Recommend me a pen and paper RPG

Games
1

So lately around our board game group there has been some loose talk of trying an RPG. On our drive home from a very sad self done demo of Descent 2e yesterday we took a wrong turn and ended up on quite a drive.

To pass the time we kinda played a very ad-hoc RPG telling the story of a federal bouncy house inspector (and ping pong paddle ninja) and his accountant partner searching a post nuclear apocalypse USA for a bouncy house. In the final act our intrepid heroes discover an ancient magical bouncy house that they fly across the land on thier captured giant eagle mounts restoring laughs to the land (and thusly restoring the world to it’s former glory.

We basically used a system of guessing the change pulled out of a cup to perform skill checks and the rest was just storytelling. Suffice to say that our game was far more fun than Descent 2e.

The lesson learned here was that we enjoyed it, but I think if we try an RPG that isn’t designed to take itself too seriously? We all love fantasy more than Sci-fi, but like to take our nerdom with a grain of salt.

2

What didn’t you like about Descent 2e? Everything I’ve read about the demo sessions has been positive. Of course, it’s a boardgame not a true RPG.

Savage Worlds is a great RPG system and works well with Fantasy.

3

My own gaming preferences don’t tend to run in the absurdist direction, and I’m not sure how mechanically sound a lot of the games that do skew in that direction would be, but here are some things I think are cool that aren’t explicitly meant to be super grim/gritty/horrific:

For oneshots:
Fiasco: I love this thing so much. It’s been described as, essentially, the Coen Brothers RPG. Not very bright people with a driving need for something and poor impulse control, leading to things going catastrophically awry. The actual mechanics are super simple and are mostly used in establishing a framework for the storytelling, and it’s been skinned into all sorts of settings and contexts through what it calls “playsets”, a few of which are included in the base book, a few more of which are in the Companion (which has some interesting things to say about the game but is by no means necessary), and years worth of free monthly playsets are available from their website. Plus fan-made ones elsewhere (in fact, most of the monthly playsets were originally fan-generated, then honored by being officially recognized). I’ve heard it played several times and run it twice myself. It was never less than amazing.

In a Wicked Age: Pulp fantasy roleplaying, extremely rules light. The setting and characters are established by drawing a few randomly selected evocative phrases and extrapolating from there. Characters have a few stats defined entirely by how large the associated die is, (most likely) a “particular strength” that can be whatever the player feels is appropriate, and a pair of “best interests” that they’re working towards. The game essentially revolves around conflicts between the characters in attempts to serve those best interests, and the mechanism there is very elegant. It’s great as a one shot, but can also be strung into a loose series of related stories, like Conan stories were.

For campaigns:
Monsters and Other Childish Things:
Kids have friendly monsters that they can’t let the adults be aware of. I’m not entirely sure what the default antagonists are, but there’s a couple different campaigns/campaign settings for it that have various threats, so really the main thing is kid + monster. It’s built using the One Roll Engine, where you roll X number of d10s for any action and it determines everything it needs to know from how many sets of matching numbers you get, what numbers they are, how many dice are in the set, etc. I think it’s a brilliant system that works very well in games like Wild Talents. Monsters is a little simpler than most of those and by the nature of its subject matter can come up with all sorts of lovely absurd situations (and monsters. I think my favorite was the eldritch teddybear Yog-So-Soft.)

Spirit of the Century:
Other FATE system games might also work, but this one is about turn of the century pulp heroes, so there’s a certain gleeful absurdity built in, as witness the first licensed fiction for it, the Dinocalypse Now! trilogy about invading timetravelling psychic dinosaurs.

Don’t Rest Your Head:
Also from Evil Hat, it’s a game about being so insomniac that you crack open a path into the Mad City, a place where all the nightmares live. It’s a constant balance and struggle against madness and exhaustion, reinforced by mechanics that make you better at solving challenges the closer you get to the edge in both directions…as long as you don’t fall off. It’s essentially a horror game, but it has a sort of surreal, silly edge to it. Puns like the Tacks Man and Paper Boys (made out of newspaper) abound, and suggested madness powers include things like Ninjas! (you are head of all the ninjas in the world).

Nobilis:
Super high concept diceless roleplaying where players are essentially demigods imbued with the essence of some core aspect of reality and charged with its defense and maintenance, competing with various supernal powers, other demigods, and things from beyond Creation bent on the utter destruction of all that is. It’s really very cool, and beautifully, beautifully written. Now, in second edition I probably wouldn’t have brought it up in this context because it came off as this pure, pristine work of high concept stuff that you practically had to be a literature major to pull off. Or maybe theology major. But third edition displays a rather silly sense of humor that you might appreciate. (Also, second edition is long out of print and routinely goes for over $100 online, whereas an electronic version of 3rd edition can be had for like $10). If you’re curious, the author also has a lovely short fiction blog at http://imago.hitherby.com/ . (A favorite of mine.)

