Sell me on your favorite role-playing game Veeky Forums

Easy mode: Game is well-known and has a huge following
Normal mode: Game is not very popular, but has a devoted fan-base
Hard mode: Game is pretty obscure, not a lot of people know about
Nightmare mode: Game is unpublished homebrew

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sendspace.com/file/txtl08
mega.nz/#F!06Q2kY7I!
mega.nz/#F!Ym5RHIJL!
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Easy mode: GURPS. If you like a lot of variation in your games it's the very logical choice: there's a splatbook for everithing you can came up to (so less work on research). The only problem is thath require some system mastery on the gm side since gurps is a rule-toolbox thet require some choices to begin with.

Normal mode: FATE. if you like variation AND a prominent narrative approach, fate is best suited: as a gm your work is lessered by the shared storytelling between you and the players. Also the relative abstraction level of the game make easyer taking care of the setting detail level.

Hard mode: Primetime Adventures. If you like variations, narrativism, and dislike preparation time PA is the answer: its a shared storytelling system with still a gm prevalence approach.

Nightmare mode: Millantauno. Its a 3-4 pages rulelite italian system about Monicelli's movie "L'armata brancaleone". Tired of your boring fantasy campaign? Had enough of this 'game of memes' edge shit? Than brace yourself and start talking like a knight in the italian landscape of 1001 a.d.. little insight: "indebted with a jew infidel" it's a possibility when rolling for starting equipment

Don't mind if I do!

Strike! is a d6 based, very fast, simple and modular system that was designed from the ground up with ease of playability in mind.
The "core" is very light and decidedly narrative, generic framework that the rest of the modules are built around. It could technically handle just about anything, as long as what you are looking for isn't simulation, but it's not very exciting.
The meat is in the submodules, most importantly, the tactical combat one. The core of the game is classless, the tactical combat adds classes, roles and feats to your characters to be used in grid based fights. Note that I say "adds"; this is on top of your skills, tricks and other stuff your character already has.
The classes/roles are mostly fluff neutral, which makes it very easy to find one that could fit your character, that you can then further tweak with feats. This makes the game a good fit for any genre where you expect the characters to get into fights often where they have to combine their disparate talents in order to overcome their enemies.
The combat itself is reminiscent of D&D, except heavily streamlined, focusing on tactical choices, positioning, etc. over raw numbers. There's optional rules within the module, that can add some of the complexity back (damage types), or tweak in other ways (for those enjoying XCOM operators operating operationally there's one where you get absolutely murdered if you are caught without cover, for example).

There's also a bunch of other modules that are worth mentioning, like the team conflict, and optional rules that make it viable for OSR style dungeon crawls and the like.

If I had to find problems with the game is that it is a bit too broad strokes (especially the core system) but because of it's simplicity it's moddable. And the CRB editing sucks.

PDF related is a post from the SA forum thread that goes into a bit more detail. I'd be also happy to go through building a character or characters.

>"indebted with a jew infidel"
...is a possibility in every setting, up to the present day.

Stop shilling Strike!

Why does Veeky Forums keep shilling Strike!?

SLA Industries, mainly for setting.

This is what happens when a bunch of Scotsmen get traumatized by life in Glasgow in times of Margaret Thatcher. It is briefly described as a game of futuristic urban horror.

Setting is a corporative cyberpunk, where almost everything is owned by a company named SLA Industries (pronounced "slay"). It is a very dark and gritty universe, where TV glorifies violence and serial killers are treated as celebrities. Players take role of superstars of SLA Industries called Operatives - a highly trained freelance soldiers of dystopian government.

World is very fun, multifaceted and has a great 90's feel to it. System is a bit wonky, but there is a Savage Worlds conversion that presumably fixes most of problems.

>Scotsmen get traumatized by life in Glasgow in times of Margaret Thatcher

redundant, all you need to say is "scotsmen" and "glasgow", the trauma is inherent

Hard mode: TALISLANTA

An exotic fantasy world inspired by the fantasy novels of Jack Vance, and by other sources such as H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dreamlands of Unknown Kadath, Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels, and The Travels of Marco Polo.

