I like weird old school influence stuff.

Whitehack is extremely interesting with the right group, the way magic works is a collaboration between players and the DM where the cost is influenced by how closely what you are/what the spell is called aligns with what you want to do. Also you pay HP which balances the power.

It really lets you delve into the whole vibe of terribly powerful magic with steep costs vs little cantrips. Like “fire” will be hard to use but flexible whereas “minor rend flesh” will do what it says on the tin. Then you get creative and come up with spells like “Stonewhispering” and so on.

Dolmenwood is a new one we’re trying to get to the table. Suuuuuper playable out of the box with beautiful worldbuilding and a keyed hexcrawl, town maps, encounter tables and shit. Absolutely gorgeous if you want The King of Elfland’s Daughter style adventuring with a weird fiction twist.

Worlds without number is something closer to modern DnD with the best homebrew toolkit and advice for GMs I’ve seen, too systems heavy for me though.

Edit: of course best till last is mausritter. You’re mice, inventory management is easy and meaningful, casting spells generates quests. Any setting you like, cats are basically dragons.

Loads of fun, like 2 pages of rules, instantly evocative.

D&D is always a safe bet because it’s by far the most normie and famous. With newbies, it’s tough to go wrong because they kind of “get” what’s supposed to happen with it.

But if you do want to branch out, one system I like is Monster of the Week, which has a sort of base ruleset that have been then put into a variety of settings. The base Monster of the Week is modeled a bit after Buffy the Vampire and various urban fantasy works that have followed, you don’t really have a class so much so as a character archetype. There’s a Slayer, like Buffy, but there’s also a Meddling Kid, like Scooby-Doo, and a bunch of other things like that. Part of character creation is to go around the table and decide how everyone knows each other and that’s based on the character’s archetype.

The actual mechanics are pretty straightforward. You basically have like half a dozen things you can do on your turn called “Basic Moves” and then some archetypes get a few more. So, your players can have a cheat sheet in front of them of what they can “do” and it helps keep things streamlined. The dice is just 2d6, so might be less intimidating than having to figure out the odds on a d20 versus a d4 kind of thing.

And the Monster of the Week setting specifically is pretty light hearted. So you don’t have to worry about asking for some ultra-serious engagement from some people just getting their feet wet. One of the main actions is literally called “Kick Some Ass” and that’s just how you say I’m going to do a combat action. Everyone can kind of treat it as extreme camp of a CW show or if they want to get a bit more serious, take it all the way to something like Supernatural or whatever.

if this is just a friendly one-shot with the coworkers kinda thing, you don’t gotta worry too much lmao, you could even just pick a system made for one night of fun like Boy Problems/Honey Heist/Lasers & Feelings/CBR+PNK, etc

but generally new-ish rpg trends over the last decade off the top of my biased ahh head:

the D&D-sphere is mostly 5e and Pathfinder 2E for the trad hour long combat every time someone tickles a goblin gameplay

Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark still dominate a lot of the indie-space. I think they’re great for new players, since they come with less gameplay expectations from other RPGs. Me personally, it took a while and a few attempts to get the hang of these since I came from GMing primarily 3e and 5e D&D, but I love a lot of these games now. Since it’s an indie boom, not every game is gonna be good, or even similar to each other mechanically, but

FitD/PbtA games I’d recommend: Apocalypse World 2e (Mad Max If They Had Sex), Blades in the Dark (edgy victorian burglars but london is like really fucking super haunted), Scum and Villainy (Blades in the Dark but Star Wars/Firefly/Bebop), Masks: A New Generation (Teen Titans), Slugblaster (interdimensional hover-skateboarding for clout), Chasing Adventure (D&D if it was PbtA, but like, even more than Dungeon World was), Bump in the Dark (modern day monster huntin’), Hearts of Wulin (Wuxia with a very unique approach to combat), Night Witches (Night Witches), Fellowship 2e (LotR inspired peoples vs overlord game), Girl by Moonlight (Magical Girls but Blades in the Dark), Band of Blades (On the run from the bone men)

Carved from Brindlewood is the newest boom in the pbta/fitd adjacent indie scene, its progenitor game Brindlewood Bay is essentially “what if Murder She Wrote took place in a town with a Lovecraftian cult” and approaches mystery gameplay in a pretty unique way -> players collect clues throughout the day and night, and once they have enough to collaboratively make a solid deduction, roll to see if they were right. Haven’t gotten around to trying these, but The Between is on my radar, victorian penny dreadful-esque monster hunting with these mechanics sounds fun af. Public Access seems fun too with an analog horror theme

OSR became a big thing, which is essentially an attempt to make the nostalgic ideal of D&D real: huge focus on expendable PCs, deadly traps, and players grinding their way through ridiculously deadly scenarios with out of the box thinking. Not personally experienced with this but I hear Old School Essentials, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Mothership are all good in this field

There’s a bunch of other stuff out there too, Agon 2e is a fun greek myth game with gameplay focused on contests, I’ve heard great things about Trophy Dark/Gold.

