Background: I played D&D, Gamma World, and Boot Hill a bit back in junior/senior high school 25 years ago. (OMG.) I loved it and bought all of the stuff and played maybe a tenth of it.
A couple years ago, I really got into the whole Euro board game genre with a couple friends and we started having a regular Tuesday night game night. We recently had to boot a person who just got on everyone’s nerves for being overly competitive and a rule nazi who was typically wrong on top of it. The same night, we ended up going to a local gaming store and were a bit entranced by the number of role playing games on the shelves and thought that maybe it might be time to try something different.
I watched the TableTop episodes of Fiasco and think that might be a good start with training wheels for seeing if it would be a match. I will admit though, that looking at some of the old module covers for D&D made me wax majorly nostalgic for those games. One of the other gamers was really drawn to Shadowrun.
We have 4 regulars altogether and a couple floaters and usually play about 4-4.5 hours a week.
You probably want something rules-light and theme-heavy. That’s going to limit your choices, but not lethally.
Are you going to be the one running the game? What are you looking for? A pre-made module that you can run through? A pre-made setting that you create your own adventures for? Or are you going to create everything from scratch?
What kind of game do you want to play? Generic fantasy? Scifi? Cyberpunk? Superheroes? Something else altogether?
Actually, maybe you don’t necessarily need something rules light (got distracted by the rules nazi comment - Euro games are often theme-light but rules heavy, after all).
What board games have you guys been enjoying? What would you say the most complex game that you regularly enjoy is?
I have a feeling that I will be the GM/DM at first and then probably switch it around once we get used to a system.
I think I’d prefer something with pre-made modules. At least at first. I remember playing a couple DM created ones back in the day and being a little less impressed and I’d hate to create a crappy experience.
As for setting, we’re open except anything “realistic” (Like Boot Hill was for the Wild West).
Games that we’re currently playing and enjoying can be on the complex side. Although the ones that get a lot of re-play are ones that are less text heavy and more Euro (symbology). But there are definitely exceptions to that rule. Here’s a quick list:
Trajan
Glory to Rome
Bora Bora
Terra Mystica
Suburbia
Power Grid
Tigris and Euphrates
Tichu
Hansa Teutonica
…and after a couple beers
No Thanks!
Loopin’ Louie
Coloretto
You might look into Savage Worlds. It’s mostly pretty streamlined. I have some issues with complications that arise with healing and dying. But it’s great for pulp gaming, modern gaming, low-powered supers gaming. And the book you need is $10. They have a deluxe version, but that doesn’t add so much, it seems to me.
Recently, they have converted the Rifts setting to Savage Worlds, though I have no idea how that could possibly work out since I’ve always heard that the Paladium system was ridicuously high-powered.
But they Deadlands setting works well with Savage Worlds. I have a mostly complete write up of my conversion of the old Star*Drive campaign setting. Solomon Kane and Necessary Evil sound pretty intriguing themselves.
I have most of the stuff put out for the Firefly game. It’s great to have, but one thing I’ll tell you one thing that really stands out about it: the system is so much like Savage Worlds that I wonder why I shouldn’t just play the setting in Savage Worlds.
I’m going to put in a word for 5th Edition D&D. It’s a nice balance of rules - less complexity than 4th edition, more room for role-playing, which is a nice thing. The Starter Set comes with an adventure that will take the party through 3rd level, and the basic ruleset is available online as a free download if your players want to create their own characters rather than using the pre-made ones in the Starter Set.
The Player’s Handbook has all the rules you need to run the game, and if you’re using the Starter Set adventure, you won’t need the Monster Manual or DMG until you’ve finished it. That was long enough for my group to get hooked on 5th edition.
Yup, we actually gamed at Fantasy Flight for a while then stopped off at the Source and got in awe of their selection.
Question about D&D 5e, (I never followed it past what is probably 1e), but could a person use an old module with 5e like The Keep on the Borderlands?
I’ll have to check out Savage Worlds too. Doing a perfunctory look at it and it would please one of our members that it uses miniatures. He’s gotten into Warhammer twice (bought lots of it, didn’t play it, sold it, rinse, repeat) but is kinda compelled by watching it.
I think Call of Cthulhu is a great gateway RPG. In my circle of associates, it’s the one that the non-RPG players are usually happy to join in on. The mechanics are usually very simple, so it’s very accessible while still feeling a little more solid that purely narrative games. There’s a lot of lore, but no one actually has to know any of it. The player characters are typically start out completely ignorant of the mythos stuff, so it’s actually better if they don’t know much. It’s pretty flexible for different group styles as well. For the players who like investigation, they focus more on unraveling the mystery. For the roleplayers, the 1920s setting is pretty neat for characters. For the sillier players, the inevitability of a horrible fate encourages them to indulge in reckless shenanigans. The game tends to naturally shift to whatever the players favor, in my experience.
