Unusual tabletop roleplaying games

The Game Room
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Left Hand, I thought I recognized you from other boards but did not know who you were in real life. Small world. You just brought me out of some serious lurking. (Last post 8/1/12, join date 7/14/99, 171 posts total.)

I played in the Kids on Bikes game with Left Hand, and agree with his comments. I kickstarted it, and am tempted to see if my family would enjoy it as they all enjoyed Stranger Things.

We also played Near and Far, which is a board game with an RPG-like component. It has a campaign mode which sounds fun.

Missed out on Microscope but hoping to give it a try soon.

At this event I also played in a version of Dread that used two towers, representing different aspects of the scenario. The GM used to post here, not sure if he still does.

And I started the weekend with a game of 10 Candles, which has surpassed Dread as my favorite non-traditional mechanic for dramatic tension. The set-up is collaborative, passing note cards left and right to assign characteristics to the other players’ characters and even in some cases to "them,’ the mysterious threat. Both times I have played were in a larger cabin with no power, at night, which may be the perfect location to host this game.

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Also a Powered by the Apocalypse game, Masks: A New Generation is, imho, fantastic for the right group. It’s a teen supers game, but focuses on personal identities, relationships, and growing up to be the person you want to be, rather than super-punching the bad guys. Unlike most supers games, there’s very little in the way of mechanics for super powers - if your character can fly, she can fly, at the speed of plot. In contrast, there are a lot of mechanics for establishing your character’s self-image, and relationships with other characters. Maybe not quite as unusual as you’re looking for, but it’s a very different emphasis from just about any other supers RPG out there.

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People sometimes point to a game like D&D, and count up the number of pages about combat, versus the number of pages about role-playing, and say that that’s evidence that D&D is bad for role-playing. I’ve always been inclined to think the opposite. The more rules you have for role-playing, the worse it is for that purpose. Too many rules, and you’re not playing your character any more; you’re playing the rules.

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Woah–hi, Joe! Small world indeed.

And I agree with all your comments on the games, at least as far as the ones I played in.

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See, that’s not my experience. Games like Masks: a new generation have some stuff that gives specific benefits for roleplaying relationships. What I found at the game day is that with a good group (which we had), this leads to folks putting some extra emphasis on the roleplay aspect.

There are definitely times in combat-heavy games where I think about a bit of interpersonal roleplay but decide not to do it, because I worry it’s gonna break the flow of the adventure and not interest folks at the table. If the game explicitly rewards interpersonal roleplay, there’s no such worries.

Sure, a system can be gamed–but it can also be used to gently direct the game’s flow.

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By this logic, you don’t want rules for combat either, because A) You can always game the rules for combat. B) Because you’re not playing combat anymore, you’re playing “the rules”. So the more rules you have for combat, the worse it is for that purpose. I think most people will find that obviously incorrect.

Similarly, if you want, you can roleplay around a game of chess, but people generally don’t.

A properly designed rules system (Just as you can build crappy combat rules, you can build crappy roleplaying rules), combined with players who are interested in what the rules are about (No amount of combat rules will make people who don’t want to play combat enjoy it, no amount of roleplaying rules will make people who don’t want to roleplay enjoy it.) produces a better result than either of them alone. Rules direct play. That’s what they do. If you are having sessions where you’re not using rules for your game, then the game you are playing isn’t a good one for what you are doing with it. If that’s your platonic ideal, one might question why you are bothering to have any rules at all. The answer of that, of course, is that there are ALWAYS rules, even if those rules are “the GM says what happens” or “we all need to agree if you are going to do X”.

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Eh, even in a heroic fantasy milieu, I can see the reasoning for rules trying to emulate the physics (or theoretical physics) of combat: how much damage does an axe do? An expanding ball of fire? A giant talon? I can also see the desire for consistency there both from an emulation standpoint and because combat is, by its very nature, contested so you want set rules. Of course, you also want the rules to be playable and fluid so a “roll 20” system may work better than some Twilight: 2000 nonsense.

Social interactions aren’t governed by the same laws and you can’t quantify “How happy does a smile make someone? How injuring is an insult about their momma?” the same way as “how much does it suck to get stabbed?” You perhaps want a way of resolving contested acts (e.g. “roll against persuasion”) but the two systems aren’t really comparable or trying to perform the same task except in the broadest sense of “playing the game”.

I’m not against rules for social things but using combat rules to justify them is flawed at best.

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I contest almost all of these assertions, honestly. The answer to “how much damage does an axe do?” is almost always gamey, and has very little to do with physics. Alternatively, it can be very genre specific, which also has very little to do with physics. It becomes even more out there with balls of fire.

And even if we assume that it’s all about physics emulation, this still supports my point: In some systems, getting hit with that ball of fire will probably kill you instantly, or at least, make you very miserable, and that produces a specific kind of behavior – respect for/wariness of balls of fire and the people who throw them – whereas in other systems, you’re more or less expected to take the ball of fire on the chin, scream a battle cry, and go on to keep fighting. That produces a very different kind of behavior. Rules influence the kind of play you get. Even when they are nominally “physics sim” rules. Rules drive behavior.

