What are some of the best RPGs system-wise? Don't care for settings, don't care for artwork...

Does anyone know good non-skill-based rulesets?

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As mentioned upthread, Dogs in the Vineyard.

The core concept is "group of people with technical legal authority operating in a lawless region where there is at best a social obligation to treat them as agents of the law and not just murder the lot of them and dump their bodies where nobody will find them". You could use it for a Jedi game in the Outer Rim if you wanted.

> stats are slighlty too good / bad past a range of +2 / -2

> Quick Rundown:

>> [Skill rank]d6, take the highest (unless unskilled: roll, 2d6 & take the lowest), add stat, compare to DC or defense roll.

>> In the case of an attack, multiply the attack's base damage per margin of success. Then compare to target's light wound, deep wound and instant death treshold. The highest you bumped is the type of wound inflicted.

>> You can spend SP on "emergency dices" you spend to represent heroic efforts at a specific tasks and add to the roll. I.E.: A dodge roll against a powerful opponent.

>> Adventurous mode: Add +1 to the result of the roll for each additional 6s. Example, 6,6,5 would be a dice roll of 7.

>> Cinematic mode: Add +1 to the result of the roll for each additional 6s AND 5s. Example, 6,6,5 would be a dice roll of 8.

>> If the dice roll is the lowest possible (4 dices, all ones), you fumbled. Your result is effectively 0 + stat. You can still succeed if modifiers say so.

BLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAADDDDDDEEEEEESSSSSSS

It baffles me that Blades is mentioned so rarely on Veeky Forums. It's the best system released in years and full of fantastic ideas that will become staples in future systems.

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I've read through the Burning Wheel rulebook and it seems to be such a good system, at least character creation and progression wise, not sure how I feel about all the combat rules. But anyway, I know that I will never have a chance to actually play it and this saddens me to no end

I hear a lot about this. Gimme a summary of the rules.

Shadow of the Demon Lord. It's got one of the cleanest, most elegant systems I've seen in a D&D-like game in years, and Schwalb found a lot of simple solutions to some of the most common issues. It's a career based fantasy game, so it ameliorates the issues of class-based systems, the progression rules are perfect, and the subsystems integrate with one another smoothly.
Unfortunately, the native setting lends itself to loledge, so the game is often talked about as a joke, which is a shame because the system is gold.

OP here. I'm a big fan of SotDL too. I like how elegant the overall design of the system is. Although I could argue that rulebooks don't tell what kinda gameplay is supported by the rules the best—it might be confusing to new people.

Reign, or really just ORE in general but I like the Reign itteration the most outside of odd ones like Better Angels

Not that user, but the core mechanic is d6 pool, take the highest. There's a table of results a bit like PbtA games, 6 means unmitigated success, 4-5 means success with consequences (one or more), 1-3 means complications and consequences.

Where this gets interesting is in the setting of fictional positioning and level of effect, which is a very quick and efficient way to simulate advantage, outnumbering, damage, or degrees of success. Most actions are done in risky positions, where success is fairly easy to attain but minor setbacks abound, while attacking a problem from a desperate position is a good way to gain extra experience but also get badly hurt, and attacking from a controlled position allows you to completely retcon poor results as you hesitate and try different approaches.

Some of my favorite rules from BitD are the harm rules, where you just describe various physical or mental injuries or maladies and invoke a minor action debuff when it's appropriate for your character to suffer them, and the flashback system, which more or less completely replaces hours of planning and lets you unfold a complicated criminal heist in media res, a bit like Ocean's Eleven.

Cont: And of course, accumulating stress and watching your character evolve through personality traumas and indulgence of vices is quite enjoyable.

OP what you want is Dungeon World.
It's a game that solves all the flaws of D&D, with a fast, mechanically simple powerful system with lots of options for both roleplaying and combat. Everything is organized under the core mechanic, which is more interesting than the boring, trite binary pass-fail of D&D. Dungeon World takes the best parts of D&D and flushes away outdated mechanics like critical hits and hp bloat. An elder dragon only has 16 hp, but is a far more engaging fight than anything in D&D. "It's my turn? Ok I hit the dragon again. 7 damage".... who even would want to play that? That's boring. That's stupid. That's babby 3.5 shit. Dungeon World allows your combat to be as flexible as your imagination. In one session of Dungeon World that I played, my fighter grabbed a vampire in a bear hug and wrestled him out the window into the castle moat. That is real roleplaying. You can't get that with D&D. With Dungeon World, you can.

