Tabletop RPGs/story-building games - beyond D&D

I was sure there was a thread for stuff like this but search came up bare. There are a couple of board game threads I could have used but they seemed for slightly more traditional board-based games?

Anyway, me and a friend are trying to get a small group for gaming off the ground. As someone who has never actually participated in D&D but loves interactive fiction, I'm interested in getting some recommendations for new stuff that has strong story-building emphasis, less interested in magic mechanics and fighting (though not put off by it, in fact my friend loves magic mechanics, it's just me who doesn't care about it). A couple of games that we're both excited about:

Ten Candles - a game where you *will* die, you just have to map out the last hours of your band of survivors. Has the added cool factor of having to be played in a room with only ten candles lit, and you get to burn stuff.
http://cavalrygames.com/ten-candles

Misspent Youth - dystopian teen drama with what looks to be very strong world-building elements.
http://misspentyouth.robertbohl.com/

Any other suggestions? Or just discussing/reminiscing about this sort of game is also cool by me, tbh.

the only one of these ive ever managed to play a successful campaign with (as opposed to like one off things) was 'dogs in the vineyard' which id recommend whole-heartedly

Track down a used copy (or a pdf) of Castle Falkenstein from t. Setting is Victorian steampunk with faeries. Game system is card based not dice based and about storytelling not math.

Sorry, I was editing and fat finger posted on my phone. First sentence should end "from the early 90s"

I was also looking for threads like that and found several recommendations for "unknown armies" which sounds pretty good, haven't read or played it though

ten candles especially looks interesting & appealingly approachable. did quite a bit of this as a teenager, played a mix of games and especially enjoyed coming up with our own settings and games, often with no real rules just story telling, which I generally preferred, and which let us play in school, which we were v hungry to escape from at lunchtimes when we were 11/12

of the proper stuff we played a lot of my favourite was warhammer fantasy role-play, which I have recently revisited with far flung friends via webcam (on roll20.net). it's pretty straightforward rules-wise and you play normal, frail people with everyday jobs who are frequently nursing injuries in a sort of decaying version of 15th century germany (the two adjectives used to describe it so frequently that they're often run together being 'grim-dark') with constant whiffs of corruption and a looming sense of dread. the main thing it has to commend it is a v well written and enormous campaign ('the enemy within') which is often cited as the best. idk how long we will continue playing it but it's a good way of hanging out & crying with laughter with friends who are living round the world

the quiet year is one of these, i would love to play it if i had any friends who were into tabletop games!

Thanks for all the recommendations. Dogs in the Vineyard seems like quite an unusual version of this sort of thing (based on Mormonism??) but that's in its favour, though maybe as a later endeavour. The Quiet Year also looks great to me, I think I like things like that and Ten Candles where you carve out a period of time as unique even though you're marching toward an inevitable end. Works with my fatalistic tendency, I suppose.

WFRP looks pretty entertaining. Ogmor are you playing 3rd edition?

playing the original version, which is the only version I've ever played, and given my general lack of interest in rules beyond introducing a random element and some limitations, seems the best-suited to me. have a look on scribd. the way it shamelessly rips off real history and places is part of its appeal, and the sourcebook on the equivalent of amsterdam ('marienburg') was great too

my group is doing "dogs in the vineyard" right now, Vincent Baker is really reliably great. more to say on this thread when I get a minute

I was a beta-tester on this game and I recommend it highly

http://bullypulpitgames.com/games/night-witches/

Fiasco could be a good bet.

the interactive fiction element in Primetime Adventures is really high - really super fun game with this great feature where, at the end of a session, you preview what's going to happen in the next session. It's episodic by design, which I really liked - one thing that can frustrate in tabletop play is how a session can sort of peter out as the evening moves on instead of building to a climax

Vincent Baker is really reliably great. more to say on this thread when I get a minute

haha i was recently having an argument abt how awful a lot of pen&paper rpgs in the kickstater era are using baker's 'urban shadows' as an example. often these games are just much worse versions of more comprehensive/restrictive rule sets - id rather play world of darkness than urban shadows, for e.g. and i think a well-run d&d/pathfinder campaign is just better than any of these loose 'story-telling' systems

emily if you want something fatalistic and inevitable you cld try 'downfall' by carloine hobbs - i didnt love it but i really prefer more open-ended and rules-heavy systems

Thanks JCLC! Those look brilliant. Most of my gamer friends are women/NB so female-heavy scenarios like Night Witches could appeal. Though as I say, the others are more into classic style stuff than I am (though I am going to insist on playing some traditional fantasy RPGs if we manage to make this regular).

Will look up Downfall in a bit.

