I can't say it was easy to chill out about a few dumb rules, I'm easily unimpressed. Et demonstrabo tibi:
Star Wars FFG
It's Star Wars, with a lot of setting fluff, some solid rules, and a lot of money to spend if you want to play it.
What a nice dice system. It's like reading tarot. A shame about the character sheet. FFG came up with a lovely resolution system that scales nicely and then they just bodged in a points system for the rest. During play I tried investing in skills to round myself out, but it never paid off as much as dumping everything into one skill and letting my guns do the talking. I kept sliding into making a boring character. Oh, there's a feats skill tree as well that I found a bit underwhelming. +1 to something on its own is a bit meh when D&D has you tonking out a handful of spells or doing a some special stuff as well as stat boosts for each feat option. It's cool game and the Star Wars universe is well depicted, but I hated character development.
Mouse Guard
What everyone assumes to be Redwall D&D but is actually a deep meta game about heroism.
Still my favourite game, but I have passed the cultist-phase and must admit that it's a little too crunchy for pick-up. And for some people it's a little too crunchy forever. I've tried to present the rules in an incremental fashion, which works, but any newbies to the game require a full reset so we can slowly indoctrinate the noob. It feels like you're pedaling but the chain isn't attached to the back wheel. Compounding my woe is that whenever I find someone nerdy enough to play it, they'd prefer even more crunch like Burning Wheel. A fine game, but I prefer Mouse Guard's setting. In conjunction with the rules it tells a story I'm more interested in.
Trail of Cthulhu
Lovecraftian horror, 1D6 at a time.
In contrast to Star Wars FFG, the Gumshoe system does skills as a resource that are burnt up during play to cheese out wins on dice rolls. It makes a wonderful mess on your character sheet as a session rolls on, reminding you of all the hi-jinks you've been up to. A positive feedback loop in a game about going mad from exposure to cosmic horrors. There's very little in the way of rules to learn, making it a great family game if your family is a bit wrong.
The Sprawl
Cyberpunk missions using the Apocalypse World system.
All of the focus on the mission at hand makes The Sprawl a very tight system on paper. Which is why I found it infuriating to GM as it constantly gave me moments of table chatter. Either a rule didn't exist or a rule locked us into weird behaviours like mysteries that couldn't be opened until the resolution of the game. Not having the luxury of several sessions to play a mission was a struggle, especially as it gives you a campaign's worth of paperwork to track corporations, the state of the mission, the players, threats, and for fuck's sake The Hacker requires you to use another sheet as well. I've heard other people love this game. Good for them.
Shadow of the Demon Lord
D&D with less crunch and more poop.
Character creation in this game is amazing. We knocked up some fascinating fellows in a few minutes and launched into a game. God I hate D20s now. Such a swingy scale of results means that a lot of the time it's hard to manage pace. Which I guess is why the game provides lots of GM leverage tools with an interesting advantage mechanic and OP bennies - if you're not used to those it can be a bit frustrating to play. A fun game to bring up on reddit because OSR nerds get riled up if you call it OSR and story game nerds get riled up et cetera.
Torchbearer
Meta game your way out of creeping death in the world's most miserable dungeon crawl.
Luke's systems always chuck out some fantastic stories. I'm just a bit disappointed that the price for that in this game is slow paralysis: As you lose health you can no longer join in. Whilst it's an effective punishment and makes the game scary and oppressive, it straight up kills my buzz. I become depressed playing this game, and there's not really a way to play it fluffy without removing its knife-tipped interlocking cogs. Might be your cup of tea if you're a masochist.
Lady Blackbird
A prepackaged steampunk adventure.
Very easy to learn, nice use of descriptive tags to increase your dice pool and a reserve dice pool for those hero moments. The pre-made characters are well designed with their own mini quests to pursue, often involving other players. Probably the only downside is that it is not a full bells and whistles system, a short but excellent ride.
The Final Girl
Story game creating a slasher movie plot.
When this one gets going it's really good. It was only on my 2nd play through I felt that the opening world building phase took a bit too long. When we get down to the murdering it's quite fun, with a playing card resolution mechanic that's quite satisfying to argue out. Our 1st game was about a discount Jurassic Park, cue lots of dino-kill, it's versatile. Very amusing, but a slow start with some daunting duties for those new to improv.
Intrepid
Story game creating a map, characters, and quests.
This is about as free-form as I can tolerate. You brainstorm a map, themes, characters, factions, and link some of them. Then you each write a quest opener, one sentence with three empty resolutions below. The goal is to grab a quest, frame a scene, and then you all improv till you hit a tipping point. Two players each narrate an outcome, and then you all vote and pull the winning ending out of a hat. It's spawned some very interesting worlds as everyone gets to join in and create scope for what sort of stories they want to hear. Very much one shot material, but so easy to teach that it's a great game when everyone has forgotten their books.
Blood and Honor
Samurai clan adventures with lots of player authority.
When players succeed I usually let them narrate the result. I find it's more rewarding than puppeteering, which feels better used when players screw up. It's rude to be told what you're thinking and doing, which is why it's a great way to narrate someone's failure. N. K. Jemesin's trilogy about post apocalyptic super mutants uses the 2nd person voice very well to narrate the hardest chapter in a hero's life. Always giving you breaks though, returning to bird's eye view to ease off the abuse. Blood and Honor codifies this in play. You build a dice pool with your traits and then wager some of those dice, each one giving you a detail to narrate about your winning result. It's a very enjoyable game that needs a tough GM to keep players from abusing traits - eg: you can't constantly ask for +3 dice for being drunk, you have to have a hangover at some point or start seeing heffalumps and woozles.
Class Warfare
The only book (splat book at that) I've seen all players willing to read.
This book turns Dungeon World into Pathfinder. It's just a big list of moves and spells that gives you a toolkit to create new playbooks or offer players options outside of their current class. Most of it is very well balanced, adding to the story instead of just min-max recipes. If you really put your mind to it I'm sure you could use this book to derail the game, but the options in this book are a discussion between the player and the GM. Does this compendium class make our game more interesting? A must have for any long haul campaign of Dungeon World, providing a good dollop of grout to seal up the cracks in some of the original playbooks.
And I've been meaning to play...
- Numenera: I bought the book and, eh, I just keep finding reasons not to play it. I'd like character creation to be like Apocalypse World playbooks but that means copying out all the descriptors. I'd like not to use a D20. I'd like some more social characters to balance out the obvious murderhobo progression track. I'd like Numenera 2 instead of the book I currently have, but I'm not giving Monty any more money when I haven't played anything yet.
- The Fellowship: Jesus H. Christ the characters sheets. What is going on with 4 sides of nonsense per player, 8 for the GM, and many more for the myriad of move triggers? I recently had a player try this author's Dashing Hero playbook at my Dungeon World table. Now DW has a lot of systems regarding accountancy (loot), many optional, and they provide plentiful ways to tax the player and offer rewards. This playbook was set on subverting that - allowing the player to ignore dungeon tax and do stunts at the same time. It showed a weird disregard for what was going on in the rest of the game. That and the author's polemic against D&D gives me pause. Do I want to play a system by someone who does not care how others want to play?
- Apocalypse World: Given how much crap DW gets, it would be nice to see what people mean when they sanctify the original article. I quite like what it sets out to do, but if I'm brutally honest, I could not give two shits about the setting, post-apocalypse is not my thing. I still look forward to playing it however, I've done my prep.
Closing
I'm an engineer, hardwired to see something wrong in everything. It's a great resource for GMing, every cloud has a silver thunderbolt in it. Take these reviews with a pinch of salt, I'm liable to change my mind. I may after all decide that I hate some of these games for different reasons.
