r/rpg • u/Authorigas • 1d ago
Basic Questions Common Misconceptions About Your Favorite Systems?
So, I've been learning a lot thanks to the amazing folks here at r/rpg. And while I have decided to slow down on trying new systems. (As my players say "three is enough, we know your eager to try more but slow it down so you don't burn yourself out.") There was a question today that cropped into my head, and I wanted to hear from the folks here on it.
"What are some assumptions about your favorite game/system that are just factually incorrect or overstated?"
I've seen a lot of assumptions made in the hobby, and some on my own. From the broad "older systems were designed for math heads and thus really not for someone whose bad at math." to others like "Call of Cthulhu is a game where every session ends in death/insanity and players can't get attached to their characters." and similarly "OSR games are highly lethal and not at all friendly to players who like longform adventures."
I feel like broad, sweeping claims like those are probably overstated-as I have heard of successful, long running CoC campaigns, and OSR games that are able to have well developed characters that last for ages. It's made me curious about some of the other broad, sweeping claims about systems that are-if not incorrect, massively overstated.
Really interested to hear some answers on this.
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u/Lhun_ 1d ago
Gumshoe - the clue finding aspect is so overrated and quite frankly bad marketing. What makes it really cool is how much it empowers players to be proactive and how elegantly it handles spotlight management.
Daggerheart - for some reason the community decided that you need to have collaborative worldbuilding ... no, you don't. You can play Daggerheart like any traditional RPG.
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 1d ago
I actually think the clue finding aspect is great just not really unique or even handled best by gumshoe.
Gatekeeping important information behind rolls of chance is how you quickly end up in either a deadlock or rerolls with zero consequence.
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u/wjmacguffin 1d ago
"Players in Paranoia are not allowed to know the rules of the game. Knowing the rules is treason!"
Of course they can know what dice to roll and what counts as a success. It's just that players cannot be rules lawyers since the GM is like The Computer and can change the rules as needed. Fear & ignorance can be fun in an RPG, but there's nothing wrong with players knowing how to play overall.
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u/CapitanKomamura never enough battletech 1d ago
The implication that the perfect rules and procedures laid down by our friend computer might need improvement is treason
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u/LawfulValidBitch 1d ago
I think a lot of misconceptions come from the uniqueness of TTRPGs as a medium. It’s the only type of media we commonly engage with where individual interactions with it are the main source of content. I think a lot of people are inclined to think of TTRPGs in the same way they think of videogames, where you’re interacting with it individually, but the core content and experience is the same. TTRPGs are not like that at all.
No matter what system you’re playing, no matter how sophisticated or developed, the core content and experience is derived from peer-to-peer interaction, which means the experience you have depends on who you are and what table you’re sitting at.
This is why there’s such a wide array of opinions on what D&D was ‘back in the day’. Some people say it was more narrative, some people say it was combat/encounter focused, some say it was very lethal, and others say it was about role playing and character development. This is especially prevalent before the internet was a thing, because your experience with D&D was usually limited exclusively to your direct friend group.
It’s honestly why I find myself getting tired of the online fandoms around TTRPGs, because I can’t help but feel that a lot of people have gotten away from what TTRPGs actually are. In D&D, for example, the prevalence of Real-Play streams and such has created this kind of singular idea of what the experience is meant to be. People spend a lot of time arguing about how to satisfy that expectation, rather than realizing that the point should be whatever experience the table you’re at has to offer, because that experience is unique, and there is literally no other way in the world to experience it.
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u/Yamatoman9 1d ago
I've noticed online that TTRPGs are frequently discussed as if they are video games and it's assumed that everyone has had the same experiences, when in truth experiences can vary so much from table to table even within the same game system or module.
It doesn't help that most of the discussion done online is from people who have likely never played the game they are discussing.
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u/Elk-Frodi Iowa 1d ago edited 1h ago
The book The Elusive Shift really helped me to see this sort of thing in the early days of the hobby. These strains were all there from the earliest days. But the tendancy to think it was strictly run by war gamers or narrativists etc .. goes way back.
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u/KnightInDulledArmor 1d ago
I definitely agree, especially after reading The Elusive Shift. TTRPGs aren’t like most other hobbies simply because each table is their own unique cell. No one even agrees what a roleplaying game is on a fundamental level, never mind how they should be played. Unlike board games or sports or video games, the game happens in your head and in the heads of your group, not really on the physical table, despite all the paraphernalia.
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u/Yuraiya 1d ago
This is it. Regardless of how a system is written, the experience of it depends on the person running it and the people playing it. Even when I've run systems I didn't like and wouldn't run again, I put in the work to try to make sure the players had some fun.
When I run systems I enjoy, the effect is even greater, because I like the system and know it well, I can get the kind of game experience I want from it even if it isn't specifically geared for it. My Pathfinder (1) games tend to have a strong narrative. My WoD games have engaging combat. Players who have played in my games wouldn't have had the same experience of the systems that your average commenter online would be talking about.
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u/The-Magic-Sword 1d ago
I think the issue is kind of the opposite in the sense that you're correct about it being about what the people bring to it, but that the lesson isn't really about having it just be whatever, its that everyone kind of has a responsibility to make it what it is. The lesson of something like Critical Role is that a game is made much better by enthusiastic players who are fans of each other.
The rot in the hobby I think is similar to other social spaces, anti-social thinking, people being obstacles instead of opportunities, things like that.
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u/Throwaway554911 1d ago
This is gonna sound weird but I find more analogs online between TTRPGs and Christian church than I do TTRPGS and anything else.
Experiences vary, even if the sign says the same church type.
We discuss (internet-argue) about minutia and details, with 6 hour YouTube essays to boot.
We have slap fights about the "ancient texts" and who wrote what / when. It started with people writing letters to each other, now filling convention halls.
"Not how we did it in the old days" etc
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u/numtini 1d ago
Everybody dies or goes insane in Call of Cthulhu.
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u/Authorigas 1d ago
That feels like one of the biggest ones I've seen. Every single comment or meme I see about the game stresses this, but I've also read about campaigns where the players do succeed and go on to longer campaigns. So it gave me some relief, since my players are ones who enjoy creating fleshed out characters.
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u/numtini 1d ago
A big part of this is that Chaosium's most well known campaigns have tended towards the long and lethal. (I run them in low pulp.) But there's an entire other world of small horror that was the mainstay of CoC for decades and doesn't necessarily kill everyone off.
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u/Authorigas 1d ago
Sadly missed my chance to pick up one of Chaosium's one shot books on sale, as I wanna make sure my players vibe with the system before I buy it. But I do have plenty of others in my library thanks to an old bundle, and hopefully my players will be able to keep some of their characters alive for a few weeks/months.
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u/PlatFleece 1d ago
The Japanese scene tends to focus a lot more on character relationships, personal horror, or otherwise investigative horror.
The average CoC campaign in Japanese RPGs are often a mix, they're either something like Ring, The Promised Neverland's first arc in the orphanage, Takopi's Original Sin, or at its most action-packed pulpiness, Parasyte.
Legitimately just watch/read/play a horror mystery from Japan and that's generally what CoC would be like. In fact, Higurashi, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil are really good templates for the flavors of Japanese CoC. In none of those games is the point of it usually "the protagonist dies or goes insane", even if there's significant risk and/or character death in some of them.
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u/Authorigas 1d ago
I'll be running some premade campaigns at first to get the hang of the system. (It's our first time playing the game, and October we all agreed would be solely focused to CoC.) But this is great to know :)
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u/y0_master 1d ago edited 1d ago
The irony being that a ton of people use that as a selling point & if this isn't happening something's off with your CoC game.
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u/DazzlingKey6426 1d ago
It’s kinda a core theme of cosmic horror.
You. Don’t. Win.
If you survive, you don’t make it out unchanged. And the changes are likely worse than death.
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u/numtini 1d ago
The Dunwich Horror is about as close to a standard CoC investigation as you get in Lovecraft's writing and Prof. Armitage is both alive and sane at the conclusion, and the Whateley's are banished.
You can't win forever, but you can buy another day or week or year.
