Check out the follow up, 6 MORE RPGs that aren't Dungeons and Dragons, here: ua-cam.com/video/wlAcbHK0VQE/v-deo.html 6 brand new RPGs that AREN'T D&D, what more could you ask for?
Hahah! In the bottom of the screen there is a progress bar with chapter titles but the second chapter is "Simba Room" but it should be spelled Symbaroum!
I'm a farmer wrenching on a tractor in the US midwest while watching a guy talk about his favorite roll playing games across the Atlantic ocean. I love the modern world sometimes.
Where as I am about 90 miles north of where he is based (UK just not London) -- and frequently chat roleplay with a friend in Alabama... And Texas... And Michigan...
I’m in bed in the Rocky Mountains recovering from my fifth surgery this year. I don’t have a body that would let me play table top RPGs in meat space, but I have an amazing group from all across the country that plays together every week with the magic of the internet and cheap webcams. Hello everyone here, I’m so happy to know you are out there.
0:45 Blades in the Dark 5:10 Symbaroum 6:20 Dead Lands Reloaded 8:15 Song of Ice and Fire 11:29 Hot War 14:10 Cyberpunk and Shadow Run 16:53 Ten Candles 21:25 The Expanse 24:40 Call of Cthulu 27:20 Night Witches
Another good one along the plans angle is... Plans are worthless, but planning is essential. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower He used many versions of this same quote over the years and it is questioned if the quote is really his.
For those looking for a written list of the games, here you go. But make sure you still watch and see why you should play these games. 1. Blades in the Dark 2. Symbaroum 3. Deadlands Reloaded 4. The Song of Ice and Fire 5. Hot War 6. Cyberpunk / Shadowrun 7. Ten Candles 8. The Expanse 9. Call of Cthulhu 10. Night Witches
I'm surprised they don't have that in the video description, along with links to them. I suppose it's due to them just having them to create this, and they are certainly cranking out content.
Thanks for the post! Here are the time stamps: 01. BitD 00:45 02. S 05:11 03. DR 06:20 04. tSoIaF 08:11 05. HW 11:27 06. C/SR 14:03 07. 10C 16:34 08. tE 21:19 09. CoC 24:39 10. NW 27:12
@@jimn4315 Today (!), GURPS is not a good system. It used to be, but from both design and gameplay perspective, it aged and continues to age badly. (I'm not saying it doesn't work nor that it doesn't serve well to those who already play it and like it - it just isn't a game to recommend to new players anymore). Also Shadowrun is great setting and its older editions were good at the time, but it's long term decline in design throughout last 3 editions (4, 5, 6) is sadly well known in its fandom. Fate Core should be in the list. So should Savage Worlds. And GUMSHOE, probably, at least in some of its iterations (personally I'd pick Ashen Stars, but Trail of Cthulhu would be a safe bet). Hillfolk too. may be 13th age? Frankly I'm not really much impressed by this list :/
@@DrakeAurum There's also now a Cyberpunk/Climate fiction hack for it called Hack the Planet where you can play as cyberpunk stormchasers who can hack nanite infused superstorms.
There's also a Fantasy Apocalyptic War one called Band of Blades where you play the last surviving human military trying to stop world ending undead/ evil demigod
West End Games' ("D6") Star Wars, Ars Magica, Feng Shui, Runequest, Pendragon, Delta Green and Unknown Armies, the second edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and its WH40K brother, first edition Dark Heresy ... and _of course_ The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The ASOIAF game sounds as if owes a lot to Traveller, Pendragon and Ars Magica. All of the White Wolf games are mixed bags, with uneven quality and some issues to work around, but the same is certainly true of Shadowrun and Deadlands. Munchausen is the boozy old dad of GMless, highly-structured round-table games like Ten Candles (and for that matter Werewolf).
I thought I had no money left after buying dozens of dice sets for D&D. And then I watched this video and .... I now have ten more RPGs being delivered next week.
Uff, I thought I'm some wierdo that the best games I know didnt make it to the list. Dont get it wrong, the list has quality entry but what about Fate and Burning Wheel? Sure the game released only in my country wont make it here but I mention it anyway: it's called Střepy snů which means Dream Fragments. It's narrative system and the setting is base on dreams. Or the Dreams that control life of humans, their longing, feeling and so.
My games growing up were: 1. Star Wars The Role Playing Game from West End Games, 2. Rifts from Palladium, and 3. Vampire the Masquerade from White Wolf.
And if you're not into Vampires, White Wolf has a whole series of beasties. Werewolf: the Apocalpyse (for those of us who want to play eco-terrorist werewolves) Mage: the Ascension Changeling: the Dreaming (for those of us who want to be fairies trapped in human bodies) Demon: the Fallen Hunter: the Reckoning (for those of us who REALLY liked Supernatural) Etc.
I played two ongoing campaigns 'back in the day', one was a homebrew setting using the Rifts system, the other was a mash-up of Mage and Shadowrun, so similar background to you. Also played a bit of Werewolf, Cthulu and Kult, and also larped V:tm and Changling, currently I'm playing a homebrew fantasy game, so I have dabbled in a bit of everything, but I have never actually played DnD!..