The game is set in a strange world of twin suns and seven moons that's overflowing with exotic peoples, places, and creatures. The time is the New Age, a Renaissance-like period that started a thousand or more years after The Great Disaster, a cataclysm that marked the fall of the once-great Archaen Age.

Talislanta has seas of glass, phytomantic bird-people, tattooed clone warriors, transmutation wizards who use quintessence to change storms into crytals, sindarans with two brains, warring cultists who have taken over entire nations, elemental demons, ice schooners roaming glaciers, windships manned by astromancers, beastmen mutants riding two-headed mini-dragons, and a whole lot more stuff that's both weird and very metal.

There seems to be a lot of editions. Which one is the best?

2E for simplicity, 4E for completeness. You can get all the books in the Library section on www.talislanta.com.

Easy Mode: Savage Worlds. Flexible, fast, and allows for deadly fights and sudden shifts. Despite its simplicity, I'd only endorse it for relatively experienced/functional gaming groups

Apocalypse World: Basically the same as Savage Worlds. Its expansions are more distinct from each other than Savage Worlds'

Maid: Don't let the anime trappings dissuade you. It's fast and the character generation is itself a fun mini game. Expect silliness and encourage silliness. I like to add a level of fuckedupness just below the surface (the Maids who displease the master are never seen again).

Paranoia: Not the official game. It's a home-brew system that I made. Character creation sets the tone, with other players and the GM competing to try to curry your favor while preventing you from being too strong. If you do start combat, it's quick but every action has a price, and you might need that dodge card for when your commie teammate Obi-O-BAH tries to shove you into the vault.

Hard mode: OG!
Wanna play a flintsones slapstick cartoon about cavemen?

..oh, and remember: you are playing cavemen so there are only 18 WORDS (since proper language still wasn't invented yet)

>the Maids who displease the master are never seen again
They get fired and move to another city?

I see nothing wrong here.

Normal Mode?:
Wraith the Oblivion is a game ahead of its time, and suffered for it. Despite an early death and subsequent memes, it is NOT unplayable. Infact, one of my best roleplaying experiences was with this game.
There are so many points of interest to this game- its surreal setting, its exploration of human emotion and memory, its wide range of story options, etc.- that it's hard not to like it.
I think the best and most controversial element of the game is the way it keep players engaged. As you might have heard, in Wraith you actually play two characters: yours, and another player character's dark side known as a 'Shadow'.
A problem I get in some games is trying to balance and juggle between players and characters when the group gets split. No matter how hard you try to share the spotlight, some players are just hard to keep in the game.
In Wraith, because everyone plays each other's Shadow in addition to their own character, it's easier to keep everyone engaged, even during import scenes when only half the party is present. While it's still possible for players to have nothing to do in a scene, for the most part it's mitigated by shadowguiding (as the game refers to the act of playing another character's shadow).

Now the game isn't perfect, and the addition of a shadow can make it easier for players to derail the game. Furthermore, shadows require a certain balance of play, lest they become a problem.

Shadowguides who overplay their shadow can easily distract or steal the thunder from their respective player character. On the other hand, shadows that get under-utilized also rob from the game experience. So if you decide to play Wraith, be sure to do it with a group of experienced roleplayers. This game definitely not beginner friendly in my experience.

I don't really know what difficulty you consider this one but: MonsterHearts.

It's a game for playing through high-school drama as teenagers who are also supernatural entities of some description. There are two key points about it which I like; the first is that the social mechanics keep the drama moving and also make sure that it's driven almost entirely by emotion and pressure instead of persuading people by being reasonable, and the other is the thematic design of the classes, each of them is based around a particular kind of person you get in highschool and the mechanics reinforce that role, as such each class has a very distinct 'personality' which I quite like.

