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D&D alternatives
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I have not yet played Ironsworn but I’ve heard only good things about it. From what I’m told, the rules are extremely narrative-based rather than mechanics-based, where you declare your intentions and then roll two dice to determine the task’s difficulty (meaning every task has a random difficulty) and one to see if you beat one, both, or neither difficulty dice to determine your level of success. I’m also told there are lots of random charts you can roll on to determine outcomes if you’re blocked to improv one on the spot; and the last thing I’m told is it’s very low-fantasy so there’s no arms race to get enough magical gear to compete with whatever threat you’re up against.
I can’t be more specific because that’s all I’ve heard, but it’s enough to interest me.
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I think that some of the d100 skill-based tabletop systems have a lot of promise! I looked at them quite seriously for a game I’ll totally code and run one day, don’t worry, I’m definitely gonna do it. It just so happens that some of the big ones are available in a bundle right now:
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/NonOGLFantasy
Mythras is really cool, and anything Kevin Crawford does is worth a glance, including Worlds Without Numbers. He also has a sci-fi take, Stars Without Number, but it is not available in the bundle.
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I continue to absolutely adore Pathfinder 1E.
I started gaming with AD&D 2E, but I really hit my stride in third and 3.5. When 4th edition came out, I tried it for one campaign and hated what they had done, which is when someone introduced me to Pathfinder. It was all the best parts of D&D 3 and 3.5, but better. There is so much material, classes, archetypes, hybrid classes, variant rules, that it’s a sandbox where you get to pick your favorite things (rules for custom race generation are still awesome to this day.) and make a campaign. It’s got a lot of math depending how you approach combat, and I admit to having a spreadsheet to help me remember all of my bonuses and when they apply, but I love building characters, and I love finding wild things to do with those characters.
If you want to see what the system looks like, I actually find their SRD to be a lot of fun just to browse. But, I may just be a nerd. The books are all well-done, if you prefer the actual media.
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Blades in the Dark - Gothic Victorian Oceans Eleven with weird ghost magic and guns.
Play a crew of ne’er-do-wells in an early industrial era fantasy city. The sun never rises because the forces of evil won the big war and broke reality a bit. You can’t go outside the city because there is a wall of lightning keeping the hordes of hungry dead spirits away. It is powered by the blood of massive demonic leviathans that live in the “ocean” (pitch black, full of stars). Hunting those leviathans is a major industry. You won’t be doing that though because you are thieves, assassins, a weird cult, or some other configuration of criminals at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and this game is about clawing your way up to power and wealth through crime.
Blades is a descendant of Apocalypse World, and has the same Narrative-focused system DNA. Character creation is very quick. Stat/Skill are compressed into 12 Actions that cover anything you could want to do. There is only one resolution mechanic: roll your Action rating in d6s, looking for the highest result. A 6 is a Success with no complications. 1-3 is a Failure. 4-5 though, is where this game shines. If your highest die is a 4 or a 5 you Succeed with Complications. You get what you want in premise but the GM tacks on an appropriate Consequence. You dispatch your foe but take a cut yourself. Open the lock but trigger an alarm. Convince the informant but have to trade something you were hoping not to.
That little turn of Consequences makes Blades a perfect game for complete improv. The game itself urges you to “play to find out what happens” and works best if you lean into this. I loved this as a GM. It allowed me to run a regular campaign-length game with a group that only had 2-3 hour windows in common while also being very busy myself. Every session is meant to be a Job that your Crew plans off-screen and then jumps into in medias res. There are rules for Flashbacks where you can bring in preparations for the Job as they come up. You scouted the patrols the night before. Stashed a satchel of grenades on the roof to counter-ambush the police string. Brought just the tool for the job, because you’re cool competent thieves who are one step ahead.
