Amusingly, Matt Colville of MCDM fame, who managed to escape his career as a very well-compensated and successful videogames writer by becoming a D&D advice Youtuber off the back of sounding self-important and well-informed about the newly released 5th Edition, and who now operates a multi-million-dollar publishing company dedicated to producing products for exactly that system, has temporarily given up his streamed 5E campaign in favor of playing an indeterminate-length 4E campaign for funsies with a bunch of Internet RPG Luminaries on Twitch, because they all realized it’s way more fun.
Right now, I am trapped in two 5E games because I love the friends who are in and running them. In fairness to the heavily modified Curse of Strahd campaign in particular, that GM goes out of his way to make the game feel like not-D&D a majority of the time; we frequently go whole sessions wrapped up in intense RP, mostly ignoring the dice except to occasionally save against the cosmic horrors threatening to crawl, many-limbed and screaming, from our characters mouths to set themselves on a path of vengeance against all we’ve ever known and loved. Generally speaking, though, I don’t really enjoy actually playing any flavor of d20-based fantasy, and try to avoid doing so outside of “excuse to see some of my favorite friends every week” reasons.
Apart from that, I mostly play in the local RPG groups seasonal “Semi Organized Play” campaigns, 3-month-long bursts of high-quality, multi-GM, novel storytelling written by the local GMs, and among those, I particularly get to enjoy Mouse Guard 2E, Chronicles of Darkness 2E, and, until recently, Mutants & Masterminds 3E with my friends.
When I get the chance, though, I always leap at the opportunity to play weird one shots of indie shit, either with friends (we did a great game of the dice-less, playlist-based Ribbon Drive awhile back that was great, and we’re playing The Quiet Year, a contemplative, card-deck-as-randomness game about building a community after a disaster tonight), or at cons like GenCon, where I always just sign up to play a full slate of funky weird shit for 16 hours straight every day.
As for what I run? I almost always run Fate, but I’m designing a new campaign using PbtA as a basis to tell a story in the vein of She-Ra, Voltron, and Steven Universe. I also ran for Exalted and Mutants & Masterminds campaigns for the local SOP program, wrote a cute little one-page, dice-pool RPG called Party of Bards, and generally like bringing back Nifty Indie Shit to my pals.
Admittedly, I didn’t actually delve into it directly in my post, because that’s a whole other barrel of fish, but generally speaking, I’m talking about RPG safety tools to ensure that the play experience isn’t distressing, triggering, or otherwise exploitative/painful for those involved or, in general, making the world a worse place by, like, enabling humanity’s worst impulses and encouraging the players to gleefully play out Nazi fantasies or some shit.
That said, Fate’s main publishing company, Evil Hat, put out the excellent Accessibility Toolkit a couple of years back that is very helpful for telling stories about and involving various kinds of disability, and ensuring that your games are accessible themselves.
And a ton of PbtA titles (a realm where queer writers, BIPOC designers, and other marginalized creators flourish) include excellent and explicit safety tools directly in their designs, from Avery Alder’s Safe Hearts addendum to her “monstrous teens process feelings of unbelonging and rebellion partly by eating people and breaking each other’s hearts a lot” RPG, Monsterhearts to Thirsty Sword Lesbians’ excellent set of safety info/philosophies, which I’ve shared elsewhere on the forums but am glad to dig back up.
Well yeah, but why the fuck would I wanna play videogames? What part of me posting here on a messageboard dedicated to videogames, in a thread about a videogame, gave you the impression that I’d played one other than Animal Crossing in the last calendar year? ahahahaha oh god I’ve wasted so much money on Steam please help me