Blades in the Dark is not very good and from what I've heard most of its mechanics are taken from PbtA anyway, without much originality added in.

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GURPS

Dungeon World really focuses on PC-character relationships... in fact that the main source of XP.
I have found in my GMing experience some players really do NOT dig that.

My (main) group in particulars prefers court intrigue, and found DW's base system to cause a lot of in-fighting in such scenarios. You can always "Hack it" as one of the creators loves to say, but out of the box expect players to chat up one another more than interacting with the world around.

And if that's what you want? Go for it. But it's better to know that going in.

You're not wrong. It does what it says on the package and is actually really fun and simple once you get it going, even if Veeky Forums doesn't want to admit it.

You've got it backwards.
Dungeon World is the lazy and incompetent AW rip-off.
Blades in the Dark is completely mechanically distinct from PbtA. It was inspired by PbtA, but you can't find a single PbtA mechanic in BitD.

>Dungeon World really focuses on PC-character relationships... in fact that the main source of XP.
No, failed rolls are the main source of XP. Relationships are an end-of-session afterthought.

Gurps. Everyday.

What do you guys think of Cypher? I'm in love with the pool system and i like xombat well enough. I just dont like how races count as descriptors since it just assumes you are human and how you can almosy break the game clean in 2 if you are a power gamer, system is gold for rolepayers from my experience gming it.

Based DtD:40k 7e of course

The narrativist bullshit of GM throwing in complications with 1 xp compensation (or on a botched roll) makes the system unbearable for me. Also the whole 'cypher' always seemed off to me - game is based around loot you spend and lose right away? No thank you.

What can you tell me about Gumshoe? I've heard of it, but have yet to read up on it.

4e and 5e are both good systems for their purposes. The rest are outdated and unusable at this point.

>You can't get that with D&D
Every rule you need for it is there, so you most certainly can.

This.

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If you want an Apocalypse Engine game, Monster Hearts does it better and was already mentioned. Since we're talking setting agnostic here, the fact that Dungeon World has the more popular "like D&D" setting is irrelevant.

I believe Kill Six Billion Demons' RPG is finished now, which is also Apocalypse Engine, but I haven't read it aside from an early draft, so I don't know how good or worth reading it is.

>setting is irrelevant
>list a game that has as its main selling point only that it's usable for any system
Even if you want to say that modularity is a positive, Mutants and Masterminds does it better.

>Tokyo Nova
This is available in English now?

Has been for a long time.

I thought our hopes of it getting translated died when our local translators slowed to a stop some years ago. Don't suppose you know where I could get a download?

The Riddle of Steel is infamous, but it introduces so many ingenious concepts (mainly spiritual attributes and how they handle combat) i recommend taking a look at, at the very least, it's spiritual successors:
Song of Swords, Blade of the Iron Throne, and my personal recommendation, Sword & Scoundrel (formerly known as Bad of Bastards)

BaNd of bastards i mean

The question is impossible to answer unless you specify what you want the system to be doing. Do you want quick and easy rules that don't get in the way of the narrative and action? Do you want heavily detailed and realistic rules for gritty combat where weapons and bones break on a regular basis? Do you want the system to encourage characters to make bad decisions because it makes for a more interesting story? Do you want empthasis on action or drama? And so on, and so on.

I don't know of another system that rivals Mage: the Ascension in terms of its magic system. Although the regular OWoD rules are fairly ordinary.

Possibly, I didn't my OP post well, but what I'm after is systems that are well-built or conceptually sound from the perspective of design elegance, and nothing more.

How so?

GURPS and HERO if you want functioning rules and lots of them.
BRP if you like the above two, but you're not quite autistic enough.
ORE if you like dicepools.
Savage Worlds if you don't actually care and just want to roll dice.
PtbA if your inner hipster cannot be contained

Character, trauma, relationship centric horror game with great rules for building interesting mysteries and conspiracies: Unknown Armies 3e.

Investigation, mystery and violence focused thriller/horror game with great rules for playing out the desperate descent of someone 'staring into the abyss': Delta Green, new stand alone version.