4

It’s Sci-Fi, but the Serenity RPG is fan-freaking-tastic.

Also, Big Eyes Small Mouth is awesome because it’s silly and can be whatever you want it to be.

5

Descent 2e just felt a little flat. The combat seems overly simplified and not that tactically interesting. We read up a bit on the campaign stuff and that seems really thin and almost tacked on as well. It’s easy to play and the barrier to entry is very low, but it lacks a depth and richness.

We only had time to read the rules and then play one scenario, but my initial impression is that while it works very well, it is just a bit bland. It just felt a bit too streamlined to me, a bit too “beer and pretzel”.(Disclaimer: TI3 is one of my favorite boardgames.)

Obviously I have not played enough to give a real review, but my excitement level has dropped dramatically after actually playing Descent.

Components are absolutely fantastic though.

6

Yeah, one of the reasons I don’t roleplay much is because if I was playing something like Deathwatch I can’t help but think “what if my space marine is flamboyantly gay?”. I just can’t help it, I’m a Cerebus man, not a Conan man.

Thanks for the suggestions though, I will definitely look into them. Also, does anyone have any experience with Mouse Guard? I’ve always been a Reepicheep fan. A mouse warrior with a napoleonic complex is just my speed. :)

7

Legend of the Five Rings is a fantastic RPG. The premise is essentially Japanese culture spread to main land Asia, where magic (Shugenja), Oni, and spiritual Monk powers exist. It has a slight playing curve depending on how familiar your players/GM’s are with some basic Feudal Japan culture stuff, up to and including the “odd” names.

My first GM helped us get over the curve by playing with folded up (lengthwise) index cards with everyone’s names on it (including NPC’s). That way we could get used to saying the “odd” names a bit easier. A small tip, but one that proved immensely useful.

As far as the gaming system goes, it’s great. It is a Roll and Keep system. So you get a number of dice (all d10’s) to roll based on your skill+stat, and you keep dice equal to your stat. 10’s explode for win!~ Attacking ends up being a straight forward affair of something like 5 keep 3 (5k3), and then damage would be something like 6k2. The idea being you want to hit a Target Number (TN). That number can be the armor of your opponent, or a basic difficulty for a skill check (often 15).

What this lets you do is play the system in two ways: by the letter of the law, you can gamble with your rolls. Say the target number is 10, but you are very skilled in this skill check (6k3). The probabilities of you beating 10 with 6k3 is very high. So you call two “raises”. This means your TN is increased +5 per raise… so now if you roll >20 you succeed and you force the GM to do something cool for your 2 raises. But if you roll somewhere between 10 and 20, you’d fail as if you rolled under 10 w/o calling a raise.

The second, and far friendlier option, is to forgo the raises, and let your GM tack cool stuff on top based on how much you beat the roll by. Rolled 36 with a TN of 10? No problem, the GM treated it as if you had called a raise or two.

I’ll cut it short, but I hope you find something you like!

~C~

8

Definitely give Fiasco a shot. Have you seen Paranoia?

9

Oh god, Paranoia is amazing. Don’t let your players read the rules. At all.

10

TI3 is one of your favorite boardgames? Try the Palladium RPG?

11

I kinda wish I still had my AD&D 2nd edition stuff, since it seems one of my friends is interested in Pathfinder. I’m always game for Fizbaning out some fireballs.

I am wondering how necessary mini’s are for some of these games though. Personally I would prefer something without any mini’s needed, and all took place in out imaginations. If I want mini’s combat I would rather just play Warmachine.

Fiasco looks like loads of fun too, though I think we might be more interested in something that can work as a campaign. As for Palladium, is that the guys that used to make TMNT and Robotech RPGs in the 90’s?

12

That’s Palladium. They’re widely reputed to have some of the worst rules in the industry. And none of the games I recommended use miniatures at all. They skew story-intensive rather than hack and slash. Savage Worlds is mini-oriented, IIRC, also uses playing cards and poker chips. Dunno about L5R, which I’ve never played. Fiasco is something I’d buy and roll out at odd moments when you’d like to do some roleplaying but you’re not in a position to move forward in a campaign.

13

Pathfinder is a lot of fun. They have a Beginner’s Box that is a great introduction to the system and has really high-quality production values. It’s perfect for new players.

http://www.amazon.com/Paizo-Publishing-PZO-1119-Pathfinder/dp/1601253729/

14

Paranoia and Fiasco are absolutely amazing. You should definitely look them up. Paranoia is my favorite role playing game, by far. It requires players who are comfortable with each other and role playing in general though, so I probably wouldn’t start there.

