sense sometimes of walking out on an icy lake. And if everyone isn’t on the same vibe then it can be a little clunky. If you can swing it, finding someone who’s run these kind of games before and playing with them is the best route. Otherwise, there are more and more live play videos out there to help illustrate the concept.

I’ve tried to avoid specific terminology because that can often lead to arguments, but these kind of games can often be found by searching for terms like “indie games” “story games”, or “Forge games” (named for a forum where a lot of these sorts of games were first developed). This Wikipedia article has some issues, but could be a good place to start: Indie role-playing game - Wikipedia

One last cautionary note if you dig into this. There’s a lot of down-nose-looking and upon-shoulder-chipping in discussions among RPG fans. (Not here, that I’ve seen, but in other forums.) Don’t get caught up in it. There’s no absolute ‘better’ or ‘worse’. The important thing is to find a game that makes it as easy as possible for you and your group to have fun. Best of luck.

48

Yeah, but the extra weight from the ink which is not evenly distributed on each face could ruin the dice rolling true. :wink:

49

You assume the dice roll true in the first place, which most d6’s do not. :slight_smile:

Ebb has some good points too – I’m definitely in the camp of “are you kidding? I don’t have time to prep a dungeon full of specific monsters” and I KNOW my players can’t be arsed to like, read over lore or whatever.

The downside, as is implied, in going the prepublished adventure route, is that you are locking yourself into the types of games that don’t really care about WHO is going on the adventure. It’s going to be pretty much the same if you bring Fighty vonFighterburg or Magicy McCastSpells. You might do different stuff, but it’s still going to be the same dungeon. Which is fine, as long as you don’t mind a little bit of the sensation of not -quite- being part of the world.

That said, there are also prepublished adventures that ARE tailored to the characters, but that’s because those prepublished adventures come with pregenerated characters (Hey, it worked for Dragonlance) and sometimes people have problems with THAT.

50

Going back to Fate, in the demonstration video, there are times when the GM writes out a card (is it an Aspect?) and puts a row of blank boxes at the bottom, which are occasionally crossed out.

How do you know when there will be boxes and how many? And when do they get crossed out?

51

Yes, those are Advantages, which are a sort of Aspect, and the checkboxes are free invokes of the Aspect (i.e., a player doesn’t need to spend a Fate point to activate an Advantage with a free invoke on it). Each time someone’s using one of the free invokes, one of those boxes gets checked off.

When a player attempts to create an Advantage, if they succeed in doing so, the Advantage has one free invoke associated with it. If the player creating it “succeeds with style” (i.e., beating the target number by 3 or more), the Advantage has two free invokes. (If the player only ties the target number, rather than beating it, they’re only able to create a lesser sort of aspect, called a Boost, which is essentially a one-use-only free Advantage.)

Usually, even after the free invokes have been used, an Advantage will stick around (until there’s something to remove it, or until it no longer makes sense, from a story standpoint, for it to still be available). A player can still use that Advantage, but they will have to spend one of their own Fate points to do so.

52

What’s probably going on there is that a character has used the Create an Advantage action. That creates a special sort of temporary Aspect that can be applied to the scene. This requires a roll against a difficulty set by the GM. A Success (roll is 1 more than the Difficulty) creates an Aspect with one free Invoke - you or any of your allies can Invoke the Aspect once for free (to gain the normal benefits of Invoking an Aspect: +2 to a roll or free re-roll). A Success with Style (3 more than the Difficulty) creates an Aspect with two free Invokes.

Some Fate variants allow you to create Advantages or other Aspects with more than two free Invokes; other characters can also add free Invokes to the same Aspect, if it makes sense in the fiction.

For example, a player may say, “I lay down covering fire!” The GM would say, “That sounds like using Shooting to Create an Advantage. Go ahead and roll Shooting against a Difficulty of, oh, +2.” If the player rolls a +3 on Shooting plus the dice roll, they create an Advantage with a free Invoke. If the player rolls a total of +5, they create an Advantage with two free Invokes. Another player could then use a free Invoke on a Defend action against an enemy that would have been subject to the covering fire. They couldn’t use it on a roll to defuse a bomb, though.

EDIT: Ninja’d again!

53

I want to mention some distinctions that can help define game tone.