Yeah I played a recent version and it was just... utterly terrible. The rules and some other stuff was so problematic that about 2-3 sessions into the campaign we got to the point things got so bad we just all decided to up and walk away from it. Bear in mind this had nothing to do with the GM, or the story setting, or characters, or players. It was due to the game itself.
1st edition Shadowrun included a note from the author claiming that, while the matrix was a great idea, something like it would never work in real life. Aaaand they also had a Poofreading Department who (in addition to failing to spot the typo in their own job description in the credits) managed to spot the missing O in Intruder Countermeasures (which made it sound rather rude).
As a long term RPer I never thought RPing would become so popular, what's more surprising to me is that D&D is the game capturing new players' attention. Personally I loathe it.
I tried convincing my players for ages to at least try somethign that is not DnD (or Pathfinder wich really is just DnD with a different name). Hope you got better luck than me.
@Kaushtubh chauhan-- Exactly such! Where Call of Cthullu and Kids on Bikes gives you a chance to possibly survive, you go into Ten Candles KNOWING the PC you make is gonna die. Honestly i can see where the charm lays in it. Your making a PC that you know has a finite time in the world, giving you the freedom to make a character you normally never would. That type of bleekness isn't for every game group,however, so i'd run it by your DM/players first.
Played this a couple of weeks ago. Everything was going 'great' for us, right up 'til the end, when everything went to shit and we all died within a few minutes. It was Glorious! (But not something I'd want to play very often.)
Just a minor word of warning. The first time I played a I bought 'long life' candles. It was a complete disaster. 6 hours into the game only one candle had gone out - and that's because someone opened a door to quickly on the way to the bathroom. Test your candles - mapmaker sure they burn for about 3 hours
Same here. Nothing says epic like a Titan Juicer throwing a Coalition hover tank at fire prepped Glitterboy. Once they plant that spike, they cant even dodge!
I love the setting of RIFTS but I hate the rules. Which is why I love savage RIFTS. With savage worlds ruleset running the game is so much easier. Playing it too. I remember playing palladium rules and going back and forth between three books trying to definitively figure out how ranged combat works.
An absolute must-play tabletop system is Paranoia. It makes for some of the most fast paced, hilarious one shots a role-player can play. Far in a dystopian future, society scrapes by in an underground complex run by a single all powerful yet thoroughly broken AI known as "Friend Computer". The players are a team of "troubleshooters" tasked with solving some problem for the computer, such as eradicating horrible mutants or exposing a treasonous secret society. Luckily, on such a dangerous mission in such a dangerous world, each player has a series of clones for the inevitability of their demise. The catch is, every player must hide that they are one of these mutants, and also a member of a treasonous secret society.
Kevin Sullivan The computer is your friend, the computer creates clones so that if you die a valiant hero of the city you may live on in spirit if not in body. Honest citizens run these risks freely, frequently and with great enthusiasm friend citizen. Not to do so is cowardice and friend citizen cowardice is treason. Please report for termination immediately friend citizen, have a nice day. I have known a group starting with fresh 6 clone sets need to recreate characters within an evenings play...
@@davidwright7193 I've been in games where I've run out of clones before getting to the mission briefing... and where I was not the only one to run out of clones on the way to the mission briefing. Ironically... those sessions were the most fun.
This definitely needs to be a thing. Lots of other tabletop channels have, like, long running campaigns and stuff or various game system reviews, but I don't know of any channel that spreads its attention like that and runs plenty of one shots of several games. That is definitely something I'll be into
I love GURPS. It's very complicated but you can play anything you can possibly think of. Half cyborg half vampire cat sure once I've played one. Jedi adept with no legs in medieval Europe sure. Dwarf techomancer news anchor yup.
The game is "front loaded"; character creation can be as complicated as you care to make it, but playing does not have to. I find it if anything easier than D&D, certainly easier than Pathfinder.
@@svennoren9047 True, in my experience a gm playing with people new to GURPS is best off making some character templates that fit setting, offer them to the players and discuss during character creation on some specifics.
GURPS is really just a pared-down version of HERO; most of the creation, action and dice conventions of both games are identical. What Steve Jackson had was an in with the S/F-Fantasy industry which got him all kinds of resource books: Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, Ringworld, Vorkosigan Saga, Auto-Duel (a rift on his own Car Wars game), WildCards, The Prisoner, etc. But the game-play is really indistinguishable from HERO (i.e., Champions). And as with HERO, if you're any good a math, you can make a 75-point character that is at least as powerful as what most people would be able to make with 200 points. Good game, but there are an easy dozen that I'd put before it an any list....
@@geekwithglasses2897 Silly Geek, doggos don't die, they go to an amazing farm north of the country, with wide space, lots of squirrels and my favorite uncle, who I haven't seen in over a decade
My favorite RPG is Mouse Guard. It has such a fun dice system that is pretty quick and the "conflict" system that can be used up and beyond commanding armies, to having a bake off or a staring contest. What is really unique and fun about this is that each player is a mouse with unique skillsets and a core belief and instincts that will be challenged through the campaign. I highly recommend checking it out! Mouse Guard RPG.
Donnie Chase I second this. I really like how you’re a mouse in a world with owls and foxes. You’re society is the underdog and while you are basically screwed on the surface, some how you always pull through with sheer will alone. I played first before I read the comics and again after I read them and both times it was magical. If you don’t like mice you can also try torch bearer which is based on mouse guard but is more traditional fantasy.
