How to Get into Tabletop RPGs
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You can play standard games like D&D solo, or use games designed to be played solo like Ironsworn [0]. Journaling games are another option that can be played alone or with friends, Thousand Year Vampire [1] for example. Lots of recent games have rules for a "solo mode" now.
The Mythic GM Emulator [2] is a simple way to play any game solo.
If this sounds interesting check out Me, Myself, and Die [3] to watch a high production value version of solo play!
[0] https://www.ironswornrpg.com/
[1] https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/products/thousand-year-ol...
[2] https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/20798/Mythic-Game-Maste...
There are a lot of great options for solo games nowadays which I really appreciate. Sometimes, getting a group of people together for a session of D&D is just too tough with conflicting schedules, so it's nice to have the option to just hang out and enjoy a solo session for a bit!
[0] - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/248562/mage-knight-ultim...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Solo_Roleplaying/
And I second Me, Myself, and Die. Starting out solo roleplaying can be daunting and watching someone entertaining who has a lot of experience doing it helps a lot in the beginning until you figure out your own flow that works for you. As an example figuring out how to use GMEs isn't exactly obvious (what sort of questions should I be asking, and when?) but it quickly makes sense watching Trevor do it.
It's a narrative-focused zero-preparation game where, instead of roleplaying individual characters, the whole group collaboratively roleplays a universe, using index cards for bookkeeping.
The basic action per turn is to add one of:
- Period: description for an era inside the universe (possibly spanning 100s or 1000s of years). E.g. "The Age of the Dragons".
- Event (inside any period): a noteworthy episode (at the scale of months or a few years). E.g.: "The Laghdur Dragonguard rebels against their masters, beginning the Dragon hunting".
- Scene (inside any event): a particular setting where specific characters actually play a part (at the scale of minutes to hours). The core idea of a scene is to answer a specific question and the answer will come up organically as the scene is played. E.g.: "Why did the Dragon hunting start? Setting: the Laghdur council." -- And, during roleplay, this happens: "The Queen of the Laghdur and her entourage plan to execute their rogue Dragons, but Feuner opposes since it would mean the hegemony of the Laghdur in the kingdom will end". -- This is the closest to traditional roleplaying you'll get.
You can add any of these (written as an index card) at any point in the timeline of the universe (there is no past, present or future), as long as they are consistent with already established facts. Inevitably you will form preconceptions about "your" universe, which will get completely shattered by other players developing new facts and storylines. It's truly magical.
With the right people it's a joy (I'd say it resonates with creative, narrative people), but don't expect anyone that associates RPGs with characters and levels, stats and fighting, to get into the mood (I'd even recommend to present this as a tabletop game instead of an RPG in that case).
It's easy to devolve into crazy settings with time-travelling and other trite shenanigans, but once you get the hang of it and get truly creative you can get pretty cool character and universe developments.
That is, if I can buy it.
From the page you linked, I clicked "BUY NOW" on the top-right, which took me to the store. I can see the prices there but the only links are on the product covers. When I click the Microscope one, it takes me back to the product page with the same "BUY NOW" link on the top-right.
Is there a quest or a puzzle on the website that I need to complete before I can spend my money on them? Is this already part of the game?
You can also buy it physical if you prefer (I do), check the bottom text in that page.
And for smaller groups there's Everyone is John, which is a lot quicker to get into. https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Everyone_Is_John
You need a group that is, IMO, either:
* Going into it with the expectation that they are going to proactively try to figure out what the story is and push it forward
or
* Happy with a silly story that doesn't go in any particular direction.
I've had fun in both types of groups. You definitely don't want players to go in with the expectation that they'll be overcoming mechanical challenges, though.
At a high level, the game starts with everyone at the table defining their relationships to the people next to them at the table. These relationships vary depending on the scenario and can range anything from "siblings ever at war" to "blackmailer and victim" to "celebrity and spurned fan". Every scenario has dozens of combinations to ensure hijinks ensue.
After that, each player determines their characters "needs". This is their characters primary motivation for the session. These range from things like "to get out of your dead end life" to "to get free of the person they want you to be" to "to get even without getting taken down yourself".
After you know your relationships and your needs, you need to fill in the blanks between the two. If you "need to get even", and you have "a sibling rivalry", it makes sense to setup a backstory about the time your sibling showed you up or embarrassed you that you want to resolve. These blanks aren't revealed during character creation, but during the role-playing portion of the game.
There are also "objects" which are introduced during character creation. These are items which feature a prominent role during the game. For example, one item might be a "bag of drugs" or a "key to the vault" or a "pearl gripped revolver". The actual meaning of these objects is completely up in the air, but more often than not with the combination of character and relationship a story starts to form about the objects that are important.