Barbarians of Lemuria is probably the most flexible rules-med/light RPG system out there. Dont let the PDF fool you, the rules proper are only like 50 pages of its content, and what a 50 pages they are. The game gives you the freedom to make pretty much any character, and due to the way the game is structured, your character will always get an appropriate bonus to things they should, logically be skilled at.

There is a graveyard that no one is allowed to visit. Maids who keep an eye on it say that it always grows when a maid is fired.

BoL is baller indeed.

WARHAMMER FANTASY ROLEPLAY 2E

A RAT CATCHER, A FERRYMAN, AN ELF MAILMAN, AND A DWARF SLAYER ARE OUT TO SAVE THE KINGDOM FROM BEASTMEN

TRAAAAAAVEEEEEEEEEELLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER


SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE

What about a setting where Nazi Germany won?

Hard Mode: Ironclaw

A lot of people (justifiably) turn their noses up to a game about furry knights. If you can get past the furry art and anthro trappings, you'll find the system is actually fantastic. Combat is quick and lethal, the magic system is satisfying, leveling and skills aren't a chore. It's a legitimately fun game that gets murdered by cringey art.

>Implying the Nazis weren't Jewish conspirators false flagging to incur Jewish sympathy and supremacy for generations to come.

>4e
Remember when you first got into role-playing as a kid, and you wanted to play-pretend your favorite fantasy novels? Remember how disappointing it was that the system really didn't facilitate that kind of game. Remember learning to love a different style of game (either through necessity, or through pressure from existing players) , where you aren't exactly the protagonists of a fantasy novel, but mercenaries trying to survive in the same type of world where a fantasy novel might take place but clearly didn't? Well 4e is the first game I've ever found that, out-of-the-box, is able to run games that feel like the sort of game you were expecting as a kid, without being diceless narrative hand-waiving (not that there's anything wrong with that.) It's perfect for a niche the rest of the gaming market just plain can't do. You've probably heard some bad things about it, and honestly most of them are true, in a sense, but can mostly be boiled down to "it can't run the mercenary-adventurer type of game you learned to love after realizing you couldn't run fantasy novel games," which is true. When you want to run a fantasy-novel style game, 4e should be the first place you look. It's specialized, but great at what it's specialized in.

4e was always a good game for the same reason everyone hated it: it wasn't dnd.
A bit too light on non-combat stuff though.

>"indebted with a jew infidel" it's a possibility when rolling for starting equipment
out with the rules already

...I'm baffled, but intrigued. Got a link/pdf for that Italian one?

I'd be willing to try Strike! or at least read it to check it out because I have been lead to understand that the actual preview rules are terrible and don't explain the rules well.

There's already an item in the game which makes it so fired maids are executed via guillotine so you're not exactly making it any more dark than it's already capable of being.

Warhammer Fantasy 3e.

It is very different from other RPGs and gets a lot of hate for being different, but it is pretty enjoyable once you get into it.

The idea that with the ability cards and the special dice, you only need about 1 good GM screen worth of rules, which makes it move pretty fast. In addition the flexibility in character creation is pretty nice with so many ways to invest XP.

On top of this is has some great adventures with great Warhammer feel and on top of that the material and adventures from the previous two editions is mostly usable as well.

I love my WFRP3 but I'll also be the first to admit it has it's issues. A bunch could be simplified, the "difficulty die" would probably be a bit better scaled to a d12, the "stance" stuff is both awesome and bothersome and there are lots of tokens and stuff to keep track of.

If you can find and use the mod for Fantasy Grounds (or a lesser degree MapTools) it helps a lot with the fiddly bits during online play.

Eon, by Neogames, a Swedish studio developing pen and paper roleplaying games. They're currently kickstarting 4th edition which is looking dope as hell. It's autistic in it's detail and design, the world is massive and the lore extensive. You might call it low fantasy, but it has magic grounded in science (it's very mathematical in it's theory). Extremely unforgiving, as you track exhaustion, trauma, pain, bleeding and blood loss when you do anything tiring or damaging to your body/mind.