For anyone who wants a full list of the games discussed, and a small summary to remember which is which: 1 - Blades in the Dark - Steampunk heist game, with 2 - Symbaroum -Dark creepy forest RPG 3 - Deadlands - 'Weird West', the wild west with creepy, crazy magic 4 - A Song of Ice and Fire RPG - Gritty medieval houses and politics in the world of Westeros 5 - Hot War - Alternate History UK, cold war gone hot. Keep society from plunging into darkness, also mutants. Dice rolls affect characters permanently 6 - Cyberpunk (2020 or Red) - It's Cyberpunk, not too distant future, corporations have major power. Hacking is a thing. 7 - Shadowrun - As above, but with magic and fantasy races. 8 - Ten Candles - Tragic Horror RPG, the sun is dead, society is failing, everyone is going to die. One-Shot RPG 9 - The Expanse - Based on the books (and show) of the same name. Sci-Fi fun times in a gritty version of the future where humanity has colonised (in every sense of the word) the solar system. 10 - Call of Cthulu - H.P. Lovecraft is problematic, but his works are spooky. Eldritch horrors are coming and you have to investigate how, and why. 11 - Night Witches - Based on actual history, be some soviet women in WW1 planes throwing bombs at nazis and maybe dealign with sexism.
"No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength" - Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. (Yup, I'm a pedant even at six in the morning)
@Scott Whatever I'd say that the differences between V20 and V5 are a little more complicated than "V5 is garbage". Don't get me wrong, V20 is better overall, but V5 did a decent job of updating the setting - something the game was in dire need of - and introduced some new mechanics that actually work fairly well. Where V5 falls short is in the fact that, in trying to streamline mechanics which, over 20 years of editions, had gotten a bit clusterfuck-y, they went a little overboard and simplified it too much (mostly in regards to abilities, skills, and disciplines). That said, V5 is easier to learn than V20 as a result, and is therefore a better introduction to the setting for a newbie so they're not getting bogged down by the mechanical complexity right out of the gate. The same thing happened with the progression of DnD editions from 3.5 to 4th Ed, and now 5th Ed is a happy medium - I can see that happening easily with VtM.
I've never actually found the White Wolf system (Vampire, Mage, Changeling, etc) all that good. The setting is interesting, but when I've played, the rules have some serious issues and some of the stuff is so vague it's always causing "fights" in the group. Though to be fair, I haven't seen the latest 2 versions, so who knows. But with WW now being a dead company, who knows what the future of their properties will be like.
You mean "Rulesmaster." Consult 9 charts to see what your strike did. I did like the various levels for Spells and Skills though. Rolemaster's level of "crunch" would put a modern "minimalist system advocate" in a coma!
@@brettdibble2763 play-by-post is when you play an rpg on an internet forum whenever people get around to posting throughout the week rather then everyone playing at the same few hour block of time.
Play-by-post originates in snail mail. You would join a group, mail in your planned activity, then receive the results a bit later. It was adopted by BBS, Usenet, and forum members in the time real-time computing wasn’t capable of hosting multiple players at once. Play-by-mail games backed by mainframes (often a university’s “powerful” mainframe) were also called “batch games” since all the player turns received in a certain time frame were input into the mainframe all at once (in a batch) and the results calculated and sent out to the players. (Showing my age: mail and post were interchangeable prior to the 1990s: hence “post office”)
@@jamiefultz3921 i went to me rpg store yesterday and of all the games listed to start soon there was NONE from WoD. it was all shadowrun, dnd and star wars. i asked why no WoD and the naswer was a simple "there are no GMs interested". im seriously thinking on starting a table now, this scorn cannot continue
H.P. Lovecraft is probably the _best_ example of why it's important to separate the art from the artist. Yeah, he was a terrible person, but he still created one of the greatest horror stories ever written which is why he's remembered. If he hadn't written those books, pretty sure nobody would ever mention his name.
People's morals are messed up. Lovecraft may have been a racist, but the Soviet Red Army committed literal genocides (before WW2) just because they didn't like the cut of somebody's jib, or because they were political opponents--and listen to how they're described in this video. It's not even mentioned. They're called "amazing". Pretty sure genocides are a worse crime than writing racist poems. Boggles my mind. 🤯
GURPS: generic Universal role-playing system, is a role-playing system developed by Steve Jackson which you can play literally anything there are tons of other sourcebooks that you can play it's a really fun RPG.
@@kabronex9877 it's not the math that's the problem. If anything, the character creation is the part I like, even though the auditing and number crunching is way more than necessary, as are the billions of skills and how they might transfer to other skills. Where the math is a problem, the issue isn't the difficulty, it's the volume. But no, it's the core mechanics that I'm not fond of. I don't like the way combat is a bunch of missing unless you explicitly never use the basic attack, and I don't like the division of traits, and I don't like the need to budget character points, or the way that the same character concept can often be created in more and less efficient ways. I don't like how players have the memorize it look up tables, like how strength correlates to damage, or more obscure things. I also don't like how the base magic system uses Fatigue, meaning wizards are better when they're beefy. I don't like how do much of the game that you're expected to spend money on is a bunch of needless mechanical garbage that won't ever get used, and so much of what does get used is just minor variations of other things, or it's overly complicated stuff that all but the most annoying GMs who get turned on by recording dice rolls will simply handwave. I don't dislike GURPS because I can't do math, I don't like GURPS because I don't want to do math when the end result is a game with too many rules that doesn't do enough to make one setting feel different from another.