Exploration, dungeon crawling and story/character development through randomness centric sword and sorcery gonzo fantasy: Dungeon Crawl Classics, be aware of odd dice. They do add to the game in my opinion, but if you dont want to invest in them, get a dice roller app that can handle odd values.

Tabletop battle game about fantastical super heroes with a campaign/character development focus: DnD5e Be aware, it lies a lot about being about exploration and role playing, but its really all just light fluff, or activities external to the system, while you set up the next battle and you soon out level all of it gaining powers to skip what little there is.

>Every rule you need for it is there, so you most certainly can.
Yes but D&D bogs down the narrative with pointless realism simulationist rules. This applies to every edition, btw.
Dungeon World doesn't do this, it is fast and light, and empowers the narrative with its mechanics.

>pointless realism simulationist rules.
>realism
>simulation

I see you've never played them.

Dungeon world really isn't any better than DnD because at the end of the day you are still just picking your character and your actions off a list of pre-approved ideas from a creatively bankrupt gang battering an ancient slurry of horse meat and genre conventions.

The flaw in this argument is that you're comparing DW with the literal shittest system and congratulating yourself when DW's better than it.

Song of Swords. Through autistic detail in combat, the system really allows you to roleplay and rollplay at the same time.
How is Sword & Scoundrel?

>PbtA
Nah

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Everything you said is completely wrong.

D&D is the worst system of all time but there are many games just like it that are essentially clones (FantasyCraft, 13th Age), games that are even worse (GURPS) and many that try to do what Dungeon World does but fail because of terribly designed rules (FATE).

>Unknown Armies
Thank you for reminding me this exists. I've been thinking of reading it since forever.

>Delta Green
Will check out.

>DCC
I love it for being so charismatic. The Crawler tool is godsend. With that said, I wouldn't say DCC's ruleset is anything outstanding per se. It's just well-built (except the amount of various tables) for what it's meant to do.

>5e
I find 5e underwhelming for various reasons. IMO, DnD idiosyncrasies that 5e keeps are quite incompatible with whatever that can be called 'elegant mechanical design'.
Character build options are rather frontloaded, and even then don't provide nearly enough interesting decision making opportunities when making a build. It's very easy to figure out, and after you've got your desired build, the actual gameplay tends to be rather one-dimensional from the mechanical standpoint.
It also is a skill-based system for which I harbor subjective antagonism.

I rather prefer 13th Age. It's mechanically much more elegant (imo). While building a character requires less time and brains, in actual play it's much more involved.

>GURPS
Isn't just a bloated descriptive engine that tries to also talk about 'balance'? An impossible task to do well in my book.

>ORE
What are some good implementations of ORE?

>Savage Worlds
Things I dislike about Savage Worlds: exploding dice (and no, I'm not talking about the d6 > d8 meme, it's an irrelevant and rare quirk), narrative currency, skills, arbitrary feat libraries.

>PbtA
I kind of get the appeal of it, but I never liked this mechanistic approach to story-telling to begin with. It smells like game theory with descriptions attached.

Why not? Give a good reason, and not just "because it's a hipster game." Because it isn't.

Okay but there are also actually good games you could try to compete against, like Burning Wheel of Legend of the Five Rings.

>Everything you said is completely wrong.
>Dungeonworld classes are just shorter lists of boxes to check than DnD

But you know, if thats the level you wanna put this on, then fine i guess:

No u

>Burning Wheel
Incredibly pretentious, overcomplicated, character generation is just basic ideas with too much structure. Not elegant at all.
>Legend of the Five Rings.
Maybe.

>Incredibly pretentious
Irrelevant given the OP
>overcomplicated
no
>not elegant
This is obviously a good thing

>Dungeonworld classes are just shorter lists of boxes to check than DnD
There is absolutely no validity to this statement. I can't refute anything when you've said nothing but meaningless buzzword tripe.

>The Riddle of Steel
I heard it's atrocious as-is, but it might be an idea mine. Will check out.

>Cypher
A variation on d20 that was made imbecilic and arbitrary by trying to be different too much.
The idea behind cyphers was good, but the narrative economy is atrocious. All in all, the game descends into meta-resource management race which is neither much challenging nor fun.

Blades is brilliant.

>Burning Wheel
How wrong am I if I think BW is fantasy Traveller?

>MonsterHearts
>Maks
>Shinobigami
>Nechronica
>Tokyo Nova
I request a rundown on mechanics for these.

