Classic Deadlands! Do you want a system that grinds to a halt in combat if you have more than like 3 players? This system is for you! Wait, that's the bad part.

Do you want a really flavorful world of spaghetti western meets supernatural meets call of cthulhu? Great!

Maybe, like me, you really love playing with a deck of playing cards for everything! You get to do that! Initative? Deck of cards. Stats at creation? Deck of cards. Slinging spells? Deck of cards. Building a fucked up mad science gizmo (my favorite)? Deck of cards!

Did you know Pinnacle, the creators, made an official deck? With all cards plus the two jokers you need. Did you know those cards feel amazing to my little stupid hands??? I love them.

Do you want to do mad science, explode things, and invent completely new shit? Be a mad scientist! Want to gunsling? Throw probably evil magics? Maybe have the power of God on your side (but not anime, that doesn't exist yet) all set during a sort of longer term civil war? Wheeeee!

It's my favorite setting and system. I don't like Reloaded, I hate the Savage Worlds system. It feels so fucking generic. But! I'm glad people enjoy it and have made so many things for it!

GURPS is my go-to system. It's incredibly flexible, both in what it allows you to do as a player, and what kind of game you can run as a GM.

It's an older system, and by default is rather simulationist - it grew out of the same tabletop wargaming that D&D did, and tends to take a more realistic approach to what players can do than more narrative systems. I like some of the more narrative systems as well - Starforged is my other go-to system - but the characters always feel a little more loosely defined to me. GURPS is perfectly happy saying "okay, you can fly, you can turn invisible, and you can't be killed" - but if you want to make your character more nuanced, it's not only possible, but encouraged!

On the other hand, if you just want to throw something together and go, you can do that too! One of my players has a character sheet that consists of their racial abilities, 5 or 6 regular skills, and a high level "Security!" wildcard skill. And 3 guns. They're a nightmare in combat, because "Security!" is their all-in-one skill with pistols and melee combat, along with anything else a person with a security background would be expected to know - it's been rolled against to evaluate patrol schedules, reading a foe's body language, and shadowing a mark, among other things. That character plays alongside someone with three different templates (classes), a mount, a bevy of different equipment options, and something like 55 different skills - because that player -wanted- that kind of detail. And they're both very effective in their domains, and play off of each other well.

That's the thing that really sticks out to me about GURPS - it's very playable with a very minimal ruleset (GURPS Ultra-Lite is free, and 2 pages - http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/ultra-lite/), and can seamlessly expand when you want more detail. And not only are there a lot of options for that detail, they also show their work - so if you're still missing something, you can generally still come up with reasonable rules. It just gets a reputation for being super complicated because the people who discover it tend to get excited and throw everything in...

The dungeon master can do whatever the fuck they feel like. It's their game. These systems are suggestions, inspiration, not law. I don't get why people get so hung up on the particular rules of some edition

I'm actually planning a twoshot of DC20 next week. So hopefully I will be able to do just that.

From everything I've been reading I've liked quite a bit, hopefully it works just as well in practice.

let me tell you about daggerheart!

having combed through a good portion of ttrpgs that have come out over the last 20 years, and having played a version of d&d since the 90s, i've found a system that does a lot of what i've been after in a system and i'm hoping that it's popularity continues to grow.

things i like:

• new player friendly (either new to ttrpgs or new to this system particularly)
• heroic curve for player actions (2d12 > 1d20)
• narrative driven, but still tied to mechanics (in combat action doesn't grind to a halt, which allows for a flow that i more appreciate.)
• degrees of success and failure (allowing for more gradient resolution to checks, which then allows for more opportunity for tension)
• hope & fear as mechanics (hope being used by players to boost what they do and fear being used by the gm to facilitate opposition. i like that there's a tangible correlation between failure and the walls closing in.)
• the structure of monster and environment stat blocks (these work really well for me and it makes it easy to frame something with the mechanics with little effort).
• the emphasis on collaborative storytelling. (this is something i think either a lot of ttrpgs just don't do, do a bad job at getting across, or gms/dms don't take into account. i like being a fan of my players. i do not like the 'me vs them' mentality of running a game. this is the player's story, i'm just furnishing it with extra layers and adding complications when things don't go their way.)

if you like a heroic, narrative-driven fantasy system that makes combat less of a wargame, but doesn't pull it's punches, then i think this one is a good shout. i feel like it has enough rules to give players direction and enforce narrative choices, but removes some of the things i feel make other systems feel tedious or unrealistic.

