AlephNull
December 11th, 2024, 02:10
My group for Wednesdays just lost its GM, and I'm looking to have another game in my weekly lineup of things to do, Weds thru Friday evenings (or potentially Monday evenings depending on time). I'd like to think I'm fairly flexible in most ways, but the one thing I'm rigid about seems to be a sticking point for a lot of people: I won't play D&D 5e. It's a bad RPG (decent wargame / board game though). I'm looking for a game of something a bit less stifling to players — where you can play something that doesn't fall into the category of "two arms and two legs with no innate powers" without having to pull homebrew out of your butt (seemingly a foreign concept to D&D as a whole, which also happens to be actively hostile to homebrew as far as games are concerned).
Right, with that negativity out of the way, games I have played / currently play and (have) enjoy(ed) include:
RIFTS (Palladium edition; I've never actually played Savage Rifts, only SWADE, but I'm open to it)
Savage Worlds
RuneQuest (Glorantha or another edition assuming you're willing to brief the conversions)
Palladium Fantasy
Tunnels & Trolls / Monsters! Monsters!
Various rules-light games like Tinyd6
Basic RP d100
Marvel/FASERIP
Pathfinder 1e (only if the rules are open to creature PCs, as they are in 3.5e D&D, the latter of which I'll also play with gestalt; only games starting at levels higher than 6-ish)
I'm open to trying new things, but no Lovecraft or anything similarly grimdark. Nobledark systems like Elric, or Lovecraft-Lite (i.e. where there are big scary things but they don't all want to kill you and the characters aren't too weak to even think about dealing with the ones that do). While my top preference is for games where anything is theoretically playable, I'm fine as long as it's not something that is restricted to a single race/species or a number that you can count on a hand. The reason for this is that I tend towards character concepts that are outlandish by the conservative standards of games like D&D. About the closest I've come to a human-like character is some of the fae characters I've run — everything else ranges from various extraplanars to dragons to beings that redefine "celestial body" and even the one time I played a hydra whose heads all had different personalities (an unexpected quirk of the variant Awakening spell some druid figured out how to cast on him; that character was a blast, but sadly the GM of that game either died or permanently lost internet access after a few years...still a good memory tho). And yes, the above systems can all accommodate these ideas without any homebrew at all (if you don't count using the optional Bestiary rule from Pathfinder as homebrew, which is something I've seen plenty of times).
Right, with that negativity out of the way, games I have played / currently play and (have) enjoy(ed) include:
RIFTS (Palladium edition; I've never actually played Savage Rifts, only SWADE, but I'm open to it)
Savage Worlds
RuneQuest (Glorantha or another edition assuming you're willing to brief the conversions)
Palladium Fantasy
Tunnels & Trolls / Monsters! Monsters!
Various rules-light games like Tinyd6
Basic RP d100
Marvel/FASERIP
Pathfinder 1e (only if the rules are open to creature PCs, as they are in 3.5e D&D, the latter of which I'll also play with gestalt; only games starting at levels higher than 6-ish)
I'm open to trying new things, but no Lovecraft or anything similarly grimdark. Nobledark systems like Elric, or Lovecraft-Lite (i.e. where there are big scary things but they don't all want to kill you and the characters aren't too weak to even think about dealing with the ones that do). While my top preference is for games where anything is theoretically playable, I'm fine as long as it's not something that is restricted to a single race/species or a number that you can count on a hand. The reason for this is that I tend towards character concepts that are outlandish by the conservative standards of games like D&D. About the closest I've come to a human-like character is some of the fae characters I've run — everything else ranges from various extraplanars to dragons to beings that redefine "celestial body" and even the one time I played a hydra whose heads all had different personalities (an unexpected quirk of the variant Awakening spell some druid figured out how to cast on him; that character was a blast, but sadly the GM of that game either died or permanently lost internet access after a few years...still a good memory tho). And yes, the above systems can all accommodate these ideas without any homebrew at all (if you don't count using the optional Bestiary rule from Pathfinder as homebrew, which is something I've seen plenty of times).