What are you doing right now? I know you’re not playing an RPG because you’re reading a blog, and doing that at the table would make you an asshole.
So, here’s a better use of your time. Choose one of these games, I’ll tell you why I love them, lovingly grab a bunch of your friends (if you don’t have friends within grabbing distance, strangers will do), and sit them down for a good ol’ time of make-believe.
Bonus: most of these games are open, hackable systems. You can make your own stuff, share it broadly, or even put on your biggest, most expensive hat (the one that says CAPITALIST in dripping, grungy letters across the front (and also the side, it’s a long word)) and try to score a buck or two by smearing your own greasy ideas into a paste made of other people’s games. You can do whatever you want, pumpkin.
The list
Eight games I love in no particular order. I love them all equally, though it is true that I love some more equally than others. This sentence only exists to prevent stacked headers
HEDGE
You are Wardens, creatures of nature stuffed full of divine power you can almost contain and barely control. Faerie forces are clamoring at the titular (heh) Hedge trying to get in. Don’t let them!
Why I love it
HEDGE is a tactical dream that demands you scream its name when you speak of it. The game is a breeze to teach, you can get started in minutes, and the rules are as abstract as this very simile — but way more satisfying.
Each playbook plays differently, and the enemies are varied as they come pouring through, desperate to get past you. Unleash awesome synergies, and immediately imbue yourself with more power. This isn’t a zero-to-hero adventure, it’s a hero-to-bigger-hero-to-oops-I-burned-too-brightly-please-remember-me-but-more-importantly-stop-the-incursion-thanks story. PLUS, the flavor text is just delightful.
Bonus: the creators are nice.
Sentinel Comics: The RPG
Sentinels of the Multiverse is a card game based off a series of comics that don’t exist. There’s a lot of lore there (some of it I have beef with), but it’s a lived-in world with established heroes and villains. Like any good1 supers game, you can also create your own.
Why I love it
The character creation in this system rules. You roll a couple dice, and combine them in various ways to pick abilities, origins, motivations, and flaws off of tables, and then get to pick your powers based on the above. It’s fun, it’s fast, and it’s way cooler than I’m making it sound.
There’s a ton of flexibility in this game, without it turning into a fight to be optimal or a buffet of power points like many supers games. There’s a great mix of narrative powers, and your abilities change and grow as the fight goes on and you get weaker. Some heroes are tanks from the go, while others only engage once they get into the red…
Sentinels is my favorite comic game, and it shines when the scenes are long, full of dynamic, comic-book style threats and environments, and defined by goals other than “punch the other guy” — but of course, there’s plenty of punching, too!
Bizarrely, the setting of this game is after the “end” of the canon world, which just means that you get to set up your own adventures on a fresh plate.
Fiasco
You are dumb criminals with big ideas. and you’re playing dumb criminals — no, no, hold your laughter.
Fiasco is elegant in its simplicity. If you’ve never played a game like this, it’s like experiencing your first euro game. There is no randomness, at least not in the ways that matter. It’s more like a LARP or a collaborative murder mystery than your traditional TTRPG. And it works.
Why I love it
Fiasco promises that you can deliver a Coen Brothers movie in about the time it takes to watch on. And it delivers on that promise. In just a couple hours, you can build a complex web of relationships, locations, items, and desires, prop them up, and then watch as everything tumbles apart.
If you’re lucky, you might come out alive and no worse off than you started.
Warning: Fiasco is an R-rated game of high-trust. Things get bloody, horny, and sad. Sometimes in that order.
A Complicated Profession
What a delightful game, I’m smiling just reading the title. You are a cartoony little space animal and also a retired bounty hunter. These days, you work on a cruise ship, and you’ve got to keep your guests happy.
Why I love it
First, for the sheer genius that your character sheet is two halves: one half is the life you left behind, and the other is the life you embrace. Over the course of the game, you lose your old skills and sharpen up new ones.
This game is fast, cozy, simple, and fun. You’ve got to use your tough, gruff bounty hunter skills to make sure the old ladies are having a good time at bingo night. I dare you not to giggle while playing this one. You can’t!
Masks: A New Generation
You are teenagers who happen to be superheroes. I said earlier that Sentinels was my favorite supers game. That’s true! Masks isn’t a superhero games. It’s a teenage soap opera about people who are also superheroes, incidentally.
