If you had your druthers, what would you play right now?

[Bihlbo]

Here you go, a fistfull of druthers for your tabletop roleplaying satisfaction. What are gonna do with that?

What game system/setting/whatever would you be playing right now if you could, because you think it's just that good. Maybe you're already playing it? I'd still love to hear about it. You should totally derail this thread with discussions as to why it's awesome.


A thought... I enjoy critical discussions as much as the rest of you, but it's really easy to find evidence on this board that all rpgs ever made are utter garbage. Get some balls and be a cheerleader, even though someone's going to think you're an idiot fanboy for it.

[Meikle641]

- A game of Mouse Guard. Assumign we can make a cheat sheet with info on it so we're not constantly flipping around the book for info to play.
- D&D 3.5.
- A game using BRP could be interesting.
- Maybe an adventure in Feng Shui, since the system seems fun.
- I'd also be down for a one-shot of After Sundown, since people seem to like it. The system seems good, from what I've read of the rules.

[Prak]

If I had my druthers and people who were willing to play, I've really been wanting to try out Legend, now that 1.0 is out.

It's a nice looking d20 variant. It looks like it will stray into rocket launcher tag, but I like the tracks, I like the implied setting, hell, it's my favourite game just for having so many references, especially Discworld references.

They haven't shown much about Hollow, and what they have is definitely weird, but I like the vague Sci Fi Fantasy feel of it. It really seems like the esoteric history of the setting is "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a planet started to self destruct. Sentient guardian robots saved what they could of the alien population and transported them to a new partially artificial world. When the aliens awoke from their hyperspace transport stasis pods, they widely suffered traumatic amnesia and began to construct a new society." I also love that it is less Tolkienian Grandpa Fantasy, and more Dungeonpunk.

I still have no clue what I dislike about Tolkienian fantasy. I honestly don't. Maybe it just feels too conservative, too old guard. Maybe I want my fantasy to be iconoclastic and rebellious. I don't know. Dungeonpunk is how WotC describes the setting/feel of Magic.

[sabs]

I'd be playing Ars Magica if I had my druthers.
Instead I'm playing Pathfinder.. sigh.

[shadzar]

TTRPG? well the only one of those i play is D&D. BD&D is too limited to get into enough peoples hands unless they go real old school and just have a shet of paper with an item list and character name and let me handle running it so they can just play. but since that wont happen....

AD&D, 2nd edition is more available and easier for me to read and find shit in than 1st edition with its lack of organization. fuck the grappling rules for 3.x, where are the rules for light sources in 1st? HAVE YOU FUCKING HEARD OF AN INDEX GARY?!?!

also there are plenty of THOSE sites up where people can get the 2e PHB info since CORE RULES put it into RTF and HTML files so they spread like wildfire online with THOSE people, and otherwise i have 32 inch HDTV/monitor that i can just share screen from my copy of core RULES for anything someone needs to reference, and i have all the "card decks" so wizard players would have their spells written out without needing the books, same for priests, and the magic items as well.

for setting? probably depending on who ran it, their own world. Might have Homlet on the shores of Amn with Taladas off the coast a ways... who knows. i never really got into the lvoe for any of those settings as fanatics seem to go overboard with the concept of "canon" and forget that shit only works for the novel writers. once the PCs arrive to the world, all hell can break lose and there is no such thing as "canon" from that point on, everything prior is just history.


2nd AD&D, homebrew world.

[Bihlbo]

I'll go, even though it's been so long since I've had any druthers I'm not sure what to do with them.

Of the games I've played, none really seem good when it comes to rules. To be honest, that why I asked this question. If someone said, "What is an example of a good rpg system?" my answer would be, "None that I know of." There are quite a few games that I haven't tried that I would love to play just because it would be something new. Dread looks like it would be a lot of fun to try a few times, either as the GM or as a player for someone who's really eager to make the game scary, but it has rules that amount to MTP with arbitrary challenge points. It might work well for what that game is attempting, but as far as rules go it doesn't broaden one's horizons and it's hard to say that it's "good". I've heard good things about Savage Worlds as well, and I'd give that a go even though from what I've seen of the rules it's kinda crap.

