I was really into TTRPGs in college, but it’s been about ten years since I’ve had a stable group to play with. I’ve run a bunch of one-shots since then, mostly using systems I was already familiar with, and I’ve also played a D&D 5e campaign through Discord, but playing online just isn’t my jam.
Now my wife says a couple of people from her work would like to try the whole RPG thing. The safe bet would probably be a 5e one-shot, but I don’t like D&D or D&D-clones all that much. My usual go-to is Chronicles of Darkness, but I enjoy getting into new games, so I decided to ask what the new hot stuff is that everyone is talking about.
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. I generally prefer urban fantasy or weirdo high-concept stuff.
Do you have any suggestions?
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.
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.