The last thing to consider during character creation are relevant locations. Like everything else, these aren't meant to railroad you down a path so much as give you an idea of what areas are important during the game. Think of campy movies as inspiration here. Important stuff happens "inside a bathroom with a line forming outside" or "the outhouse at the camp" or "inside the illegal gambling den". How and when these locations come up is not defined, but up to the players.
At the end of character creation, everyone has a basic idea of their relationships to the people next to them as well as objects or locations which are relevant to them. It's time to start filling in the blanks by proposing a scene in which you lay out the setting (maybe one from character creation) along with the characters involved (based off of relationships or discovered connections) along with your goal for the scene. If you're brothers who have a long time sibling rivalry, maybe your goal for the scene is to finally confront you brother and expose all the times they chose the fame and spotlight over friends and family which are "what really matters". It's completely up in the air at this point with the relationships and motivations you uncovered earlier acting as guiding posts for directions the game can take.
The challenge here is you need a collaborative role playing group as you're looking to reach an ending which everyone is satisfied with. Sometimes that means leaning into the villain role and understanding what happens to the villain in the type of story you're putting together. Sometimes that means leaning into the tragedy which stories sometimes become. Sometimes it means you're the big damn hero that prevailed against all odds at the cost of everything dear to you. The point is, by the time story telling starts everyone plays an equal role in determining the outcome of the story and the main objective is to tell a good story not to be the "winner".
I find Fiasco works extremely well with settings like the Coen brothers movies. Think about Fargo. It has a ton of interesting characters, none of them wholly good, but all of them compelling and connected to each other in unexpected ways. As long as you're able to roll with the punches and make a compelling story out of things, Fiasco is one of the most rewarding systems out there. But you're setting your own pace and your own challenges, so someone expecting a structured adventure like you'd get from an experienced DM with a known setting is going to be disappointed. Telling the story is up to EVERYONE, not just one person laying out the rules.
I totally agree it can be fun with the right group, but the right group is either very open minded and comfortable with each other, or decent or better improv players.
The specific thing I like about the Apocalypse system games for this sort of list, though, is that they seem to be in the general ballpark of "as rules-light as you can get while still having mechanics for fighting monsters."
Considering how much I browse RPG books I’m surprised I haven’t heard of “Powered by the apocalypse” games at all. But then those don’t appear to be ones available in game and book stores.
[1] https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16173/Mythic-Role-Playi...
However, I will admit... The actual Dungeon World book is pretty bad. Great rules, great player sheets / printables, rather poor book as TTRPG books go.
I've also thought it would be kind of funny to have a game where they players start out as themselves, at the start of the game, and then describe myself going to the door to check on some banging. I get eaten by a zombie and we go from there.
The chance mechanic centers around pulls and towerfall events using a Jenga tower instead of dice. As the risk increases, players are required to make additional pulls to succeed until the tower collapses a catastrophic penalty occurs / the game phase changes. Timing these to happen at the tensest moments is a ton of fun.
Another really fascinating feature is the pre-game. Character sheets are replaced with private questionnaires adapted to give each player context and reasoning behind their character's motives:
"What did the Captain do to your father that made you want revenge?" "Who's death drove you to leave your family to join this one-way space expedition?" "You weren't close to the player who invited you on this camping trip. Why did you come?" "Why haven't you told the medic how you really feel?"
It gets pretty interesting when people use the same names for answers and the GM spins their stories together.
And the best part is that there are plenty of pre-rolled scenarios with character sheets available for free online. "Beneath the Ice" is The Thing themed and captures the action and paranoia well.
Would recommend!
Find it on https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/browser/filter/id/10122
It has a large friendly community on Discord, a lot of active players and an enormous amount of content - notably it is generally backwards compatible with many of the older D&D modules. You can read through the basic rules here - https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/....
While saddened to see the increase in rules complexity since that time (my attention dwindled around 3e), imagine my surprise and joy when I came across Basic Fantasy!
If you’re looking for a nearly zero-cost way to get into a game that “feels” like classic D&D (less focus on tactical combat and more on the role playing aspect, supported by modern d20 rules), I’d highly recommend it.
[1]: https://www.drivethrurpg.com
[2]: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/222950/Amazing-Tales-co...
When she was 5, though, she did enjoy collaborative storytelling. I would start by building the character with her:
"Once upon a time there was a..."
"Squirrel!"
"Yeah, and this squirrel was named..."
"Elsa!"
Then, when we'd established the character she wanted, we'd establish the type of "campaign" she wanted:
"So, one day Elsa the Queen of Purple Squirrel Kingdom was sitting on her throne when one of her squirrel subjects came to ask her for help, 'Please, O wise Queen, I need your help...'"
"Finding Taylor Swift!"
Then we'd proceed to tell the story of how Queen Elsa the Squirrel saved Taylor Swift from the next door neighbor's dog together (actual example), stopping every few sentences to get her input.
I learned to play this game with her from her father, who also happens to be a great D&D GM.