I've yet to play Tomes, but I liked that work so much that I came to tgdmb for to rub shoulders with the nicest bunch of sweethearts I'd ever want to meet. I'm the only gamer I know who's familiar with it, so I'd have to run it. The only problem with that is, most of the gamers I know are either stuck in an AD&D mindset and so rules that are consistent and balanced are like metal bananas to a monkey; or they just really don't care about the rules and can make the game fun even if it's Pathfinder, Arcana Evolved, Exalted, Vampire, or 4e. It's hard selling either groups on a rules system that has a purpose they don't care about and a premise on which they don't agree. I'm planning on tricking some into playing it anyway, but the rest of that plan is taking a lot longer than I anticipated.

The Elder Scrolls setting is one I would love to use for an rpg. It's got its problems, but everyone I want to game with has played Morrowind through Skyrim, so I won't have a hard sell or a steep learning curve to deal with. Plus, there are a few elements I especially love about the setting, mainly that men and mer could be thought of as ethnicities of one race that diverged long ago (and for the same reason I like that, I've always disliked the beast races and would prefer they be NPC-only), and that the closest thing to deities are simply powerful, magic-rich, limited beings who are not necessarily "divine" in nature.

I would play the Conan d20 rpg by Mongoose again without hesitation. R. E. Howard would write his stories while reading them out loud, specifically because he wanted them to be good tales that could have been passed down by reciting them around a campfire. This visceral, emotional kind of storytelling does get hampered something awful by tactical combat like d20 provides, but if the group knows the rules well enough to roll through combat with more flair than fiddling it's super fun. Plus, Lovecraftian horror is just cooler with pirates than with professors. You kind of have to accept that the rules are going to screw you over as much as the GM does, and not get too attached to any gear or abilities your character has, because weapon focus: arming sword is only fun until you get all your stuff stolen and have to make do with a broken post and a dead boar for a shield. But that stuff is fun if you don't clench up too much.

[Prak]

I just had an idea which makes me want to play Demon the Fallen. You could have a Devil (the politics and leadership house), with five dots of Influence (able to influence international politics), five dots of Resources ($30,000/mo), and four or five of Fame (nationally recognized) and play The President of the United States.

I'm torn between the concept of "Devil used demonic powers to become president by broadcasting mind control magic" and "POTUS was in a horrible accident and nearly died, and Devil possessed him while his body was weak."

It'd be amazing. Horde of vampires causing trouble? Call in the national guard. Enthralled secret service. Pacts for faith with other politicians. God, I really want to play this.

[Ikeren]

D&D3.5E, or Tomes. As much as I recognize the stacks of flaws in 3.5E, I also enjoy knowing how to abuse the hell out of them, and I've got lots of positive experiences playing 3.5E.

[Whipstitch]

I'd still really like to get through a full game of After Sundown sometime. I like classic monsters and AS at least lets you have different types around without it turning into an incomprehensible clusterfuck right at character generation. Frank's suggested advancement systems don't seem to sit well with control freaks, in my experience, but it's still hits me as a helluva lot better than White Wolf's old arbitrage system--you could basically win character advancement at chargen and overall it was just a train wreck.

[vagrant]

Fuck it, I still think SR4A is one of the better systems out there. We all know the failure points, and every RPG has those - but I'm still a goddamn SR4 fanboy, mostly because I can in fact make the thing make sense without pulling too much shit out of my arse.

(Or get bogged down in actual work, which I really try to minimise. I'm a lazy bastard, but hey, my players have fun so it works. I do end up doing more work than I'd like, but c'est la vie.)

[Bihlbo]

I'd be playing Ars Magica if I had my druthers.
Instead I'm playing Pathfinder.. sigh.

I've only tried AM once. I hadn't even played half a dozen rpg sessions when someone invited me to the game. 11 people in a board room saying how their stodgy old Euromonk who universally hated God but had to pretend to be a Christian, spouting off Latin like I was supposed to know it, and just generally telling 11 self-contained stories about what happened over the Summer, Fall, and part of the Winter that without context I couldn't possibly care about. No fireballs, no monsters, no cool loot, no adventure. Didn't like it.

Now that I'm more used to RPing I can see how the pretense is interesting, but I'm still a bit at a loss as to what makes it fun.

[Grek]

I get the feeling that I would really like Shadowrun, if I had the books/players for it.

After Sundown also sounds cool.

I'm mostly sick of D&D at this point, but mostly due to oversaturation. Legend might be the answer to that.

A CoC/Conan d20 hybrid game would be pretty cool.

I'm always down for Paranoia.

[OgreBattle]

Here you go, a fistfull of druthers for your tabletop roleplaying satisfaction. What are gonna do with that?