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u/y0_master 1d ago edited 1d ago
Like in the cosmic scale of things, humanity is just a spec in the universe & the whole of time & we can't really do anything about that. That's also a big part of cosmic horror, which isn't, as mentioned, orthogonal to the now & here.
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u/Strange_Times_RPG 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Blades in the Dark is great for 1-shots"
I am convinced this sentiment is why so many people think the game is not for them. They try a 1-shot and deem the game mediocre at best and for good reason: almost all of the depth is in campaign play. People don't get why stress is an awesome system because they don't have to engage with Vice. Heat is meaningless until you start caring about Rep and Wanted Level. Sure, flashbacks and floating inventory are cool, but all the things that make the game one of the greatest of all time can only be seen in extended play. Faction mechanics, crew upgrades, claims, downtime projects, event clocks, all incredible mechanics that make Blades what it is.
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u/y0_master 1d ago edited 1d ago
BitD honestly is bad for one-shots. In the sense that it isn't a good fit (&, as you note, doesn't bring the system's forte's to the front, most of which are designed for longer play) & all of that comes just from the fact that making the crew & getting rolling with playing is easy & quick (like most games from the general PbtA family).
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u/drfiveminusmint 4E Renaissance Fangirl 1d ago
Having now run Blades as both a pair of one-shots and a couple of short campaigns, I completely agree. You'll probably still have a good time if you run a Blades one-shot, but it only becomes one of the greatest RPGs ever made when played in a longer campaign.
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u/DravenDarkwood 1d ago
I actually do think it is good for 1 shots, but not for people who haven't played tbe game before. Like u could do a solid heist movie of various kinds, but if you never played it before it will seem like a mess. I feel that game is eady to understand but you need a slow burn to get it all
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u/BionicSpaceJellyfish 1d ago
"Traditional RPGs don't encourage narrative play" seems to be the biggest one I run into. Like there's some hard and fast law of the universe that makes simulationist rules incompatible with narrative gameplay.
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u/Fenrirr Solomani Security 1d ago
As an extension "so-and-so game is just a wargame, it's not a real rpg".
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u/BionicSpaceJellyfish 1d ago
And this is wild to me. Like I play some crunchy as fuck wargames and the simulationist nature adds to the narrative for me.
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u/Ultrace-7 Stage 99 Games 1d ago
I think the idea is misguided but not totally off the charts wild. Some people think there's a sliding scale between complexity of the rules system and the potential for player-driven narrative. As someone moving away from RNG in his own games, I see where some people get the idea -- crunchy rules, myriad tables and outcomes driven by dice are seen not as something to keep players on their toes and prevent railroading of the story, but rather as a straitjacket that gets in the way of the story they want to tell.
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u/Cajbaj Save Vs. Breath Weapon 1d ago
I think what you say is true but people misattribute what you learned to skirmish games. If you have simulationist rules you can tell any story within the constraints of the established reality. If you have narrative rules, the narrative is constrained by the intent of the game systems. In both cases they can be ignored in equal measure if the story is really so important, but to be too light on them becomes mother-may-I and therefore places undue load onto the Game Master to decide the narrative, which they could always do anyway. Seeing as the point of a game is to play the game then a game with crunchy simulationist rules is the game that allows the most narrative freedom for the player characters of any ruleset type.
See the excellent blog post Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice
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u/atamajakki PbtA/FitD/NSR fangirl 1d ago
I'd happily banish this take and "it's a storytelling tool, not a real rpg" from this world with the same wish.
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u/Mayor-Of-Bridgewater 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'd add any take that invokes "modern game design" as some grand arbiter of worth. It ignores game objectives, design concerns, and is so nebulous. I'm saying that as someone who recognizes and respects a lot of changes and ideas in recent rpgs.
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u/Alistair49 1d ago
I’ve enjoyed Classic Traveller, hordes & hoards of various homebrewed D&D, and GURPS through the ages. I like Into the Odd and hope to try out some PbtA/FitD etc style games eventually. The incredible range of games out there that people like demonstrate to me that there’s a huge range of tastes in the world of RPGs, and that it is possible to like more than one ‘flavour’. Modern game design doesn’t necessarily make a better or more enjoyable game. It might make a more easily read, digested/understood and better laid out game though.
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u/Mayor-Of-Bridgewater 1d ago
I would love for games to take on better standards of editing, layouts, grammar, and flow, most every game needs it. That said, I more take umbrage with this casual dismissal and condescension I occasionally see, while that phrase is all to vague to mean anything. What modern designs? In what ways? What doesn't work in a game? Would those designs actually improve it?
I like pretty much any kind of game that isn't combat-heavy, but that phrase particularly irks me.
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u/Charrua13 18h ago
It might make a more easily read, digested/understood and better laid out game though.
fwiw, the hill I die on is that anything that is easier to read and more easily digested/understood is categorically better. Modern game design, if nothing else, does this.
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u/GreenGoblinNX 1d ago
Ironically, I tend to find systems that "encourage roleplaying / narrative play" tend to turn it into something mechanical and strip it of meaning. Roleplaying doesn't need mechanics, IMO.
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u/vaminion 1d ago
Same here. Every roll of the dice brings the RP to a screeching halt while we decide what deep secret about my character's past was revealed, why I owe a life debt to this previously unmentioned mob boss, or to give me time to think of why my character, who isn't an idiot, decides to do something so pants on head stupid it would be decried as bad writing if it were a TV show.
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u/BionicSpaceJellyfish 1d ago
I feel the same way. I've bounced hard off of such games.
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u/GreenGoblinNX 1d ago
One of the few times I will defend D&D is when people criticize it for only having mechanics for combat and ignoring the other two "pillars of roleplaying" (exploration and social encounters / roleplaying).
Exploration needs two things - players willing to explore, and GMs willing to give them interesting things to find. That's it. No mechanics needs. Same for social encounters - no mechanics are really needed.
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u/amazingvaluetainment Fate, Traveller, GURPS 3E 1d ago
Also that people who play sim games come to the table with a novel to be played out
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u/LordSadoth 1d ago
Anyone that says Shadowrun doesn’t encourage RP is nuts. That games rules are so fucking intense and simulationist that you HAVE to RP, the game doesn’t give you a choice.
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u/PhasmaFelis 1d ago
You're not wrong, but I would agree that they don't encourage narrative play. They give you the opportunity to do it if everyone is on board, but they don't really help you do it either.
So really it's up to the players, but even with player buy-in it can be difficult to transition to more narrative play if most of the table is used to murderhobo play. Narrative-focused rules can be nice for that.
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u/SlumberSkeleton776 1d ago
Counterpoint: all of the stuff narrative rulesets do is stuff I do, and I don't need a system to do what I'm already doing myself (if anything, what it mostly does is step on my toes). I need one to do what I'm not doing myself.
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u/Charrua13 1d ago
The corrolary to this point is "I don't need any mechanics to do anything because I, as GM, as long as I have player buy-in, can do anything at any time." (This is the entire premise of FKR, fwiw).
The point of "narrative rulesets" (the term is loaded so I'm putting in quotes here), is "make it easy to Do The Thing", and cut away all other stuff that gets in the way of The Thing. (The thing = "being narrative"). But, more importantly - what it actually does is create processes for which there are extrinsic mechanical benefits to Doing The Thing.
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u/The-Magic-Sword 1d ago
The devil is in the details-- because what we create in the sense of "narrative" and how that thing is created is heavily contested.
Some people view narrative as aping the structural limitations of tv/movies/books, whereas others are looking for the universes those things provide a window into, and plot-structures from those other mediums are a hindrance.
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u/mythcaptor 1d ago
And also to support specific types of narrative.
Sure, you probably could use a more generic rpg system to play a bunch of old ladies solving crime in a slightly eldrich New England town, but it wouldn’t fit naturally. You’d need to do a lot of work as a GM to fit the genetic system to that specific story. Narriative games like Brindlewood Bay sell a specific narriative experience, and they’ve already done the work to build game systems to support it.
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u/Belgand 1d ago
I see the point, but I also find it to be a lot more restrictive. When it's all bound up in rules and mechanics, I'm no longer actually creating much of it myself. I play RPGs for freedom, not to be constrained by "the rules tell me to do X". For me, the rules exist solely as a means of arbitrating potential disputes or areas of uncertainty. Narrative is not an area where I feel like that's needed.