other systems that i've eyed but haven't had a chance to play yet:

• delta green (high on my list. horror/conspiracy setting that put regular folks up against lovecraftian horrors. not to solve or understand it, but to end it. it's like call of cthulhu but you hate your job and you want to go home.)
• lancer (epic mecha building fantasy. make a big beautiful bot from a ridiculously large number of options over time and fight. super duper crunchy)
• the wildsea (post apocalyptic fantasy of sailing on the treetops of an overgrown world and dealing with what's left behind after nature takes back the planet)
• mothership (aliens the ttrpg. shit goes down on spaceships. you will probably die in a spectacular way. it will be fun.)

most of these recommendations have come from quinns quest on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/@Quinns_Quest) and having followed quinns from board gaming to video gaming to ttrpgs, I feel like he does a great job of highlighting a lot of overlooked gems in this space. if not just to check out the possibilities that are afforded to you when you step outside the box of what has become popular, but to experience games that people put a lot of love into and it definitely shows in their work.

as a last point, i think it's okay to be critical of things, even things that we enjoy. often times the things we like the most are the things we're most critical of. i personally have watched d&d grow from ad&d to where it is now, and still play it. mostly because it's popular and the people i play games with know it well. they're the same people i've been making great strides with in terms of introducing new systems and showcasing all the neat stuff people have made. i'm not a fan of d&d anymore. mostly because i've grown tired of it, but also because of all the baggage that it has (wotc and hasbro being the biggest two). but i am a fan of tabletop gaming and getting together with friends to have fun. i think that's the primary goal, so whatever you use to facilitate that is fine. just don't close the door on criticism because you don't want to hear anything negative about what makes you happy. open the door to new things.

I'm partial to Fate.

It's very open. You don't have to worry about looking up the right class or feats. You just describe what you want to play, and if the group thinks it's cool and a good fit for the story, you're basically done.

Now, the downside is this requires a lot more creativity up front. A blank page can be intimidating.

I like that players have more control over the outcome. You can usually get what you want, even if you roll poorly, but it's more of a question of what you're willing to pay for it.

Every roll will be one of

• succeed with style
• succeed
• a lesser version of what you want
• succeed at a minor cost
• succeed at a major cost
• (if you roll badly and don't want to pay any costs) fail, don't get what you want

It's a lot more narrative power than some games give you. I don't like being completely submissive to the DM, so I enjoy even as a player being able to pitch "ok I'm trying to hack open this terminal... how about as a minor cost I set off an alarm?" or "I'm trying to steal his keys and flubbed the roll... How about as a major cost I create a distraction, get the keys, but drop my backpack by accident. Now I'm disarmed, have no tools, and they can probably trace me with that stuff later. But I got the keys!".

It's more collaborative, like a writer's room, so if someone proposes a dud solution the group can work on it.

The math probability also feels nice. You tend to roll your average, so there's less swinginess like you'll get in systems rolling one die.

When it come to more traditional RPGs, I really like Pathfinder 2E for the following reasons:

• It scales very well from level 1-20. The math just works
• Encounter design and balancing is easy for the busy GM
• All of the classes are good, there aren't any trap classes
• Teamwork is highly encouraged through class and ability design
• Degrees of success/failure
• Easy, free access to the rules
• The ORC license
• https://pathbuilder2e.com/
• Pathfinder Society Organized play is very well done and well supported by Paizo
• Women wear reasonable armor
• The rune system for magic weapons/armor
• And so many more

My current DM despises 5e

I think it's because 3.5 offers such a ludicrous bag of dickfuckery for the GM to employ at their leisure it's literally like hanging out with someone who insists on cleaning their guns with company over.

I just want to play cyberpunk red again.

Modern iterations? Daggerheart. Full stop. 🤷🏼‍♂️

d&d 5e is a fine system, it's just more than i want to gm and more than my friends want to learn. so simpler systems like shadowdark or black hack are really great for us, but if your group knows d&d 5e and has fun playing it, than why the hell not just play 5e?