What game system/setting/whatever would you be playing right now if you could, because you think it's just that good. Maybe you're already playing it? I'd still love to hear about it. You should totally derail this thread with discussions as to why it's awesome.


A thought... I enjoy critical discussions as much as the rest of you, but it's really easy to find evidence on this board that all rpgs ever made are utter garbage. Get some balls and be a cheerleader, even though someone's going to think you're an idiot fanboy for it.

Apocalypse World with a group of sexy ladies.

D&D with Gygax around the phase he made Cavaliers. Being able to talk with Gygax about things like if clerics didn't exist, warrior/wizard balance, and so on.

RIFTS with Kevin Siembieda. He is basically the only person who can run it in the way it was intended to be run.

Warhammer 40k with a fully customized army.

Nowadays I have more fun designing than playing RPG's heh, so my fistfull of Druthers would be having Frank Trollman's undivided attention for X amount of time to get my heartbreaker finished.

[Hicks]

Dungeons: the Dragoning 40,000, 7.6th edition; with book 2, for spelljammers. If we had not mysteriously lost our cache of dice I'd be Story Mastering it right now.

[Koumei]

Every now and then I think "I'd like to play [WW product]", enticed by all those boobs and other peoples' tales. Then I remember that it's actually shit, but it'd be nice to actually play old Vampire at a fetish nightclub... actually that isn't "playing Vampire", that's "picking up nerdy goth girls".

Or "Demon had some cool concepts buried in there, and the way you can get a dice pool of 20 on a TN 3 Difficulty 1 social roll is awesome!" but that too really comes down to "the kind of girls who play Demon are the kind of girls I'd like to have a brief fling with" and not "this is an excellent actual game".

Exalted and Scion, that's less the case, more that it'd be fun to play on the Internet where it's boobs everywhere (and sometimes it is fun to do just that, the benefits of the Internet being "such forum games typically last about three weeks before they fold, so you don't even have to commit for long).

As for a game I'd actually really like to play in a way that isn't related to boobs... I dunno. I don't find myself wishing I could play in a D&DTome game, because I already do. My requirements for that are met, and I'm quite happy with those. And the majority of other systems I find tend not to excite me - they generally treat combat as being as big a deal as D&D does, but don't do as good a job, mechanically. Maid, perhaps? Maybe TMNT or Rifts or Nightbane played MAXIMUM SPLAT-STACKING, ALL OPTIONS IN, GO HARDCORE mode?

[Bihlbo]

RIFTS with Kevin Siembieda. He is basically the only person who can run it in the way it was intended to be run.

Nowadays I have more fun designing than playing RPG's heh, so my fistfull of Druthers would be having Frank Trollman's undivided attention for X amount of time to get my heartbreaker finished.

1. You're going to have to explain why you think Rifts the way it was intended to be run would be any good.

2. I'm fairly certain that with x amount of time the chances of your heartbreaker getting finished or not has nothing at all to do with anyone's attention but yours.

[Bihlbo]

Every now and then I think "I'd like to play [WW product]", enticed by all those boobs and other peoples' tales. Then I remember that it's actually shit, but it'd be nice to actually play old Vampire at a fetish nightclub... actually that isn't "playing Vampire", that's "picking up nerdy goth girls".

Or "Demon had some cool concepts buried in there, and the way you can get a dice pool of 20 on a TN 3 Difficulty 1 social roll is awesome!" but that too really comes down to "the kind of girls who play Demon are the kind of girls I'd like to have a brief fling with" and not "this is an excellent actual game".

This is the kind of thing that's fun to talk about on the Internet, but entirely regrettable upon reflection. But, I don't blame you for being as tempted by it as I once was.

As for a game I'd actually really like to play in a way that isn't related to boobs... I dunno.

I do know. You are wrong. But you are also misguided. Try actual titties that belong to someone you care about; that does not disappoint. But it's kind of off topic.

Maid, perhaps? Maybe TMNT or Rifts or Nightbane played MAXIMUM SPLAT-STACKING, ALL OPTIONS IN, GO HARDCORE mode?

Why? Are these good?

[hogarth]

I'm happy enough with 3.5/Pathfinder, which I play pretty frequently.

I'd probably like to try a Champions or Mutants & Masterminds game again some time.

[Aryxbez]

IF I had my Druthers, I'd continue playing a High Level Fantasy campaign...if [Tome] 3.5 D&D wasn't such a mess of a game requiring system mastery to DM it efficiently.