While I was fanatic for MT during its heydey, I've played/GM'd all the versions published since 1978 and switched a few years ago to the Mongoose version of Traveller. MongTrav v1 was a bit rough but MongTrav v2 seems to have polished the rough edges a bit.
@@kevinsullivan3448 Then he shouldn't be making videos like this. Not mentioning Traveller because it's old is like not mentioning ST TOS because it was from the 60's.
@@DennisMoore664 That's the best reason not to mention STtOS. If you weren't alive to watch it the first time you shouldn't sully it with your eyeballs.
Friend computer is always right. Saying otherwise is treason. Knowing the rules (which edition) is a treasonous activity and should be terminated immediately. Here is your ticket to self termination booth.
I love the cypher system. The games of Numenera I’ve played were like being in a story that would’ve been drawn by Moebius in the pages of Heavy Metal. And the system made everything flow nicely without too much crunch. Great for focusing on roleplay and storytelling.
Props for posting about Deadlands! It's one of my favorite RPGs that almost nobody has heard of. You missed one of the big highlights though. It gives people a great reason to do terrible impressions of various American accents. ;)
Shout outs to my favorite tabletop games. Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars RPG - the buy in is a little hefty but i LOVE the narrative dice system. And Mutants and Masterminds - anytime i can play a Super Hero/ villain i am there. Crunch is hefty though.
Definitely was hoping to see FFG Star Wars on this list! Would love to hear Johnny's opinion of it. The narrative dice is my favorite dice system just because of the scenarios it can create and how well it captures the essence of the Star Wars movies.
@@Thwarten I was hoping to see it too, but he did make a point of saying he wasn't a big one for RPGs in established properties, so that may have been a barrier for him moreso than The Expanse and SoIaF. But who knows, if enough people ask for it, he might give it a proper review on here.
Edge of the Empire is definitely my favorite RPG because nothing can beat the fun factor of force points and the utility of the scene as opposed to long/short rest system. That and skill trees are muy nice to track character growth.
Through the magic of Kickstarter, we got to play Blades in the Dark while it was in development. We had a truly lovely (if that word can be applied to a game of Blades) game and a ton of fun building up our crew. Blades to us always felt like we were right on the edge of disaster and hanging on by the skin of our teeth. I particularly LOVE LOVE LOVE the flashback mechanic and think it is one of the best design elements I’ve seen in an RPG in a very long time. Ten Candles is one of those harrowing experiences as an rpg player that leaves you walking away from the game going, “what just happened? Did I have a good time? Or should I seek therapy?” Another game that’s just coming out that is truly brilliant is Icarus. I got to play it with the developer and it is one of the most intriguing and novel games I’ve seen in a very long time. I highly recommend checking it out. I could ramble on about more games and the games that you talked about but people don’t really want to hear that. Cheers, JiB
Rolemaster is my all time favorite, beating out DnD, in my mind, back in the 80s. It also had Tolkien's Middle Earth as a setting available, so double win.
Loved Rolemaster after my group "graduated" to it from MERP in the late 80's - early 90's. If I did it again I'd probably leave out every Companion past 3, maybe even 2 though.
Spire is glorious and has is one of the most evocative settings I've ever read. The Appendix for Goats is gold and I love the Art Deco inspired designs they used throughout the book.
The old Marvel role playing game had an amazing system that really worked well! You should check it out sometime...it's amazing they created a workable system that can handle such a diverse universe full of different power types and sets. They also had a karma system so good characters lost karma when they did bad things and gained it when doing good things...like experience points that can also be taken away; you could also spend karma in an emergency to modify a role as a last resort. Amazing system from top to bottom.
Only problem I had with it was the complete reliance on so much randomization of powers and stats. Every party I ran with had two or three near useless characters and one who had Monstrous level stats and universally useful powers.
"From the depths of hell in silence Cast their spells, explosive violence Russian night time flight perfected Flawless vision, undetected" Sorry couldn't help myself.
One of my favorites to play as an RPG is Rifts. Rifts premise is lay lines pop up all over the world allowing for mutations and magic as well as odd occurrences. The lay lines can produce different realities or timelines if you go into them. Which creates interesting and unique takes on any genre of RPGs. Want a Superhero style character next to a mutant dog, next to a Terminator styled robot going into a Rift and appearing in a D&D styled world it's viable. The Four Horsemen of Apocalypse roamed the lands of Africa, Mexico was controlled by Vampires, Atlantis rose from the sea, and is controlled by dragons. The options were endless.