What immediately came to mind when you mentioned the post-apocalypse was a little game called Apocalypse World. My group come from a Call of Cthulhu background, where the game mastering required a lot of planning and scenario building. In the end it put way too much strain on our Game Master in terms of time investment, so we had to quit playing for a while. Based on the amount of work he did, it was a very understandable move.

Apocalypse World is a bit more improvisational, with some cool, simplified rules on how to resolve conflicts. Check it out if you need something that isn’t very heavy on rules, and don’t require you to sit a week beforehand making up scenarios. The rule book is pretty easy to read and sexy in and of itself. The setting is excellent too, and I hear the authors are great to work with if you have questions or inquires about the game. I wouldn’t say that the game takes itself particularly lightly or anything, but so much of that is a matter of the established tone of the storyteller and players, not the rules themselves.

15

Apocalypse World is definitely great, but by default is a pretty gritty apocalypse, which is why I didn’t bring it up initially. If you’re going to buy it in PDF format, btw, I would highly recommend just purchasing the Lumpley Games PDF library (this is one place to get it, but there are others). It’s a little bit more, but you get all of D. Vincent Baker’s games, including things like In a Wicked Age (which I brought up above), the renowned Dogs in the Vineyard, a LEGO mecha strategy game, a pirate RPG called Poison’d (with really nasty pirates), kill puppies for satan, and a two player horror RPG called Murderous Ghosts. There are some really cool ideas in 'em.

Also, there are a couple of Apocalypse World hacks out there that riff on the rules for other purposes. Joe McDaldno’s Monsterhearts is basically your teen monster romance RPG - shades of things like Buffy or (shudder) Twilight. Then there’s also Dungeon World - which as you might imagine is a classic, old school dungeon crawler as rendered via Apocalypse World mechanics. They’re not quite done yet on that one (recently had a hugely successful Kickstarter), but they’re predicting by the end of the year.

16

It’s worth mentioning that D&D “5e” is in development and open-playtest, with a rumor release date of GenCon 2013. The current playtest material is super early and basic and doesn’t even have character creation so it’s not worth considering for a full-blown campaign.

D&D 4e requires minis. 5e is aiming to please all of the edition loves, with a baseline game close to D&D 2e, with optional components to add game systems as desired.

17

Indie RPGs I have been contemplating:

Microscope, where you all collaborate on a history, role-playing different characters that come up in your narrative and switching back and forth. Requires blank index cards.

Mythic, which purports to require no GM preparation or to even work without a GM if you want it to.

I’ve bought both of those but haven’t really learned them yet.

Inspired first by the nostalgia and soul-searching in the press surrounding the 4e/5e D&D crisis, and second by watching “I Hit It with my Axe,” I really want to start up a tabletop group. But my main co-conspirators have bowed out already (one has a new baby and the other dumped his girlfriend and is moving to Canada in some bizarre midlife crisis).

I guess I’m going to have to seek new connections at the local gaming store.

18

Mythic is crazy and fun. It’s a simple system that allows a lot of flexibility and leads to some crazy situations.

19

An excellent RPG that you can get the entire ruleset for free is DragonQuest, originally by SPI (later acquired by TSR). The Yahoo Groups for the game, dqn-list and dq-rules should have everything you need. The 2nd edition is the one you want.

Learning curve for this system is pretty steep, but I like it a lot. It is also rather brutal and avoids the standard munchkin problem where you’re soon enough wading in and slaughtering hordes of dragons. Not happening under this system, you’re going to have to develop a character a decent bit before you wading in and slaughtering more than a handful of goblins.

There are some excellent community additions to the rules as well, most of which you can download from the files sections of the groups.

20

I was looking for an RPG to play with my kids awhile back. Initially went to the new D&D, then to Pathfinder and finally ended up with [b]Swords & Wizardy[/b], which has the added bonus of being free. It is essentially old school D&D, and fabulous because of it. Familiar and not overly complicated.

Light your torches, don your helmets, and ready your spells … the Swords & Wizardry Core Rules are a “clone” of the original Gary Gygax 1974 fantasy roleplaying game that started it all. With a thriving internet community and tons of support products, Swords & Wizardry is bringing back a lost style of fantasy roleplaying. Forget huge rule books - just play. If you can imagine it, you can do it in Swords & Wizardry. The rules are simple and quick to learn, and they are infinitely flexible.

You might also consider looking into [b]Warrior, Rogue & Mage[/b] (which is d6 based if you’re into that) and even [b]Dungeon Squad[/b] which is aimed at kids and thus super simple.