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I play DnD, and I'm finding it... Somewhat frustrating. Roleplay seems to have very little impact on the story, and characters don't seem to matter beyond that they're characters made to inhabit the story, and through which the players can experience the story. A town mayor will just as happily hire a barbarian who can barely speak as he will a nobleman to handle anything from goblins harassing some trade routes, to diplomatic escorts and protection details of visiting royals.

I don't have that many issues with that particular example, but I think it highlights the point: Backgrounds don't seem to matter. I'm currently playing a nobleman in Icewind Dale, and while I understand a remote area like that with lots of hardships probably won't care too much about maintaining etiquette, your background should have an impact on how the world treats you. I don't expect my character to be treated with reverence everywhere, but if he were a soldier, I'd expect him to be treated differently by a guard than if he were a sage, for example.

Roleplay often feel inconsequential, like I said. I don't get experience for dealing with a Speaker well, or defusing a situation involving a local. I'd like those things to matter.

The world is another thing: It seems static. This is a complaint of DnD in general, not Icewind Dale. Things happen, the PCs show up, and then you're allowed to handle things in whatever order you prefer. I don't have a massive issue with that specifically, but it seems as though the entire world just stops to watch what happens. Things generally need to continue rolling even if a farmer had a child go missing. Seeing the effects of "things rolling" beyond some farmers tilling a field would be nice.

I should mention, I'm a fairly undramatic person. I don't enjoy tacking on twenty different traumas to my character, so any systems that require those won't gel with me, but I'm always happy to hear suggestions.

Basically, just what do you like?

What cities do you feel most comfortable using? As a player, where do you enjoy visiting? As a GM, what do you like to use? What makes a city feel good and fun for the game?

Please, be subjective, go nuts. What do you like?

I mentioned this in my last post about TTRPG assumptions I've needed to break, but one of my major assumptions has been-"Avoid older systems or older editions of systems, because those were written at a time when we didn't have a good grasp on tutorializing for newer players, and systems were more math/crunch based." Obviously, this is incorrect as back in the old days, books were written with the assumption that people had never played TTRPGs before, where as nowadays there's a lot of carry over between certain systems as TTRPGs have become more mainstream as a hobby.

However, this did leave me curious, as to what actually does classify a system as obtuse, or hard to learn? There are obviously systems that just fundamentally do not work like FATAL. Systems where the mechanics mostly (up to interpretation*) make sense but the book is poorly formatted ala Vampire 5E's core rulebook. And there are systems where there are so many printing errors and mistakes that the mechanics are a mess (What I heard happened with Shadowrun for a good while.) But I'm curious about what some of the broader issues that can make a system harder to grasp can be, as my perspective makes me blind to some obvious issues.

As I said before, I'm a newcomer to TTRPGs and someone who prefers narrative>Crunch in most cases. I really like to learn more whenever I get into a new hobby, so I apologize for asking what may be obvious or basic questions. I'm really grateful for the time and answers folks have to share.

Do you know any system that was made to be a one-shot machine, and don't have progression rules?

I know some in the horror genre like 10 candles and dread. But a less niche one, is there any?
Or a more generic one-shot system "should" have progression rules just in case?

We spend a lot of time here arguing about which systems are "obtuse" or hard to learn, and lately I've been thinking the reading experience and the playing experience are almost two different games.

Mine was Blades in the Dark. Reading it, I bounced hard: flashbacks, stress, position and effect, the whole vocabulary felt like homework, and I put the book down twice convinced it was overengineered. Then I actually ran one heist and it clicked in about twenty minutes. The stuff that read as fiddly on the page turned out to be the exact scaffolding that made improvising a score easy. I went from "this is too much" to "why doesn't everything work like this" in a single session. I've taken flashbacks into other systems several times and it always seems to be a hit.

So I'm curious about everyone else's version of that. Not the system you love unconditionally, but the one your gut told you to avoid based on the book, that won you over once dice actually hit the table. And if you're up for it, what was the specific moment it turned?

