Shopping for a new system

[Prak]

My friend is looking for a system to jump ship to from 5e. Her sort of wishlist is:

• More of a focus on collaborative storytelling, like a PbtA game
• more systems for combat than just "If you're hitting someone with a sword you roll this ONE move"
• good systems for talking with NPCs and convincing them of things
• Actual systems that encourage roleplaying your character rather than treating it like a game to be won, and encourage you to make time for little scenes between characters
• that same feeling of growth and leveling up from D&D.

Something like a midway point between 5e and PbtA, she says.

I can list off and talk about plenty of different systems, and did, but I'm curious if people here have any suggestions I can take to her.

Looking at it myself, I don't know of one system that does all that, or even a system that feels like a clear winner. For collaborative storytelling and encouraging rp, there's FATE. For talking to npcs, there's After Sundown and Fate. For more tactically deep combat, I don't really know of a system that really does "different characters have different feeling combat stuff" (or does it well, I should say). Fate sort of comes out on top, but it doesn't really have much in the way of an advancement system. And combat doesn't necessarily feel different from one character to another.

Now.... yeah. I think 3.5 could work well, with some hacked in subgames. But, my friend and most of the group isn't really up for the deep mechanical grind of 3.x. For that matter, I think Storyteller could be molded into something that works well. But she's got a job and not necessarily the inclination to dig into Storyteller and take on the project of making it work.

So, after those, the only real strong contender is FATE with some hacks, but I'm not sure FATE can be hacked to have character advancement in a satisfying form.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

That's a tough one. I don't think any game is gonna deliver all of that but she might like Burning Wheel or Exalted. I feel dirty recommending either of those but they both *try* to be maybe kind of what she wants.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I can't think of anything that hits on all of those without getting crunchier than she seems to want. If you want to go full Frankenstein-homebrew, I have some suggestions, but that's about all.

[merxa]

I will also recommend Burning Wheel, it has rules that addresses each of the bullet points; how effectively is another question but at least it'll be different.

[Emerald]

So, after those, the only real strong contender is FATE with some hacks, but I'm not sure FATE can be hacked to have character advancement in a satisfying form.

It depends on what you'd consider satisfying. I've made a bunch of Fate hacks for my group (who wanted to play "basically Fate, but more crunchy") that ended up being heavier than most published ones. For two of them, one based on Last Airbender and one on Mass Effect, I added a sort of "overlay" on top of the system (based around a sphere of elements and the combat/tech/biotics trinity, respectively) that provided a framework for powers beyond just being aspects+skills, standardized a library of common effect Aspects that could be used as keywords in things, added some things like Blocks from DFRPG and a mechanic for situational free boosts, gave rules for standardizing and generating stunts in tiered power levels, and so forth.

The additional granularity and sort of "skill tree" organization that extra stuff presented made for some easy and obvious advancement paths without restricting things too much, and there was more tangible progress than just increasing numbers or throwing bunches of aspects at people. So you can definitely make advancement work, so long as you have a clear idea of the setting/tone/magic system/etc. you want and are willing to get creative with the add-ons for your particular hack.

[Prak]

I'm reading through Burning Wheel, got to the Steel stat and...

Why.

Why do people write systems like this?

Who the fuck wants to play a character who all but pisses themselves-- dictated by the system--when a fight starts?

[Grek]

Blades in the Dark manages to satisfy the collaborative storytelling, not completely awful social mechanics and incentive to roleplay requirements. Its combat system is much more functional than 5e, but unlike PbtA it has actually has a fairly robust way to handle variable action difficulties. What the system lacks is character creation. Specifically, it's a class based system which expects the DM to homebrew your class for you at the outside of every campaign. I have no fucking idea why they decided to do that (aside from maybe laziness), but if you're willing to overlook that flaw or hack together your own Swords and Sorcery class list for people to choose from, I would give it a solid 5/7 for goodness of fit to your purposes.

Alternatively, if your friend likes Kill Six Billion Demons, Broken Worlds (the K6BD PbtA hack) is actually fairly decent and deviates from the basic PbtA assumptions at several points in order to attempt to fix some of the issues with PbtA.

[Prak]

I'll take a look at Blades in the Dark and might suggest it.