Also of note - *Earthdawn:* the fantasy world setting from far in the past of Shadowrun en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthdawn *Amber RPG:* A diceless RPG set in Roger Zelazny's Amber multiverse en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game *In Nomine:* Angels and demons playing out an eternal war on Earth, by SJG en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Nomine_(role-playing_game) *Rifts:* A future Earth in which a catastrophe caused dimensional rifts to open all over the planet turning it into an apocalyptic Multiversal nexus en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifts_(role-playing_game) *All Flesh Must Be Eaten:* A zombie survival RPG with a great game system en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Flesh_Must_Be_Eaten *Paranoia:* Just an hilariously good time en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)
I LOVE The Expanse and all the AGE games. Edit for context: The Expanse RPG uses what's called the Adventure Game Engine, which is a system that the company who made The Expanse RPG also used to make 4 other games. They're all 5 of them (mostly) compatible with each other, which means if you're playing Modern AGE you can have a weird one-off quest where you meet a character from The Expanse who somehow ended up in modern day chicago and you have to get them back into their proper world/time. I like some of them better than others, but they are all really fun. Please if you are reading this comment, do as the video says and check out The Expanse and its sister games. The Expanse, Modern AGE, Fantasy AGE, Dragon AGE, and Blue Rose.
probably because The New World Of Darkness isn't THAT good and the new Old World Of Darkness seems to be quite......tailored for safe spaces? Dunno how to put it.
I wonder if the flashback system from Blades In The Dark could be showed into Shadowrun, it could use something to make those painful "planning" hours go away.
@Paul Gauthier Sure, FitD Shadowrun would be ideal, haha! I keep meaning to check out the existing FitD cyberpunk game, but can't say I was super excited by the brief description. The Sprawl is pretty good and I've used it to run the CP2020 setting with some success, but those are slightly different animals on both counts.
The World Of Darkness games have been my favourite, with vampire at the top of those! Also picked up a game called Cavemaster recently which plays using stones, which seems really evocative with the setting in the mechanics. In the same way that Fate Of The Norns: Ragnarok does by using runes instead of dice!
Yes, I had an ongoing World of Darkness group in high school. We played Vampire, Werewolf and Changling. I still have about 30 books from the 90s that I wish I could get more use out of.
For a game with a contemporary setting and a heavy focus on roleplay it's hard to beat the WoD stuff. Vampire was always my favorite. Very political to begin with and it was easy as a storyteller to scale your campaigns. Did you want more intrigue than combat tonight? Simple to do. More combat focus tonight? Also easy. I was never a stickler for dice, though we rolled a fair bit, but I always felt it was a strength of the game because it was just as fulfilling to have a single night mission as it was to have a year long campaign.
Here's the games in case anyone wants a list. 1 - Blades in the Dark 2 - Symbaroum 3 - Deadlands 4 - A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying 5 - Hot War 6 - Cyberpunk 6.5 - Shadowrun 7 - Ten Candles 8 - The Expanse Roleplaying Game 9 - Call of Cthulu 10 - Night Witches
I didn't know that game. As a flight combat simulator and RPGs lover I am interested in war planes pilot RPGs. Can you tell me something more about the witches game?
I'm not surprised. Vampire can be a bit contentious and deals with a lot of topics that aren't everyone's jam. Anima on the other hand just isn't a very good game. It's super broken and not just because the translation is terrible.
Rifts is an awesome RPG. Anima is worth it just for the artwork but is also very fun to play. Dark Heresy has always been a favorite. Feng Shui and Paranoia were fun too heh.
Night Witches: also an absolute great song of the band Sabaton. Shadowrun is the only P&P I played so far, it's very good fun. Ah, I've played also another game: Earthdawn. But what that one is is basically Shadowrun minus the cyber elements, set in a Medieval-esque timeline. But it plays in the Shadowrun universe, created by the same guy(s) afaik. I'd love to get back into roleplaying... Do you also know other systems, like The Dark Eye or The World of Darkness (Vampire and Werewolf), and if so, could you address these? Thank you for this video, it's one of the formats I looked forward to the most when you started the Dicebreaker project.
true, there are strong hints that Earthdawn & Shadowrun are set in the same game universe. just that these settings are separated by 6000 years(or is it 12000?). one thing though, game mechanics very, very different from each other. for example, with Earthdawn, a player needs, at most, 2 each of ALL the types of dice(d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 & d20). Shadowrun, you MUST have the infamous 'cube of dice'. holds 3 x 3 x 4 d6's. 36 in total. pretty sure Shadowrun is the main reason why these cubes are sold most if not all gaming stores.
My thought on the list: 1. Blades in the Dark: a very changed version PbtA system. Recommending scum and villainy or hack the planet that build upon the Blades changed rule for scifi or cyberpunk style. There is also City of Mist that is also really interesting take on the system 2. Symbaroum: from the same developer that created Mutant Year Zero. There is also tales from the loop (detective story ala stranger things) and coriolis (scifi stories) from them. 3. Deadlands reloaded: well there are other savage world setting that s really good. There is also the deadlands hell on earth setting 4. Song of ice and fire: one problem with it is that it's quite easy to game the system if you put your mind to it. One system that I really like from the same publisher is Mutants & Masterminds 3E. 5. Hot War: never tried or read the rule so I don't know much, but it seems really good. 6. Shadowrun / Cyberpunk: I really love shadowrun despite all of its flaws & the massive ammount of d6 I need to carry for playing. Caution the rule can be really inconsistent sometimes. For Cyberpunk, there is also the Witcher rpg using the same rule. 7. Ten Candles: never know this exist. Definitely will check it out. but I love Fiasco, a game which the character also more or less almost always lose in some ways. 8. The Expanse: using the AGE system (Fantasy Age, Modern Age) that also powers Dragon Age RPG for more fantasy spin. 9. Call of Cthulhu: really good detective game. If you don't fancy the world setting but like the detective stories, there is the Gumshoe system that have more wacky (TimeWatch) or super power (Mutant City Blues) setting for the detective genre. 10. Night Wiches: another PbtA games. There is a lot of setting and genre for PbtA. My favorite is Mask and Monster Hearts. Have heard good things about other but haven't really played them only read through some of the book. Other system that I like but not on the list : Vampire the Masquerade, Stars Without Numbers, Numenera (Cypher System), Capers, FATE Core
About the other systems you mention: VtM(WoD) is a very good game but you need the right kind of players for it to be good. Stars W/O Numbers and Numenera both suffer from weak rulesets. In Stars the game goes from if I get hit once I am gonna die to getting hit 10 or so times and looking at the enemy and saying is that the best you got. In Numenera, I built a character and without even trying as a tier 2, I was singlehandedly defeating tier 6 threats w/o hardly breaking a sweat. FATE Core is another one that requires a certain type of player for it to be successful.