PC Competency is very High. Even a rating of 1 in an Action lets you roll a die and 50% of the faces of that die are some kind of Success (with or without Consequences). If you have zero in an Action you can spend 1 Stress to add a die to even that roll. The result is that even the least combat-competent character can still occasionally pull out a gun and hold their own. This is a game where the question is less Can You Do It and more How Does It Go Down? This results in high-energy play where everyone at the table really gets to flex their creative muscles.
tldr; Fantasy Peaky Blinders + ghosts. Super easy to start playing. Fast-paced, conversational gameplay. Can be easily played with next to no GM prep.
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Mythras - Mid-Crunchy Toolkit for Historical and Fantasy games that want Verisimilitude.
I have not been into the D&D style games for decades, and Mythras is what I play mostly instead these days. The thing I like most about it, and that it has in common with the many other d100 Chaosium titles it shares lineage with, is that the mechanics are grounded in realism. Specifically, where D&D and games like it assume that your party is going to face a set number of level-appropriate combat scenarios per day that are tuned to appropriately pressure the spell slot and rest economy, Mythras assumes instead that what you want are circumstances and consequences that roughly mirror reality. Combat is deadly even for talented warriors. Fighting a larger group is a bad idea. Getting stabbed at all is to be avoided.
The PCs have strong motivations to be more risk-averse, as the margin for error is not padded with the assumptions that PCs can murder-hobo their way out of any given situation. Framing the game reality in this way has some interesting effects. Suddenly the laws of society have their weight again. The ability for PCs to beat the City Guard in a fight no longer implies that they cannot be bound by the law. Likewise while taking big risks has the appropriate disincentives, the PCs can make meaningful informed choices to sometimes accept the risk if the reward is great, and those moments feel all the more exciting. Sneak into a well-patrolled villa and murder the patrician? Succeed and reap the rewards of taking a main antagonist off of the table? Fail and have to run away? All possible and feels more meaningful for the lack of an assumption that this was made permissable and easy because it’s the planned scenario.
There are a ton of settings books and several campaigns for Mythras, across many time periods and cultures. I don’t know of another single line out there that has as much content that isn’t western european feudal of some kind. Constantinople, Rome, Polynesia, Celtic Britain, Babylon. And beyond that, this is a Chaosium d100 game. That means that literally hundreds of books across the lines of Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, Elric and many others are all there for adaptation to the ruleset. I personally love me some dark horror in my fantasy, and it’s so easy to crib something into the game to back any idea that comes up.
In practice, a Mythras game plays more like Call of Cthulhu than D&D. There’s a lot more focus on talking, politicking, creative problem solving, and at times running away from the terrible consequences of a turn in the story. PCs end up going through far more of the classical steps of a story, including the all important mid-journey experience of “Why didn’t that work and what do we do now?”
tldr; Setting-agnostic Fantasy and Historical storytelling system that supports a more literary experience.
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Has anyone played Numenera? How did it feel?
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@Arkandel I have not actually played it, but have heard enough great hype about it that I bought a bunch of the books and have many theoretical characters ready to go.
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I’ve enjoyed Pathfinder 1E if you want the closest-to-D&D3.5-you-can-get experience. They made some things better, they made some things way more complicated, but it’s good stuff in general.
If you like fast and simple, Savage Worlds is solid for that. I want it to be a little more detailed, personally, but it’s good for what it does.
I’ve only been able to play a tiny bit of it, but I do like the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, and I’ve heard really good things about the AGE system from Green Roninm, but have never played it.
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My game of choice is Pathfinder 2nd right now for my fantasy games. About to start diving into Savage Worlds. I have heard good things.
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@BloodAngel said in D&D alternatives:
My game of choice is Pathfinder 2nd right now for my fantasy games.
That’s a great opportunity then to ask - what made you choose that over 5E? Since (I assume) you did so before this WOTC drama.
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@Arkandel Honestly, I enjoy the CG. I like the Ancestries a ton, I love how characters at least in my games, feel more natural and not just generic fighters. I also love the Goblins of the pathfinder world, also the lore of the system itself with the lost gods. Both games I’m running now are using the default setting, just creating the big bad and the plot myself. I enjoy the diversity of the world out of the box and that is very rare for me when I run games.