How many games with systems designed to guide roleplay have you read? Because this seems like a typical “I’ve seen D&D and its derivative games, and not anything that actually does anything meaningful with the form.” answer. The ol’ D&D “roll a diplomacy check!” mechanism is, frankly, pretty terrible for a game if you want it to be about social actions… which is fine, because D&D isn’t. So it provides a way for you to elide past them and get on with the dungeoneering.

My point is not “You have combat rules, so you should have social rules.” Sorry if it came across that way. My point is “You may wish to have rules for combat, and the reasons for that are actually surprisingly similar to the reasons you may want to have rules for social interactions” – namely, to produce interesting, sometimes unexpected results, to guide the sorts of experiences you might have when engaging that activity, to direct the way people approach that activity.

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So, back to the OP, here’s some more suggestions unusual ttrpgs:

Puppetland: you play as sentient puppets, fighting against the tyranny of Punch, the Maker-Killer, and his army of Boys, sewn from the dead flesh of the Maker of All Puppets.

Weave: uses fairly traditional dice mechanics, but most of the game, including characters and “campaign playbooks”, are on your mobile device. To create a character, you are dealt a hand of tarot-like cards, which you scan into your mobile device; each card gives you a set of options for character abilities and flaws. It lets you quickly build a complex character with an interesting backstory, but you can’t pre-design a character. Also, hefty up front cost ($60+ for the game for not a lot of physical content). Also, while the mobile device usage makes it highly portable, since you have to have everyone always on their device and online simultaneously, it is a real power drain. And not playable if you don’t have a good internet connection.

FATE: you probably already know about this system, as it’s fairly well known. The major published books (Spirit of the Century, Dresden Files, Atomic Robo) are all really well done, but fairly traditional games, albeit much more narrative than games like D&D. Their Worlds of Adventure line of pay-what-you-want PDFs, though, can get fairly wonky.

DramaSystem: if you think rules for social interactions and roleplaying get in the way of actually roleplaying, avoid at all costs. If you want ANY combat rules or crunch, avoid. Otherwise, it’s a really interesting, fairly minimalist approach to roleplaying dramatic conflicts.

GUMSHOE: another one that you probably already now about, but just in case…GUMSHOE is a fairly traditional, mid-weight rpg system, with a bunch of different settings, from the Lovecraftian horror of Trail of Cthulhu to the over the top, slightly campy wild time travel adventure of TimeWatch. It’s set apart by three things. One is that it was designed from the ground up for investigative adventures. You can definitely run more traditional action adventures, but the emphasis is really on investigating, gathering clues, and solving mysteries. The second thing that sets it apart is the publisher, Pelgrane Press. A sort of “mid-major” company, it produces an almost ridiculously high quality of graphic and physical design for their books, and features a stable of top-notch writers and designers (including my two favorites, Kenneth Hite and Robin Laws). The third is a sort of house approach to adventure and world design, which gives you hooks and seeds and evocative quotes, and usually at least two versions of any given NPC or location to help customize it to your own home campaign.

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Puppetland has SO MUCH weird stuff going on. All speech is required to be in character or you take damage! There’s a 1 hour time limit! Puppets have weird restrictions (finger puppets don’t even have hands!) and all kinds of stuff. I’ve never tried to play it, but it sure seems neat!

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The writer of Puppetland (John Scott Tynes) is one of the writers for my favorite setting system (Unknown Armies). I may have to check it out.

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Another reason to have social rules is so that socially awkward or otherwise not super great orators can enjoy playing smooth motherfuckers, much like 60 pound weaklings get to play buff barbarians and klutzes get to play nimble thieves.

It can lead to funny things, too - I remember once rolling a character that had absurdly high scores in the “bluff, misdirect or otherwise lie” abilities but next to nothing in persuasion, etiquette or rhetoric. It got to the point where it was almost easier for him to convince you the sky is green than to agree with you it’s blue ; and eventually I just gave up on trying to do anything uncrooked with him - so every single statement he made included some form of bullshitting his listeners in some way, even when he had no intention to actually deceive or bamboozle them.
No, he was neither a lawyer nor a politician :D.

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That’s a good point too – when “How persuasive is your character?” is tied directly to “How persuasive does the GM think you, the player, are?” then you run afoul of multiple problems: First, the fact that you are tying character performance to player performance in an area where many people would love to be able to play a character who outperforms them and second, that everything eventually comes down to “GM may I?”

In much the same way that combat rules abstract combat so that the mixed martial artist at the table doesn’t get any advantages in combat, social rules that abstract roleplay prevent the naturally charismatic player from being able to succeed at all his social stuff even though he has invested nothing in his character’s social capabilities.