Symbaroum doesn't use the Year Zero System. It is it's own thing. It has roll low d20 mechanics.The year zero system uses d6's. Regardless of the system, Symbaroum's setting is fantastic.
@@EricEsenwine ah sorry the one with year zero is the forbidden land. well I have just skim through symbaroum rulebook. Haven't got time to play. But it's from the same dev at least right.
@@dragonjaw95 ahh yeah... Jarningren the company that produced Symbaroum merged with Free League a few years after the games release. Its a different system but distributed by the same developers of the Year Zero system! Cheers
Man been ages since I thought about Monster Hearts, I've never played such absolute trainwrecks of petty awkwardness as playing a teenager as a teenager.
My favorite RPG-System is and always will be Dark Heresy. Some other people in the comment section have explained the setting already, so I won't talk too much about it. What I simply love about it is that you are not some random guy like in most other RPGs. You are part of the Inquisition and you're in because you have exeeding qualities and skills. You are part of humanity's best 1 or 2 percent. And still the galaxy is terrifying. As the game progresses you either work your way up, joining the ranks of the 0,1% of the Imperium's most capable servants, or die trying. But the horrors and dangers won't end, they even became worse. You can become insanely powerful. By level 6 a player character has the authority to command platoons of soldiers, give orders to high ranking police officers or demand audiences from planetary gouverners. But challenge keeps comming. You will never be save, never be powerful enough to vanquish all resistance. And most likely, you will die by horrible means. Pretty grimdark. But I also love the rules. Your character seldom feels incompetent in what he should be good at. What was challenging or impossible at early levels becomes mudane later on, but new problem arrive which are much harder to deal with. Combat is complex but not as rule-riddled like Shadowrun or DSA. You have a good range of interesting manouver choices and an easy way of implementing boni or mali into rolls. Equipment and skills increases your efficience in combat but won't make you invulnurable or unbeatable. Low tier weaponry won't be of any use later on but a chain sword will always be a danger to your character's life. Damage and healing is tough and will make you wary of running into combat mindlessly. Special damage like falling is devastating, so no falling down a tower and walking away like in D&D. A few meters can break your bones, a few more will kill you. But the worst thing is being ablaze. Don't you ever catch fire in Dark Heresy. You will die... Did I mention the 8 pages of rules all about maiming and spectacular death? Limb loss is no rare sight in Dark Heresy. A mechanic that can break your group instantly is Fear. Frightening creatures and objects have a Fear Rating forcing you to roll Willpower when encountering them. Failling this test can have varying consequences from simple shaking over passing out to insane giggling and shooting comrads. It makes fighting a Daemon much more intense and challenging, as should be. You can and will also accumulate Insanity and Corruption of the course of your campaign, giving you a sense of the horrors and deviance your character has witnessed. Insanity can be interesting to play and renders you immune to some frights, yet corruption has no benefit and will screw you over. I could praise the system for ages... But I'll stop here. If you like or love Warhammer 40k and Pen&Paper, give it a try. The Inquisition demands your service, acolyte!
I'd recommend the game Paranoia XP. It's one of the few games I've played where death is solved through excessive cloning, and that the entire team isn't supposed to trust each other.
I actually started playing and running RPGs with other systems and didn't try D&D until years later. I love the Warhammer settings (both 40k and Fantasy) so when Dark Heresy was released I first read it mostly for the fluff. But after the "Inquisitor's Handbook" came out I didn't want to just read the splatbook so I found a group online and started playing. That must've been late 2008 and ever since that first campaign I was hooked. Dark Heresy pulled me into the hobby and got me started as a GM too so I still love it to death but I did branch out and tried a ton of other systems too. The list in no particular order: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, Only War, Black Crusade, Mouse Guard, Paranoia (XP and the new one), Delta Green, Traveller (2008 edition), Kill Puppies for Satan, Dungeon World, 7th Sea and a AD&D 2E Birthright campaign. I also decided to introduce my friends to the hobby by running a game of Pathfinder for them. Eight years later I'm still running that very same campaign where they just hit level 12... In my defence, we play maybe once every two months because scheduling a session with eight adults is a bloody nightmare.
Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke was not so pithy as MacArthur's paraphrase: "The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon's saying: 'I have never had a plan of operations.' Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."
