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.

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...

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/317424/Dissident-Whispers

^ All proceeds going to the National Bail Fund Network

What are people's opinions on paid games on R20? Should I as a noob stay away or is it worth taking flyer on?

OK obvs not RPG but Codenames is playable online now! Any ILXORS fancy a game? https://codenames.game/

what is it?

Oh, it's board game about words. You have a deck of cards with a single word printed on each, and deal some ~25 of them out. Two teams have certain words that they need to guess to win, and one person on each team gives out very concise clues to get their teammates to pick the right cards.

I am accelerating down a massive WFRP 4e hole and it is gre8.

Been DMing the first stage of The Enemy Within, finishing in the next week or two, it's been a lot of fun.

The combat/advantage system is a bit of a mess but who cares about the combat really

Had a guy going all in on portraying a deluded Bretonnian Halfling Robin Hood wannabe, it's like getting some acting for free

we love to see it

That’s the way it should be.

Assembled a group for WFRP 4e and we generated characters last Sunday, and had our first play session on Wednesday. Outrageous fun. I’m having difficulty thinking about anything else.

TTRPG based on Come Dine With Me, anyone? https://kierongillen.itch.io/come-dice-with-me

Oh my.

Who you playing as Nick? I had a very enjoyable run last year as a young soldier who lost a hand to a bomb attack on my first full play session

I’m GMing. Party had a ratcatcher, a slayer, a physician and an outlaw. Done three sessions on an introductory adventure I wrote, and next Wednesday we do Night of Blood...

No horrific injuries yet - they’ve mostly been combat averse, and sensibly set a rat ogre on fire before letting the slayer at it - but the outlaw got beat up bad by skaven and has contracted ratte fever (but doesn’t know it yet).

Slayers’ first attack on the rat ogre was to hit it with his “bottle of cheap spirits”, and he was lucky enough to catch it right in the snout and give it a second ‘ablaze’ condition. He then basically dismembered it as it tried to flee.

waaaaagh

i bought troika and am excited to run it soon

Played through about half of the legendary Night of Blood in our fourth session. My Kanka journal entry:

A stormy night, in pursuit of a mutant family – but is it to capture or to warn? – the road turning to sludge beneath cartwheels, a strangled, braying sound from beyond the treeline: someone – or something – crosses the road behind the cart, following closely at the forest edge. Then a stag, suddenly, bloodied and terrified, lunges from the forest ahead. The cart upturns, and beastmen attack, giving up their hunt of the stag to hunt the party instead.

The Slayer dispatches them swiftly, and the journey resumes, thunder and lightning, something is in the forest and following: mutants attack! A slog of a battle this time, eyestalks and fur, eventually overcome. Too late to turn back, keep going, a flash of lightning illuminates a coaching inn up ahead. But the gate is locked. A side door gives entry to the courtyard, but the inn is locked, though lights illuminate inside behind drawn curtains.

Knock on the door, a disgusting landlord, surprised to see anybody and not keen on strangers tonight, a roadwarden and a lanky, goggly-eyed barman, suspicious of the party, something about a bandit attack. The ratcatcher takes his dog outside and notices horses in the stables are uneasy, lets them out carefully, and finds the half-devoured corpse of a stable boy in the hayloft.

What in Sigmar’s name? Summons his companions, something alive on the stable roof, the Slayer climbs up there and battles a hideous, mutant spider thing, perhaps once a man, slipping on the pitched roof, flaming arrows from the physician illuminating the scene. The outlaw sets the hayloft alight, and Slayer fells the spider-thing but slips and falls from the roof, two stories straight down onto hard, sodden earth. Is he dead? The doors of the inn are locked and bolted again, and this time they will not open.

this is a neat description of a solo dungeon world game, for anybody here who's never played the system and is interested it.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/one-on-one-dungeon-world.349103/

Can we get an update from Karl Malone??