And I really dislike putting any sort of benefit or reward behind Doing The Thing. I want players who do it for its own sake, not because they were coerced into it by some external factor. If a player needs to be bribed or nudged in order to do it, it's going to feel empty to me.
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u/PigmyWurm 1d ago
Also, you can say this shouldn't matter, but if a system has 50 pages related to moving around and attacking something with a sword and one page about role-playing and narrative development, it's understandable that people will assume it's a game about hitting people with a sword. That doesn't mean you can't build a narrative as well, that is basically how chainmail developed into DnD, but it's less obvious, and their aren't the supports for people who are less automatic.
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u/Viltris 1d ago
I think it's a matter of taste. Some people want mechanics for roleplay and storytelling, and some people want mechanics to just get out of the way.
There's no universal answer, just different preferences.
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u/BionicSpaceJellyfish 1d ago
I would argue that that is more of a player buy-in issue and not so much a rules issue. Its not that traditional RPGs don't encourage narrative play, just that they make certain assumptions about the players that may not actually be true.
My players tend to enjoy more modern rpg settings because they can better imagine themselves fitting into the game and its world. When we play fantasy games, they tend to get more tropey and will play a pastiche of a character from a show they like. I think most trad games assume you will do the former while narrative games assume the latter. Neither of those are bad, just different and can be difficult if you are expecting one type of game and get the other.
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u/FrostyKennedy 1d ago
If anything, simple systems make me check out narratively because I can't create advantages with little actions.
If there's a super important assassination and the shot you take is always gonna be 2d6+stat and 8 is mixed and 10 is great, what does it matter that we spent twenty minutes getting a high vantage on our target? Just fire from in the crowd, your choices are meaningless.
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u/DriftingMemes 1d ago
Brendan Mulligan famously said something to the effect of: "I know how to act out an awkward meeting with a former friend, I don't know how to calculate arrow strikes/damage." His point was that D&D did all the parts he needed, he didn't need rules telling him how his characters should/feel react etc.
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u/Josh_From_Accounting 16h ago
Well, I think you may be mistaking "encouraging" with "can't."
Traditional RPGs don't encourage narrative play. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson actually never intended you to actually roleplay your character. That wasn't a thing people did back then. The game doesn't encourage that type of gameplay.
And yet it naturally emerged anyway and formed the hobby.
You CAN do narrative in a traditional TRPG. People have done it since the hobby started. Narrative mechanics weren't a thing as we know it until Ron Edward's Sorcerer in the mid-2000s. But, encouraging it is a different story.
I think the real issue is people discussing this idea either do a poor job communicating it or lack the nuance to fully understand it.
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 1d ago
Additionally with OSR there is a misconception it's all just dungeon crawling with little to no RP. Which is not the case at all.
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u/Authorigas 1d ago
That was an assumption I had that was quickly corrected, thankfully. Now I just need to figure out how lethal it actually is-or if that's overstated too.
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u/SekhWork 1d ago
OSR IS extremely lethal... if you treat it like a game. OSR does a good job of trying to treat the world like a real place with real dangers and players that just run in and say "I attack the monster" will often get swatted down for their hubris.
Players that approach a situation with the caution and respect it deserves of someone actually existing in that world on the other hand will likely do just fine.
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u/delahunt 1d ago
This is what I was going to say. A lot of the games with high lethality also don't gate progression behind kill XP. The idea is less about "combat is going to kill you, so be ready to make a new character at the drop of a hat" and - generally - more about "consequences for poor decisions and poor luck can be severe, act accordingly."
Above 3rd level in D&D 5e you're supposed to just kick in the door and go after the monsters because you're basically playing an action movie character at that point.
At the equivalent in OSR games you're still just some guy (a skilled guy, but still a guy) who is going to have a really bad day - or a quick end to all his days - if that orc's crossbow hits him when fired.
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u/SekhWork 1d ago
At the equivalent in OSR games you're still just some guy (a skilled guy, but still a guy) who is going to have a really bad day - or a quick end to all his days - if that orc's crossbow hits him when fired.
One reason I enjoy Delta Green, and a lesser extent, Shadowrun character design more than 5E stuff. You are generally just... a dude. Maybe a very skilled dude, maybe a very well equipped dude, but a bolt to the heart, or a sniper round to the skull, or as my Delta Green player found out on Saturday... just a random county deputy that rolled quite well vs my friends critical fumble....and you can be dead in 1 bullet.
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u/delahunt 1d ago
Yep, I'm enjoying it a lot in my Dragonbane game I'm running right now. My PCs are skilled. One even has maxed out archery at this point. They generally wreck most of the book encounters with a combination of their skills and tactics.
But things get serious real quick the second someone fails a dodge/parry roll or damage gets through from a lucky crit. And I enjoy that they get to feel powerful, but never to the point that they can just disregard the threat violence could pose to them.
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u/Jalor218 1d ago
This is one of the things that makes Mausritter so great. It's never counterintuitive that you have to run or hide, because you are a mouse.
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u/Neuvost 1d ago edited 1d ago
Re lethality: The OSR design mindset is less "kill the players!" and more that more interesting things happen in an unbalanced game than in a balanced one. When you roll 3d6 during character creation to determine a stat, you're just as likely to roll 18 as 3.
That said, lethality might still be part of the theme and be a design goal, occasionally even more so than the 1970s games that inspired them. Depends on the game. Pirate Borg is less deadly than MÖRK BORG, tho even r/MORKBORG recently had this conversation about whether PCs can gain too much HP.
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u/SilverBeech 1d ago
And that it's mostly exploration. The first part of the game is sure. What you do with what you've found to get the things you want though is the really fun part. It's often called "faction play" because it often requires picking sides and playing one group off against another, but it can equally be working with environmental or "trap" hazards to change the board too. Memorably, one party once caused an avalanche to defeat a hill giant fort, instead of having to fight rom by room as the module author supposed they would.
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u/loopywolf GM of 45 years. Running 5 RPGs, homebrew rules 1d ago
That VERY much depends on your GM - but one can say that about any RPG.
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u/atamajakki PbtA/FitD/NSR fangirl 1d ago edited 1d ago
There are some really vocal people out there who'd try and have you believe both Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts are basically nothing but non-stop erotic action, games designed for porno freaks who are leaping over the table to rip clothes off.
They're not, of course, but most of the complainers have never read either book.
EDIT: Nothing wrong with games for horny freaks, to be clear! 2026 has seen some great ones.
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u/Hungry-Cow-3712 Other RPGs are available... 1d ago
I am continually frustrated by people being confidently wrong about AW's Special Moves. It's clear they're repeating something they were told without bothering to check for themselves
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u/atamajakki PbtA/FitD/NSR fangirl 1d ago
It reeks of the same kind of telephone game as a lot of the D&D 4e hate, where people are just regurgitating bad-faith arguments someone a dozen folks back in the chain made up! Completely divorced from any actual text, just pure playground gossip shit.
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u/amazingvaluetainment Fate, Traveller, GURPS 3E 1d ago edited 1d ago
Me, not being interested in sex/intimacy Moves at the table, correctly reading the Move text as starting with "When you..."
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u/Hungry-Cow-3712 Other RPGs are available... 1d ago
Where are you reading that? I've just looked at 1e and 2e and both of my copies say IF not WHEN.
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u/Frapadengue 1d ago
I think it doesn't matter, they're just saying that the sex moves are only triggered when the player decides that their character is having sex, it's not like the game is forcing you.
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u/amazingvaluetainment Fate, Traveller, GURPS 3E 1d ago
Just going off memory, my apologies. I don't really see much of a difference between "if" and "when" in either case, they're still qualified by "you don't ever have to do this unless you want to".
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u/Hungry-Cow-3712 Other RPGs are available... 1d ago
Sorry. I misread your comment as supporting the common misconception.
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u/delahunt 1d ago
Your use case of "When you" is valid. But some people will - wrongly, and sometimes maliciously - read it as "See, it has to happen and this happens when you do that." as opposed to "You can choose to do that, and if you so choose this is what also happens."