I'd nominate Mouse Guard (I'm a massive fan of its "fail-forwards" mechanic), and Fate Accelerated Edition (story collaboration and world creation done on the fly with minimal rules).
I was slightly upset that Rifts, by Palladium Books, didn't make your list. The World is awesome. The system is hinky, but the breadth of characters is unmatched.
1.) Shadow of the Demon Lord. (Same creator of Song of Ice and Fire RPG) 2.) Shadow of the Demon Lord 3.) Call of Cthulhu 4.) Cypher system ( the strange, Numenera, God’s of the fall) 5.) Mage the Awakening 6.) Warhammer fantasy 2ed 7.) Mutants and Masterminds/Blood of Heroes 8.) Dungeon Crawler Classic 9.) Shadow of the Demon Lord 10.) Shadow of the Demon Lord
I really love The Burning Wheel. It was one of the first campaign I was in. To date it’s the game the party was responsible for a theatre burning down after we put on a puppet show. The reviews of the show were excellent though. Also if you like Call of Cthulhu and The Expanse, you need to play Eclipse Phase. Existential horror, digital immortality, hardish sci-fi and you can be an octopus
I saw that EP is releasing a 2E, so I'm keeping an eye out for that since a lot of new editions that have come out this year seem to have streamlined a lot of their games (Pathfinder is one I'm thinking of in particular).
@@nikkorocksalot5254 Oooh, I'm gonna take a look at the PDF, then. I like me physical books for reading seriously and appreciating the art, but nothing beats the convenience factor of just having a PDF on nearly any computer now.
Games mentioned that use a narrative-based system based on the Apocalypse Engine that adds specialized gameplay mechanisms. (They are so radically-different from the baseline Apocalypse Engine that they don't get the "Powered By The Apocalypse" badge on the cover.) 00:45 *_Blades in the Dark_* [One-Seven Productions, 2017] - A heist-based RPG. 27:13 *_Night Witches_* [Bully Pulpit Games, 2015] - A warfighting-based RPG. One mechanism is that the group each takes it in turn being gamemaster and the others play the characters. Another is that gameplay is divided into Day (for interpersonal conflicts) and Night (for combat missions).
I love Shadowrun, but I don't really like the newer editions after 3rd or maybe 4th. They need to reboot and get back to the roots of the game, it has become to fantastical in the story and world they have built with the newer editions and lost a lot of the gritty cyberpunk feel in my opinion.
OD-X I played a homebrewish version of the newest shadowrun. In it we were the police and it was just corruption left and right on multiple occasions we would get notes from higher ups telling us to ignore something or stop looking into a case. One time we didn’t follow the suggestions and we almost got blown up
My top 5 are 1 cyberpunk 2 vampire the masquerade 3 sla industries 4 paranoia 5 call of cthulu I watched u for the 1st time and i enjoyed so i have subscribed an notified the bell icon and look forward to more to come
Through the Breach by Wyrd is easily my favorite although being a relative newcomer in the pool. Conceptually different enough that it feels fresh. Game play is relatively easy to understand. No dice, just fate decks. Character creation is not as straightforward and easy to understand as I would have liked, but once you figure it out, it is VERY entertaining.
I think it's interesting how important it is to mention Lovecrafts racism, even though it wasn't something noteworthy back when Lovecraft lived, but not mentioning how horrible the soviets were or how the nightwitches also threw bombs into villages and killed civillians.
There have been Marxist professors infecting American university campuses since the 1930s, although now most are too young to ever have received checks from Moscow. They infected the minds of American youth, starting with the Hippies, and now decaying to the Antifa-types and the Millennials although there is resistance to their "obey my opinions for marks" plan. They think championing the causes of screamer-groups is more important than creating a strong, unified nation. Meanwhile, they excuse the 100 million murders from the Communist system.
27:11 *Night Witches* The planes they flew (Polikarpov Po-2 ) were actually a recent design, first flown in 1928 and used in military service until 1953 (and in Warsaw Pact training and reserve units until 1959). It was a double open cockpit design that was designed as a trainer (much like the similar British Tiger Moth 2). It was also used as a liaison, casualty evacuation, and supply aircraft . They were modified with bomb racks and flown by light bomber squadrons from 1941, but the Night Witches were the only all female squadron. Most had been trained by the Komsomol youth organization to fly gliders and planes before the war. They were used as pilots because they could be used to free up male pilots to fly front-line aircraft. Like other Soviet military personnel they were not treated as prisoners of war when captured and were often executed (if they were lucky). There is an excellent graphic novel ( _Night Witches_ ) by Garth Ennis that may have inspired the game.
I'm with you. I played it for awhile, and if you like something from one of the other Palladian games you can easily bring it into Rifts. Like I said. I agree with you
@@mikebanks4195 The two times I played GURPS I didn't enjoy it. Hard to tell if it was the GM or the group or the system, but I went right back to Rifts. Still do, though I enjoy DnD and such just as much. Rifts was my first gaming experience.
Rifts? Fun game, terrible system. Savage Worlds Rifts is apparently quite playable (although I'm not a fan of Savage Worlds, anything is better than the palladium house system) but it's too little, too late.