Why I love it
In some superhero games, the answer to “How long does it take me to run home from Chicago” is “let’s consult this chart to see your speed score and Chicago’s distance score…” In Masks, the answer is “Just long enough that you missed picking up your sister from soccer practice, and your parents are PISSED”
Some of my favorite memories of playing RPGs are sitting around and telling a Legacy character (one whose whole shtick is living up to the legacy of a parent, in this case her dad) that maybe her brother should have been the superhero instead.
This game is PBTA at its best, with playbooks for every trope you can imagine. Secret identity? Alien? Hideous beast? All here, and each with their own prescribed arcs. Are you learning to be loved? To control your anger issues? To define your own path? Masks. It’s a game.
Plus, like most of the games on this list, Masks is open, so you can grab this template (made by friend of the blog Erin Tierney) and make your own hero playbooks
Heart
Heart is dungeon crawling designed through a narrative lense. Its sister game, Spire: The City Must Fall has you playing as opressed dark elves turned terrorists trying to overthrow society with doomed plots that not only won’t work, but will also turn your loved ones against you. Bad news!
Here, you go below the city, where everyone is evil and the brains run on time. Sorry, the trains run on brain. Sorry, the brain train run. Sorry.
Why I love it
I could tell you that Heart has a clever fallout system that makes your characters’ lives into a slowly building ball of tension that explodes, bit by bit to give them accumulating bits of unnerving, unsettling, and unwelcome tics. That they are morphing the hell around then just as must as the hell around them is morphing them.
That wouldn’t be a lie, but it wouldn’t be true, either. The reason I love Heart is because it has the best damn powers of any game ever. Spire famously has Man With A Gun, a power where your noir journalist summons a man with a gun and no particular allegiance into the scene. Heart has a man who wears armor that is also a train. Heart has a witch made out of bees. Heart has — did you hear the train one? You can have TRAIN ARMOR!
Heart is a game where you are constantly planning your own demise, because the way you die is VERY COOL! You can make a statue out of beeswax, permanently cementing yourself and another into this terrible place. You can whistle, summoning the train that has been hunting you for ages, telling it exactly where you are… knowing that in its path to run you down (and reclaim its coal-stained hide from your armor?) it will take your foes down with it.
Spire is a game about trying to rebel, and knowing you’ll fail. Heart is a game about planning to fail, and seeing what chaos you can accomplish in the meantime.
Broken Rooms
The year is 2007. The world has split into 12 realities, all of them doomed. You, like a very small percent of people, have a gene that allows you to travel between them. Oh, you also have experienced severe trauma, which gave you super powers, and the world-traveling can only happen at places of high emotion.
Why I love it
Broken Rooms has a d12 dice mechanic that matches its lore (13s are crits, and appear everywhere in the world). The setting is miserable and familiar, the quests short in nature and mirroring the heroe’s journey (easy to go down, hard to climb back “up” to the more stable worlds), and over the source of a campaign you grow more powerful and also less able to relate to those around you. You are constantly seeing suffering and losing your ability to connect as a result of it.
I’m a sucker for a game with an ending, and this is a game
13th Age
13th Age is my favorite D&D clone. My biggest gripe with it is that that’s all it’s aspiring to be. If it had the kind of crazy classes that Heart had, this game would be an absolute gem. So as much as I frown when I see “Fighter, Ranger, Wizard Rogue”, I have to smile at the sheer brilliance of the implementations.
Why I love it
People call Pathfinder 1e D&D version 3.75. They’re wrong. Pathfinder is 3.5.1. You can fit the changes from 3.5 to Pathfinder 1 on a single notecard. It doesn’t take lessons from D&D, it pretends it doesn’t exist.
13th Age is 3.75. It takes the roleplaying focus of the 3rd edition of the game and combines it with the tactics of the 4th. Gone are the massive lists of skills, replaced with an elegant background system (I have a 3 in Sailor, and that makes me pretty good at keeping my balance in rough water, surely that applies here!).
Not everything lands. One Unique Thing is a little kitchy for my taste, and I never really cared for how involved the (13) gods (“Icons”) are in play. But the things that land land hard. Each enemy has goals and objectives, and every level up matters. It’s a theatre-of-the-mind game with teeth, where powers hit 5 enemies clustered together, and most spells give you a choice: cast it big and weak, small and focused.
If you’re gonna play a D&D-like, you can do a hell of a lot worse than this one!
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This isn’t true! Marvel Heroic, for one, is an excellent supers game that launched without character creation rules and it STILL rules. ↩