Related discussion: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/103550/what-would-be...
Also, there's a YC alum (I believe) that operates a GM-for-hire service:
First of all, regardless of the system, a lot of gameplay happens online these days. People are spread out, pandemics happen etc.
And sometimes chat plus rolling real dice isn't enough, for which "Virtual Tabletops" were created. Let's take a popular one as a prime example. Foundry VTT[1] is a self hosted node application that you actually buy, no subscription (there are subscription-based hosters, if you don't have the skills/server for that). And it exposes a lot of its internal API to extension writers. So you can do almost anything to extend it, to local macros (e.g. click one button and your big bad superhero enemy icon turns invisible, an explosion happens and damage is rolled), extension modules (add UI elements, dialogs etc.) to whole rulesets.
It's a tinkerer's dream and for people inclined that way a good way to spend some time between games. You might start your "career" with an existing adventure, and then spend the preparation time not on drawing the map, but importing that setup into your virtual game environment, so that everything runs smoothly. Just like in the olden times, one would buy the miniatures and carefully paint them.
Speaking of drawing maps, I also wasted way too much time in Dungeondraft[2], a rather neat map drawing program. It uses the Godot toolkit and lets you draw with blended terrain textures and line segments that turn into walls and doors. The result is good looking, even if you don't have any drawing skills. Way different from the graph paper looks of the 80s.
As for rules systems, you'll find that they almost mirror the programming language confusion and associated camps. Everything started with strict subdivisions, like the infamous "levels" that measured your hero's progress (something between a military rank and a Campbellian hero's journey) and classes (wizard/warrior etc., basically your military unit type or Jungian archetype). Compare that to the structured programming era. Progress over what happened before, still used by some with few changes, but maybe not the non-plus-ultra of the field. (And with some opinionated writing that still gets passed around as gospel, although compared to RPGs, Dijkstra was at least right)
That's D&D, Pathfinder, and for the retrocomputing charm, everything that falls under the OSR (Old School Renaissance), i.e. old versions of D&D, often slightly hacked.
In imperative programing, you focus on the computer model, and opposed to that you get your languages that feature more on the math-y/theoretical side of things. In games, that would be those rule set that focus more on the story as it happens on the table, rather than rules as the "physics engine" from which those stories emerge. That's our functional programming side of RPG-dom. Quite en vogue these times, so a lot of the games that are mentioned in the video and the whole "Powered by the Apocalypse" thread in this post would fall under that. As with PLs, those can be rather "conventional", but with different approaches to purely focused on telling stories, just like you can go from ML to Coq.
As your third tier, not as popular as it once was, but still part of a lot of systems, you got the trend where you wanted to escape the class/level simplicity and actually make your "physics engine" more realistic. This often resulted in games where creating your hero didn't just mean picking a vague class and starting out at "1st level", but spending a budget of "points" on various properties, allowing more freedom and fewer artificial constraints. Combat and other decision making endeavors were often more complex and tried to adhere to real-world elements. So you didn't just have one "attack roll" like in a board game, you had attacks, parries, determined the location where you hit your fencing partner, could even do specific martial arts maneuvers etc. Let's call this the Object-Oriented phase of RPGs. Mostly because it got popular in the same time and we need to fill out our pillars, not because it's a literal match.
And just like OOP it's both not as popular anymore, but has crept in a lot of other systems. "Point-buy" is regarded as more fair than just rolling dice to see how good your hero starts out, and thus even used in games that focus more on story. And some of the more "real world" games elements are used, even in old-fashioned class/level games.
D&D is basically the C family, and you get everything in there, from modern C++, where you try to stick to new and clean approaches, but often the old legacy issues shine through (Pathfinder) to people trying to keep it simple yet somewhat modern (C11 => D&D 5th edition), to some people arguing that there never was anything wrong about ANSI or even K&R C (clones of old systems like Old School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC). Heck, even B seems to be around ("Zero edition D&D")
Pathfinder 2nd edition might be close enough to Rust (or Go?). Enthusiastic fanbase, tries to stick with the gameplay established by D&D, but be more safe/balanced about it. Looks a bit weird, but you get used to it.
FATE is Python. Tries to be a bit functional, a bit OOP, a bit traditional, but above all easy to use.
GURPS was Ada. Tried to make it all thoroughly designed and militaristic/industrial. Never quite accepted.
And these days you get a whole lot of new "languages" that people try to sell you on, often half implemented, not substantially different from others.
Heck, there's even ML happening, with "GM emulators" and "solo engines". With prettty much the same results.
This is such a shame. I'm not sure I would assign a militaristic/industrial aspect to it but otherwise agree with your comment.
It's unfortunate because it was my system of choice back in the day. After a few years playing GURPS (medieval/fantasy, superhero, cyberpunk, the works) I tried to play a couple different DnDs but could never get into them. They were so limiting and with progression systems that IMO work well on a video-game but not as well on a tabletop.