It's like the difference between "Shall" and "May" when it comes to legal text. One means it happens. The other means there is discretion as to whether or not it happens.
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u/grendus PF2+FITD+OSR 1d ago
In all fairness, systems having rules for things pretty strongly encourages gameplay in that direction. And conversely, systems that lack rules for things discourages them even if it's a thing that you could totally do by asking the GM.
I think it was Justin Alexander (might have been Matt Coleville) talking about running AD&D and how it had "fleeing combat" rules that his players didn't know about. When he explained it to them, all of a sudden they were quite willing to flee combat if it started going against them, because running away didn't mean the guy last in initiative gets dogpiled by the monsters, there's an actual way to get out of combat safely. And this shaped how they engaged with the rest of the game, since they were now more willing to engage in combat that was riskier since they could mitigate that risk by fleeing combat early on if it proved more dangerous than they thought.
You may not be required to engage with the eroticism rules in Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts, but if you sign up for a game in those systems you should be prepared for those mechanics to come into play because they're explicit rules. That doesn't mean these are horny games, but it means that if you don't want to explore sexual themes you probably should pick a system that doesn't include rules for them or else explicitly discuss removing those Moves from the list.
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u/vaminion 1d ago
In all fairness, systems having rules for things pretty strongly encourages gameplay in that direction.
Especially when the game comes from a design culture of "You should only include rules for the things the game is about". It isn't helped by the periodic mob of people who will show up to explain why sex is a load bearing feature of AW whenever someone says they don't want to include that in their game.
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u/DreamcastJunkie 1d ago
Thirsty Sword Lesbians is in there, too.
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u/Hungry-Cow-3712 Other RPGs are available... 1d ago
TSL doesn't help itself with the name, but yes, it also counts
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u/UnspeakableGnome 1d ago
Traveller characters often die in character creation.
This was staistically never true and simply does not happen in newer versions.
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u/FamousPoet 1d ago
"If I don't roll, the monsters can't do anything."
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u/KlausVonLechland 1d ago
lol where does this come up?
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u/SekhWork 1d ago
People misreading PbtA rules that say the GM can't take action unless the players do something... ignoring the caveat at the bottom that says "the players choosing not to do anything is a choice that you can react to."
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u/y0_master 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's basically 'stuff happens (ie by establishing threats & other fiction elements that are about go off & GM moves) unless the PCs stop it, by taking action', outside of when the PCs initiate their own courses.
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u/y0_master 1d ago edited 1d ago
All the systems that the GM does not roll & opponents do not make discreet actions of their own (which has been an increasingly more regular approach). Like PbtA, FitD, Outgunned, Cortex, Mist Engine, my own homebrew system ;), etc.
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u/drfiveminusmint 4E Renaissance Fangirl 1d ago
I think this is related to a different misconception - namely, that Moves are "abilities" that the players can "use." Moves aren't optional; they trigger when their preconditions are meant, even if the player doesn't want them to!
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u/Surllio 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Pendragon takes away player agency by stating out mental traits and forcing how you play."
No, its designed to reflect the darker urges of the human mind that, under duress, can win. Its not taking play away from you, its asking you to play out what happens when the flaws show through rather than just gunning for the optimum outcome. Most of these rolls are weighted in your favor, and you aren't rolling every time. Only in moments of extreme stress. A person begging for mercy from a man known to be merciful is not uncommon, but if that man is a vicious murderer and there are witnesses to this moment? Do you cast judgement, or do you remain merciful. You might choose to remain merciful, but can you stop the urge to be the judge? Roll for merciful.
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u/remy_porter I hate hit points 1d ago
I haven't played Pendragon, but I like systems where controlling my character is mechanized. Like, it's not just, "Oh, I crawl through the pile of snakes and pull the lever," it's "Oh, my character is deathly afraid of snakes, I'm going to spend some bennies to overcome my fear of snakes to pull that lever."
That makes me feel more in control, not less. I'm making tradeoffs based on who my character is.
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u/Surllio 1d ago
The way pendragon wirks is that it lists a series of 13 sets of opposing traits. Merciful/Cruelty, Chaste/Lustful, Trusting/Suspicious etc ranked usually on a scale of 20 (11/9, 13/7, etc). You are a knight in Arthur's court. You have certain idles you are trying to uphold. You have certain traits you are famous for. The adventures are common knight duties, but you are being challenged on these traits. Most of the time, you just do whatever, but under duress, and you will be faced with supernatural things, your negative traits can win out if you fail the roll. This can impact your standing, your glory, and your traits.
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u/DazzlingKey6426 1d ago
DnD is easy.
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u/y0_master 1d ago edited 1d ago
D&D is a good intro point to RPGs for everyone - it *really* isn't.
It's helpful if you come from a background with similar mechanical elements, like WoW or heavier boardgames, & a bit if you at least vaguely know of the D&D-isms like the Classes & such. But it's a very bad fit for people with a different background (like more theater / improv / creative writing stuff & just not from another gaming hobby), & not having to have explained to them all those rules just for a bit of bacic intro play.
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u/Terrible-Common-84 1d ago
So much this. DnD is not an easy ruleset, it's an overburdened simulationist ruleset that's pushed largely by community momentum.
For instance, if we look at a character sheet and the stuff people often attach lots of importance to, it's a giant mess. What does an "18" strength mean? It means a +4 to your relevant dice rolls. That +4 is what matters is what should be on the sheet. How often does that "18" number actually get used? Basically never. Oh, that number increased to 19? Cool, doesn't mean squat until you get it to 20 and that bonus becomes +5. Why even bother with the 18/19 on the sheet? Why crow about having "18" Strength instead of "+4" bonus?That's not even getting into keeping track of feats and abilities and all their interactions as characters get into double digit levels.
Honestly it's a ruleset I consider best utilized for PC games like Baldurs Gate where the computer is keeping track and handling all the numbers back-end stuff for you.
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u/BionicSpaceJellyfish 1d ago
Back when I played 2nd edition we just said fuck it and rolled under our stats for most things. Trying to beat someone at arm wrestling? Roll a d20 and get under your strength. Trying to remember something you forgot to write down? Roll against your Intelligence.
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u/GargamelLeNoir 1d ago
It is NOT stimulationist! It's a system where a non magical human who has been adventuring for a few weeks literally can't be killed by a cannon ball, nor will the shot impact his abilities in any way.
DnD is made to be satisfying and tactical but it's neither realistic nor simple.
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u/Mars_Alter 1d ago
Never confuse "simulationism" with "realism"; though I guess that's a common misconception, in itself.
In any case, it's relatively trivial to simulate a world where someone gets tougher by adventuring, and where a modestly tough adventurer can withstand multiple cannon balls. If you can imagine it, then you can model it.
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u/VinTheRighteous 1d ago
"Simulationist" isn't a term meant to describe the realism of a game. It describes how granular rules and systems are in mediating interactions.
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u/hadriker 1d ago
Simulationist systems focus on making the game feel realistic and logical.
Gamist systems focus on fair rules, mechanics, optimization etc.
Dnd is very much leans more into a gamist ruleset as its focused on mechanics, balance and fairness in its encounters, along with character optimization.
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u/SortzaInTheForest 1d ago
"Simulationist" isn't a term meant to describe the realism of a game. It describes how granular rules and systems are in mediating interactions.
Call of Cthulhu is simulationist and it's barely granular.
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u/wishsnfishs 1d ago
Right, simulationist simply refers to what the design is trying to emulate. A simulationist design attempts to capture the "realism" of what it is portraying. A traditional WWII wargame might have relatively simple rules for two squads engaging in a firefight, but the outcomes would be based on realistic statistics. The picture gets blurry when we talk about the "realistic" expression of hitting a litch with a fireball, which is why simulationist games tend to have very hard magic systems. As in, assuming all other physical variables remain the same, how would a blast of fire interact with a bone person? Granularity and simulationism are often correlated, but not synonymous. 4e combat could get extremely granular at higher levels, but no one would describe it as simulationist.
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u/Big-Bag-6043 1d ago
Current D&D is anything but simulationist. The last time you could reasonably call it that was maybe 3e.
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u/Jozarin 1d ago
Early 3e at that
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u/Big-Bag-6043 1d ago
I don't think the core changed significantly in that time. The general approach remained pretty grounded in "these rules describe how the world works".