I've gotten to the advancement rules of Burning Wheel and I do not understand the person who wrote it. Your character mint stand around doing nothing at the start of a fight, because it's about playing not murder-hobos or something. But then you track skill use and test difficulty to advance, because the system wants you keep a fixing ledger or something. But then, also, you have say "my character spends five hours a day reading books/ doing weapon drills/ whatever" so they don't get rusty, because, again, it's about normal people with real jobs? But then also you can just go (pick a fight/cast a single spell/treat a paper cut) on the last day of your skill category cycle to ward off skill atrophy.

who the fuck is this person and why are they like this?

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Burning Wheel is one guy taking every idle thought he's ever had about RPGs, throwing them into a pot, and hoping a playable game comes out. The XP system is one of the reasons I said I felt dirty for recommending it. I would guess that most people who play it just ignore the XP system or house rule it to be a lot less cumbersome.

[Prak]

I think there are some interesting ideas, but...

I cannot comprehend the kind of person who chooses to play that game. Like, I like granular mechanics, in terms of 3.x, where I can see a 30ft chasm and look up the difficulty based on circumstances and judge how badly my character will get hurt if they fail. This is not my kind of granularity, and every character I ever made would have, like, "nothing surprises me" as an instinct. Any system that encourages you to always have something specific is.... something that needs another pass.

[Dogbert]

Your friend's wishlist only tells me she has no idea of what she wants: She wants options, yet she quotes a system infamous for its cookie-cutter characters. She doesn't want "gamey," yet she wants something that's "just d&d-ish enough" This is the only statement that can be translated into something that's not an oxymoron:

[*]Actual systems that encourage roleplaying your character rather than treating it like a game to be won, and encourage you to make time for little scenes between characters

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard this and what the person really means is that they're tired of all combat all the time I'd be pretty well off by now. Your friend clearly has the murderhobo blues.

Regarding what she wants in particular, you know her better than we do so only you can answer that. If you want a FATE compromise with vertical advancement, though, try Legends of Anglerre.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard this and what the person really means is that they're tired of all combat all the time I'd be pretty well off by now. Your friend clearly has the murderhobo blues.

I have the opposite problem. I want to be a badass murderhobo and my friends want to play FATE or Apocalypse World or some shit.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I've heard some cool stuff about Soulbound, and the incentives for the party to act as a team seem surprisingly elegant. Not much of a Warhammer fan personally, but this new high fantasy setting they are using for the RPG seems pretty cool.

[Prak]

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard this and what the person really means is that they're tired of all combat all the time I'd be pretty well off by now. Your friend clearly has the murderhobo blues.

I have the opposite problem. I want to be a badass murderhobo and my friends want to play FATE or Apocalypse World or some shit.

I... sort of have this issue. I play RPGs to kick ass and be competent and powerful in a way I can't in real life. I don't mind RPing, I'm just... quiet. Like I am in real life. I tend to stick to the background both in RP and meatspace, and let things happen until there's something for me to react to. I do like FATE, mostly because in my only real experience playing it, I was able to use my aspects creatively to, well, be a competent, powerful badass (even more fun because it involved invoking my own trouble aspect).

She has expressed dissatisfaction with how combat tends to go because I'm playing a warlock with Hunger of Hadar, so when we get into any big climactic battle, I can just drop a 20' radius area of 1d6 cold and 1d6 acid per turn and complete darkness, and the enemy is down pretty soon after I do that. I don't know how others handle the enemy suddenly being plunged into darkness, but she has enemies in the area move randomly, stumbling around, meaning that HoH ends up effectively stunlocking enemies while also dealing damage each round. If they end up on the edge, but still inside, the affected area, then we're able to see, say, their arms out in front of them, letting us then also target them while they're still in the area. The fact that I also have the invocations that allow you to pull or push a target hit by your eldritch blast 10 ft (collapsed into one with her permission), means I can also move enemies into area effects, whether HoH, that cloud of blades thing, or... out a window behind them (I killed a mindflayer this way, albeit one that was, I believe, already weakened).

So... I kind of guess that it's not necessarily about prevalence of combat, presence or lack of deep tactics, or whatever, but... possibly more about the fact that I'm decent with strategy and playing a spellcaster.

[merxa]

your friend is the GM and will be running the new system you are investigating?

From the couple of paragraphs, the GM sounds overly permissive, which isn't necessarily bad but a few permissive rulings in 5e can trivialize a lot of encounters. Is she running from a module?