Of course, there are limits on the value of this sort of thing, depending on how your game resolves tasks. In a D&Dalike, you don’t really want to be able to say “Sir Reginald is a brilliant tactician, so he should be able to come up with a better strategy for this fight than I can.” (Even though it’s generally perfectly acceptable to say “Fitzvald the sneaky knows way more about traps than I do, so he should be able to spot the signs even if I can’t.”) D&D “zooms in” on combat in way that requires the players to make the high level decisions while the characters make the low level ones (You can say “Erdric the bold flourishes his rapier, feints at his opponent’s midsection, and then lunges for his thigh!” or whatever, but it doesn’t have any effect on the progress of the game unless your CHARACTER has some sort of ability to help.) so if you want social stuff to be equally important (Disclaimer: In spite of what people say, in D&D, it’s usually not) then players should be able to say things like “Reginald is going to try to persuade the king by bringing up his responsibilities under the feudal system.” without having to give a word-by-word. The player is making a high level decision, and the character is taking care of the details.

Of course, there also ARE games where things are zoomed out on combat to the point where Sir Reginald being a brilliant tactician is a perfectly reasonable reason he should win a fight – those fights are probably abstracted as single die rolls or something similar, in a challenge-based (as opposed to task-based) resolution system.

Of course, none of this is even going anywhere near how MASKS operates - that game is so far removed from the relative physics sim of a D&Dalike that it doesn’t even really compare.

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Fae Noir was a neat RPG with a good premise… It was basically Shadowrun in old gangster times. Trolls and Elves with Tommy guns and magic spells.

The biggest problem we had, though, was that there was no Charisma stat. All social activities required actual roleplaying. Which you could argue is fair, I guess that can encourage people to roleplay who otherwise wouldn’t (in a forceful, heavy-handed way).

But then there is a “singing” skill, which has no stat to associate it with so there’s no clear way to actually use it. And you can buy “annoying” as a character flaw, which has no mechanical disadvantage in a game with no social mechanics, yet gives a mechanical advantage by providing extra build points. It’s like partway through writing the book they forgot their plan to ignore social mechanics.

Frankly I don’t like it when a game expects a player to be able to perform as the character for success. I shouldn’t have to be a trained medical doctor to roleplay a character with a medicine background, or have gone through multiple tours of duty in the military to play a grizzled soldier, so why should I have to be a real-life skilled diplomat to persuade an NPC in a game? I just call it lazy game design.

(In real life I actually do have those kinds of skills, I’ve been a salesman and mediator in real life, but it’s the principle that bothers me.)

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That does sound awkward; I don’t assert that you “need” a charisma stat or social skills, but if you are running a game that has one or the other but not both, you’re going to run into weird situations and you might want to think hard about why you are doing that.

Iron Kingdoms has this problem - it’s a Stat+Skill style game, and has a BUNCH of “social” style skills and no social stat. In theory, you’re supposed to roll “whatever seems appropriate” so if you are trying to intimidate someone by bending a crowbar, you roll intimidation+strength, but there are lots of situations for skills like Seduction, Negotiation and Ettiquette where there isn’t a good mapping for that sort of thing. Though to be fair, the skill list in that game was also less that super well thought out overall.

The “annoying” flaw sounds doubly annoying. I’m not a big fan of “get extra chargen points by taking irritating rules-based character flaws” to begin with – it tends to result in stuff like, “Oh, so this game takes place in a boundless desert? I think I’m going to take “Phobia: Boats” for 5 points.” and it’s just impossible to balance at the best of times. There are better ways to model this kind of thing and this approach should go in the dustbin at this point, I feel.

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The same sort of design trade-offs apply to computer RPGs. But it’s often in the opposite direction: social success is entirely based on the character’s abilities, while combat success depends on the player’s tactics and twitchiness.

There’s no one correct design, of course. It’s a matter of what the game is supposed to be about, and what the players expect to focus on.

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Exactly; The problem is that most people engaging the tabletop RPG space view it through the lens of D&D, even if they don’t realize they are doing it (Been guilty of this myself in the past) so everything ends up getting framed in that context.

Back on the original topic, I recently got a chance to play Clink, which is nominally a Western (genre) game but works reasonably well in anything. You start with very little on your character sheet - a name, a trait of some sort, one “coin” and a couple of descriptors - and when it comes time for you to do something heroic, you can spend your coin to narrate a flashback to give yourself a skill to help address it. And if you have a trait that applies, you automatically succeed, and the “roll” is actually just there to determine the cost, if any. You can earn another coin by playing your trait, and you can fill in a second trait at some point during the session.

And… that’s most of the mechanics. (There’s also stuff for what to do if you DON’T have a skill to address the situation and a few other things, but still.) It’s tidy.

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Do you get to re-use a flashback without spending a coin, if another similar situation comes up?

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Yes; Once you’ve used a flashback to give yourself a skill, it’s yours. You write it down, and you can apply it whenever it applies.

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Just thought I’d revisit the thread to say that I picked up a copy of Munchhausen to take on a family vacation, and the kids loved it. Granted, I ditched all rules except suggest a crazy story for the next player, but it kept them entertained in airports and on long car rides.