The Essential Reading List for TTRPGs

I love that Burning Wheel made the list. It is challenging to play and needs all the players to be bought into the system as well but man is it worth it. While the rules are complex, I love how easy it is to tune the complexity to the table. Ie you can leave out a lot of the subsystems and use the core mechanic until the table has more experience. From there you can scale up as needed. It's a system I've only ever run as the dm but never as a player. Hopefully someday.

> Post-1974, however, D&D has been extremely reactive in its design. It largely does not innovate, but its massive gravity means anything it refines is reflected back into the industry in a massively disproportionate way

D&D is in an interesting position where if it innovates too much in its game design and mechanics (4E?) then (some) people complain that it's not D&D anymore, but if it doesn't innovate enough then (other) people complain that it's stale and old-fashioned. Which is a bit like complaining that Shakespeare is full of cliches.

Personally I'm happy with 5E+ being similar enough to other versions of D&D to be familiar, but with some clarified and refined rules, along with lots of options and classic flavor.

Many of D&D's most wonderful contributions aren't necessarily in rules proper, but in flavor and world-building. I have spent a lot of my RPG life, both computer and tabletop, in the Forgotten Realms.

(And to open a can of worms, I would also say that the original d20 System SRD and OGL, which spawned an ecosystem of compatible RPGs from multiple companies, was an important innovation – at least until Hasbro/WoTC sabotaged themselves multiple times.)

> thealexandrian.net

Not to be confused with the (also very awesome) Alexandria RPG Library, which often comes to events like PAX:

https://alexandriarpg.org

I doubt there is much funding for it (though I dream of universities with game studies departments), but I think RPG scholarship is a valuable contribution to our cultural heritage.

Neat list and several that haven't been read about personally all that much.

The GNS (game, narrative, sim) Theory from Burning Wheel's at least a deconstruction of RPGs to consider although there have already been several critiques written of self limiting RPGs based on taking those as the end-all of the experience.

Apocalypse World's also a fairly cool choice (that might actually work quite well with other themes) based on the "setting is fleshed out during character creation." A lot of games definitely run into that issue where it feels like you're just wandering around in somebody else's sandbox, and there's not all that much input into the actual world itself.

Somewhat counter to that, a few that might have been interesting for inclusion, yet which often feature other people's settings.

- Star Wars (WEG or FFG). WEG version was one of the first to try tackling really big stuff fighting really small stuff. And the d6 system worked fairly smoothly for gradual progression. The FFG version had a cool implementation of Force Points, and being able to influence rolls and change results as long as the usage of the Force Points was appropriate for that style of Force user. Both are also notably for being more like encyclopedias of Star Wars, that often cover parts of the setting in incredible detail that might have only been superficially glanced at in canon films / television or quasi-canon extended literature.

- Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Rogue Trader. Interesting from my own perspective simply because it takes the standard part of most roleplaying games, that the players are exceptional members of society, and almost inverts that idea. The players are still "somewhat" exceptional, yet most of the actual main story "cool" stuff, was kept pretty far away (namely, roleplaying a Space Marine). You're pretty much just a ship captain (or the operational crew) and you're a long way from being stomped on by a titan or ripped apart by a bloodthirster.

- White Wolf extended (Werewolf, Mage, Wraith, Changeling). Seems a bit unfair to focus exclusively on Vamp alone, since at least Werewolf was somewhat popular at the time. The rest are probably decaying popularity though in order of writing.

- Savage Worlds. Interesting for using advancing dice types to relate the skill of characters to each other.

- Marvel Super Heroes (1984 TSR game). The list included did not cover even a single example of superhero gaming, which seems like a bit of an oversight, considering how popular the movies are and the general fanbase. MSH mostly because the power scale was ridiculous. The classic game had some chart where normal people were maybe a five (5), super's were perhaps a fifty (50) ... except the chart went up to 5000. https://www.classicmarvelforever.com/cms/universal-table.htm...

- Mutants and Masterminds. Another superhero game, just for a possible example. Perhaps a somewhat more sane choice. Offered a relatively playable game from a super character perspective, if perhaps slightly bland (just because all the powers tended to work almost the same way). Still had kind of crazy scales, just not quite the crazy of MSH.

- Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. A fun super hero game that was extremely free-form by comparison. Mostly focusing on the narrative elements, with plot points, and doom pools, and groups being able to effectively vote to end scenes by spending dice from their pools. It also had a fairly cool way of handing out story experience where you mostly got experience for being in character and then the group giving their Siskel and Ebert votes on how people did representing the characters they were playing. Could maybe be a bit mean if your group was critical, yet mostly encouraged playing the character like they might appear in the comics.

- Shadowrun. Nothing about cyberpunk, even though the 80's and 90's had a bunch of cyberpunk ideas floating around in roleplaying gaming, literature, and movies. Also perhaps notable simply for the incredibly dangerous rules, and how long you could take making a character, and then die on your very first run in corporate land.

- Palladium. Also. Super deadly. However, notable for being one of the first games to really try and ask, "what happens when a normal person fights a tank?" Hugely different scale weaponry with megadamage auto-deaths for most related results. Main setting was very creative though and had lots of moving pieces for the gamemaster to use. System itself was unfortunately a little convoluted for character creation, yet offered a unique take on "class" based designs, with a bunch of archtypes that were extremely different in their application.