I have tested this principle on GURPS, Call of Cthulhu, WFRP/Dark Heresy, and Fighting Fantasy/TROIKA. It's almost one-hundred-percent functional with no conversion work required. There are some quirks but even those lean more towards funny and interesting rather than actually disruptive or game-breaking.

The key to why this works is that the characters roll things based just on their stats, with the system giving them modifiers to those stats rather than setting up external target numbers that they need to meet. In D&D your attack roll is against an enemy armor class, and if the enemy is statted on Call of Cthulhu or something then they don't have an armor class and you're stuck. But if your character is GURPS, then you just roll 3d6 to shoot at that cultist, and if you hit, the cultist rolls 1d100 to try and dodge. Everybody just does their own thing and meets in the middle to see the results.

The quirks mostly pertain to character power levels. GURPS characters are by far the strongest overall, what with how the bell-curve works: even a 13 in a stat or skill, not very impressive by the system's standards, translates to 84% odds of success, which is some endgame odds for a Dark Heresy acolyte. And even the core book grants them access to all manner of superpowers and psychic abilities and magic that a low-fantasy WFRP wizard-lord can only dream of. And they take inordinate amounts of punishment before finally going down. But not everything goes their way: WFRP and Dark Heresy characters have Toughness, which is effectively three to five points of guaranteed Damage Resistance to everybody, and tend to have a lot more wounds too, especially the big monsters and demons and such. Dark Heresy gets the most forgiving sanity mechanic, with the characters outright becoming immune to lesser fears as they're exposed to worse and worse things. And those Call of Cthulhu investigators crit a lot more and harder than anyone else in any other system, that keeps them in the game and occasionally leads to some real nasty surprises.

Give it a go, see for yourself. If you run any of the above systems then you've now got a whole bunch of new adventure modules to throw your group in. Isekai your investigators into Enemy Within, dump your acolytes into Masks of Nyarlathotep, it all works.

For those who are tapped into their local community’s Facebook, discord, meetup, etc., what RPGs do you see being advertised to get games going that are NOT 5e?

Near me, I see Call of Cthulhu, Cairn, Starfinder 2e, Daggerheart, and Shadowdark somewhat regularly. Of course, it’s 90% 5e.

How about you?

Assume the players know what tabletop role playing is through cultural osmosis but they have no prior knowledge of game mechanics, are open to any genre and have not watched any games being played online. They have light board/video game experience and are likely more excited about the role playing aspect than crunchy combat.

***Edit***

since a lot of people are responding with "whatever genre they enjoy most" type of responses even though the imaginary player group are open to *any* genre, imagine this scenario is happening at a convention and you are a GM tasked with trying to convert people into tabletop RPGers and only have one game and one adventure to bring with you

So, my main group is coming to the end of their ICRPG campaign and its time to switch it up.

I pitched a few games and they liked the sound of Blades In The Dark.

I'm looking forward to it. I've not run Blades in literally years. But in the last week I've started to worry.

My concern is a) they're almost all very new roleplayers and none of them have played Blades, b) we play at work in the lunch hour so don't have long, c) it's quite a complex game with interlocking parts, and d) we play on Teams and I'm the only one with a copy.

So, I did think maybe see if they were happy to switch to Electric Bastionland. Still a city game, but weird instead of spooky, but critically much easier to teach and get a good amount done in an hour.

It's a shame because Blades can be great. But I don't want to spend 50 mins of a one hour session re-explaining the ways Stress can be spent. But the setting is so cool. But so is EB!

I'm in something of a quandary.

Hello everyone! I recently finished up seven blog posts in seven days disassembling and reassembling one of Paizo's best Adventure Paths, Curse of the Crimson Throne. The idea is to document my own GM process to create the structure of an AP I'd want to run, and is system agnostic--meaning this analysis is about breaking down the story beats more than the mechanics. If you've played or GMed the campaign, just like long-form storytelling, or even are just curious what those Paizo APs are all about, feel free to check it out!

Here is the start of the series (the blog is free... it's simply too much text to paste here):

Deconstructing: Edge of Anarchy (Curse of the Crimson Throne 1)