My Favorite RPGs and Why I Don't Play D&D Anymore

During High School, my brother introduced me to D&D, the white box version. And I introduced it to my friends and we played our own homegrown highly modified games until college. So, I GMed for about 10 years. Most of those games were dungeon crawls. My games matured from random roll up charts and encounters to more theme-based dungeons, but they were all still dungeon crawls. Characters did evolve from the "character funnel" (start with 1st level characters and see who survives) to I let you make anything up as long as you have a good enough backstory. Then I stopped playing as college and work (real life) interposed itself. Fast forward 10 years, I attended a local gaming convention and signed up for my very first LARP and had a great time. That group of Vampire LARPers used the convention game as a way to find good players for their table top RPGs. They mainly ran a homegrown version of GURPS. From them I learned a totally different gaming style, a story based game vs min/max kill things and taking their stuff game. I think I've been playing and running this new style of game for almost 20 years.


As an experiment, I decided to run the Freeport Trilogy using D&D 3.5. I had bought the D&D 3.5 books and they sat on my shelf for over 10 years. I had an idea for an Epic Level Campaign, but I could never get my LARPer friends interested in it. So I was excited to run a game of pirates and an award winning campaign.

What could go wrong? I found that a co-worker and his partner were looking for a D&D game, so I invited them to my gaming group to fill seats. They were D&D game lawyers and my co-worker created a reasonable character and from play, I could tell he was more interested in character interactions and story, but his partner was a min/maxer and had created a Half-Orc Barbarian tank.

I found the clue trails in Freeport a bit weak and some clues were only available on the bodies of assassins sent to kill the PCs. A bit on the weak-sauce there. Yeah, lets send an assassin and the assassin would have incriminating evidence on them pointing to who hired them. What type of hit man would do that?

The Freeport Trilogy had various excuses for combat and I was happy to have the min/maxed Barbarian in the game. He killed everything in one or two hits, so combat mercifully ended quickly.

So, I learned that D&D wasn't my game anymore.

I tried D&D 4.0, 5.0 and Warhammer Fantasy 3.0. Didn't like any of them. I liked Warhammer Fantasy 2.0 better. Warhammer Fantasy 3.0 seemed like it was trying to sell special dice and cards that were game aids and tried to replicate a video game experience (just like D&D 4.0).

p.s. I'm currently playing in D&D 5e, The Curse of Strahd. I'm really enjoying the game, so never say never. My vote is for leveling milestones instead of experience points and limiting the amount of combat.

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So what do I like to GM or play (in alphabetical order)?

A Penny For My Thoughts

A mostly GM-less game. The GM acts as a player. Diceless.

My favorite pickup game. You only need a few slips of paper and some tokens like pennies. The players are amnesiacs trying to recover their memories in an asylum. The story unfolds with the help of the other inmates.

I dislike some of the ritualistic aspects of the game, so I drop that when I run it. Here's a link to an article I have written about it and Dread.


Call of Cthulhu 7.0 Edition

Investigating clue trails, history, and a game where combat will get you killed. Lots to love in CoC. Amazing amount of published scenarios and support material.

The game is in the horror genre, based on the Cthulhu Mythos created by HP Lovecraft and added to by other contemporaries and modern authors. One of the best TV shows to tap into this was the first season of True Detective.

Don't Rest Your Head

Players enter a very imaginative dream world when they fall asleep. As they learn to manipulate the dream world, they lose their grasp on reality.

I've never run this as I've only played in it to explore the nightmare landscape. I'm a bit intimidated about running it as dice management requires a deft touch for the GM.

Dread

This is great for a horror game. The Jenga tower completely matches the ups and downs of horror.

Here's a link to an article I have written about it and A Penny for My Thoughts.

Feng Shui 2

Lots of Kung Fu madness. Great for John Woo and Jackie Chan fans.

Settings are white rooms where players get to use whatever elements they can dream up (that makes sense) to help in their over-the-top combat scenes.







Fiasco 

I'm a fan of Coen brothers movies and Guy Ritchie's movies: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; Snatch; and Revolver. And Pulp Fiction.

This is a GM-less game. The GM acts as a player.

Another great pickup game, but you need to have various playbooks already printed in order to play.

Game is best with people who are comfortable making up stories and character situations on the fly. Also a sense of dark humor is required.

Godlike 2

WWII with soldiers with super powers, but they can still get shot in the head. Gritty and deadly. One of the best simulations of chaotic combat available.

This game requires 10d10 for each player and handfuls of d10s for the GM. Lots of crunch, but it uses ORE (One Roll Engine) which uses one die roll to determine initiative, action result, hit location, damage.

When I run this at a convention, I always have on hand lots of backup characters because you never know when a Nazi gets lucky and shoots a PC in the head.

TimeWatch

Time travel and fixing history. Lots of fun and thinking out of the box. An investigative game where you keep on travelling back in time to find the pebble that got dropped in the time stream (or the butterfly who flapped its wings).

Here's a link to an article I wrote about TimeWatch.