My very limited Burning Wheel experience is from a shallow reading of the rules and watching streamers play the game. It is definitely not combat orientated so a typical Burning Wheel session going to play very different from 5e. I would recommend watching some videos of people playing if the advancement rules don't completely ruin the game for you; I thought the social mechanics such as how you use circles to create NPCs, or social combat to determine decisions is really interesting. Advancement did seem overly complicated, with characters having to check off certain test types for a skill to advance it, but it does encourage characters to take certain risks.

The GM could also be experiencing some level of burnout, and taking a break or changing things up can help. People can try running 1 shots or mini campaigns of different systems, and would be a good opportunity to try different genres, maybe your GM would be interested in Call of Cthulhu or Pulp Cthulhu, or maybe a couple nights of paranoia could shake up the usual GM-PC dynamics, etc.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

My friend is looking for a system to jump ship to from 5e. Her sort of wishlist is:

• More of a focus on collaborative storytelling, like a PbtA game
• more systems for combat than just "If you're hitting someone with a sword you roll this ONE move"
• good systems for talking with NPCs and convincing them of things
• Actual systems that encourage roleplaying your character rather than treating it like a game to be won, and encourage you to make time for little scenes between characters
• that same feeling of growth and leveling up from D&D.

Something like a midway point between 5e and PbtA, she says.

I can list off and talk about plenty of different systems, and did, but I'm curious if people here have any suggestions I can take to her.

This list is curiously devoid of game complexity/crunch preferences.

Again, I realize it's not popular here, but Exalted is a reasonably good fit. There's a kickstarter out for the Totally not a New Edition, Essence.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/20 ... escription

Another possibility I'm guessing at is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - maybe? I haven't read or played the game.

Another possibility is using something like Mutants and Masterminds 3E but for fantasy roleplay. On the now recently defunct green ronin message boards there were some hacks on how to do it. (It's not that hard.) The basics of it were to dial the power level (equivalent of level) down, and offer powerpoints inbetween bigger level ups.

If you do some digging, there are some other anime based RPGs out there, which I believe have other systems than just combat. (Could be wrong though).

The other thing that the first 4 criteria remind me a lot of are oWoD/NWOD games.

[Prak]

Well, I was just carrying over what she told me she wanted, and as I'm in the game, I have a sense of her and the overall group's preference on complexity, so, I suppose it's my failing that there wasn't anything about complexity.

My understanding of the group is that they prefer less crunchy systems. I asked if people would be interested in a 3.5 game if I ran it, and no one was. I think, overall, the group is not really into super mechanically complex systems, and in fact recommended against Burning Wheel based on that (quite aside from my personal distaste for it from what I'd read). I think they'd be willing to handle greater complexity for the things they care about, which is, broadly, the stuff my friend specifically called out (social interactions, roleplaying incentives, etc)

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

"We want more complexity for our improv!" I would recommend FATE like others have said, in that case.

[Prak]

I'm pulling for either Fate or Blades in the Dark, but I'll have to wait and see what she decides on

[pragma]

I like Blades in the Dark a lot, it's a great rules lite, but my experience running it hasn't included a lot of satisfying combat complexity.

In spite of your friend's objections, I think D&D 5e is the one of a few games that supports tricky combat. I think she can get the roleplay incentives she wants by leaning really heavily on the D&D 5e inspiration mechanic. You could go further and treat ideals/bonds/flaws like FATE aspects to give players more control of when they gain and lose inspiration.

[Bigdy McKen]

Sounds like 13th Age to me. Definitely wouldn't recommend that game for most denners, but some of it hews pretty close to the things she's asking for:

One Unique Thing, player-defined traits, icon relationships lean into the collaborative storytelling and roleplaying she wanted.

13th Age has a lot of D&D4 in it's DNA, so it has a lot of discrete abilities with specific effects for combat. Movement is abstracted so there's less need for maps and minis, and it still has 4E's problem with hit point bloat, which is an achievement since the game only has 10 levels.

Not much in the way of social systems though, from what I remember. It's essentially just: roll die vs DC: if you succeed they'll give you a hand job and the deed to their farm, if you fail they hate you forever.

Has XP levels, feats, powers, etc. for that D&D leveling up feel.

There's also Exalted, but I get the impression she's looking for something lighter.