When you know what you want to do, there's almost certainly more than one way to do it. It's easier to come up with a new way of doing it than to do it again the same way, unless you wrote exceptionally good comments along the way. It's not the best at anything, but you can do everything. And you can make anything work with anything else.
And it hasn't had a major version release in N years, and that's just fine.
(Having modules for everything would fit JS, too, but I'm not mean enough to call any RPG out as being the same as that.)
I myself like GURPS a lot. The point buy nature isn't even the major factor here, but the "physics engine" stuff. A satisfying resolution mechanism where quite often when I ask "What's the equivalent for this real-world action" you got someting that slots in nicely. And a 3d6 bell-curve hits my sweet spot.
You may be intrigued by Phoenix Command. Written by a literal rocket scientist, it offers a level of granularity down to time-of-flight of bullets, penetration factors of various materials, and much more. Not everyone's cup of tea as you can imagine.
As a counterpoint, I created https://rolz.org - it works as a basic chat with dice rolling functions and has a - completely optional - super-minimalist "VTT" mode.
When I GM remotely, I noticed simplicity is key for me. I don't want to MC what boils down to a supervised session of Baldur's Gate. I want to narrate, let my players narrate, and use some basic utilities to assist.
My general getting-into-RPGs advice is exactly the same: keep it simple, spontaneous, and dynamic. Last week I DM'd a complete beginner's session of Vampire, no rules or background knowledge required - people enjoyed it way more than a complicated and involved introductory adventure I recently GMed for the DSA world/system (it's a German D&D equivalent).
For some people modeling stuff based on complicated rules is a mandatory part of the fun, and honestly, more power to people who feel that way. But as I get older, I find myself and my players enjoy things that don't require homework more.
In the bad analogy section? Good question. I mean, it sells itself as being quite different, but there's way more legacy than they'd accept (clans etc. are basically classes). Also a bit more visual and quintessential 90s.
PHP, I guess ;)
Having experience in PF1 and D&D, I've tried to look into alternative systems, which can be characterized as "rules light" to ease newbies' pickup stress. I was surprised by the sheer quantity of options, leading to a complete analysis paralysis. Not only there's a plethora of OSR (old-school renaissance) systems regurgitating old D&D, but also games with new and interesting mechanics.
My preliminary findings:
• Dungeon Crawl Classics: + great style + plenty of contents + lots of random tables + high-effort magic with consequences + close OSR compatibility - (huge con) weird dice
• Tiny Dungeon / Advanced Tiny Dungeon: + simple and logical mechanics (based around 2d6 -/+ 1d6 for [dis]advantage) + concise rules - bland magic - magic almost requires buying additional book (micronomicon) - not compatible with OSR/D20 contents without conversions - not many adventures/settings to choose from
• Barbarians of Lemuria: + simple system - not generic enough (strong Sword&Sorcery flavour) - not much content available
• ICRPG: + very rules light + great DM advice section of the book - disputable mechanics decisions which not all players might be on board with - low compatibility with classic contents - included setting[s] don't look flexible enough for different styles of play
• EZD6: +/- basic mechanics on the verge of being limiting +/- strong reliance on metagame mechanics - relies on DM being really skilled - low classic contents compatibility
• Microlite and variations: + super light and low crunch + great compatibility - mechanics break down with progression - may be too simple for inexperienced players/DMs
• Low Fantasy RPG: + nice mechanics - not exactly rules light
• Worlds Without Number: + free + decent compatibility with OSR/D20 content + huge set of DM tools + generic enough for different styles/settings - not rules light
• Basic Fantasy: + free + great OSR variation - Not the best presentation of the rules (lots of jumping around the book)
Other contestants: Swords & Wizards, Castles & Crusades, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, World of Dungeons
This is just scratching the surface and needs to be put into a big table of comparison to be at least minimally useful. It would be nice to crowdsource this comparison in some wiki.
Another great one is The Black Hack which is much more rules light and in the DCC vein.
D&D 5e and PF 2 both do a pretty good job of:
1) Streamlining and simplifying rules, and
2) Making battles less dull for whoever's not currently taking their turn,
which helps a lot with a couple weak spots in those systems.
I'd still not call them "rules light", but they are a lot more approachable than before.
5e is streamlined system, with simple bonuses and advantage/disadvantage. Where as PF2 is somewhat daunting with multi attack penalties and the huge number of various statuses and qualities. Somewhat annoyingly ending up in decision paralysis with some classes. Then again started with play testing, so it could have somewhat improved.
Meanwhile, I'd probably tend to point someone interested in D&D but without much knowledge of or opinions about systems, toward 5e—if you don't know you want a somewhat-fiddlier ruleset of something like PF2, then you probably don't want it.