It would take conversion. Sooner or later, someone will get around to doing that conversion homebrew-style. In general, though, since 3rd edition the GM has some tools available to guestimate how tough a given fight would be for the party. So, instead of just throwing in 4 5e orcs in place of the 4 Basid D&D orcs, you would first do a little math to see how deadly the encounter would be for a party who had the levels you expect them to have at that point. If it’s too deadly, you’d change the encounter to something the party is more likely to live through.
I’m going to throw in the suggestion that you just pick up Dungeon World instead. It may or may not be everything you ever wanted in an RPG, but it’s inexpensive since it doesn’t try to sell you three books for $50 each before you can play, and for many people, it’s the game they always hoped/wanted D&D to be before they actually played D&D.
It’s also probably easier than 5E to convert old D&D modules to, and indeed, has a section on how to do it. Double plus additionally, you can view the entire game in SRD format here or here to determine whether you like it.
Savage Worlds is probably another good choice, but is more generic and a bit crunchier. It suits some people, but a lot of people seem to be annoyed by it. I don’t have any personal experience here.
And then of course, yeah, you could shell out the big bucks for D&D 5E (or pick up the starter set for like $15 for a stripped down version. Also available in free PDF) but honestly, I can’t think of any particularly compelling reason why you would, unless you really want to play D&D and not just “a fantasy roleplaying game”
I’m also going to argue against Garula’s suggestion that you play Call of Cthulu. Call of Cthulu is dated as heck, and lots of people end up creating really unsatisfying experiences with it. It can be made to work, and do cool stuff, but it doesn’t do much to help you. You can do better these days, IMHO.
Call of Cthulhu (CoC) is very flavorful and relatively rules light-to-medium, but it’s only for certain groups. If you want to play old school DnD build around killing monsters and taking their stuff, CoC is not going to fit the bill. If I saw Arkham Horror or other games in the Lovecraft universe on your list of games, I’d recommend CoC (or it’s modern day X-files-esque setting, Delta Green) without hesitation. Not seeing those, games on your list, I don’t know that CoC would be your style. It’s generally run as a very flavorful horror game with a (relatively) high mortality rate. If you’ve ever wanted to be the (doomed) protagonist of a Lovecraft story (or Mulder and Scully for DG), it’s your system. As Arik says, the system is a bit dated, but it serves its purpose.
I will say that DG is my second favorite setting/system, but it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. There’s a DG scenario called “Last Things Last” that sticks with me years after reading it. It’s my goal to someday get it to the table. If you go that route, look into it online. The scenario was part of a contest and is freely available.
My personal favorite system is Unknown Armies (UA). It’s modern horror, but the enemies aren’t monsters but other humans (or their creations). It’s harder to find, but if there’s a copy in the “used” section of your game store, it’s worth picking up. The horror system provided a much needed update to the sanity system in CoC. The scenarios book, One Shots, has one of the best scenarios ever written for an RPG in “Jailbreak.” It’s a one-shot scenario that requires a relatively high number of players, but it’s great. The system isn’t revolutionary, but it’s slightly better than CoC IMO.
IMHO, even given the “I want to a run a game of Lovecraftian Horror!” style, I’d still recommend going Trail of Cthulu before Call, just because Call’s design is so clunky and oldschool.
Maybe I missed someone calling it out earlier in the thread, but what is “DG”?
Isn’t Unknown Armies supposed to be getting a revision or something pretty soon? Yes, yes it is, at least, according to Wikipedia and the game creator’s twitter.
You mentioned Fiasco, and I’ll say, yes yes yes! It’s a tremendous game.
Another game along slightly similar lines: Dread. It’s a little tricky to play and is also a one-shot game, but it’s a lot of fun. Here’s how it goes:
-Before the game begins, the GM sets up a story with some rough outlines of playable characters.
-The GM sends each player a questionnaire for their character, with leading questions like, “What was the last thing your neighbor said to you before you killed him?” or “What’s in the box you keep in your closet?” or “Why are you so afraid of cats?” or “What skill do you have that is going to save your life when the apocalypse comes?” or “When did you first realize that you could control the weather?”
-Players fill out the questionnaires in as much detail as they want, thereby making the character their own. (this is possibly my favorite part of the game–I like to take the questions in a wholly new direction to make the character psychologically compelling and often a broken person).
-Players gather and build a Jenga tower.