Sandbox vs. Linear

Sandbox games allow characters to pursue their own path where players can “push sand around as they like.” These games tend to not be very epic in concept. If you were in a Lord of the Rings game and you were a hobbit with the One Ring, what would happen if you decided to not go to Mordor? The epic story would be destroyed.
[ul]
[li]Old D&D was sandbox-style.[/li][li]Megadungeons are sandbox, as are most old-school dungeons.[/li][li]The party might be in a coastal city and the DM might be planning for them to assault a dungeon east of town. But the players decide to hop a ship and become pirates.[/li][li]This style incorporates a lot more improv from the GM.[/li][li]Sometimes, there can be subtle pushes back to adventuring that the GM has prepped. For example, if the GM prepped a wizard’s tower on the road east and the players switch it up and head west, the GM can just put the tower west of town so that the party still encounters it.[/li][li]Or, the GM can try to use authority figures or fearful creatures/magic to try to direct players. For example, the royal navy can just be finishing up destroying all of the boats that the players wanted to book.[/li][/ul]

Linear games (sometimes pejoratively called Railroading games) are games where the party doesn’t have many choices to make in the medium to long term. There might be short term choices (e.g. I choose to use a short sword instead of a mace) but once that combat is over, there might be only one door to go through or doors that, in reality, go nowhere, except for the one.
[ul]
[li]These games have a much easier time being epic in scale because the GM can expectedly force the party to take certain actions like going to Mordor.[/li][li]Pathfinder (often referred to as 3.75) are linear and very epic.[/li][li]Cinematic games tend to be more linear (games like TORG or Feng Shui.)[/li][/ul]

High Power vs. Low Power

This might seem obvious but many folks don’t think about it. In High Power games players have a lot of power.
[ul]
[li]Superhero games are high powered.[/li][li]Much of D&D post 3.0 is high powered.[/li][li]High Powered games are one of the reasons that game companies publish splatbooks[/li][li]High Powered games can lead to Munchkinism[/li][/ul]

In low power games, the characters don’t have a lot of power on the scale of people versus the world. Sure, a 1st level wizard with a Magic Missile spell would be scary to almost any regular folks, but he wouldn’t be able to knock off the local treasury based on this. In a superhero game, a beginning character can pull off a bank heist quite easily.
[ul]
[li]Low power games are usually grittier[/li][li]Death is often on the line (these kinds of stakes are usually not on the line in, say, later D&D which I earlier defined as higher power. Sure you could die, especially if dice rolls went against you, but the challenge rating and the dailies usually means that you won’t die.)[/li][li]Pulp games are usually lower power[/li][li]Horror games are usually lower power[/li][/ul]

Rules-Lite vs. Crunchy

Really, there is a ton to say here, but the things I wanted to point out are that
[ul]
[li]Rules-Heavy games tend to be more combat-oriented in content[/li][li]Rules-Heavy games tend to find their combat to be more tactical, often with more meta-gaming by the players usually about combat advantages.[/li][/ul]

Game Master Fiat vs. Rules Lawyering

Goodness! That is pejorative of me just saying “rules lawyering,” but I couldn’t think of another way to say it. In most games, the GM’s word is law even when it seems to contradict the rules. Players don’t always react well to that idea and they have successfully lobbied some game companies to include rules to rein-in GMs from doing what they want.

Role-Playing vs. Game-playing

When taken to its limits, role-playing becomes pure acting. This might be fine and fun, but it seems to be more thespian/stand-up/improv comedy and less game. A game has rules and pure role-playing can dispense with that. On the other end of that spectrum, pure rules systems become board games and not RPGs.

54

Nice summary, Zelski. :slight_smile:

A few things I’d add to that:

Pathfinder can be very linear, but IME, that’s a function of the adventure that the GM is running. If you’re playing a Pathfinder Society (Paizo’s organized play campaign) adventure, it is likely to pretty railroady, as that’s how organized play adventures tend to be structured (those adventures usually have a very specific sequence of encounters that GMs are expected to guide the players through).

Similarly, Paizo has a number of Adventure Paths (published adventure series, designed to take a party of characters from 1st level to high levels), and most of those, too, are on the linear side. But, there’s nothing about Pathfinder itself that discourages a sandbox campaign, if that’s what the GM and players want to run.

