Roleplaying Games

These 18 RPGs Are WAY Better Than D&D

IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership. — from The Devil’s Dictionary

Apparently everyone has decided that roleplaying games are “cool” now because of Stranger Things. The problem is that D&D is a crap game and there are better games out there. In no particular order…

Gamma World

Like vanilla D&D, but actually interesting. Mad Max meets The Muppet Show meets Rick and Morty. Post-apocalypse brought on by the Large Hadron Collider laying a bunch of alternate universes on top of ours. Random powers and super-tech represented with random cards keeps things crazy. Characters are mashups of one weird thing and another weird thing. Giant sentient plants. Pyrokinetic hawk people. Teleporting gelatinous cubes. I once played an Temporal Yeti. That’s Bigfoot with time control powers. That is a hundred times cooler than any Dwarf Cleric.

Our Last Best Hope

Basically Armageddon: the RPG. Cooperative GM-less story telling game. Play through a one-shot disaster movie plot. Stop a giant asteroid. Fix the planet’s core. Restart the Sun. Save humanity, but probably die in the process.

The Cloud Dungeon

D&D for papercrafters. Dragon’s Lair meets Little Big Planet meets Adventure Time. It’s a one-night game in a book. Good for kids, or gamers that don’t take themselves too seriously. Lightweight mechanics, with a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure feel. Because you’re drawing and writing in the book, it’s a destructible game. You only play it once, but if you buy the PDF, you can just print out a new one. Soon to be followed up by another DIY game, Ex-Spelled, set in a crap version of Hogwarts for crappy wizards.

The Five

The Last Dragon meets The Warriors. Colors meets The Man With the Iron Fists. Straight Outta Compton meet Afro Samurai. Dominoes-driven system meshed with a soundtrack mechanic. Battle rival gangs with fists, words, and raps. No other game is like it. The rules could use another edit, though.

Apocalypse World 2nd Edition

The game that took over the world kinda. Mad Max meets Game of Thrones. Sex is a sub-system. Apocalypse World introduced the idea of Playbooks: self-contained hybrid cheat sheets/character sheets. The Angel, The Battlebabe, The Driver, etc aren’t just character classes. They are singular people in the game world. There can’t be more than one of each in the same game, and if they die, no one can play it again. The “Apocalypse Engine” powers a lot of variations. Also, consider using a 3rd party expansion called The Engine, which adds some hope to the whole depressing thing.

City of Mist

Apocalypse World meets Hunter: The Reckoning. Fairly rules-lite. Delicious artwork. Characters are basically possessed by legends of city life. Setting is Sin City meets Marvel Noir meets Streets of Fire. Characters are built purely out of storytelling Tags. There are no numerical stats like Dexterity or Charisma. Features an abstract, hit-point-less Narrative Damage system.

Thunderbirds — The Roleplaying Game

Turns the Thunderbirds board game into an RPG. Features a deck of mission generator cards which determine the type of mission, antagonists, complications, etc. Uses the tokens and dice from the board game, as well as the board if you want. No character generation. You play a member or ally of International Rescue. Character improvement is predetermined. Lightweight rules, but no real guidance outside of how to play. Not a good starter RPG, but great for experienced gamers.

Fiasco

The unofficial Coen Brothers RPG. Almost pure storytelling. Tragic and funny. No GM. No character sheets. The game focuses on relationships, connections, and goals. Your character will probably fail at achieving those goals, which is why it’s a fiasco. The main book includes three scenarios, called playsets. Most official playsets are downloadable for free, or you can buy them collected into anthologies.

Flatpack: Fix the Future

An optimistic post-apocalyptic game. Play kids salvaging a not-too-horrible world. Lightweight mechanics with a video-game-ish achievement system. Minigame-centric. Any tabletop game or puzzle can be part of the game. Part of a character’s advancement is finding and hauling back high-tech prefabricated buildings, called flatpacks, to help rebuild your town.

Risus: The Anything RPG

Super rules-lite. Cliche-centric mechanics. Meant to be used for funny games, but it works for just about anything. It’s one of the best host systems for overly-crunchy games you want to port to a different system. Everything under the sun has been adapted to Risus, mainly because it’s easy. Lord of the Rings. Rifts. Star Wars. Farscape. You name it.

Demon: The Descent (plus World of Darkness: Mirrors)

The Prophecy meets The Matrix. Techgnosic espionage. You’re a fallen angel, and God is a super-computer. Tell me the word “techgnosic” doesn’t turn you on. Normally I hate crunchy games, but a copy of Mirrors can fix that. It’s a book of game hacks so you can take a cleaver to the rules and cut the character sheets down to the bare minimum.

Nobilis: the Game of Sovereign Powers

One of the weirdest RPGs in existence. American Gods meets Call of Cthulhu meets Sandman. Players are Powers, sometimes called Nobles, who embody aspects of reality. Fire. Knives. Crime. Medicine. They work for often jerkface gods and fight a Forever War against invaders from outside reality. Diceless system. Slightly crunchy. Disgustingly good art. Make sure you get the edition with the cover shown. Other editions are dodgy.

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

Avatar: the Last Airbender meets Kiki’s Delivery Service. Collaborative storytelling, not hard core roleplaying. Help people. Get into trouble. Very anime. Very upbeat. Very narrative. Note that the other version, Do: FATE of the Flying Temple, uses the Fate system and is more of a classic RPG.

Valiant Universe: The Roleplaying Game

The smallest of the comic book universes currently has the most comic-bookish game. Optionally GM-less. Players can take turns narrating the game. Light-medium weight mechanics. The fluff details the backstory of the Valiant comic universe, which, BTW, is way more accessible than Marvel’s or DC’s.

Paranoia

1984 re-imagined by Terry Gilliam. A classic RPG updated with a modern system. Semi-card-driven. Basically, Skynet is in charge of a sealed underground city called Alpha Complex and you are one of its special agents called a Troubleshooter. Your job is to shoot the enemies of Alpha Complex: Commies, Mutants, Traitors, and sometimes Commie Mutant Traitors. And anyone can be any or all of those. So trust no one. Also, you will die a lot. But that’s OK because you have five backup clones.

Misspent Youth

Fight the Authority in a dystopian future! Older gamers would call it Cybergeneration meets Underground meets Fiasco. Don’t trust anyone over 30. Uses a craps-like game mechanic. Art design is a mess, but it’s supposed to be. Character gen is fairly quick. Game sessions are designed to last seven scenes. An older version is free to download, but you should spring for the updated edition.

Eclipse Phase: Transhumanity’s Fate

Fate-powered version of a very crunchy game. The Expanse meets Black Mirror meets Stargate. Humanity has left Earth because several versions of Skynet went berserk and attacked everyone. Now humans live on Mars, in space stations, around Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, or in huge ships that are basically Burning Man in space. The mind is software. Bodies are interchangeable. Some animals have been uplifted to human-level sapience. It’s all crazy now. Players are agents of Firewall, a non-governmental secret society trying to save humanity from an alien nanotech virus that’s trying to rewrite humanity, alien slugs that might be galactic con artists, and humanity’s own need to kill each other.

Dread

The tabletop RPG with jump scares. Uses a Jenga-powered system. Characters are generated via questionnaires to determine abilities, shortcomings, personalities, and fears. Success and failure hinge on Jenga pulls. If you knock it over, your last-ditch attempt at survival fails and you die. Good for most kinds of horror stories, from classic monster movies to Five Nights at Freddy’s. I may make a ‘New Mutants’ reskin if the movie is any good.