Woah, Fiasco looks cool

I wouldn't ordinarily self-promote anything on ILX (I don't do much) but this game I wrote about being a teenager is my favorite thing I've ever written. And is totally playable, people have even played it without me in the room.

Fiasco is a blast and kind of the go-to crowdpleaser of one-shot storytelling RPGs

The best thing about Fiasco is that the creators have totally stayed on top of it and have released new free modules (or story packs, if you didn't grow up on 1st Edn TSR products) every month since release. There's a huge variety of settings there to use with a wide variety of broad types - Kennedy talks at a trade show in Dallas in 1963; Queen Elizabeth believes there is a traitor in court; a band of adventurers have lied about killing a dragon because there is no such thing; Hong Kong gangsters work out how to split up HK after the British leave; two local news channels vie for popularity.

Dread is also a pretty fun horror rpg you can convert to any appropriate setting but the looseness makes it more of a storytelling game. Diceless, attempts to do something important (or more appropriately out of character, like when a schoolgirl is suddenly able to tie a tourniquet) are resolved by pulling from a Jenga tower. It stays up, you do the thing. This also builds suspense into the game because you WILL fail at some point. It comes with an 80s VHS horror plot which is pretty great, and has a really solid character generation system where you answer a dozen questions (some of which are totally innocuous) and what you've written down should describe your character.

There are more than a handful of Japanese games that are at least superficially interesting and could work with the right group: Clover, which is kind of an unstructured game about being a 5 year old; Tokyo Brain Pop!, features psychic schoolgirls and demons; Maid RPG takes the core setting of being a maid at a house to set up anime adventures in the house; Motobushido is samurai bikers, like the Flower Travellin' Band cover gone violent; Golden Sky Stories has you playing magical foxes and raccoons and is twee as fuck.

There's a game of Monkey: Journey To The West that I haven't tried but I could see being fun.

Grace looks really good silby.

haha i was recently having an argument abt how awful a lot of pen&paper rpgs in the kickstater era are using baker's 'urban shadows' as an example. often these games are just much worse versions of more comprehensive/restrictive rule sets - id rather play world of darkness than urban shadows, for e.g. and i think a well-run d&d/pathfinder campaign is just better than any of these loose 'story-telling' systems

lol I mean this in a friendly way but this totally sounds like an argument you'd pick

http://www.marryingmrdarcy.com is good if you enjoy the novels/poking fun at the tropes of Jane Austen

Hm, not for me. I wouldn't mind a satirical society backstabbing game (like Sting of the Wasp in tabletop form) but romance is not my bag.

Oh help. We've managed to organise a group to play Ten Candles but even though everyone else has more experience than me (because despite knowing a reasonable amount about this sort of game I've never actually played one) I have been nominated to GM. Any tips?

I've decided I'm going to concentrate prep on getting the room into a good horror atmosphere and do the introduction as a recorded message, but as the point of the game is to build the story together, do pretty much no preparation in terms of 'things I will make happen'. Is this a terrible idea?

Using sound and/or mixtapes is a great thing. I remember doing a Cthulhu game in Pastoral England where I played the Mark Hollis album and Cycle of Days and Seasons for the opening sections and The Place Where Black Stars Hang when it started going wrong.

You could listen to some actual play podcasts to check that your assumptions mesh with the reality of the thing. I don't know if starting with ~~collaborative storytelling~~ for your first game to DM is more or less in the deep end than starting with the-party-is-in-a-tavern, though, I'm also in the 'I know too much about this stuff for someone with no actual experience' camp.

I am thinking about looking for a group myself.

So this went pretty well, I think. I probably could have forced more decision rolls as people still had most of their cards left to play by the time the candles started going out on their own, but the players were all getting into their characters so it seemed better to not interrupt. The darkness and the pre-recordings worked great for mood-building. I was completely and utterly drunk off my face by the end of the game, but so was everyone else and I think I managed to keep it together and running smoothly.

Also for some reason I kind of figured people would just choose 'standard' characters, but loved that we ended up with a very strange group trying to fight the darkness together.

is Delta Green to trad for this thread? I've been reading up on it/listening to some live plays

This sounds amazing, I realize it's a bit of a puff piece in support of a kickstarter thing that isn't finished yet, but wow:

https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/9/15589492/divinity-original-sin-2-game-master-mode-gameplay-video-dungeons-and-dragons

The lizard — confusingly, he went by the name Walrus — looked at the wares on offer in this shop and was not satisfied. He demanded that the shopkeeper procure his finest magic wand, something he kept hidden away from the regular rabble that come to the shop.