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u/425Hamburger 1d ago
I do agree that DND is not that easy, but if we subscribe to the NGS system of classification, I wouldn't call it Simulationist, it's much more gamist with classes being more like abstract categories of abilities than in world occupations, a very limited skill list and everything being focused exactly on the five foot grid.
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u/kBrandooni 1d ago edited 1d ago
Applies to quite a few narrative focused games that have mixed successes (success with a consequence), where people act as if the GM has to pull some wild complication out of their ass every time that outcome comes up.
The potential consequence should be rooted in the fiction, so you shouldn't even have to come up with something post-roll as that stuff should already be figured out before a roll is made. Half the reason you're rolling in the first place in those games is down to there being some kind of risk involved aside from failure.
Also, the consequence doesn't need to be this big thing that shifts the entire scene on it's head. It could be as basic as "you go for the attack, but they manage to land a hit on you in the process" or "you try to listen into their conversation, but you don't get anything and they've moved on. You've lost your opportunity" (This one fits a just consequences outcome, but wanted to point out what LitM calls blocked consequences).
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u/atamajakki PbtA/FitD/NSR fangirl 1d ago
It drives me nuts - most PbtA games spell out exactly what happens on a 7-9 on every Move and FitD games have a giant menu of explicit consequences to pick from!
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u/Authorigas 1d ago
One thing I liked about Daggerheart is that the book notes it's okay to delay a consequence for later if your struggling to think of something in the moment. IE-
"Everything works out...for now."
It takes some of the pressure off the GM, and raises the stakes for the players by implying that something can go wrong in the future.
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u/withad 1d ago edited 1d ago
I wonder if that's related to the tendency for critical failures to always be cartoonishly awful ("You rolled a 1? Well, your character poops himself, slips on the poop, and accidentally stabs two other party members on his way to the floor. Roll for damage.").
Like people feel they have to go to one extreme or another when describing actions unless it's very clearly spelled out otherwise.
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u/An_username_is_hard 1d ago
you try to listen into their conversation, but you don't get anything and they've moved on. You've lost your opportunity
Wouldn't this be less 'mixed success' and more 'total failure'? Like, I'm not sure how "you do not achieve what you tried and your opportunity is lost" has any success component to it!
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u/ordinal_m 1d ago
It drives me nuts when I see people say that PbtA games are rules light
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u/OffendedDefender 1d ago
I like to say “rules lite, procedure heavy”. The mechanics are typically very easy to grasp, but there’s typically a codified procedure of play that may take some time to understand.
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u/Toatkgstuff 1d ago
yes, just look at a character sheet/playbook
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 1d ago
I think people just look at it from a math perspective. Pbta and FitD is fairly procedure heavy.
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u/drfiveminusmint 4E Renaissance Fangirl 1d ago
This specific misconception is why I don't really like the term "rules-light." I don't think it really captures anything about what the experience of playing the game is like. You can have games that have fairly simple rules but they're used constantly and strictly, or games that have complex rules but the actual experience of playing them is mostly free-form.
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u/heurekas 1d ago
- That Genesys is vibes-based.
People seem to think it's made up on the spot if you succeed or fail, ignoring (or not knowing) that there's a basic pass/fail built in to the system.
Even if someone doesn't know what to make of Advantage/Threat, the system lays out clear examples beyond narrative means of what can be achieved with enough of each resource, same as with Triumph/Despair.
Granted it's not as prevalent today as it grew beyond just one game, but I still see some bring it up. Nowadays it's mostly people griping about the symbolic dice, which is fair. If you don't get it, you just don't.
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u/Jalor218 1d ago
And similarly, that you have to make up narrative consequences for every single roll. In practice you never have to - it's Boost/Setback dice when there's an obvious justification for them, taking/clearing Strain when there isn't, and then if someone has a great idea for a narrative consequence you do that instead.
I think this misconception comes from the profusion of games where you do mostly roll partial successes without clear definitions, and from the fact that people who like those types of games will bounce off of Genesys having combat rounds and crit tables.
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u/heurekas 1d ago
I think this misconception comes from the profusion of games where you do mostly roll partial successes without clear definitions,
Yeah I agree. Many modern games do that, but Genesys isn't one of them. There's never a partial success or failure, just added flair.
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u/Anung_Un_Rama200 1d ago
Pathfinder 2e is a tactical combat game with sidedish of roleplay.
As someome who recently GM'd to completion a 5-year campaign, it can be that, but really wasn't for us. Most sessions when I run it are roleplaying, character interaction, players thinking of a harebrained scheme and failing and usually 1 to 2 combat sessions. Hell, games with no combat aren't that unusual. It's just when it comes to combat, most of the players enjoy the kind of tight, tactical combat PF2E has to offer.
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u/dodecapode intensely relaxed about do-overs 1d ago
People often claim that Fate (and some other narrative games tbh) plays like a "writers' room". That's never been my experience of it.
Moment-to-moment play in Fate is really not too dissimilar from many other TTRPGs. It's not like we sit down and break the scene down into beats before we play it out - which is what a writers' room would do. Generally, the GM describes the scene and you decide what your character is going to do. Then if a roll is required to resolve the action you make one and the scene moves on from there.
I think maybe some people get really hung up on the "declare a story detail" action you can do by spending a Fate point. This does give the players some control over the world, but it's generally over scene-level stuff (we're not spending a Fate point to declare that Sauron has decided to run away and join the circus instead of conquering Middle Earth) and the GM always has final say.
In reality this tends to be the least common use for Fate points. People usually want to spend most of them invoking aspects on rolls to make their characters be awesome.
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u/Distinct-Mushroom560 1d ago
GURPS is overly complicated. Really, it's just not organized very well, and makes zero assumptions about the type of game you want to play.
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u/DreamcastJunkie 1d ago
The biggest problem with GURPS is that the most complex part is character creation, and getting a brand new player over that hurdle is rough.
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u/Ka_ge2020 I kinda like GURPS :) 1d ago
The biggest problem with GURPS is that the most complex part is character creation, and getting a brand new player over that hurdle is rough.
The problem here, of course, is it's not that difficult. I like to think that it assumes the fix: you create a character working with the GM.
There are so many games out there whose experience could be improved---and I'm including D&D in this---if you worked with the GM when you created a character.
This is purely an anecdote, of course, but the times that I've personally had to create a character from the book without input from the GM have all been... less than stellar games.
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u/paulmarneralt 1d ago
As a regular GURPS GM for the last 5ish years, I adapted from Dread and i stead give a list of questions about the character along with information about the world to players and make their first characters for them. I'll try. Go over the sheet and see what adjustments they would make. The questions themselves cover everything I would need to know from character archetype, to personality, to history, to vices, to how the player themselves imagine them.
It's worked great for me!
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u/CertainItem995 1d ago
My experience as a gurps fan who used to believe that is it is often a GM problem. If you go to try GURPS and your GM just hands you Basic Set Characters and a point limit and tells you to go build without offering any templates then they screwed up. Hell for even a player familiar with the system I'd at least suggest some templates to narrow it down.
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u/Gwyain 1d ago
Agreed. As a GM, my general method is have my players tell me the character they want, and then I build it for them in the system. I know GURPs, my friends very much don’t. But the mechanics side? 3d6 for basically everything is easy. But the character building if you don’t know the system is brutal.
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u/y0_master 1d ago
Yeah, character templates are a must. Similarly with other so open-ended systems with tons of points to spend, like HERO / M&M or Eclipse Phase. It helps if you have a very solid idea of what character you want to play when you begin, but it's good to have them around as a short-hand.
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u/LupinThe8th 1d ago
GURPS is a very simple core system that just happens to have about a hundred optional subsystems to help it emulate different genres and franchises.
In practice you just pick whatever ones are relevant to your campaign and ignore the rest. Probably don't need magic and spaceship combat and superhero powers, and World War 2 guns and actual official Ghostbusters proton packs for your game.
But if you do please invite me, that sounds interesting.
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u/Mo_Dice 1d ago
Can't like 85% of it be summarized as:
- 3d6 roll under
- Pick a template your GM made
I've never played so I dunno for sure.