Uses exploding D6, and generally you roll three d6, referred to as "Ob3t6" since it's Swedish. Rough translation is "infinite 3d6". If a dice shows a six, you pick it up, add another and reroll that dice until you stop rolling sixes. You want to get as low as possible for tests, and high for damage rolls. I cannot do this game justice in text, and I wish it was translated fully, because the universe is fantastic, massive and nothing I've ever tried previously has captured that deadly, low fantasy feeling.

Wait I found it, was only a quick google away.

There is an italian game called Sine Requie in wich nazi germany wasn't defeated in WWII because the dead rose fron their graves, and so nazism never got defeated and maintained it's status.

Nightmare mode: I worked out a rules light d10 system for playing Kaiju adventures. For the sake of roleplaying you also have a human(oid) character who is bonded to the monster in some form (Fay Raye and King Kong, Hogarth and Iron Giant, the Fairies and Mothra, or even simply the lone scientist warning of the danger a monster represents.

Combat is governed by only four stats so it moved pretty fast, with the emphasis on being creative in your approach to combat without resorting to a list of maneuvers.

Like Game of Thrones? Like AD&D?
How about a game where the Divine Right of Kings is a literal, tangible force of the setting? Welcome to Birthright, motherfucker.

In most games, getting your own kingdom is an endgame or postgame achievement. In Birthright, it's usually part of the starting package. You get to run your own country in between adventuring sessions and engage in politics or wars with NPC lords or even other PCs. In addition to the nation-ruling aspect of the game, there's also a simple, but useful massed battle system.

Long story short, in the world's ancient history, there was a war between the gods and their mortal champions. After much devastation, the old gods died while their heroes became new gods (and understandably, decided to leave messing with the mortal realm to the mortals). From the new gods and their followers, all the kings and nobles of the world are descended, and they carry some of their divine magic in their bloodline, which they can use to shape the lands they rule, drawing magic from places of nature. Many followers of the god of evil have become great and powerful monster lords , the Awsheighlien, using their own black bloodline powers to wreak havoc.

I agree with you, save for the implied given that fantasy-novel-in-role-playing-game-form isn't D&D, and the further implied that "that weird fantasy-mercenary-survival-horror thing that we all developed an acquired taste for is the only true D&D.

That... I actually want to see. DO you still have any of your home-brew material?

Did you seriously use a Big Bang Theory reaction image?

Yes, it is from the approval/request sub-folder of my reaction avatar images folder.

Now do you have the combat-streamlined Narrative Kaiju-Genre-Game or not?

that weird fantasy-mercenary-survival-horror thing that we all developed an acquired taste for is the D&D most 4e haters refer to when hating it.
Fantasy-novel-in-rp-form shouldn't be D&D since they're mostly about the main character while a game played with 4-6 people shouldn't be.
I do get your points though.

>Fantasy-novel-in-rp-form shouldn't be D&D since they're mostly about the main character while a game played with 4-6 people shouldn't be.

I gotcha, though you can totally have 4, or even 5 protagonists. 6 is pushing it. I guess, I just always figured, since the original creators of D&D were fans of Vance, Tolkien, Howard, and Wagner, that games should endeavor to feel like Vance, Tolkien, Howard, and Wagner. But then again, at the end of the day, that's just a matter of taste, and if I started crusading about it, in a vacuum, I wouldn't be any better than the people militantly insisting that mercenary-survival-horror is the only true TTRPG.

This is true. To make matters worse, the book itself isn't great either (still much better though).

Core book pdf here: sendspace.com/file/txtl08

And of course I can answer any questions you may have.

Can I play a minion master necromancer in Strike! and not break the game/be useless? Most games have problems with that.

Well, sorta.

For a minion-mancer you'd want to be Summoner or Buddies (the classes are refluffable, so you can just say your summons for the summoner are zombies rising up from under the ground, or that your "buddy" is a skeleton or a death-knight or something).