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I don't see any buzzwords, user.

> #
>Every rule you need for it is there, so you most certainly can.
Yes but D&D bogs down the narrative with pointless realism simulationist rules. This applies to every edition, btw.

That's only true about 3.5 and advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Which no coincidentally where the versions that ran the longest and have the most splat books produced for.

If you've only played advanced Dungeons & Dragons and 3.5 then yes Dungeon World is in improvement. Most games would be.

I'm not a big fan of Dogs in the Vineyard. It feels very metagamey to play, with lots of betting of dice and calculated escalation at the meta level to win confrontations, not going with things as the character would choose to do so unless you deliberately make a suboptimal choice.

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Monsterhearts and Masks are PBTA, which use the Apocalypse World system.

The first one is an urban fantasy game, with romance, drama and violence. Think Twilight if it didn't suck. Players play teenaged (or at least young) monsters (Vampire, Werewolf, Ghost, etc) trying to navigate through life. The system uses a social bonds system, called Strings, that count as social leverage you've got over another character and can be used to add to your rolls.

There's a sex move for each character type, that further increases the drama, triggering whenever the character has sex. One sex move might make the partner turn into a monster and attack the player; another might make the character lose all his leverage on the partner, etc.

It's actually pretty fun if you don't play with annoying assholes.Very fun if you play it as a political intrigue type of deal... It's fun.

Masks: The Next Generation is a superhero system for playing teenager superheroes, think Young Avengers, Young Justice, Teen Titans, etc. It also uses the PBTA system, just like MH, but the twist that Masks brings to the table is that since these teenage heroes are so new to the business, their self-image is affected by the way the "public" perceives them.

Shinobigami and Nechronica are weeaboo shit and I don't like it.

Tokyo NOVA is much more fun but still weaboo. Cyberpunk game, but can also be modified, the basic idea is heroes in a near future. Playing cards are used instead of dice. The suits of cards correspond to four abilities: Spade () is reason, club () is passion, heart () is life, and diamond () is mundaneness.

My favorite for the fantasy is Barbarians of Lemuria. Has awesome magic system and intuitively simple character creation and advancement (and mechanics).
My favorite for horror, modern day adventures, and city fantasy is Unknown Armies. Has best horror mechanics ever, also has great fluff and mechanics for modern magic.

BoL is one of my all-time favourites of light-weight and elegant design.

Seconding Barbarians of Lemuria.

>success at a cost
>cost makes it harder to succeed overall because (for example) you picked the lock but made noise, which caused previously nonexistent guards to spawn and go check it out
>also the DM operates entirely by fiat

>why not

-Some players enjoy tactical combat, even if it's not an RPGs main focus. DW fails at this aspect in comparison to quite a few other games.

-DW makes use heavily of DM fiat and their interaction with players. While that's fine for pure collaborative storytelling, not every campaign can or should operate in that manner. Sometimes the GM is just an arbiter of mechanics as the players explore a world/dungeon/story.

-Being a PbtA game there's a lot of RP mechanical interaction. Some people like that, which is why PbtA is popular, others do not.

-The "success at a cost" mechanic is not always enjoyable. Sometimes a player should just succeed or fail. Not everything has a downside on success. The world just doesn't work that way and neither should a fictional one. Further, the trait itself is not unique to the system and it can easily be applied to ANY dice RPG if a DM wants.

-The game can be, but is usually not very difficult/fatal. Some people don't like that.

-The game really lacks exciting customization of character traits. Even D&D has better class customization.

Just a few off the top of my head. I like DW, but it's not the best game ever and it's not very exciting to run as a DM.

I'm going to throw in my vote for SotDL, it scratches the combat itch of D&D while giving me the narrative focus of some other games. It's smooth and easy to play and run. The game feels like D&D as it should have been and is closer to an OSR and WHFRPG combination than it is to D&D 3.5/4e/5e in playstyle.

I'm agree the book layouts aren't great, in fact they kind of suck, but they are workable and the elegance of the rules means most players can still figure it out relatively quick.

Also, I found that it's VERY easy to rip from its grimdark setting and apply to almost any setting I want but keeping the lethality. It's actually a really great "generic" system if you just modify it only slightly for each new setting.

