I totally agree with the previous two posts about Pathfinder. It is probably familiar to a lot of gamers only because it’s been around so long, being an offshoot of 3.5. Having played in that gaming system for something like 15 years now, I still have to routinely resort back to the rule books. The rules system is, well, extensive, we’ll say. But most of the rules you don’t need to have total recall of. You just have to look them up when those special circumstance comes up.
But, I only have three anecdotal counter points to that. The first is that all role-playing games, to anyone who isn’t familiar with role-playing games, are going to be strange and overbearing at first. The second is that we all were at one time new to these games, and we did just fine. And the third is that I personally find myself more in situations where I am teaching the game to new gamers, more so than playing with veteran players, and maybe I’m just a good instructor, but my new players have done very well.
Pathfinder has rules onlineto help with game play. Game terms have links to their definitions and rules effects.
If you want something with more emphasis on storytelling than mechanics, you can try out Heroquest. If you’ve ever played Runequest, it uses the same game world, Glorantha. This game doesn’t use character classes or ability scores. Instead, the players write up their characters using key words, such as “I am an Esrolian priestess from Dragon Pass.” The GM then assigns values the players can assign to their attributes. Throughout the campaign, the GM will reward the players hero points which they can use to increase their attributes or make new ones.
Generally, any potential conflict, whether it’s combat, socializing, figuring out a puzzle, or even planting a crop, has the GM assigning a value that the player rolls against. In the last case, a player with a Farming of 17 wants to plant corn. The GM says the world resists at 13. Both roll and add their scores, and then compare. There’s 4 possible degrees of outcome (Major Victory, Minor Victory, Minor Defeat, Major Defeat), and the GM works the result into a story snippet. Major Victory in this case means the player not only successfully planted his corn, he’ll be able to feed the entire village instead of just his family.
Even if the player makes up something ridiculous like “I can lift mountains,” his starting value will be at best a W1 (21), and the GM can say this mountain is a 5W5 (105) to lift. But, the player can put every hero point he ever gets into lifting mountains, and by the end of the campaign might be halfway there to being able to lift mountains.
Worrying about Fiasco going off the rails is a bit like worrying that in a D&D game the orc might die.
My favorite Fiasco story, from a SF playset: someone built their character around the idea that he’d built an undefined brain-swapping technology and that he’d used it to swap bodies with another PC, trapping that PC in a gnarly old-man body while he was in the other PC’s gorgeous rock-star body.
In a bit of poor planning during one of my scenes, I defined the brain-swapping technology: a gun.
WORST IDEA EVER: Swap bodies with someone else, leaving them in the body holding the body-swapping technology.
And that’s where the game went off the rails, as the gun re-entered the story: everybody was shooting everybody else with it, until eventually none of us were in our original bodies, someone had swapped with a giant jellyfish alien, someone else was in the motherboard of the spacecraft, and everything was chaos.
It was fucking brilliant. We could not stop laughing. Alcohol may have been involved.
I’d love to give Trail a try, but I haven’t played it yet. I’ve heard good things.
Delta Green, the CoC setting.
Last I heard, this was in the “We’d like to do it, but nothing is set in stone” phase. If there is an update, I will snatch it up in a heartbeat. I’ve managed to accumulate all of the old books in either dead tree or electronic form. I have a campaign to run that’s still on my gaming bucket list.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean there’s no difference between a game where all the rules are on your character sheet, and a game where you need a bunch of lists and table.
This one, this one, I HATE. You want to know WHY “we did just fine”? Because the people who DIDN’T “do just fine” QUIT and you’re not hearing from them. It’s not like roleplaying games are some hugely popular hobby where you can look at say “Okay, fine, whatever, a few losses.” RPGs are a niche in a niche. We need everyone we can get. We can’t afford to pretend that “We did it with these crappy rules that don’t even explain how to play, so obviously everyone can.”
I don’t want to cast aspersions on your teaching ability, but how many of them left the experience in a position to buy a book and play on their own? It’s EASY to play almost any RPG if you have someone there to tell you what to do all the time. It’s much harder to get to the point where you can play without that person.