Baldurs Gate 3?

I love me an Armando hot take, so I gotta ask–what is the best (and second best, and third best) ruleset today, June 2021? I’m sure you’ve put it in another thread somewhere but I don’t remember seeing a Penbladian screed recently so I must not be following the right threads.

Hell yes.

In addition to being kind of familiar with the D&D ruleset, for me it’s not JUST about the ruleset, it’s about the setting. Not specifically The Forgotten Realms, or Faerun or whatever, but…the high fantasy that has kind of pervaded culture is basically D&D. The creatures, the spells…I have a basic understanding of that universe because it’s what basically all of fantasy has adopted. I can just as easily play a Pathfinder game, even though the rules are different, because they stick to the same setting. But I know what to expect when I find an orc, a troll, even a beholder. Most games that make up their own ruleset also make up their own setting and creatures and the like, and honestly that’s just not as compelling to me. Which, to be fair, is a “me” problem, I acknowledge.

I’m sure Fate is somewhere in that group for @ArmandoPenblade. If I recall correctly that’s one of his go-to systems.

I don’t know how anyone would be able to translate that into a video game. Fate is best when it’s a collaborative storytelling experience with everyone in the whole group ad-libbing the scenes.

Solasta was my first exposure to 5E and while individually a lot of the changes made sense and were for the better, the overall effect was a less interesting set of combat rules that started boring me. I would much rather be playing 4E, and I would dearly love to see a CRPG based on it.

I will be playing BG3, or trying to anyways, but I am in no hurry based on what I know and comments I have read.

I’m sure that at some point in the last decade, Steve Jackson Games had a $5,000 stretch goal on a Kickstarter for a 48lb boardgame remake that will provide the first any day now.

Per my specific criteria:

Hot take: the D&D 5E ruleset isn’t very good, as a TTRPG in a general sense, as a system-vehicle for supporting creative and safe roleplay, OR as a basis for a tactical combat minis game, which is all it really goes out of its way to actually encourage, anyway.

TTRPG rulesets/system design philosophies that are good* as vehicles for supporting creative and safe roleplay experiences for players:

  1. Fate - Absolutely up there, as guessed by @Telefrog. A generic, adaptable, and well-supported game framework with a quick, universal resolution system that never halts play just because “you failed, so I guess nothing happens;” Skill-based class-less play that focuses on choice and freedom rather than following the same boring old set of mildly branching development paths; heavy player-involvement in everything from power design to worldbuilding to “what would be a fun result of your abysmally bad roll just now” to increase buy-in and decrease GM burnout; and an inherent recognition of elements that make adventure fiction fun and engaging, with rules and systems in-place to help maintain that Tone consistently throughout play. It expands across genres incredibly well and has lots of neat opportunities to “tweak the levels” to tell different kinds of stories, so long as you want to tell interesting stories about proactive, capable people doing awesome shit. If you don’t, well, I dunno, just live your life IRL, I guess, Captain Boring.
  2. Powered by the Apocalypse - A complex design philosophy pioneered by Vincent and Meguey Baker based, at its core, around using a carefully selected set of Real World Game Mechanics (e.g., dice/stats) to propel an interesting Fictional Conversation between friends, acting as a support scaffolding for the kind of story you’re playing to find out. For many PbtA games, this happens to include a relatively consistent set of mechanics, like a universal resolution system that, like Fate’s, inherently presupposes that every roll of the dice should move the story forward in interesting ways, and like Playbooks, frequently designed as a bundle of descriptors, fictional permissions, and interesting, flavorful Moves that help you tell the story of a particular kind of character that would be awesome in the style of fiction that game helps you create. However, the PbtA philosophy can drive fairly weird creations, like the subgenre of No Dice, No Masters/Belonging Outside Belonging games derived from Avery Alder’s Dream Askew, where dice are ommitted entirely in the pursuit of telling interesting, emotional stories about marginalized communities finding ways to support each other and grow outside the dominant paradigm.
  3. Storyteller System – I’ll include one that doesn’t actually tend to generate many games I actually like, but which does actually contain a modest amount of crunch, which I acknowledge some people might actually like, for some reason. Spiraling out from the original game of Goth Kids Pretending to Be Sexy Vampires with Dice, Vampire: The Masquerade, the ST diaspora is largely the product of White Wolf Games and sometimes-subsidiary-sometimes-tangentially-related-sidepiece Obsidian Path that breaks character abilities out across three categories (physical, social, intellectual), also gives you an absurdly in-depth skill list for your particular genre, and inherently recognizes the possibilities for treating social conflicts as entirely unique from physical ones. The dice pool system is probably easier to read than most d20-and-mods-based resolution mechanics until you get to Exalted-scale conflicts where your dice pool is 40 d10s deep, but it also provides lots of neat little opportunities for Goofy Math/Numbers Go Up minmaxing for the munchkins among us. Plus, all of the games are drenched in absurdly self-important mechanics like “Humanity” and “The Exigence” and “Nascent Archivalism” (at least one of these is probably real).