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>Ripping on BitD while praising DW.
It's not even bad. I like DW. But praising a game tg hates while ripping on the new hip BitD is just poor bait.

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>success at a cost
That's one of the best parts of PbtA games. Under the standard "success or failure" model, failure usually means you either have to try a different approach, or you take ndX abstracted "bad stuff points". With PbtA's "success/partial success/failure" model, every possible outcome moves the scene forward. If the cost does nothing more interesting than make it harder to succeed, you have a bad GM.

>the DM operates entirely by fiat
Most PbtA games codify what the DM can do into "DM moves". That actually restricts the DM, and allows the players to more easily anticipate what consequence their action might have. Most of them also have some kind of metacurrency that players can use to overrule or compensate for DM decisions.

None of those are good things. Elegance IS a good thing and thousands of generations agree with that. Just because you are a contrarian fuck, does not make you right.

>advanced dungeons and dragons
Which is every single edition including 4e and 5e, those are all advanced Dungeons and Dragons. And actually 5e and 4e are only marginally better than 3.5, they suffer from the same issues, and they are all complete crap compared to Dungeon World. Get over it.

>y-you're wrong!
>why?
>lmao I have thousands of generations on my side how dare you question me

>My favorite for the fantasy is Barbarians of Lemuria.
Low-tier rip-off of Dungeon World. Uses same dice mechanic and same general target number, but without the fast powerful narrative mechanic that Dungeon World uses to enhance the story line. Barbarians of Lemuria is a poor attempt to imitate FATE with vague skills and loose rules that are weak and bad for new GMs. So actually, Barbarians of Lemuria is the objectively wrong answer compared to Dungeon World.

This. This so much.

Everything you listed are the traits of a garbage player who should not be playing RPGs. Pathfinder is for them, and Pathfinder is a containment RPG for the worst kind of autists. If you don't like roleplaying, you should not be playing a roleplaying game. Period. End of story.

haven't seen this pasta in a while

>roleplaying
You're not roleplaying, you're playing a character in a genre fiction or in a sitcom. It's made like a movie or a TV show, it's not fucking immersive.
"Collaborative storytelling" doesn't make me engage in the game more, it makes me realize that my character is just that, a character in a game.

We are not talking controversial babby's first non-DnD games with unhealthy amounts of crutches for lowbrow DMs with uncooperative mediocre players.

If you need so much to be codified then you have serious imagination and social interaction issues.

DW is conceptually mediocre, period.

This thread has too many people falling to the DW bait. There's just no way anyone would like DW enough or find it this good to continue arguing about it.

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Just as you cannot rape the willing, so too can you not bait the fa/tg/uy. For the fa/tg/uy thirsts for posts to disagree with, and to bring down with "logic", and to "debate". Bait is a necessary release.

Mutants & Masterminds, 2e for D&D players, 3e for others.

Have you read Ars Magicka?

>D&D is the worst system of all time
I see you're new to this hobby.

>The Riddle of Steel is infamous
Is it because of all the dick-stabbing?

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>It feels very metagamey to play, with lots of betting of dice and calculated escalation at the meta level to win confrontations, not going with things as the character would choose to do so unless you deliberately make a suboptimal choice.

I found a very easy fix for this: just don't show the players your hand. Just tell them that you see their raise and raise them (N) and keep track of your numbers secretly. This prevents them from calculating how close to victory they are. It makes my games much more intense because the players have no idea how tough the fight is going to be from the outset.

>haven't seen this pasta in a while
I'm surprised more people didn't recognize it right away.

>There is absolutely no validity to this statement.
Wanna bet?

> I can't refute anything when you've said nothing but meaningless buzzword tripe.
Or is it actually, a literal description of the playbooks? An actual list of pre-approved actual check boxes.

I mean this is fighter, i can crop out a few more if you wanna call this an outlier but then, you know you'd be lying.

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Mutants and Masterminds
Savage Worlds
Fate
Shadowrun (5e [but 4e is still better ree])

Again though, I cant emphasize M&M enough. Its point based character creation is one of the best Ive ever seen and even though it was made with supers in mind, the mechanics scale perfectly to anything else thanks to the PL system. The game basically balances itself and the only problem ive ever had is players being intimidated because rather than choosing a class and race that tells them what they get, they get to choose and having to make choices seems to make some players shit thier pants from lack of creativity.

