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These three systems are very popular and have great reviews, they all have pros and cons but they all promise to be cleaner, easier and faster to run than 5E or PF while still supporting a wide gamut of fantasy games. Have you tried any of them?

Which of these three systems do you prefer for campaigns that might have different tones: arcs with more survival, others with more epic and heroism, other campaign chapters with more grim-dark horror and mystery, some leaning more towards dungeon crawling while others more to social interaction and intrigue.

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Dragonbane is very flexible and it seems to easily cover and adapt to more OSRish and precarious themes (danger, high stakes combat, dungeon procedures) while also being excellent for heroic fantasy (high damage, and HAs than can give that feel as well as to bump up HP/WP), and being a BRP descendant game it’s also extremely versatile and can cover mysteries and horror exceedingly well. Also it has a great and large community and 3PP of amazing quality.

Vagabond is OSR adjacent as well but more pulpy, and I believe more versatile than OSE or DCC. Easy to grasp. Not so much content for it, and the community is smaller.

Nimble seems to orient more to high fantasy and might be the least versatile but keeps the dopamine-hits of character customisation and heroism that 5E is characterised with.

I'm looking for what other fantasy ttrpg games out there use PF2e's mindset to the design. Very clear understanding of impacts of various abilities, categorized into something like rarity rankings to bring a GMs attention to high impact abilities, and it's balancing system is fairly reliable to deliver the promised experience.

Only they are simpler than pathfinder. I find that even after all this time we are missing rules and details and correcting fiddly bits which are part of what helps the balancing aspect work. So basically it's 95% of the way there to being my ideal system just a bit too complex.

I'm open to pathfinder 2e hacks as well.

I’m kinda a noob, played a few sessions of D&D before but nothing too experienced. I’ve never delved into the world of other TTRPGs, but Ironclaw has caught my eye on how funky and unique it is. Is it too clunky to play as a never-been-a-Dm-before?
Anything equivalent? I just think the art is fabulous, and I’ve got an interest in Anthros. Thanks yall.

(P.S. any suggestions for a ttrpg to ease people who’ve never RPed into them? I live in buttfuck nowhere and want to get a campaign going.)

Back in the days of early Covid, I built a system for sci-fi games. Dice pool, point-buy, flexibility, all the stuff I love. We ran the sci-fi game for about a year, but two players had a kid and another moved and the game, sadly, never finished.

A couple years later I revamped combat and brought everyone back for a one-shot, which people enjoyed.

Last summer, I decided to do a bunch of one-shots, and when we played the one-shot of the sci-fi system everyone said, "This is great. Why aren't we playing this?" But they wanted a change of pace--now it would be steampunk. Great. Revamped the rules, adjusted the professions, built a city and a plot of an occupied city and a ritual that brought forth folkloric beings (fae, vampires, etc.) to create chaos to use against the oppressors.

It worked well. Honestly, the dice system probably works even better for this kind of story, which is Indiana Jones-ish in its Things Are Going Very Well, or Very Badly nature. We had a blast. Pulp fun works, creepy stuff works.

The climax ended up being a Split the Party two-parter, and due to logistics (two players from one of the parties couldn't make it last week) I just ran each section independently. One team dealt with stopping a ritual, and to do so they had to make deals with fae and a vampire. The other team built a bomb and took a stolen zeppelin to stop reinforcements from coming in by train.

As an example of the 'Indiana Jones-ish...ness' of it, last night the Gadgeteer had to go under the zeppelin and repair the bomb mechanism. Failed his check to paraglide back up to the zeppelin, so went flying at one of the enemy biplanes coming their way. Rolled extremely well on the grappling hook, which wrapped around a wing of the biplane and got him on top of it, where he threatened the enemy to parachute out. He gets into the biplane, which he does not know how to use, so the team Psychic opened a link between him and the Pilot. This is pure pulp and I loved it.

There's still going to be an epilogue next week, but the main arc of the game is done. I haven't finished running a campaign since Numenera back in 2020. Very happy this system could hold up to anything I threw at it.

I mainly GM 5e and while I do actually enjoy the system a lot, combat as we all know can slow to a crawl rather easily. The thing is that I enjoy the kinds of characters 5e lets you make and I generally enjoy the sorts of things characters can do in combat, I just don't think a D20 system with a bunch of positive/negative addition is the quickest way to go about actually resolving combat.

I say "still a full-on combat system" in my title because I know that some systems exist that basically boil combat down to rules-lite or rules-absent cinematic experiences and I want to emphasize that this is *not* what I'm looking for. I've played systems like that before and they were fun enough, but that's not the goal here.

tl;dr I think 5e combat has good ideas but turns take too long; looking for suggestions on systems that accomplish similar feeling combat but change how it's resolved.

Hi, I sincerely am looking for something very specific for a very specific mood my group asked me about:

We were talking about how "gods of old" were people with superpower and dominions, and in that talking we laugh about synchretism and how some religions make their gods mingle between them.

So we wanted to do a game about different (fantasy) gods meeting in a court event, like a coronation, marriage or birthday. And basically play out the drama and intrigue, very Good Society coded but more focused in nobility and having things like "winter has arrive as the god of gardens got rejected by their lover and so they are now sad"

So, wanting to see if something like this exist.

I saw an animation of small animals fighting inside a tree, and I became very interested in the idea. I thought about "Roots," but I'm not sure if it's the best choice for this.

Any suggestions?

Brief rant: I just checked out a game's preview on DriveThruRPG. Here's what I got: a cover, a copyright page, 3 pages of table of contents, a full-page art page with "Introduction" at the bottom followed by another full-page art page.

That's it.

I won't buy your product without some inkling of what I'm getting, especially since I can't return the product if I don't like it. If I'm looking at your book on the shelf at a store I'm going to flip through it before I buy. For a digital sale you can at least give us a couple of random pages of rules, setting, something so we know how the book is laid out and whether we'd want to buy it.

If I wanted to try some new ttrpgs and aimed to concclude them within 6 months of biweekly play (10-15 3hr sessions), what would you recommend?

As is evident from my recent posts, I'm drafting a few RPG campaigns to offer to a group of players I'm still deciding upon.

One of these is a campaign where the players play as members of a hive mind, loosely inspired by u/hexalby's Overmind CYOA. Each player character is a drone/agent of the hive, and more powerful/independent ones at that. The players together are the Overmind, the totality of the hive consciousness. Like in Ars Magica, we'll be doing some form of troupe gameplay as players collectively develop the hive and Overmind, have individual PC's that are mostly independent and their recurrent characters, and play as less important/disposable/smaller extensions of the hive.

They will have a degree of control over time period and setting, and can choose how they want to pursue the only directive they have: grow.

Smaller, more minor influences in the campaign are Chris Wooding's Silver and The Girl With All The Gifts (I haven't read the book, I know, I need to).

What's a good system to run this? I'd like to have a few options to weigh, but really the only option that I can think of that would work without serious homebrew is GURPS.

Thanks in advance!