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u/JordachePaco 1d ago
ADnD 2e is a crunchier and more combat-heavy game system than 5e and modern d20.
It is very much opposite. It's just easier for PCs to die in the older systems
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u/yoro0 1d ago
Probably "MÖRK BORG is just an art book". I mean, it's not. Sure, the system is simple and there could be more things in the core book but it offers amazing tone, great lore, and those simple rules that I appreciate are not reinventeing the wheel. It's a fantastic game with so much great supplements and 3rd party content, awesome community, inventive hacks... For me it's so much more than just "an artbook" :)
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u/DazzlingKey6426 1d ago
Pirate Borg is probably the easiest to actually read, Cy_Borg is the closest to pure art book in my rankings.
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u/Ashgerg 1d ago
People always seems to ignore the level of intentionality about almost everything in Mork Borg. There’s almost no dead space because if its not rules it’s fantastic art that serves to set the tone, create the setting, and give every GM tons of amazing ideas. A picture speaks a thousand words and all that.
Plus their really tight writing means it’s just not necessary to dedicate a ton of space to the “words” so to speak.
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u/Party_Goblin 1d ago
This is fresh in my mind because I just saw it expressed again the other day. "Palladium makes great settings that are unplayable because of terrible rules." No doubt Palladium's settings and art are top notch, but the idea that somehow these books have stayed in print for decades despite being unplayable is asinine.
They're not the "elegant" mechanics people in this space seem to clamor for, but they support the settings and provide a fun gaming experience overall. I feel like the main thing stopping people from even trying Palladium games is that they've heard this erroneous experience repeated ad nauseum. Honestly, just try any of the reprints from the last 20 years and you'll pick up the rules just fine, especially if you come from an OSR background. The system is meant to have gaps for you to fill with your preferences. That's a feature, not a bug.
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u/Language-Of-Grief 1d ago
Palladium is a mess, but it's certainly playable. It's basically a system that grew out of Kev's AD&D house rules, and really shows, but I'd never call it unplayable. I also take offense at people saying it's "complicated."
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u/EyeHateElves 1d ago
Even though I've moved on to other games, I probably had the most fun playing Palladium games.
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u/nightfall2021 1d ago
ROBOTECH was my first RPG.
And for years, about the only thing my group played (or that I ran for them) was Heroes Unlimited and Palladium Fantasy.
We didn't do RIFTs that often, but when we did, they were memorable games. With one that my players did as a squad of Coalition soldiers, we still look favorably on that one 20+ years later... the "Mud Dogs Campaign."
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u/delahunt 1d ago
I still fondly remember playing Robotech.
There was a rule for shooting missiles out of the sky before they hit you. It was the coolest thing ever to be able to recreate exact moments like in the show.
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u/KaijuCuddlebug 1d ago
I just took my first dive in to Palladium's catalog with the TMNT book, and my response was just an incredulous "really? This is the system people talk about like it John Wicked their dog?"
Inelegant really does seem like the word. There's a lot of rules spread out throughout the book and there's a fair bit of bookkeeping to track, but most everything you need has a designated spot on the character sheet and the core resolution is just D20 combat and D% skills. Like...chill.
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u/MountainWisp 1d ago edited 5h ago
I would say this is the most charitable interpretation possible, this take, whereas the "great settings that are unplayable" take is the most uncharitable take really.
For me, IDK. I cut my teeth on Palladium as a teen, hours and hours of many different games, and every game they've made is just laid for me and the people I play with that feels obtuse; to the point of being just a total bitch to play. I would completely have given up on the hobby had I not branched out into other games, especially 3.5e D&D, with all the problems that it has and I wouldn't touch 3.5 and its descendants either these days.
I do understand that it meant to have gaps, that is definitely the era the system was designed in, but at the same time the amount of stuff that is in the game makes it a daunting task to know which gaps to fill with what needs to be there without playing it first, which, yeah. And having a GM come up with rules for the gaps on the fly like that definitely will drive certain players up a wall.
To me, it's a game written with a so-called OSR mindset, that has too much going on it to truly fit what makes OSR gameplay so great for GMs.
That being said, a game of Nightspawn is something I will never say no to.
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u/CyberKiller40 sci-fi, horror, urban & weird fantasy GM 1d ago
Fate Accelerated is the first to read because it's shorter.
That's a wrong assumption, because Accelerated builds on top of Fate Code and requires the GM to know it first. I had many bad sessions with GMs who never read Core and ran Accelerated.
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u/Airk-Seablade 1d ago
Weird. I had minimal Fate exposure and ran Accelerated fine. What're the problems you see with people who have only read it?
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u/CyberKiller40 sci-fi, horror, urban & weird fantasy GM 1d ago
Usually it's about setting difficulty for tests, and ability to relate approaches with actual skills.
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u/squidgy617 15h ago
Mine is that people start with Core instead of Condensed because it sounds like it's the only "core" book. But Condensed is actually, in my opinion, a much better starting point since it is better written. Core is great to go to for examples and detailed explanations though.
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u/Toum_Rater 1d ago
The idea that 7-9 is "partial success" in PbtA (or 4-5 in FitD).
This might depend on the game, but generally, it's still a full success, and there's also a consequence. Sure, sometimes the consequence might be a lesser effect (i.e. "partial success") but that should not be the norm, and should not be frequent at all IMO.
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u/Feline_Jaye 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is not helped by some PbtAs literally saying "partial success" 😅
It definitely reminds me that you really need to read the precise words in PbtA, as how they describe a 7-9 matters for tone, balance and feel a lot.
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u/lilybug981 1d ago
I once had someone tell me they didn't like PbtAs because there wasn't enough guidance for the game they ran via mechanics and they kept having lulls where no one was speaking. They said it was like watching gears grinding trying to think of something to come next. And I said something like oh, yeah, it's definitely a vibe that doesn't work with every group, but when I GM I tend to check my reference sheet and pick a move to use whenever things slow down. I'll interpret them broadly, but sticking to them lets the players pick up on patterns well enough to help keep momentum going themselves.
The person responded that they had ignored the reference sheet while trying to run the game because they found the loose limitations to be arbitrary. So...they weren't using the GM sheet. They felt like they were getting stuck. And they still didn't refer to the GM sheet. They then insisted PbtAs basically aren't even systems, they're just roleplay with some dice every now and then. I kept my mouth shut, but yeah, that sounds true of the way they tried playing one.
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u/remy_porter I hate hit points 1d ago
A few games call it "Success with a cost", which is a framing I like much better.
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u/No_Solid1035 1d ago
That D&D "is good for any kind of game" when it really isn't.
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u/diluvian_ 1d ago
Dying during character creation in Traveller, more specifically that you can randomly die using the lifepath system. Outside of the literal first edition of Classic Traveller, that kind of random death was moved to an optional rule in all subsequent editions (the iron man rule).
It is possible to kill your character in CC in modern versions of Traveller (I'm familiar with Mongoose's second edition) without the iron man rule, but you have to deliberately set out to do so by continuously rolling terms until your character accumulates age-related penalties that brings their stats to 0. Needless to say, there's no way to actually do that in a typical game that you actually want to play.
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u/TsundereOrcGirl 1d ago
That HERO System / Champions requires postgraduate math to run and play. You use the same arithmetic every other game uses, and that's mostly in charge. Sure, using a phone to roll the dice speeds things up dramatically, but that's hardly ubiquitous to HERO either.
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u/Language-Of-Grief 1d ago
The core rules to Champs fit on like 8 pages if I recall correctly. Most of the "math" is all front loaded during character creation.
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u/y0_master 1d ago edited 1d ago
That in D&D 4e you seemingly can't roleplay, as "it's just a boardgame / WoW", & all sorts of other stuff (could have a damn long list here) that keeps getting regurgitated as accepted knowledge by people with no actual exposure to the game (because they heard it from the general zeitgeist) or in bad faith, including how it was this abysmal failure that didn't sell at all (& that PF consistently outsold it) & nobody played & WotC just pulled the plug on it.
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u/DazzlingKey6426 1d ago
Casters “roleplay” by pushing their I.W.I.N. buttons.