Oh! Dread is fantastic at the thing it is good at, which is horror one-shot sessions. The rules are incredibly lightweight, which makes it nice for people who have never played and RPG before or people who just want to jump into a story. By using a real, physical Jenga tower as the mechanic everyone can see the tension building up as the story goes on and the crash always provides a good jump scare. Then there is a tension break as the tower is rebuilt but goes up again as the initial pulls for missing party members happen. I also love the 20 questions style character creation, which lets people put as much or as little work into it as they want, doesn't get bogged down in mechanics which break immersion, and lets the GM really surprise them with difficult dilemmas.

People are very bad at explaining what they like about things, because usually they like things in contrast to things they don't like. And people who do identify what they like positively often just get told that their input isn't welcome, either.

The problem isn't whether someone is focusing on negative aspects of what you're playing or the positive aspects of what they are, it's that discussions about minority systems are often just puked up onto people who weren't asking. The conversation is often:

"Hey, how can I do [thing] in [game I'm playing]?"

"[Game you're playing] sucks at [thing]/isn't designed for [thing]. You should play [something else]."

"But I like [game I'm playing], and don't want to convert to a whole new system."

This means not only is the asker's question being totally ignored, but they're being hit with -- sometimes even bombarded by -- value judgements they weren't interested in.

We're RPG player, we have a long tradition of trolling each others, AD&D player will tell that Vampire is the opposite of a RPG while WOD player will reply that AD&D is a boardgames and that it misses the role play element to be called RPG.

But all this trolling tend to be all fun, and not many people would straight up refuse D&D game (even I, play it like once a decade, there is so many other game out there and so few time)

There are systems like Blades in the Dark that bypass all the planning phases and just let players jump into the interesting parts of the story. Better yet, it has mechanics to support this kind of play.

"Simulation" type RPGs can be done on computers these days with much more detailed and satisfying tactical combat, but narrative-focused games that play more like an episodic show is where the really interesting TTRPG stuff is happening in my opinion.

Without saying anything negative about D&D 5e, let me tell you about two of my personal favorites:

The Dark Eye

Under the name "Das Schwarze Auge", this is one of the most popular systems in Germany and has existed since the mid 80s and the latest edition has been available in English for about a decade now. There are dozens of source books and hundreds of official campaigns and standalone adventures, all set in the same world and a single ongoing canon (apart from a few early works that have been retconned). There are decades of detailed in-world history that you can use as a background for your own campaign if you want or selectively ignore if you want to focus on your own interpretation of what the world should look like.

Mechanics-wise it's a lot less board-game-like than some 70s/80s/90s systems while not going the full "storytelling first" route that many more moderns systems seem to prefer. On top of the eight basic attributes, characters can select from a pool of skills and feats that cover everything from combat to magic to social interaction to crafts and hobbies. The system focuses a lot less on combat than other high fantasy systems and it's absolutely viable to have a group of purely social-focused characters that never get into a single fight but still get to use a lot of the system's mechanics.

Overall it's relatively complex if you want to use absolutely every rule but at the same time very versatile and can be customized to your playstyle.

Opus Anima / Opus Anima Investigation

Sadly out of print and never officially translated to English so I'll focus on the one thing that works without the official setting: it's one of the simplest systems I've ever seen. It uses a pool of D2s (odd/even on D6, coins, red/black cards, whatever you have on hand) where the number of dice is determined by a basic attribute and a skill that can be combined however the situation requires. Dexterity + mechanics to build something, perception + mechanics to recognize a mechanism, knowledge + mechanics to understand the underlying principles or remember who invented something. To avoid experienced characters failing an easy check out of pure bad luck, everything over 10 dice is not rolled but gives half a success (rounded up) automatically. That's it. That's the whole system.

Yes! Thank you!

One Roll Engine is my obsessive small-time RPG system. I've always loved systems where you get to roll a heap of d10s, but more importantly it has a highly expressive and generalizable core mechanic that allows everyone to roll at once without taking turns, and attacks resolve in a dynamic fashion so that initiative order, damage, hit location, and contested rolls all happen in one roll. It's great for gritty, fast-paced, lethal combats where you can give players a lot of freedom to get creative and stay engaged. It has great rules for easily killed mooks as well, so you can quite easily have huge numbers of enemies and allies all in one battle, and it takes far less time to resolve each turn - and a far greater proportion of that time is people talking about what they're going to do. Reign uses ORE, and that includes rules for running companies (gangs, businesses, armies, entire countries even). I've used ORE variants to run occult horror, mecha, low-magic fantasy, slice of life, robot sci-fi, and more over the years. It's a great system and I can teach 85% of what you need to play in just a few minutes.