I never even jumped on 5TH, due to how much I was not too fond of the 4th edition. So I went from 3.5, right to Pathfinder, and never looked back.
But to be frank, I’m not the rules lawyer of my group. I run with the goal of telling a narrative and plot. So, if you want more of that side of things, I’m not your guy sadly.
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My group had a little fun with Dungeon World (which is a powered by the apocalypse system) and I bullied them into CGing for a Thirsty Sword Lesbians game that never got off the ground but it was definitely in a fantasy universe.
I’m NGL though I’m set up for 5e, I own all the books, even with a canceled dndbeyond sub it’s going to be real hard to make the switch. I don’t want to go back to Pathfinder.
maybe i’ll go to pathfinder 2.0, i’ve heard it’s more slick, but mostly I’m probably just going to whine and cry a lot.
let it be a challenge to you
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My preference for high fantasy gaming right now is 13th Age. It took a bit more from 4th Edition D&D than other D&D-a-likes, and it’s great fun.
I haven’t played Ironsworn, but I’m in a Starforged game - using the same system but for SF, and I’m absolutely loving the system. If the fantasy variant is half as good, I think I’ll try it for my next fantasy campaign.
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@Arkandel said in D&D alternatives:
Has anyone played Numenera? How did it feel?
I’ve played it and love it. My only complaint is a completely irrational one. See, the way challenges work is, they’re ranked from 6-18, the number you have to roll on a d20 to succeed. You can bring this number down in increments of 3 by spending from an appropriate pool, which you have to do before you roll the die. So I can spend half my daily allotment of muscle to reduce the difficulty to roll a boulder, then roll a nat 20 and feel like a chump who overpaid. It’s the miser in me speaking.
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@GF Solving this with a house rule just for you (now hunt down the coders for me, plz)
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@GF said in D&D alternatives:
@Arkandel said in D&D alternatives:
Has anyone played Numenera? How did it feel?
I’ve played it and love it.
How easy is it to run a custom campaign based on your own setting rather than its own?
My perception of Numenera is it’s basically hard-set in a world with disposable artifacts etc, which can be a lot of fun if that is what you want to play, but for example what if I wanted to run in a gothic horror Ravenloft-style instead?
Would the mechanics kinda dictate the content?
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@Arkandel said in D&D alternatives:
What if I wanted to run in a gothic horror Ravenloft-style instead?
I don’t see why you couldn’t. The world is so screwed up from a billion years of pre-apocalypse cultures trying to rewrite reality that there’s doubtlessly a Ravenloft out there somewhere. I don’t know how well the mechanics are suited to the kinds of things you’d expect from a horror game, though.
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@GF One of the things I appreciated about D&D is that you could pull all kinds of themes with its mechanics without feeling odd about it. Horror (Ravenloft), post-apocalyptic (Dark Sun), high fantasy of course, play in other dimensions like the Nine Hells (Descent into Avernus), etc.
There’s something to be said about mechanical flexibility enabling GMs to run whatever they have in their head.
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@Arkandel Honestly, horror D&D never made much sense to me. The mechanics, at least in the editions I’ve been aware of, have always been in support of killing things to get their loot. Horror is about helplessness, so D&D has always felt like a bad match to me.
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@Arkandel There is a setting-agnostic, generic version of the Numenera rules (cypher) and a different setting (the strange), so… it’s already not required to be a billion years in the future.
You can fluff up the mechanics in different ways. Force field… I think you mean holy symbol that needs fresh holy water to ward off attacks! Grenade? Alchemical bottle.
… hell, call everything a potion.
The trickiest part is character descriptors. ‘Replaced flesh with Cybernetics’ might not work 1:1 (but maybe clockwork?)
Also also, one of this is to say that there isn’t a corner of the Numenera setting that thinks it is a replica of Ravenloft, everything looks like it exactly, and now a cyborg arrives in a very GURPS fashion.
Edit for spelling and calling the one book by it’s actual name.