Also, regarding power level and character death: one of the aspects of D&D (and many fantasy RPGs) is that resurrection magic is available. Particularly once characters in those games make it out of the starter levels, character death is more of an inconvenience (and a resource sink), than it is a cause for having to create a new character.

55

Splatbook?

Munchkinism?

56

“Splatbook” is the addition skinny little rulebooks that companies publish to accompany the main set of rules. You buy the D&D three main rulebooks, but then you can buy “Footfur and Elevenses: the Complete Guide to Halflings” or “Xanax’s Guide to Psionics” or “Big Bag of Holding: All the Equipment You Never Knew You Needed” if you want to add the extra rules/options to the game.

“Munchkinism” is a playstyle in which you ignore everything except making the most powerful character you possibly can, especially by finding stupid rules exploits. Using the Footfur&Elevenses rule, you create a Tallman Halfling, who gains advantage on thrown weapons; using Xanax’s Guide to Psionics, you take the cantrip Exploding Caltrops; using the Big Bag of Holding rules for poisoning caltrops, you poison them. Now you’ve got a first level character who can attack with advantage and cause an explosive poison cloud an infinite number of times per day. Munchkinism!

57

Interesting … I’m curious about the origins of those terms.

How did munchkins become associated with that style of play?

58

For the origin of the term “splatbook,” AFAIK, this is the generally accepted explanation.

59

For “munchkin”, I think it may be as simple as older gamers reacting to younger players who started playing and who focused on accumulating power in the game instead of either (a) roleplaying or (b) playing ‘cleverly’. These new players were younger, hence shorter, hence ‘munchkin’.

It’s become a fairly established term now though. There’s a very successful card game from Steve Jackson games called “Munchkin”, along with many expansions, that builds on the idea of accumulating power and wealth and screwing your friends over to get there.

60

Before we get too far into “Let’s explain how Fate works”, I’d like to point out, probably again, because I’m sure someone else must have mentioned it, that you can literally get Fate Core FOR FREE. (Pay What You Want, but feel free to pay nothing once and go back and pay more later if you want.) So if you’re really curious about the game, just pick it up. It’ll be a good learning experience even if you decide you have no interest in it.

I feel like a lot of old school play gets more credit for being “sandbox” than it deserves. You don’t REALLY have choices in a lot of oldschool games, because your choice is “Go to the dungeon, or we don’t play D&D tonight, because I’ve only got one dungeon.” Sure, you can make other decisions about pacing (Do we rest now or push on?) or maybe some nice arbitrary ones like “You stand a T intersection, do you go left or right?” but I think “sandbox” implies more than the “One dungeon and a town to retreat to” that characterized a lot of oldschool play and dungeons.

To me, this is the opposite of sandbox; It’s just pretending your linear game isn’t by saying “Sure, you can go anywhere you want!” and then the same thing happens regardless.

I don’t really think this follows either. (Aside: This is the first time I’ve heard TORG described as ‘cinematic’) I suspect it comes down to a difference in definition for the term ‘cinematic’ – if you are using to mean “containing lots of elaborately constructed setpieces” then yes, if you are using it to mean “full of character driven drama and meaningful personal choices” then no.

This seems to me to be overly generalized. Superhero games can run the entire gamut. A game based on The Avengers is high powered, a game based on Daredevil or The Punisher, not so much. “Street level heroes” is absolutely a thing. Similarly, I think drawing a direct line from “high powered games” to munchkinism is an oversimplification – yes, it might work that way for D&D games, but D&D certainly doesn’t comprise the entire space of high powered games. Try to munchkin in Mythenderand see how far you get. :slight_smile: (P.S. it’s free.)

It sounds like you have a strong opinion here. :wink: I largely disagree, too. (Consider just using the term “Following the rules”?) In my experience, most “reining in” of GMs “doing what they want” is based on preventing them from doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing anyway, rather than taking away some Gygax Given Right to do whatever they please. It’s also much easier for new GMs to get the hang of things if the game isn’t constantly expecting them to wallpaper over the problems with its rules.

A coherent ruleset that isn’t constantly relying on the GM for every single thing is less work for the GM to run and helps provide a more consistent experience for the players (What worked yesterday can reasonably be expected to work again today, even if the GM is cranky today.)