To determine how the shopkeeper would respond, Walrus had to complete a dice roll. With a click of a button, the game master created a pop-up on Walrus’ screen that had him roll a 20-sided die. The GM also noted that since that character had an intelligence higher than 12, he got a bonus of plus one to the roll. The roll was successful; the dwarven shopkeep begrudgingly trudged to the back of the store and returned with a powerful fire wand that was not originally part of his stock.
Larian Studios

It’s important to note that none of this was scripted. There was no dialogue option in the game to confront the shopkeep, and the wand that Walrus purchased was not actually hidden in back in the initial version of the map as it existed when we loaded in. Rather, as in classic pen-and-paper role-playing games, the GM went along with the flow of the storytelling as it happened, adapting the world of the game, taking control of NPCs and spawning in items to meet the needs of the party.

key quote of course

“The game master mode was a Kickstarter stretch goal,” Wincke explained. “It’s grown a little bit out of hand. It’s become its own thing. But we’re really happy with it.”

anyone play starfinder yet? gearing up to gm a campaign and it's a lot to get my head around having only played 5e but i'm pretty excited about parts of it, the ship combat rules in particular have me itching to build some cool encounters. not sure about the heavy magic presence and why it couldn't be handwaved away as telepathy/alien powers instead of explicitly integrating the fantasy and sci-fi settings but that's quite a minor nitpick.

welp, to each their own

when was the last rpg to successfully inhabit the space opera, uh, space

Has there been one that isn't Traveller?

Star Frontiers was the bomb.

Big co-sign on WFRP and The Enemy Within. Sadly we never got to finish the campaign.

Star Frontiers was the bomb.

i played my first game of Burning Wheel on saturday & have signed up for a campaign with the same DM, so we'll see how that goes

i'm looking to run a RP intensive game (or games) around themes of counterinsurgency, civilian urban survival during war, occupation, and small unit combat and i'm looking for a fairly light system that would be easy to run such a thing in -- any suggestions please? (it actually turns out there was a This War of Mine style RPG made but it seems basically impossible to find.)

Haven't played it but: would you dig Night Witches? http://bullypulpitgames.com/games/night-witches/

And from the same designer, Grey Ranks http://bullypulpitgames.com/games/grey-ranks/

it looks extremely interesting and i'd love to play it but i don't think it'll let me simulate what i have in mind from the description... altho maybe. i do like the idea of having separate cycles for interpersonal drama and then mission/conflict.

oh that looks good too. i'll have to watch the gameplay vids after work to see if there's enough of a framework there that i can alter it to take place today.

any ilxors interested in maybe trying a rotating RPG club online through maybe roll20 or fb chat or something? there are a bunch of systems and settings i'm interested in trying and my weekly group is pretty much committed to the current dnd campaign.

already doing one. we use roll20 for the map and character sheets and dice and we use google chat for talking to each other, works pretty good.

plz can i get in?

sure. i'm the GM, we're playing the 1982 edition of TSR's star frontiers, about halfway through the volturnus campaign.

how do u want to connect? i'm on facebook at facebook.com/mordy if u want to talk through there or you can just email me @ mms531 *A*T* nyu *D*O*T* e;d;u;

i&I wanna be playing some call of cthulhu tbh

started a delta green campaign with four friends yesterday. it went pretty well.

that's such a great idea. i've wanted to start a dnd game with my kids and my 8yo is about to finish the first harry potter book so it might be perfect timing

Do it guys, it's a lot of fun and also it keeps em busy when they wake up too early on a sunday morning and you can't think of anything to keep their spirits up.

She calls it "cave game".

One of them I essentially just stole the main maze element of the old UK kids TV show. Another I gave her a bunch of word-search type things to solve, and another was a series of "my first is in fire but not in dire" type riddles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYvoWFBoEeM

they're 11 and 8 - they want to be silly and have fun

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 22 April 2020 10:08 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

look at dungeon world! it works really well for silly fun. most of the world is improvised in play, but it has kind of useful mental metrics for running a game in non-frustrating ways and not stymying players. everything is 2d6 rolls with some simple modifiers.

that sounds perfect. i will check it out!

stayed up later than I planned last night, wistfully reading the Amber Diceless Roleplaying rulebook.

just sharing my cyberpunk 2020 progress! we met for the first time, via Roll20. we ended up just creating characters, setting up abilities, figuring out how to use Roll20, and buying some equipment. Our first actual session is two weeks from now, and after that we should be playing every Thursday night for as long as Coronavirus lasts, I guess.

i posted this on another thread, but i'll leave it here too:

I'm playing Ten Ton Heat, a Fixer that also plays drums for an up-and-coming band that has a gig on a pirate radio station barge near Seattle in a couple weeks. I'm not quite sure what i look like, other than my Attractiveness level is 6 (making me the third hottest member of the band; we have a pair of identical twins from Chechnya that are incredibly hot and charismatic, with very low intelligence), and I've purchased a set of SmartGoggles with 3 CyberOptic modules: Teleoptics (20x zoom), MicroVideo Optic (I can record up to 20 minutes of video), and Infrared.

what system are you using?

we rolled most of our character's backstories and "Life Events", although we did manually adjust a few things for more fun. here's what the other crew ended up like:

Rockerboy (one of the twins, and the one that is pretty much the band's "leader", even though we're agreed that we're a group of equals, and i've demanded that we share any band income equally. he put everything into Cool and Attractiveness, and the Rockerboy Special Ability: Charismatic Leadership, which allows him to sway an audience up to his level (10) squared, x 200. which is 20,000 people! in a strange twist of random rolling luck, he has the most starting money out of all of us - $24,000 Eurodollars, compared to my $3000 and the Nomad's $1000), but he also just lost his job, so he has no more monthly income coming in. since he's the rich guy in the group, i made him buy me top of the line electronic drums ($800).)

Techie (the other hot twin, more of a multi-instrumentalist. He and the identical twin Rockerboy grew up with a family that "vanished", which is funny because my family also "vanished", separately, in Vietnam. normally the Techie will be visually distinguishable from the Rockerboy because he'll always have lots of hologram related gear on. but we've also established that if the situation demands it, the twins can truly seem identical to other people, so there will definitely be fun shenanigans.)

Nomad (the bass player. also an orphan or abandoned earlier in life. all four of us are like that, and generally we have no money (except for the Rockerboy's previous windfall of cash from his previous gig).

i'm going to work on my character portrait later this week. can't wait to get started for real!

sleeve, what do you mean by "system"? if you mean the overall game setup, we're playing version 2.0 (Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0). however, a new version JUST came out - Cyberpunk Red - so after this first campaign we may migrate over to that if we're still interested. we're all planning on playing the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 videogame too, this fall

yeah that's what I meant! thanks.

have you played it before?

Karl your group concept sounds excellent + like a lot of fun. are you acting as the group manager + booking gigs bc you're playing fixer? are you only going to play shows or are you doing illicit work on the side?

xp no, don't think so, although I am familiar with the old Iron Crown Cyberpunk game which was Rolemaster-based. is this the one that was originally Steve Jackson Games?

are you acting as the group manager + booking gigs bc you're playing fixer?

i'm not sure yet! we didn't get to spend much time working that out yet, but i'm sure i'll have a better idea after the next session.

are you only going to play shows or are you doing illicit work on the side?

i definitely want to get us into illicit work on the side, for sure. plus, due to Life Event rolls, i have a connection in the Mayor's office, and the Techie has two connections in the Seattle Police.

forgot one more detail for Ten Ton Heat - one of my drumsticks is actually a drumKNIFE. i worked this out with the GM already. The Fixer has Melee, Brawler, and Handgun as "Career abilities" (a set of 10 abilities that are recommended for your Role, and that you have to dump your starting allotment of 40 ability points into). i intend to use my drumknife way too much, and what i really want to do is get into a situation where i do a drum solo, and then at the climactic moment, throw the non-drumknife high into the air so everyone is looking at it, and then throw the drumknife at the enemy and run away

also, three out of the four of us are musicians, so i think at some point we're going to write a cyberpunk song for our band

I am green with envy! That sounds awesome.

Ooh :)

I never posted in this thread I guess? I actually played in a Cyberpunk Red (using the starter pack thing) for a couple of sessions before the lockdown, and it was great fun :) our characters were all so awesome, and we were immediately the most caring people in night city? (that's what it's called right?)

i acted out this awesome scene that i'm still proud of where half the party ended up in a mexican standoff with some angry incels on a roof, i got on the roof and sat cross-legged in the middle with a bottle of soju and two cups and basically commanded the lead incel to sit and drink with me while i gave him some kind of insane rambling circular tony robbins motivational speech and defused the entire situation. then he went downstairs to apologize to the bartender for being a creep and my party mugged his lackey.

oh man!

if i were there, i would definitely have recorded that with my smartgoggles

haha someone did! but they failed their, uh, something roll, and it didn't go viral yet :(

which is for the best i suppose bc my guy is trying to keep a low profile on account of trying to take down the corp that killed his anarchist art collective/polycule

i went really wild with my backstory

did you have any media in your group? I almost switched to Media at the last moment, but only 1 other person in our group has decent combat skills, so i figured i should be someone who can help out there as well

also notable, my character has an obscenely high cool stat, and i communicate entirely non-verbally 90% of the time to "maintain the illusion"

xp no media! they haven't added it yet to Cyberpunk Red as far as I know. I think it'll be in the full book, which comes out... some time.