I've been running Call of Cthulhu games since the summer - regular group, we've run through four scenarios now, starting up on our fifth now. Still getting a bit of a grip on how best to use the mechanics to advance the game but everyone is having fun so that's cool. Only one character death, another close call. This week we continue our investigation in Foxfield, MA, where the town supervisor has been acting strangely. (SPOILER: the Mi-Go have kidnapped his children and put their brains in canisters and their bodies in suspended animation).

unfortunately, our cyberpunk 2020 game suddenly ended mid-summer due to real life social conflict. the DM (who i have been friends with since HS and who I have made up with, since) kept getting testy with people when they couldn't align with his schedule, and then things reached a head when he guilt-tripped another play who had covid-like symptoms and then guilt-tripped someone else who was taking a vacation and didn't want to play for a couple weeks. i was feeling confrontational and i called him out on it in the group text, thinking for some reason that it would be a good idea to publicly confront someone with long term anger control issues. things went downhill.

it was a cyberdowner 2020

sounds like it still went better than the 2077 launch

for sure!

haha, yeah....also it the DM's first time running a game, and it was pretty rough. the first time we faced combat, he said that he hadn't yet read "that section" of the manual so we all kind of walked him through it for an hour or so

oh dear

woof. Sorry to hear that Zack.
i feel like i am cancelling or unavailable as much as any of the players - tbh it's not that hard to be chill???

it is definitely not that hard to be chill when it comes to accommodating people's schedules during a pandemic, it's the most relatable thing

ZacH** sorry.

no big deal!

names are dumb anyway

This might be the wrong thread but does anyone have an idea of a RPg that would be good for a single 7 year old to play, with her very tired dad as DM? My daughter is full of imagination and loves such things, and I started a very simple self-made RPG for her last summer, but I am running low on inspiration for scenarios and stories and would like to come up with some kind of good experience for her, especially as she is a single child in lockdown and is going (not so) quietly insane

all i really know is dungeon world but it’s very flexible and values story over tables of stats etc - you can easily noodge things the way you want them to go. it works best with very minimal prep - a few monsters, maybe an NPC or two particularly for a 1-player game - and maybe an idea of a setting - but most of the world/history gets fleshed out in the questions you ask during character creation. if your daughter is imaginative you’ll find that she does most of the prep for you!

for more of a fleshed-out adventure scenario you could search for slave pits of drazhu

Ah, great stuff - thanks Tracer x

can i suggest choose your own adventure books or any of their gazillion variants? i bet you could find whole collections on ebay.

Fighting Fantasy books! They're kind of a halfway house between Choose Your Own Adventure and D&D (you roll two normal dice to see which page you should turn to, there are hit points, damage, etc)

speaking of:
http://ffproject.com/

also - offered unexplored and without a sense of quality -

https://chooseyourstory.com/Stories/
https://infinite-story.com/

And a site that lets you craft your own:
https://www.inklewriter.com/

Thanks Forks! She loved a kids CYA-style book when she was 3, been waiting till she was ready to try some more - and there are a few Star Wars ones out there too (she saw a New Hope for the first time a fortnight ago and is now OBSESSED)

I would recommend Basic Fantasy RPG if you want something light and D&D-derived. It's a re-organization/slight modification of the 1980s Basic Set rules, but modified to include ascending armor class and a few other minor things. Best of all, the pdf is free, there are a lot of free adventures, and you can get everything at cost if you want print copies -- the rulebook is abut $5 through Lulu or Amazon.

https://www.basicfantasy.org
https://basicfantasy.org/downloads/Basic-Fantasy-RPG-Rules-r107-bookmarked.pdf

The author suggests it's appropriate for kids 6+.

Another very stripped back D&D-clone is White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game -- another free .pdf
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/190631/White-Box--Fantastic-Medieval-Adventure-Game?filters=100_0_0_0_0

i've heard people swear by Root as a fun tabletop for kids/adults
https://ledergames.com/products/root-a-game-of-woodland-might-and-right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpxV-uNZef4

I've played Root and enjoyed it but I thought it was pretty complicated for adults!

Yeah about sixteen minutes into that video he says "that's where the real game begins!", lol.

Thanks again, guys - definitely going to get one of these started up for when she rises around dawn on Sunday!

I was going to recommend what this other ilxor was doing with their daughter, but in the end it's probably a little redundant.

Ha yes - i'm just running dry of ideas of my own at the moment, and could do with a system that might offer challenges/puzzles/stories beyond the ones I've stolen from half-remembered movies and The Adventure Game from the 70s