I'd want to run a Zombie Apocalypse game, though I can already do that, wonder if one would be improved by better ability to differentiate characters, like unique archtype abilities? If nothing else, think such a game would be massively improved by having bunch of random tables for finding stuff in certain locations, and Community management minigames.

Fallout campaign, if I could figure out what system would be best, for minimal amount of work for the adding of new content that would be required.

Cartoon Action Hour, an RPG based on old 80's cartoons like Thunder Cats, GI Joe, and Transformers, and its RNG is a D12. Though I would be hard pressed to find a physical copy of the thing.

The Elder Scrolls setting is one I would love to use for an rpg. It's got its problems,

awwwwww yeah! I agree with this notion here, I like the setting enough there would be some locales and time periods I'd want to see explored (Akavir, early 4th era/pre-Skyrim, Ebon Arm's return, etc). Playing the games sometimes reminds me of interactions I'd like to do different, or do in a Tabletop (getting to defy a fetch quest to use a useful item for own purposes,creates potentiallymore interesting stories). Though I disagree with the notion of not letting Argonians/Khajit/Akavir-races, and even lesser known beast races like the sload and Lilmothitt. Two core beast races have established themselves as common PC races that should be viable, and the Khajit have a vaguely interesting enough culture that you could base an entire game on their kind alone.

System wise, imagine might want some type of Dice Pool game to replicate the current direction of deadly combats, and allowing for advancement that doesn't go much of anywhere. Since it'd seemingly allow players to openly create the character they want, opposed to just using FantasyCraft or 4th edition for fighting man-man combat forever!

To any consolation, there was a very short term Elder Scroll Campaign here. Also you said the setting has problems, what problems were those you had in mind?

Also, how would pretending that D20 works for Conan, if it doesn't work apparently? Whole weapon focus example alone shows, that it hurts the flavor of just picking up any weapon and do awesome visceral things.

Nowadays I have more fun designing than playing RPG's heh, so my fistfull of Druthers would be having Frank Trollman's undivided attention for X amount of time to get my heartbreaker finished.

I'm sure you could make that happen..for the right price.

[erik]

I'd be down for some DnD 3e where everyone wrote their own approved homebrew class (subject to change if they felt they wanted to go in another direction).

Or HEX. I have a friend wanting me to resume my ages-old, tabled HEX campaign, I may have to dust that off now that we have a regular game night going again.

[Sigil]

Dungeons: the Dragoning 40,000, 7.6th edition; with book 2, for spelljammers. If we had not mysteriously lost our cache of dice I'd be Story Mastering it right now.

Seconded, I definitely want to try that out at some point.

[Koumei]

This is the kind of thing that's fun to talk about on the Internet, but entirely regrettable upon reflection. But, I don't blame you for being as tempted by it as I once was.

No way, it's good fun, it just doesn't happen in this shitty state.

I do know. You are wrong. But you are also misguided. Try actual titties that belong to someone you care about; that does not disappoint. But it's kind of off topic.

No, I meant "If we're actually talking about gaming for its own sake, then I don't know which game I really want to play", not "I don't know about that crazy non-boob gaming!"

Why? Are these good?

Maid is good fun. I'd like it more if there was system mastery and complex decisions in character creation (and advancement at all), but hey, it's decent. And solving things with fists is no more in-depth or effective than solving them with arguments, tea parties or figure skating competitions.

As for the Palladium games, sometimes they can be fun to play with the right people, using the right combination of stupidity, but the games themselves are bad.

[tussock]

More of the Castles & Crusades I occasionally run.

A more d20-like homebrew, if I could be bothered brewing it.

To play it'd be anything 3e (easy mode so it doesn't grind), or 2nd ed (mid-level so it works), or AD&D (low level for hard-mode), or GURPS4 (gritty western), or probably anything where I can have a character and roll some dice with some sort of a concrete outcome toward achieving an immediate objective.

[Bihlbo]

I'd want to run a Zombie Apocalypse game, though I can already do that, wonder if one would be improved by better ability to differentiate characters, like unique archtype abilities? If nothing else, think such a game would be massively improved by having bunch of random tables for finding stuff in certain locations, and Community management minigames.

I'm planning on doing just that. I finished running a short-run game which resulted in the ZA. I want to pick up that world just as the gore hits the fan and force the players through some rules-lite RP-heavy horror/terror settings in which people of the world discover their gods have abandoned them and the dead now walk again. However, less Walking Dead with character development, more Dawn of the Dead with inevitable death-by-zombie. Then jump into a board game that I haven't made yet, allowing them to play out the survivors rebuilding society, fighting back the horde, etc.

