I’ve been playing tabletop games for as long as I can remember. My parents didn’t really believe in video games, or TV for that matter, so passing the time that way was right out. Fortunately, my whole family are huge Tolkien fans, and I think a few of them had played D&D back in the day, so when I asked for a copy, I got… well, I got Dungeons and Dragons: 4th Edition for Dummies by Bill Slavicsek, Richard Baker, and Mike Mearls. And what a book.
I really liked 4th edition. My friends and I had no idea what we were doing, but it was easy enough to get some adventures as PDFs, find photos of the monster manual, and use the player character sheets included in the for Dummies book to play… well, something kind of like D&D, anyway. We rolled dice, occasionally. We were 13. 4th edition’s highly modular, object-oriented design gave us a lot to chew on without actually understanding much of the overarching system, and the art was very inspiring. Minions and per-day/per-encounter Powers made running the game much easier for my hyperactive little brain, too.
Since then, I’ve been the only person in my friend groups who consistently wants to play enough to put together a group, all the required materials, and a schedule. That means I’ve gotten to play a lot, and mostly on my terms, which is great! Being a “forever DM” can really suck, especially if you have players who don’t respect you, but that hasn’t been my experience.
Since 2018, I have been playing mostly 5th Edition D&D. It’s… fine? It’s fine. It’s a “legacy game,” a way to squeeze the last few millions out of the grognards who preferred 3.5’rd edition to 4th but hadn’t yet jumped to Pathfinder, or would be willing to come back. And then Matt Mercer and Stranger Things came along and the rest is history. We’re stuck with it, now; D&D 5th edition, 2024 edition is a franchise. I use mostly MCDM products for my two long-running weekly campaigns - Flee, Mortals! to replace the Monster Manual, Where Evil Lives for villains and lairs, and tons of resources from their magazine ARCADIA.
You don’t need me to tell you about 5th edition.
So let me tell you about some other games! Currently, I’m most excited about Draw Steel from MCDM Productions. Matt Colville has been a huge inspiration to me over the years, and this game embodies a lot of the things I loved about 4E D&D without any of the baggage, and with a more up-to-date feel.
I’m playing Daggerheart from Darrington Press as a three-shot with my usual RPG group. I think this was the right choice; ita a game thst requires a lot of trust and buy-in. It’s like D&D, and borrows elements from both Apocalypse World/PbtA and Blades in the Dark/FitD, but it is neither of those things. It was extensively playtested before release, and it shows; there are a bunch of systems that could be really frustrating, but are not, because they’re tuned extremely well.
Major departures from D&D include explicitly inviting the players to participate in worldbuilding, limiting the GM’s ability to act unilaterally (you need a Fear token, or some kind of opening like a failed roll or a player asking a question, to do anything), and a reliance on “scenes” as a unit of time. It’s generally just less crunchy than D&D, and less interested in being a simulation. Instead, its mechanics - which are extensive and flavorful - act as a shared language for everyone at the table.
Our first session was spent entirely on character creation. The cards make it easy for everyone to choose abilities and attributes simultaneously even if only one player owns a copy of the game, something I always found difficult with in-person D&D. The per-class character sheets help a lot with the flow of both character creation and play, and, as always, explicitly connecting characters before play starts is a good idea which the game facilitates well.
Our second session involved exploitation and two fights. I really enjoyed the fluid initiative system, but my players got very lucky and didn’t generate much fear, which lead to both encounters being easier than expected. The Beast Feast campaign frame provides mechanics for harvesting food from monsters, and everyone had a great time with that.
When that oneshot ends, maybe I’ll write more about it here.
Their site appears to be down at the time of writing this, but Ardens Ludere’s cyberpunk heist game The Sprawl (or get it from a retailer) was the first non-D&D tabletop game I every played, and it’s great. It’s a good example of the second crop of Powered by the Apocalypse games, and I think it really understands the purpose of the three-tier check system more than, say, Dungeon World did. It’s got collaborative worldbuilding, tons of evocative options for the various classes, and its relatively rigid structure gives a lot of support to players who don’t have a deep grounding in cyberpunk literature.
Miguel Lopez-Hall and Tom Bloom, as Massif Press, have managed to create what is, in my opinion, a “best” in three separate ways: the best mech combat individual wargame system, the best worldbuilding of a post-scarcity society for space opera, and the best digital toolset for a tabletop RPG to date. LANCER is worth a buy for its perspective on leftist politics alone; throw in some truly excellent art and COMP/CON and I think it’s simply the best choice for crunchy sci-fi tabletop games.
Shadowdark, by Kelsey Dionne a.k.a “The Arcane Library”, is a survival horror game that harkens back to dark rooms, stone hallways, and the zines and limited light sources of an imagined 1980s gaming tradition. I’ve only played it solo, but I’ve enjoyed it that way, and I’m planning to do some one-shots when and if I can. It not as simple as a “Lasers and Feelings” or even “6th Edition” type of game, but it’s certainly nowhere near as complicated as any edition of D&D or even most Powered by the Apocalypse games.
I’ve also run a number of Dionne’s D&D modules, and they’re quite good; well designed and presented, with enough information to support the DM as players stray off the beaten path but not so lore-heavy as to bog down my prep. Not always the most original ideas, but at this point she’s put out good fare from 1st to 20th level.
Dream Apart, part of Avery Alder’s Belonging Outside Belonging system, is a really interesting game for me as a diaspora Jew who wasn’t well-educated in my culture as a child and has had to reconnect; it was fun, and silly, and lead to some pretty powerful experiences. See also Dream Askew for leatherdykes, Flotsam: Adrift amongst the stars for space fantasy, and BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home for Filipino post-cyberpunk dystopia.
Alder has published a number of other games, my favorites of which are The Quiet Year and its companion/contradiction, The Deep Forest. These are games about land, something I’ve never had a simple relationship with, and they form a really good conversation about the meaning of community in the presence of violence.
Jay Dragon of Possum Creek Games is better known for working on hybrid digital-tabletop roleplaying game Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, but Jay’s prior work Wanderhome is dear to my heart. It’s a take on the post-apocalypse which doesn’t shy away from difficult subject matter or the consequences of destruction, but which imagines a world with no new violence, no fresh catastrophes, just adorable animal-people, their insectoid livestock, and the relationships they form along their journey.
Ben’s publishing company’s name has a slur in it so he doesn’t get it on this page. No SEO for you. His game Microscope is really good, though. In many ways, it’s not really a game - more like a collaborative worldbuilding exercise for two to five players. You come out of it with a good understanding with the history of a specific time period, in a specific place.
I have a lot of games. I like buying books, reading them, looking at the art - even if I never play them, they give me ideas for writing, music, my other tabletop groups. But, not having played them, I don’t feel I can really talk about them with much authority. Here are a few.