Recommend me some rpg games...

[chongjasmine]

Recommend me some rpg games other than pathfinder and dnd to try.

I like the fantasy and history genres. I like Western as well, and pirates. Mystery is fine as well.

I don't really like science fiction.

Recommend me some rpg games and tell me what genres do they fall into. Thanks.

[Vladim]

I'm a big fan of Ironsworn, a rules-light (or maybe, rules-medium), narrative-style game. The core game and setting falls into grounded, a bit gritty fantasy with vaguely viking-esque vibes, but it is actually pretty flexible. It has plenty of advantages.

• Free, completely legally, available as a pdf from the Ironsworn website here.
• Flexible, supporting traditional (GM-led), cooperative and solo (GM-less) games.
• Well supported, with good communities like the Ironsworn Discord (friendly, diverse, helpful and active) and the Awesome Ironsworn page (lots of good homebrew content there).
• Easily hackable, with lots of hacks available for free, like Vaults and Vows (which emulates D&D 5e) or Elegy (which emulates Vampire: the Masquerade) and many many more.
• Lots of high-quality actual plays such as Me Myself & Die and The Bad Spot for learning what the system can do and how it works.

If you have questions about it, I'm happy to answer them.

[Yamazaki]

Blades in the Dark is a game that I've really come to love. In short, it's scoundrels in a dark gothic desielpunk-ish city trying to survive by doing crimes. It's Thief and Dishonored and Peaky Blinders as a TTRPG, with a dash of Ocean's Eleven. See, that last bit is what makes it really nifty compared to more traditional games that have roguish antics in it: it's designed specifically to emulate heist movies.

Blades in the Dark is a Powered by the Apocalypse game, although it's such a mechanical divergence (as much as any PbtA game can diverge mechanically when there's no mechanical system to unify the design philosophy) that most consider BitD and its children, Forged in the Dark, a PbtA fork. Suffice to say, they share a lot in the narrative-first approach - everything is about storytelling, rather than simulating a reality. This leads to giving the players more narrative power.

In BitD, this is done thru the metacurrency Stress, and it has two functions. The first is to avoid bad things from happening - you can resist the bad outcomes of things by accumulating Stress. For example, if you missed a jump across rooftops, you can use Stress to say that you caught the ledge or broke thru a window a floor down, which might still inflict injuries of some sort, but it's better than plummeting to your doom. The second function is what make BitD shine, though: Flashbacks. See, BitD doesn't want to bog everything down by forcing the players to sit and plan everything out, and rather just jump into action. But to allow the scoundrels to feel like they're actually skilled at what they do, they can take stress to go into a Flashback, showing how they planned or prepped for a multitude of things, be it finding a guard to bribe ahead of time, changing the tracks of a train, stashing gear just past the guards a few days ago, and so on.

If you're interested, Blades in the Dark has its own SRD. It's not ideal for learning the system, and there's a few aspects that are kind of confusing (Position and Effect, most notably, as well as the Downtime phase grinds gears because of its explanation), but it's an awesome game.

Additionally, worth mentioning are some of the Forged in the Dark games, such as Scum and Villainy (scifi - think Star Wars if it's just Han Solo, Firefly, and Cowboy Bebob), Runners in the Shadows (legally distinct Shadowrun without playing SR proper), Band of Blades (dark fantasy army on the run from undead horde, trying to slow them down while making it to a fort for one last stand), Slugblaster (radical dimension hopping teens doing tiktoks of their slick kickflips and trying to go viral), Songs for the Dusk (post-apoc exploration? This one I'm not too sure about but heard cool things about it), Fist Full of Darkness (weird fantasy western/Red Dead Redemption), and many others.

[chongjasmine]

Thanks for your recommendations!

[cailano]

I'm primarily an OSR (Old-School Renaissance) player and GM these days, so I'll throw in a recommendation for Basic Fantasy RPG.

OSR games mimic the spirit of early editions of D&D. Characters are less powerful than in modern editions and the dungeons are more dangerous. The rules are simpler and combat runs faster. Character build options are much more limited.

Basic Fantasy is easy to learn and play and it is completely free in PDF form. They sell print editions at cost, so even a physical copy of the core rules only costs $8.

BFRPG doesn't have the production values of Pathfinder or D&D or anything close. But it can be a lot of fun to play.

https://www.basicfantasy.org/

 

 

[Malkavian Grin]

My recommendation is to go into the advertising games section and look for something that sounds fun but you've never played the system before. Perfect way to get experience with something. (Often people can help you with the rules if you don't have them).