I’d generally want to include some cool options like the Genesys “story dice” system that powered the semi-recent spate of Star Wars RPGs from Fantasy Flight Games, the GUMSHOE mystery-solving system that actually makes that experience not suck ass, or Monte Cook Games’ Cypher System that powers properties like Numenera, but truth be told, I don’t have enough experience running these to directly recommend them to anyone. Also I hate how Numenera handles randomness-decreasing-resource-expenditure (it’s a bid-first system, rather than a pay-after, and I hate risk, hah).

TTRPG rulesets/system design philosophies that are good* as the basis for a tactical combat minis game, which is all they actually go out of their way to encourage, actually:

  1. D&D4E - It’s like 5E, except designed by someone who doesn’t hate GMs with the fire of a thousand suns and likes giving players actually meaningful choices and a capacity to feel genuine growth and accomplishment over time while also enabling engaging tactical decisionmaking. Also you can make a Monk who’s primary combat stat is Constitution, so you’re just beating people to death with your goddamn Meat, as Kord intended.
  2. I Don’t Fuckin’ Know, I Like Telling Stories About Feelings With My Friends; Who Gives A Shit About My Percent Chance to Punch the Orc; I Want to Know How Likely I Am to Help Her Recognize the Corrosive Systems of Corrupt Power that Set the Two of Us Against Each Other in the First Place, Providing Us an Opportunity to Join Together to Strike Down the Oppressors and Also Maybe Kiss But, Like, the Kissing Isn’t the Most Important Part of Things, Just Sometimes, It’s a Nice Secondary Option

* As always with subjective terms like “good,” YMMV, but if it varies from my own, it’s also wrong, and you’re wrong and also bad and also probably a Goddamned Libertarian

I may be a bit of an outlier in that I have never tabletopped D&D…my first intro was the old school Gold Box games (Pool of Radiance, specifically,) and then the Baldur’s Gate era, NWN, and stuff that’s come since. So mostly I knew 3.5 via PC games, although I’ve owned a few Player’s Handbooks along the way just because I dig the idea of playing, just haven’t really had a good opportunity. (Maybe soon!)

That said, Solasta hasn’t soured me on 5E at all, but I don’t have the same frame of reference as many of you.

Yesss, inject the rant into my veins…

Thanks! Is there anyone still playing 4E? I have to imagine that releasing 5E kind of sucked the air out of that room. And what do you end up playing yourself? (And what do you end up running)

Sadly, what I’m most likely to do:

Creative I grok but I’m not sure I understand what you mean by safe roleplay experience. Is safe what you’re referring to with things like this?

CRPG’s just flat out can’t do “creative roleplaying experiences” so systems designed for that are kinda non-starters in this context. At the end of the day we’re talking about tactical combat engines with maybe some other stuff bolted on top, so either it’s a rich and interesting tactical combat and character development engine or its not. I’d love to get to a point where it’s possible for CRPG’s to do more, mind you, but we’re obviously not past the “choose one of these three options” stage and aren’t likely to be for some time.

Put another way, collaborative storytelling is wonderful, but requires people to collaborate with. :)

4E was a fine tactical table top game. It was garbage as far as D&D goes, in my opinion, as it forced you into very specific roles based on class. I think 5E is fine for what it does - a widely played RPG system that has gone a step in the right directly with the most recent incarnation (lighter rules, options to play without minis, etc).

That being said, it is still about standing next to someone and chopping at their HP until they collapse. There are much better systems for real world RPGs. For a CRPG like Solasta, I think 5E is fine. I’m in the camp of as long as the story is good and the mechanics give me a reasonable ability to do what I want to do, then great.

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

Ahh, I see. I wasn’t sure if safe in that context was mechanical or you meant the social kind of safe. Thanks for clarifying!

Mea culpa on this, getting Armando going on an rpg-system tangent is like shooting fish in a barrel*, but I couldn’t resist.

*never actually tried that, though

Yup. For Fate in particular, the best I think you could do is to use one of the generic tabletop sharing systems and basically use it to communicate with your players.

I’d dearly love to see someone try to tackle turning Fate of Cthulhu into a CRPG.

Here we go

Overall hearing most of that made me feel better.

I still hope there is some robust modding options, because I’m sure someone will make a mod to tweak most of the stuff that bugs me if it still exists.

Did… wait… did you WILL this to happen?

EDIT: Honestly I thought they were aiming for this year let alone “hopefully 2022” so if this is upwards of 18-24 months away, I retract the majority of my criticisms as this is much earlier in development than I had assumed.

If only I could use my powers for the betterment of all mankind.

Still… I’ll take it.

Sorry if this is old news to people following the game more closely than I.