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Got to go with this classic. I like PbtA, Trails of Cthulhu and many other systems, but this original stalwart is still pretty good. Simple percentile system backed up by streamlined, no-frills combat, sanity and other necessary options.

In play, the rules work reasonably well for a grounded, "real" world scenarios, and fade into the background to not interfere with running (or playing) the game.

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Clearly F.A.T.A.L.

Though it's not a popular answer, probably Maid rpg
:^)

>MonsterHearts
Didn't find Monsterhearts to be that great. Too easy to break on accident, though I haven't played the second edition.

>GURPS
You're mistaken but in the most understandable way possible. It's a game that wants to be Generic with a capital G. If you want rules light they want to be able to do it. If you want all the rules, then they want to have that for you, too. But if you give someone a book with All The Rules, then the default assumption ordinary people have is that you use them.

>ORE
Reign, if you want a Black Company simulator. Monsters and Other Childish Things if you want a game between Persona and Pokemon

>DW is conceptually mediocre, period.
No. It's far better than D&D and many other RPGs as well. There is not a single thing that another RPG does better than Dungeon World.

It's the worst system that regularly sees play.

Except you don't check boxes in D&D, so it's not a valid comparison. Please educate yourself.

>It's the worst system that regularly sees play.
Because it's the best known system and therefore the benchmark for quality, nobody's going to go for a system that's "worse than D&D" unless it's because of a really well-loved integrated setting, as with Exalted. Although there definitely used to be other worse systems (e.g. RIFTS) that saw a lot of play.

The most powerful tabletop roleplaying game is Dungeon World. If you can't run Dungeon World (or any games of its family, PbtA), you don't know what it means for a ttrpg to be powerful and elegant. Once you learn Dungeon World, you will see what is lacking in all other RPGs.

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>Except you don't check boxes in D&D, so it's not a valid comparison. Please educate yourself.

>at the end of the day you are still just picking your character and your actions off a list of pre-approved ideas
>Dungeonworld classes are just shorter lists of boxes to check than DnD

You are like a walking, talking parody of yourself.

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I think the problem is options, as DW have horribly minimal options for you to customize and experiment with, which makes it terrible for campaign play.

Also the game is built on bullshitting through a situation, I could probably run a game with zero preparation and its indistinguishable from another's game. infact its so easy to do, you can break it down to a simple flowchart. Simple? Yes. Deep? no

I mostly agree with this stuff. And personally i would for all my criticisms actually recommend DW to new people to RPGs, with some of the side 'how to play' materials because ultimately that's what i think DW can actually do. It can be a tutorial for new players and DMs.

A lot of the philosophy of how to play role playing games, a lot of what makes them good and a much more interesting and versatile medium than videogames, movies or just traditional making shit up on the spot, is brought forward by DW. Its not the only one to do so, and it is far from exhaustive. Furthermore all the things it does are things good DMs eventually adopt to some degree but by introducing people to the hobby using it, they can get a head start on the stuff that really makes role playing games shine, before they move on to better systems.

And make no mistake you should move on, because DW has no longevity.

I realized it the moment I looked at the playbook, which is a bit of a misnomer, should be 'play sheet'

PbtA is best when used in a game where the characters are supposed to be omni-competent. The stats are rather broad, and most moves are universal, making differentiating characters and their talents somewhat difficult. Everyone is equally good at talking, for example - give or take a small modifier from stats, and except the party's "Face" characters who excels at it. But no one is really incompetent at it. Same for combat. The combat oriented playbook has extra options, but everyone else can cap fools with reasonable efficiency.

This is not necessarily a drawback. For traditional fantasy adventuring groups, cyberpunk teams, and such, the characters are supposed to be cut above the rest and have a very broad skillset, so that sort of streamlining by stripping out long skill lists makes the game faster to play without losing much.

I do wonder how PbtA will work in-game for a more grounded game where characters are supposed to be everyday people, like the upcoming Kult. It might be a bit harder to justify systems-wise how some pacifist grad student can just pick up a pistol and be almost as effective with it as an average cop. 5 points difference is a lot (if one character picks +3 to Violence, and the other -2), but with the system being on a point allocation basis, that would mean the cop character would need to sacrifice things like fitness and detective work to get that edge. In practice, the gap is much smaller.

Still, it's a great system for certain types of games.