1) GURPS and GURPS using it's optional rules. (ie, "GURPS is a toolkit" or "Powered by Gurps")
I've been playing Gurps since the 90s, and it just fits like a glove at this point. I'm in the middle of working up adaptations of some other RPGs, old and new, to Lite 4e, just for fun. (I may end up running them here, I may not, I dunno, but the stuff I'm looking at includes Boot Hill/ GURPS Old West, Gangbusters/ GURPS Cops/Mysteries, and- the one I'm working on now- Fallout.)
2) D&D 5e: It's easy to get running and has a large audience right now. I can knock out a character in about a minute, and get playing fast. People know what it is, you don't have to explain or set up much.)
I also like how adaptable the system seems to be, because I've seen a LOT of other games use the game engine but a different set of assumptions. (There are adaptations of the
LoTR RPG,
Symbaroum,
Dark Souls,
Oz,
Hellboy,
Doctor Who, and a bunch of other ones, plus some really interesting original takes like
Brancalonia or
Five Torches Down)
3) PbTA (more for the settings, rather than being amazed by the system itself.)
Seriously, here's some PbTA settings:
Alas for the Awful Sea (Mystery and Crime, 1800s Britain),
Public Access (horror, along the lines of certain 'found footage' YT channels),
Monster of the Week (Fighting monsters while you, yourself are monstrous),
Brindlewood Bay (imagine Lovecraftian
Murder She Wrote),
Dungeon World,
Apocalypse World,
Flying Circus,
Pasión de las Pasiones (Telenovelas),
City of Mist,
World Wide Wrestling (backstage drama and in-ring action),
Monsterhearts,
Spirit of '77 (one of the best times I've had on RPoL was this one),
Epyllion (a Dragon Epic, in which you're one of the dragons)... The list is really long, and has some amazing ideas.
4) Dramasystem (You don't see enough of it, for my tastes, but I'm always happy to see it.)
I love this system. It makes settings that might otherwise seem ungameable, not only gameable, but really fun to play in. (Rather than do another list, I'll link you to one:
https://medium.com/@jcubertafo...pitches-6d9863837f02 )
5) Hero System, 5th Edition.
I never cottoned onto 6th or that Champions Now! thing, but I've been playing HERO since I was a kid, and (even more than GURPS) it's sort of my gaming "native language". It's a bit fiddly for narrative-gaming expectations, but I love how flexible it is, and the support the gameline had is just the sort of stuff I prefer.
Runners up: Along the lines of PbTA, I like Fate's Worlds much more than I like the system itself. I can use the old-school Storyteller system without much problem. There are also some retro games (FASERIP Marvel, for instance) that I will always show up for.
Other than that, there are a lot of games I like for the setting
much more than I enjoy the system itself.
This message was last edited by the user at 11:44, Sat 05 Aug 2023.