Since under minionmancer I assume you want to have a lot of minions, that means Summoner. They have a first level summon that summons 7 weak minions that can pile on enemies. I had a player play that as a necromancer in one of my games, with that summon being random body parts that he animated.

My homebrew is based on oldschool D&D with some new rules to iron out the speedbumps.
>Less bookkeeping
>Mana system, the 'cool' and potentially game-breaking spells are tied to systems of advancement to avoid abuse
>Three core classes; Fighters, Rogues, Magicians.
>No feats or skills- anyone can attempt anything feasible with class bonuses thrown in if relevant.
>HP is fluffed as meat points to avoid discrepancies; yes unrealistic fighters can take 8 swords in the gut and walk it off, that's part of the setting.
>dungeon crawling with completing dungeons = xp equal to dungeon level

It's fun for me to make anyway, not necessarily fun for others. I accept that.

Oh, there's also the necromancer class, but him having many minions relies on killing and reanimating things in-combat, and the basic undead shade he gets only lasts for 1 turn (it's a self destructive ghost thing). Later undeads last longer, but it's a lot more fiddly than just going with Summoner.

Seriously though, do you have it? I'm quivering with...

Because it's AWESOME!!!!!

Just reading it right now, and it's all I ever wanted from a RPG: lots of action anyway.

P.S. note the five exclamation marks:
sure sign of a diseased mind, if you ask me.

Y'know - neither of these gifs is very conducive to owner user's predisposition to share the preffered media ...

Perchance you might be persuaded to consider ... an alternate approach ... if you know what I mean.

>A RAT CATCHER, A FERRYMAN, AN ELF MAILMAN, AND A DWARF SLAYER ARE OUT TO SAVE THE KINGDOM FROM BEASTMEN

I know, right?
A pint of Lager says they don't survive the 2nd encounter.

No bet

It's the sort of game that can end up with a kung-fu Predator and his four-armed mohawked jungle savage druid can ride a dinosaur into battle against the evil Lord Blackbough, Dominar of the Dark Glade while a demonic creature from another dimension engages a lich-lord in a rock-off to the death in the skies above.

Imagine a world where the remnants of failing terraforming magic blend with the hateful works of ages-past demonic tyrants to create actively malevolent firestorms.

Imagine every fantastic heavy metal album cover put in a blender and made into a game.

Imagine slashing your way through an army of goblins on the dark side of the moon.

Imagine SenZar.

not sure whether hard or nightmare mode as game is fanmade and free but almost no one knows about and aside from myself (as dm) I've never seen anyone else play it.

>Halo Mythic
literally a halo rpg, play as any branch of UNSC, ONI, an AI, play as police or even as a civilian. Includes all equipment from time periods (pre covenant, covenant war, post covenant war).
Can also play as covenant and prometheans should you feel like it, though since we all hate everything halo 4 onwards we stick to the earlier stuff.
It's pretty combat focussed and the gunplay is very satisfying, weapon customisation is incredible and power levels seem good. vehicle combat is done well and the game flows decently, the dice system is a bit odd but we get by. My first session involved a squad of marines that were stationed on Harvest during the beginning of the war, they join up with the Spirit of Fire and follow the plot of Halo Wars 1 loosely, was a fun time. The players wanted to be beefier so I let them graduate to ODSTs after enough battle commendations and now they go around fucking up covenant. I also gave the squad an AI to keep them company which they take along on every mission. It's fun though your players have to enjoy sci-fi and like halo, which has become skub afaik, which is a shame since it's so fun

>Nightmare mode: Game is unpublished homebrew
well, i am about to publish my own fantasy heartbreaker and i do happen to like it more than published games, so...