4e took most of those away and made what remained much harder to push.
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u/Active_Aardvark6411 1d ago
“X system is bad for roleplay”/Combat and Roleplaying are two ends of a bimodal spectrum.
Even in the crunchiest games like Shadowrun, not only is there room for roleplay (because that room is created by the GM and the player), but the act of engaging with the game is roleplaying, because the game is about being shadowrunners and doing heists. (I don’t play Shadowrun so I probably got something wrong there but that’s not the point)
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u/Impeesa_ 3.5E/oWoD/RIFTS 1d ago
"D&D 3E had intentional trap options that were just bad on purpose so you could learn not to take them."
It seems to be the case that all options were intended to be at least situationally useful, even if the best use of a thing might not be obvious or intuitive, and "system mastery" would come from learning about those applications. The given example was the Toughness feat, which appears on-theme for a Barbarian but is largely useless to them, while a level 1 Wizard in a convention game that never sees level 2 can take it and nearly double their HP. On the flip side, the unintentional state of balance is another thing entirely. It's clear from the old stories that playtesting wasn't robust enough to really work through the ways the game had changed from 2E, and then fully iterate some more.
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u/rizzlybear 1d ago
There is one that just gets under my skin.
“Shadowdark is stripped down or based on 5e.”
And it’s straight up incorrect. It borrows ONE rule from 5e (adv and disadv) and the author has plainly stated it’s based on BX.
Where I think people get confused is, Shadowdark and 5e both draw a lot of system from common predecessors.
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u/jeremysbrain Viscount of Card RPGs 1d ago edited 10h ago
Legend of the Five Rings Fifth Edition uses the Genesys System. It does not.
It has a couple of similarities, but L5R doesn't use Genesys Narrative Dice and isn't a narrative system.
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u/Authorigas 1d ago
Saw Legend of the Five Rings was on sale over on Drivethru. I won't be buying due to a lack of players, but I am admittedly curious about the game now.
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u/y0_master 1d ago
That narrative / story systems have to be very light. Cortex, FitD, & co being somewhat on the crunchier side does not make them not that.
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u/Kill_Welly 1d ago
In Genesys (and Star Wars before it), the dice side effects are a group effort — players decide their positive results, GMs decide negative results, though of course everyone is encouraged to share ideas regardless. The GM is not on the hook for constantly inventing new twists — and it's okay to fall back on the basics sometimes too.
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u/Consistent-Tie-4394 Graybeard Gamemaster 1d ago
Rolemaster is too hard to play and impossibly complicated GM.
Shadowrun is a broken system, and you can't run a good game that includes deckers, riggers, and/or mag es.
I ran both these games regularly as a dumbshit teenager, and we played rules as written.
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u/Prestigious-Emu-6760 1d ago
Since it's about favorite systems
Torg/Torg Eternity is too weird and the cards don't add anything.
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u/Individual-Spirit765 1d ago
Champions (and other Hero System games like Fantasy Hero, Star Hero, etc.) are too complicated and math-heavy. Truth is, all the complexity and most of the math is front-loaded into the character creation process. After the character is built, your character sheet lays out exactly what the character can do and how it works, and the most complex math you’re asked to do is adding up die rolls and subtracting defenses.
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u/manicpoetic42 22h ago
Solorpgs: There are a lot of misconceptions, 1. solorpg is only journaling/a story telling system 2. solorpg can't be fulfilling like typical rpgs 3. solorpging isnt real rpg 4. you can't play regular ttrpgs solo
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u/bionicjoey DG + NSR 1d ago edited 1d ago
- OSR games are necessarily deadly
- OSR games are about the DM being adversarial
- OSR games don't allow you to roleplay your character
- OSR games don't tell good stories
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u/Elathrain 1d ago
"Cosmere RPG is a 5e D&D variant"
This is an incredibly understandable take on first read, I made this mistake too, but the similarities are so superficial.
- The action economy looks superficially like the PF2e 3-action system, but PF2e has a soft standard/move action split inherited from D&D 3.x while cosmere has far fewer 2-point spends. Additionally, the ability to sacrifice one action to move in the fast phase instead of the slow phase and no rolled initiative is a hugely different strategical and play experience.
- The attribute system looks the same if you don't read it, but they are a different six stats and every stat (except maybe the social attribute Presence) is useful to every character because they control different derived statistics you usually actually care about.
- Yes it's a d20 system, but it's subtly different in that you roll attack and damage at the same time, and advantage can be applied to either (or both, if you have two sources) which is often an interesting pre-roll choice.
- Cosmere is classless and offers real build choices even in the first few levels.
- Rather than pretending that martials and casters are balanced, Radiants are unapologetically stronger in specific ways, which counterintuitively gives non-magical characters a clearer niche to shine in.
- Focus is a very flexible resource that lets every character exert themselves for extra stuff, which is a big deal for many builds.
- For magic, the Investiture combat-scale resource is a very flexible bar for making magic both very free and having a real but not devastating cost when you run out and need to spend 2 actions to refresh it.
- The weapon table is cut down to only weapons with mechanical distinction, and each has a set of traits that give it tiny additional rules, like Momemtum giving free advantage when charging a target. Each weapon and armor has an additional expertise trait if you have proficiency in that weapon/armor type.
- Tier progression is both harder and softer, with each Radiant Oath unlocking huge leaps in power, but also they are optional and many characters will opt to delay or ignore them as other talents are often more contextually useful. The health per level drops each tier which reduces the effects of number bloat more than you'd expect.
Yes, Cosmere is a game that was not created in ignorance of 5e, and it's not exactly an innovative system in the sense that there is no mechanic in it you can point at that can't be found in something else, but it's sort of a Greatest Hits system where it steals all the good ideas from the past decade and puts them into a highly polished bundle. It looks super bland to read, but it so freaking smooth in play.
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u/y0_master 1d ago
'Candela Obscura' is an unfinished game with no resolution mechanics - All because of this apparently being some people's first exposure to non-very traditional games & bad faith arguments by some waiting for something to bury the Critical Role crew in regards to because they don't like them.
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u/deviden 1d ago
There’s a whole magic circle of popular DnD YouTubers who will regularly shit on Critical Role stuff to get clicks but won’t say a negative word about each others (bad, underwhelming) games and supplements.
Frankly I’ve come to suspect they all share an agent or a publicist because they’re all showing up in each others’ crowdfunders and doing the same events like DnD in a Castle Camp $4k a ticket type stuff.
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u/aslum 1d ago
Having read through CO I will say it felt to me like it was a just slightly undercooked FitD game. I think if they'd taken another 6 months they could have put a bit more polish and lore in there and had a fantastic game. As it is, it seems pretty good (and probably an excellent choice if I wanted to run something in that very specific genre) just not great. However there was a certain window of Hasbro/Wotc putting their foot in their mouth so hard they'd have been fools to keep working on it and not rush it out the door.
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u/GreatMarch 1d ago
“Genesys/ Star Wars rpg is just a mess of meaningless symbols!” Is something I see and it often hurts. People seem hesitant to engage with WHY the system was designed like that, namely that the symbols were meant to be interpreted and used to create narrative situations beyond just a binary success/ failure. The game probably wouldn’t have the same feel if it was more conventional numbers.
On the same subject, the idea that FFG Star Wars RPG is too inaccessible. I could understand this a few years ago, but there are consistent runs of the FFG books out in stores (at least in the U.S.) and you can find free online dice rollers for the system.
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u/jim_uses_CAPS 1d ago
I was weirded out, at first, by the idea of the dice and the system. It is now my favorite; I have yet to find a system that allows for such cinematic roleplaying: something like that you can miss your shot but cause your opponent to flinch and spoil their own aim is so simply and elegantly captured. I love it.
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u/nightfall2021 1d ago
My group still doesn't like it because of the books, so if I run SW, its usually Saga edition, but FFG SW is probably the most authentic to the style of soap opera that Star Wars is.
The utter chaos and coincidence that happens, and how stuff happens that is good, but also adds complications.
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u/Mayor-Of-Bridgewater 1d ago
I've been in some spaces that called Delta Green fascist, which confuses the hell out of me. It's a game about people working for a group that is cruel, but not fascist, and depicts what it does to people as horrific and somewhat pointless. While the game has some strange takes regarding race, the creators are definitely progressives. God's Teeth is incredibly vicious regarding politics.