i am so sad the game went on hiatus, it was seriously so goddamn fun. the DM ended up running a different game over the internet and i joined but i didn't know anyone i was playing with and everyone's voice sounded similar and it was the Alien RPG which has really cool mechanics but i felt like it moved too slow and was really stressful and i ended up dropping bc i couldn't make one of the games bc i was having a bad brain day :(

ooo Alien RPG sounds fun too

Not sure if you've said this elsewhere, Karl, but are you playing with friends or did you hook up with a group through roll20 itself? I've been feeling the urge again lately, and never really got that much off the ground with pals.

playing with old high school pals. but yeah, i guess you can find a game with other people through roll20 as well? i haven't really messed around with it too much yet.

If there were a way to wrangle all the timezones, I'd love to play with ilxors.

i was going to say, i'm surprised there's not an ILX game going on right now! i would join the party but i'm cyberpunkin for a while

I'd maybe be up for an ilx game but yeah, timezones might be an issue.

i'd love to play this w/ ilxors when it comes out
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redcarnations/red-carnations-on-a-black-grave

That looks fun, never played anything like that

i was joking around a while ago about making an RPG set in the reign of terror, tocsins and tumbrils

Would be well-received

About a year ago I started work on an RPG about posting on a message board. The classes are done, progression and basic game mechanics are done... I gave up because it all just felt too meta. Might dig it out.

i would love to hear more about that

i am putting all my skill points into image posting and typing speed

It's in a work notebook somewhere (might actually been be in work somewhere) but the general premise was that you had to keep posting without losing interest, getting banned or lapsing into self-parody.

You basically controlled your own narratives and the GM would occasionally bring in unifying threads like clusterfucks, real world event, C/D, Defend The Indefensible, POX etc

Stats were in semi-contradictory pairs - perceived knowledge vs actual knowledge, readability vs repetition, snark vs nice guy, motivation was a standalone stat I think.

Classes were journo and wannabe as separate things, faux naïf, nostalgiac (maybe this was going to be either someone who would go on about how good the board used to be and/or someone who had grudges from previous board beef), fact bringer (possibly with minority interest as a sub class), board lawyer, social media substitute and something I called Light/Heat which was basically a Noize Dude.

Progression was about a combination of believability and citations/memorability in the hope you could become a board regular without having to become an admin.

Some say... we've been playing this all along.

i did order a pdf of red carnations so when it comes out i'll bump to see if ppl want to get a game. is there interest in putting some kind of rotating indie ilx tabletop online RPI together just in general? so many of these games i haven't played but have heard amazing things about (like dogs in the vineyard). but it's unclear to me how you go about finding a group for this -- my irl now roll20 group is great but i wouldn't really describe them as RPI (but trying!) & we only play dnd 5e.

What's RPI?

roleplay intensive as opposed to more mechanically interested or combat oriented games normally. it's a term of art i know from the MOO/MUD days when some servers distinguished themselves along those grounds and normally didn't allow any OOC (out of character) interaction. my dnd group is more about cracking jokes and ppl have varying levels of immersion. one thing i like about a lot of these indie games is they seem to be designed exclusively for RP - some hardly have any mechanics at all!

That sounds like it might be up my alley!

Definitely keep me updated, I'm interested but might not be able to fit in with you US players. Ideally I'd go for RPI *and* cracking jokes, nothing too strict but everyone giving it their best.

RPI & jokes is the holy combo. I'm also interested but GMTing it

reposted from idiot thread repository:

i have been devouring information about dungeon world and it feels like just the right kind of loosey-goosey for me. run and gun. the fiction is paramount. HOWEVER.

i am getting extremely ANXIOUS to GM (DM?) this game with my kids. i have no idea wtf i'm doing. i'm supposed make up villages on the spot and give them tags? if i make up a monster to battle my kids i need to create special moves for them on the fly??

how do i dispense with this anxiety??

i think as you do it you'll get more comfortable with it. doing it with your kids should be forgiving i'd think and good practice for dming for adults?

just don't tell your kids you made any of it up, let them believe it all comes from the game and they'll think it's all cool. worked on the adults i made stuff up on the fly for!

both those posts sound wise.

i've gone way down a rabbit hole with this. these are fun: http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html

what do ppl think about forum roleplaying? probably too embarrassing to ever do on ilx...