Can you tell more about it?

it's a game that mixes dark fantasy with greek drama/shakespearean tragedy, featuring a system that comes closer to simulating the fantasy genre than any games we have seen so far

>system that comes closer to simulating the fantasy genre than any games we have seen so far

That's quite a bold claim to say the least. Can you elaborate a little bit?

sure, i wouldn't bother to publish a game if i wasnt convinced i had sth to bring to the table

combat: i studied actual movie combats, based on that disposed of hitpoints and alternating attacks and replaced them with a mitigated deathspiral and momentum of combat
outside of combat: i have grown convinced that it's impossible to run consistent genre simulation without metacurrency to incentivize and discourage certain behaviour (unless you have truly amazing players). i recently peeked into the new conan rpg, it tries to do sth similar as far as I can see but it's kinda tailored to conan and could use some streamlining

I just need to finalize the contract on 3 art licenses, then the website can go online. finally.

Thank you sir! I look forward to checking this out later today!

D&D 2e is the poster child of OSRG and for good reason.

Is there a hidden mode between nightmare and hard mode? Because I've literally never heard of a single person on Veeky Forums even mention Tokyo Nova.

The Hero System.

This is the original "stat me" RPG where you can build any character you want. Its hallmark Power building system lets you not only build any individual power/magic/technology that you could want but you can also build them to function in a customized system of your choice (i.e. you can build Vancian magic, "Mana Point" magic, realistic weapons and armor, straight up no BS superpowers, etc).

Character creation is not all that Hero has to offer. It is a 3d6 roll under system just like GURPS but effects are usually in handfuls of 6-12d6 which lends a certain mechanical weight that can be appealing compared to rolling only a die or two. Combat is an underrated gem rich with tactical options. The system as a whole is elegantly interconnected as well as ultimately tied into or relatable to the base Characteristics.

Hero touts itself as "the ultimate gamer's toolkit" and once you grasp the character creation system and the game mechanics you will find yourself tinkering away at making exactly the game you want with characters that bear more of your own personal stamp than any other game out there can offer.

If this is working on you dear reader then I present two troves. First the current edition of the Hero System:

> Hero System 6th Edition Trove
mega.nz/#F!06Q2kY7I!
r2JY-moVxFUGl90w6LDa2A

> Getting Started
Find Volume 1: Character Creation and Volume 2: Combat and Adventuring.

And the past edition of the Hero System:

> Hero System 5th Edition Trove
mega.nz/#F!Ym5RHIJL!
Qk1NgisxONlZbCQdbNYBZg

> Getting Started
Find Hero System Fifth Edition Revised

Another charm of Hero System is the backwards compatibility. While there will be differences between a 6e, 5e, 4e, 3e, 2e, or 1e character they will not be so insurmountable that they are unrecognizable or unplayable together.

Where do we discuss Strike! ?

does anybody use it for something other than superhero gaming? did you ever play fantasy with it?

If you want to play something that isn't superheroes, you use GURPS.

I recall a billion years ago there was Fantasy Hero System game and even had friends run it but I missed out.

If I wanted a "do anything" fantasy game I'd go with GURPS too, but I think Hero and M&M work.

/4eg/ is our home now.

Yay!

I've used it for or else to play superheroes, fantasy (S&S, Urban, and High), modern day action, Fallout, Star Wars, Rifts, Fate/Nasuverse, the list goes on.

The thing is with GURPS you buy the two core rulebooks and then some rules supplements for more rules. With Hero you only objectively need the two core rulebooks. Literally everything else shows you how to use the rules in those two books to a different end. GURPS is a restaurant that has a menu full of items bought from GFS or Sysco while Hero is a kitchen and pantry that puts the culinary arts in your hands.

>The thing is with GURPS you buy the two core rulebooks and then some rules supplements for more rules.
You don't actually need anything except Basic Set.

Yeah, this really isn't true. It's been a while (decades?) since I've looked at Hero but I know GURPS has everything you need to play in the Basic set. All the other books just discuss how to use what's in there and expand on them. For example: Fright Checks are in the Basic set, GURPS Horror just expands on how to use them more interestingly.

The add on books for GURPS are mostly for those who want more detail in an area. Again, the Basic Set has a "TL6 revolver" but you get High-Tech for a "Remington Army Model 1873" or whatever. Your game will run fine with either.