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u/conn_r2112 1d ago
Yeah, the whole “old school DnD is a brutally lethal meat grinder” thing gets thrown around ALOT. In reality, if you play smart and don’t run into every situation with your sword drawn, like you’re a medieval John Wick, it’s actually not that deadly at all.
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u/thestupidone51 1d ago
"Traveller? Isn't that the game where you can DIE in character creation?" I haven't scoured the whole comment section so forgive me if it's been mentioned already. You used to be able to die in character creation but it's been an optional mechanic at most in all but the earliest editions. The mechanic made a lot more sense early on because you could make a character super quickly, unlike the current system which is a whole minigame that can take a while even if you know what you're doing
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u/contentronix_inc 1d ago
"A particular system is bad because it was written by a bad person."
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u/atamajakki PbtA/FitD/NSR fangirl 1d ago
I think a game being written by a shithead is a perfectly good reason to not want to waste time reading, playing, or discussing that game.
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u/Toum_Rater 1d ago
Sure, but that doesn't automatically mean the game is bad and has nothing to contribute to the hobby. Without the willingness to discuss Dungeon World, we wouldn't have Stonetop, or Chasing Adventure, or Dungeon World 2, or lots of other games based on DW which don't have shitty creators.
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u/Time_Day_2382 Worldbuilding and Critique Enthusiast 1d ago
Fantastic pick. Art has artistic merit separate from the person who made it. You shouldn't give bad people money, but that is a separate issue.
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u/rivetgeekwil 1d ago
That games like Fate allow "making shit up" by spending metacurrency. This is the farthest thing from the truth and a complete misinterpretation.
EDIT: Similarly, "fiction first" meaning ignore the rules and make shit up. This had gotten so prevalent that I wrote a lengthy blog post about it.
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u/LeidusK 1d ago
That Dragonbane is a 5e clone. They get really stuck on the use of a d20 and an advantage mechanic.
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u/remy_porter I hate hit points 1d ago
I don't know if I'd say Fate is one of my "favorite" systems, but the idea that Fate is a narrative system and Fate points are a narrative metacurrency is one of my pet peeves. Fate is a highly mechanized system that very much centers manipulating the game under its mechanics! People call it "narrative" because it doesn't reward "optimal" play, but honestly, it plays more gamist, if we accept that framing (I don't, but anyway).
Fate points are not a metacurrency any more than hit points are. They represent your character's pool of "I can do shit". You replenish it by accepting compels- by allowing your character to indulge in things that maybe aren't great to do at the moment. "My character has the aspect Stoner. I'm gonna bail on meeting our fixer and stand outside and smoke weed. Y'all can catch me up on whatever the mission is." You earn Fate points by having your character act in line with their concept, or by letting the GM declare that your character concept has a limitation in this scene. "I'm going to compel Stoner. Not only did you miss meeting with the fixer, but you're still pretty baked right now, and this conflict is too intense, you don't want to use your Fight skill, so that'd be a -2." "Nah, dawg. I'm gonna spend a Fate point to cancel that out, because this is important, and we need to win."
It's honestly a mechanization of your character's id/ego/superego when combined with your aspects.
The most narrative-ish part of Fate is that aspects are broad tags without well defined boundaries, but that's okay, because the mechanics help you there! When can a player invoke an aspect? WHEN THEY PAY THE FATE POINT TO USE IT. "But it doesn't narratively apply?" Make it make sense.
"I'm going to invoke stoner to get a bonus on my overcome check to destroy the secret files." "How does stoner help with that?" "I've definitely got a lighter, bro. I'm just gonna set them on fire. And like, it's not just a bic, but one of those propane lighters with the blue flame." "Yeah, that makes sense."
I recognize that this runs counter to the guidance in the book, which I admit is a much more "follow the fiction" description of the mechanics, but the game plays better and faster if you let the mechanics drive the fiction, in my experience.
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u/SekhWork 1d ago
Everyone dies or goes insane in Delta Green.
Ya'll the games most famous system is the Bonds system where the slow degradation of your characters connect with family and friends is a key part of the narrative drive of the system. That only works if you don't die.
That said, the game is very lethal for stupid characters. If you see the unknowable horror and try to rush it with a shotgun, you will often find that is not going to work. If you stick around after learning this, or watching it tear apart a team of soldiers that came with you, that's on you, not the system!
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u/CapitanKomamura never enough battletech 1d ago
That a "rules light system where the GM does rulings" is automatically easier. It depends on a lot of factors.
Making a ruling (and in some cases, inventing a roll from scratch) is not that easier compared to just remembering the rule that applies to a situation. Rulings are built on precedent, so you still need good rules that can inform the basis of a ruling. But the most important thing, many GMs aren't game designers and can't spontaneously improvise game mechanics. If the rules are good, engaging, cohesive and coherent, for me it's easier to just read the big book two times and then reference. And in a crunchy game, rulings are easier because you have precedent.
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u/Kuildeous 1d ago
Spot-on about Call of Cthulhu. Yeah, I had many deaths when I ran it, but there was one PC who kept surviving each time, and he actually ended up with more sanity than he did at the beginning.
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u/Jalor218 1d ago
"Call of Cthulhu is a game where every session ends in death/insanity and players can't get attached to their characters."
Well, you covered my #1, so my #2 is "Godbound PCs feel too weak because all the adversaries in the book have more attacks/damage than the PCs can ever get." Narratively, this is because they're supposed to be the equivalent of max-level D&D characters who've decided to go kill gods, while the PCs became demigods five minutes ago... but the book admits that this explanation is only necessary because they do so much damage.
So why do this at all instead of building the game differently? Because those attacks are very easy to block. Any PC can spend a resource that refreshes daily to block or dispel a single attack that they can justify their powers stopping. The result of this is that powerful adversaries get one or two good attacks off, and then the PCs start blocking and dodging their Ultimate God-Slaying Strikes once they realize they need to use more than a small percentage of their power.
Sometimes this option gets missed because there are PC abilities that also block attacks, and the norm in D&Dlikes is "if there's an ability for something, by default nobody can do that thing without it." But those PC abilities all have some other upside - either a smaller resource expenditure, a duration of more than one attack, or the option to use them on attacks that don't thematically match.
I actually like Godbound's approach a lot, because it feels closer to the "epic anime fight" experience than I've gotten from most other systems attempting to do so - even though it doesn't model the momentum of the fight or the little exchanges of blows like Exalted or something does. What it does capture is the decision-making, where you have to feel out whether a foe is worth your full strength and come up with ways your abilities might counter theirs.
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u/MrDidz 23h ago
The prevailing assumption about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is that it's combat system is deadly. It one of the things we warn our players about and characters are given 'Fate Pionts' which are sort of 'Get Out Of Death Free' cards on the grounds that they will be needed to keep characters in the game long enough to complete an adventure.
Mathematically, the claim is correct. Combat in WFRP is deadly, and it's very easy to for your character to get killed, especially in the early game when most mobs are far more powerful and better equipped and skilled than yours.
However, the truth is that in my thirty odd years as a 'Forever GM' I have never lost a character in combat. Which whilst unusual seems to prove that the game isn't as deadly as it likes to imagine. The combat rules are certainly deadly, but it seems that the fact that the players recognise the fact and thus are cautious about combat minimises the risk, and in my case at least, have never actually got their characters killed. I've had quite a few close calls, with character down to their last wound, or rolling on the critical hit chart which can result in sudden death. But they have always survived if sometimes unconscious.
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u/jokerbr22 1d ago
Werewolf the apocalypse glorifies bigotry and senseless violence.
I hate how the game that is explicitly about fighting injustice, righting the wrongs of your ancestors and playing a tragic hero gets so deeply misconstrued.
People see the disturbing issues that are out there by design and label the game as “fascist” “racist” or “genocidal”
You are MEANT to hate how bigoted the Garou are
You are MEANT to fight against senseless cultural norms and limitations
You are MEANT to right the wrongs of your ancestors, not just blindly glorify them
You are MEANT to rage against the machine
That is the whole point.