I have nothing to add but I always thought Lancer (mecha game) looked cool and Delta Green (x-files meets CIA) . But im totally out of the loop of whats cool and in and hip

I’m enjoying weird silly one shots like Goblin Errands lately. I think weird goofy one shots are having a bit of a Renaissance right now. Just sitting at a table having a goofy ass time is underrated

my experience is that pbta games work quite well with noobies. pbta/fitd still has quite a following, but it’s more of a stable current of the ttrpg landscape now, rather than the new hotness. a couple of well known urban fantast games in that space that come to mind would be Monsterhearts, Monster of the Week, or Urban Shadows, though i haven’t read or played any of those, as it isn’t a genre i usually care for.

these days, 5e is still the one big game, and most of the new games that i’ve seen get a lot of hype are essentially variants of 5e. Shadowdark, Tales of the Valiant, Level-Up, stuff like that.

I would’nt be able to speak to what is cool but I’ll share some newer titles that seem to capture the current trend.

Shadowdark is the ultimate Old School Renascence game using the style and sensibilities of classic D&D while updating it to use modern mechanics that make it more approachable.

In Mythic Bastionland you begin as a young knight errant, seeking the glory to lead warbands, earn a place in court, and rule your own domain. Glory is found in hunting the Myths of this world, manifesting them into reality while protecting the Realm from their strange influence.

Mothership a sci-fi horror RPG where you and your crew try to survive in the most inhospitable environment in the universe: outer space!

Urban Shadows is an urban fantasy tabletop roleplaying game in which mortals and monsters vie for control of a modern-day city in a political battleground layered just under the reality we think we know.

I think its a pretty great time for smaller publishers so finding something that fits the genre your group is looking for.

I know you said no DnD clones but Draw Steel and Daggerheart are pretty good alternatives, Draw Steel is very tactical where as Daggerheart has some meta aspects that help storytelling.

Pathfinder 2E is the normal “I want D&D 5e, but not D&D” option right now. A lot of people seem to like the design better.

There’s also a new one by the Roll 20 (Matt Mercer) crew, but I’m not sure if that’s out yet and I’m blanking on the name.

If you’re willing to tread outside of this lemmy instance, there’s ttrpg.network, which is an instance dedicated to discussion of tabletop rpgs. They’d definitely be clued into the new hotness.

My usual go-to is Chronicles of Darkness, but I enjoy getting into new games

Have you checked out Curseborne yet? The preliminary pdfs are floating around and it looks pretty good imo. It’s from the people (I think? It’s the same studio at least) behind NWoD/ChoD making their own unified not-World-of-Darkness setting with a unified system for mixing their own versions of all the major WoD archetypes together in a party and campaign.

About ten years ago, people wouldn’t stop talking about Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark, but that stuff didn’t really gel with my group at the time. Maybe I should give those games another try, though I’m not sure they’d work all that well with new players.

The thing about these games is they’re strict genre fiction. If you don’t have complete buy in for that particular sort of genre-writing they don’t really work. Lighter weight systems like that are also paradoxically easier to pick up but harder to play, because their lack of thoroughly enumerated rules also puts more weight on both players and GM to decide what narratively makes sense for the players to be able to do or what the results or consequences of their actions are since you’re all effectively weaving it from scratch using genre tropes.

I also have never enjoyed playing or running these games, though, for all that I get what they’re doing and feel like I meaningfully improved as a GM for other games by understanding the perspective that PbtA/FitD games are coming from.

So, there are a couple key leading design movements.

In mainstream spaces (i.e. 5e D&D-adjacent) you have a new generation of games with a focus on well-tuned tactical combat and trying to tie in more narrative mechanics for non-combat scenarios. These games are generally similar in complexity to D&D 5e, albeit with higher optimization ceilings. Examples: Pathfinder 2e, Daggerheart, Draw Steel, Lancer. I would also slot Fabula Ultima here even if the tactical combat isn’t spatial in nature.

In indie spaces, you have a lot of post-PbtA microgames, where the idea is to riff on an established mechanic with bespoke material for capturing a specific vibe. The 24XX movement is a key example. Really, any of these can be picked up and played with little prep, you just have to find something that you like. You also have diceless (and often GMless) games based on Belonging Outside Belonging, which are super narrative heavy and based on collaborative storytelling. Jenna Moran’s games (Nobilis, Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, etc…) are also a major precursor to this movement, but Jay Dragon’s games (Sleepaway, Wanderhome, Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast) are probably the most notable modern examples.

The other major indie movement is the New School Renaissance (NSR) movement, which is derived from the Old School Revival/Renaissance (OSR) movement. While the OSR movement was mainly about recapturing what was perceived to be lost modalities of play (generally based on a nostalgia for Basic/Expert D&D), NSR games take the core mechanical aspects of the OSR and apply them to more diverse genres and themes. Mothership and Mork Borg are the biggest games in this space, with a mountain of 3rd party support, but games based on Into the Odd (Bastionland, Cairn, Mausritter, etc…) are also a major current.

In addition to these design movements, you still have a lot of stable currents as well, including PbtA/FitD games, trad games published by legacy publishers (Onyx Path, Arc Dream, Chaosium, Free League, Pelgrane Press, Green Ronin, etc…) as well as a fair number of 5e-clones/hacks.