The Elder Scrolls setting is one I would love to use for an rpg. It's got its problems,

awwwwww yeah! I agree with this notion here, I like the setting enough there would be some locales and time periods I'd want to see explored ...Though I disagree with the notion of not letting Argonians/Khajit/Akavir-races, and even lesser known beast races like the sload and Lilmothitt. Two core beast races have established themselves as common PC races that should be viable, and the Khajit have a vaguely interesting enough culture that you could base an entire game on their kind alone.

I agree with part of this. A Khajit-only game does seem interesting, for instance. I'm willing to change my original stance, but it seems as though the beast races really do not fit the setting very well. They are treated as dirt-worshiping ignorant foreigners in the games I've played. That's fine if you want that element in your game world, but I very much do not. Either your foreigners should be as redeemable, deep, capable, and attractive as your locals or you've simply added an element to the game which enables people to get their jollies on hating the Different (even if you don't actually engage in it). Thieving gypsies and tree-hugging, drugged-out assassins, that's all they are.

So yeah, either redeem them and flesh them out with a serious effort made to make them as human as orcs or bretons, or just accept that you can't write them out of the setting entirely and keep treating them as the same less-than-human untouchables that Morrowind through Skyrim have. The former takes a lot of work, and the latter is easily done by saying, "Play someone who actually has a soul, thanks."

Also you said the setting has problems, what problems were those you had in mind?

^ also:
Most video game rpg settings started out with all the depth and creativity of cheap pulp mag rejects. TES is no exception. It began as a painfully derivative bunch of tripe with no more story or character than Rogue. Every enemy could have been goombas and koopas and the game would have been the same. It wasn't until someone tried to make something beyond the hack-and-slash nature of the games be entertaining that they made it into something good. Many of those confines have limited the setting, but I am seriously impressed by how they worked their way out of many of them. For instance, "goblins" became either oblivion creatures or descendants of cursed elves. The "gods" became creatures only treated as divines by mortals out of respect, awe, or flabbergasted incomprehension. Orcs became an interesting civilized ethnicity rather than a dark-skinned ugly baddy you get to kill without feeling like a monster (even though by all accounts you are). Not all of those limitations have been overcome, but the details of which ones bug me more than you aren't important.

And you just can't get past the mechanics of the thing. Tell someone who's a fan that you're running a TES game but using rules they associate with another setting and you might cause an aneurism. The magic system is fine for a game meant to be played with a caveman's input device console controller, but if you tried to write that up it would be something like 5 pages and people just seriously laugh at that crap. You cannot play a fantasy RPG as a mage who's limited to 8 types of effects that magic can pull off. Even 4e did better than that.

Also, how would pretending that D20 works for Conan, if it doesn't work apparently? Whole weapon focus example alone shows, that it hurts the flavor of just picking up any weapon and do awesome visceral things.

Well, the folks at Mongoose took the approach that magic in 3e breaks the game at a certain point, so nerf the crap out of magic and let the game be more about stabbing and raping (the opposite of Tomes, frex). That part of it works pretty well, especially the part where if your heroes have permitted a worker of magic in their midst, they are accepting his prowess at the cost of probable demon-horror-mindcontrol-elderbeing-monster fun. And the parts that give characters bonuses to punching out horses, fighting with an ox jaw, being caught in a combat in just a thong, and seducing woman-shaped set pieces work great. Soldiers and anything that players more like a standard D&D class (which is still in there in every class, mind you) kind of sucks. There are many ways to simply make your character wrong via trap options like weapon focus.

Accept that at times your character is going to be unoptimized and on par with a commoner no matter what you do and that stuff bothers you less. Which kind of works out, because Conan might have been a tough mess of murdermeat as a level 3 rogue/4 barbarian/2 pirate/2 noble, he was still prone to getting captured and defeated, left to figure his way out of a mess with nothing more than his disdain for civilization, spiritual things, the gods, and book learnin. Try playing that story in a system that maintains your effectiveness in every situation and you're likely to find it boring.

[Korgan0]

Tome 3.5, houseruled SR4, After Sundown, Paranoia, Big Motherfucking Crab Truckers, Unknown Armies.

I'd pay an obscene amount for a good Star Wars RPG, but as far as I know such a thing never existed.