During play, whenever you want to do something, if you can completely justify it using your questionnaire (“Remember that bit about how I learned to lockpick at the orphanage? I pick the lock on the jail cell”), then the GM just lets you do it. Otherwise, the GM makes you make a pull on the Jenga tower, with four results:
Successful pull: success (unless someone decides to fight you by making their own pull)
Chicken out: failure, but not life-threatening failure.
Tower falls: your character is removed from the story in an appalling fashion.
You deliberately knock the tower over: you succeed, AND you’re horribly removed from the story.
The game starts off jovial and relaxed, because early Jenga pulls are easy. But as the session goes on, tensions ramp up–and by the time you’ve reached the story’s climax, with a rickety dangerous tower, even though everyone’s laughing, your hands are gonna sweat like a motherfucker when it’s time to make the pull.
We ended up playing Fiasco last night and had a blast. A fun little story about a small town with a preacher, a gold mine, and a mail order bride. It was a first RPG experience for one in the group and it took a bit for him to get into it but it really came together when it clicked.
Systems such as QAGS (Quick Ass Gaming System) or Fate are light on rules and have the added mechanic of letting the players directly influence the story (and alternately let the DM directly affect the characters at the cost of having to give them more tokens by which they can influence the story later, so the whole thing becomes a collaborative effort).
A little more rules heavy is the Cortex system by Maragaret Weiss games. (Yes, that Margaret Weiss.) Someone mentioned Firefly, which is a sub-flavor of the Cortex system. They also have a version based on the TV show Supernatural. And another called Demon Knights which is an original concept by Dead Gentleman Productions which involves the forces of Heaven and Hell fighting each other through mortal delegates if the Monty Python guys were writing the script and threw in some traditional fantasy gaming tropes for good measure. (E.g. There are “Vampires”. They have standard stats one would expect. There are also “Syphilitic Vampires”. They are identical to “Vampires” in every way, including stats, except one is advised not to sleep with them. And they also tend to scratch their crotches a lot.)
Then there are the various systems by Arc Dreams publishing. Monsters and Other Childish Things is an interesting setup where monsters are real, only children can see them, and children are the only thing keeping them from destroying the world and humanity. You play the children, and each has a monster pet that they control. These systems are a bit heavier on mechanics than Cortex, but not horribly so.
I’m going to throw in a couple other board games, in case you haven’t tried them:
Settlers of Catan
Ticket to Ride
7 Wonders
Talisman
As far as role-playing games, Shadowrun is really cool. I’ve been meaning to get back into it. Interesting game mechanics. Not overly top-heavy, yet immersive. There is even a “living” campaign of it called Shadowrun Missions, if you want to jump into pre-made scenarios. There are also modules that you can buy.
If you are looking for nostalgia, D&D 5th is a good choice. From what I hear, the new format of the books makes it easier on DMs to easily put together campaigns by more or less plugging in certain modules. Of course, there are always the published modules. There is word of them doing a “living” campaign, possibly set in Greyhawk (my favorite setting). I haven’t heard anything lately, but I’m sure there is something in the works.
My personal favorite is Pathfinder, but if the last time you played D&D was 1st edition or AD&D, then this might seem just as alien to you as any other game system. The main thing I like about Pathfinder - besides their “living” campaign, Pathfinder Society - are the books. With just three books, you can craft a fully immersive campaign almost by randomly turning to pages in the books. Those books are the Bestiary, Inner Sea World Guide, and the NPC Codex .
I’m not sure you’re allowed to say “I like boardgames!” without having played these two.
Every memory I have about Shadowrun has the game system completely excised, because it felt so clunky, even back then. Shadowrun has a very interesting setting (for certain values of interesting) but I’ve never been able to recommend the game.
Pathfinder is another one where honestly, I feel like they’ve written some interesting content, but the game system is this horrible, bloated mess. There’s like two dozen books full of …stuff that adds more and more complexity to an already not-especially-simple rules. Pathfinder strikes me as the sort of game that is played almost exclusively by people who’ve been gaming constantly for 12+ years and have had a chance to absorb all this organically, and recommending it to someone looking to get back into RPGs feels like telling someone who hasn’t played a computer game in a decade to start with Skyrim and ALL THE MODS.
I kind of agree, and I love Pathfinder. My head has got a couple of hyperactive hamsters in it who, given nothing to do, will chew the shit out of the furniture. I have to give those hamsters a wheel to run on, something to burn off their extra energy. Pathfinder works well for this: the rules system is huge and complicated, but I can keep a fair amount of it in my head, so I can, for example, keep the hamsters occupied by trying to figure out how to build a 12th-level archer while I drive somewhere.
But for someone just getting into gaming, it can be really overwhelming.