Ryuutama is the RPG I’d like to throw into the mix. It’s a nice, easy to learn game about a group of villagers going on a journey. The GM “plays” a character that follows the group and writes down the story of their journey. It’s the only RPG I’ve ever gotten my wife to play because she could mechanically start out with a kitten to travel with.
Rules are generally okay. The problem was that the book & art layout wasn't as good as most other high quality RPGs coming out these days. I also felt there was a lack of art in it. That said, I would prefer using W&G's system over the FFG version's d100 system which is overloaded with a bit too much DRM hell. I say that as someone who has loved WFRP since 1st edition which uses the same core. FFG 40k just adds even more crunching and numbers everywhere. I'll still keep them all, however.
I've played Rifts. I totally understand why is WASN'T included. LOL. Those who like it really do like it but I didn't like the power creep from one book to the next in the series.
@@moguldamongrel3054 Things getting more powerful overtime. For example the base book for Rifts had all the races (RCC) and classes (OCC) to pick from. Great. Then the Atlantis supplement came out. Starter characters from that book could shred a whole party of base book characters. Then the England supplement came out and - wait for it - starter characters from that book could shred parties or individuals from the the Atlantis group. It went on and on. Whole character classes and races became utterly nonviable.
also, speaking of one-shot RPG's, literally anything by Grant Howitt is pure gold. Goblin Quest, Crash Pandas, and Honey Heist are all wonderfully silly games that can be played by anyone with minimal setup, and Goblin Quest is a DM-less system which is a huge plus.
To throw my recommendation out there: Riddle of Steel. Riddle of Steel isn't a great system in lots of ways, but the combat is fantastic. It takes the super abstracted combat found in almost every other RPG, and turns it into an incredible minigame (well, a couple of minigames, really) that involves every cut, and every thrust. It can be a little weird to get your head around initially, but once you do, combat starts to speed up a bit, and it leads to some very dramatic and emotionally charged fights, as every single move can result in death and maiming. it has a few other good features, and a few features that are...not so good, but it's well worth a look. Especially if you were wanting something a little bit more visceral. The combat system is especially good for low magic, and historical, games.
I recall loving Rolemaster back in the day, along with MERP. I'm planning on picking up a few HARP books as soon as they finally get the Bestiary they've been working on out the door.
Here is my add list: I.C.E-Rolemaster, GDW-Traveller, Champions, Gamma World, Boot Hill, (already mentioned: Rifts). While I haven't played D&D since the 80's, I love how the industry is getting a second chance and the dozens and dozens of games I've played for the last 30+ years are getting a major come back!
Aye, was looking for that. You either got the (UGE) meta-genes to be an elf or a dwarf, or you don't. If you do, but the mana is low, you don't develop as anything but a normal human (or awaken to magic, for that matter). If you do, AND the mana is sufficient, BUT a certain something goes (goblinization) odd (wrong, even according to elves and dwarves), elves become orcs instead and dwarves becomes trolls instead. Born at the right time, your baby might've popped out knife-eared, due to elf genes you didn't know you had; then, you might even pop your own tusks, due to goblinizing the same genes. You don't do between.
Volume level of 99% of video: 30 Volume level of duck quack: 100 QUACK! Great subject, though - I love that D&D is getting so much love these days, but it's never been my favorite system. Good to see some spotlight on worthy alternatives.
Check out the follow up, 6 MORE RPGs that aren't Dungeons and Dragons, here: ua-cam.com/video/wlAcbHK0VQE/v-deo.html
6 brand new RPGs that AREN'T D&D, what more could you ask for?
Can you put time stamps in the video?
Hahah! In the bottom of the screen there is a progress bar with chapter titles but the second chapter is "Simba Room" but it should be spelled Symbaroum!
I'm a farmer wrenching on a tractor in the US midwest while watching a guy talk about his favorite roll playing games across the Atlantic ocean. I love the modern world sometimes.
@@loveblanket6512 Hello! you're not too far away.
Where as I am about 90 miles north of where he is based (UK just not London) -- and frequently chat roleplay with a friend in Alabama... And Texas... And Michigan...
Also Ohio and I absolutely feel this. The world can be good.
I’m in bed in the Rocky Mountains recovering from my fifth surgery this year. I don’t have a body that would let me play table top RPGs in meat space, but I have an amazing group from all across the country that plays together every week with the magic of the internet and cheap webcams. Hello everyone here, I’m so happy to know you are out there.
Gamer from Michigan checking when you posted this and realizing I got a LATE start to today.
0:45 Blades in the Dark
5:10 Symbaroum
6:20 Dead Lands Reloaded
8:15 Song of Ice and Fire
11:29 Hot War
14:10 Cyberpunk and Shadow Run
16:53 Ten Candles
21:25 The Expanse
24:40 Call of Cthulu
27:20 Night Witches
@band thingy. Thank you, I will have to try and search for "Symbaroum"
I've been playing rpg's since the end of the 80s and i've heard of two from the list. Lol
Thanks the captions called the second one Simba Room and I couldn't find it.
@@BunnyTheOverlord Honestly, who do I have to kill to have some Champions/Hero System love?
Sad star wars isn't listed. By ffg
“No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Not unlike Mike Tyson's "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."
I was mistaken. Cheers mate
I kind of like "This is the perfect time for Plan B."
"Do we even have a Plan B?"
"Nope. But this is the time for one..."
Thank you. I first heard the line from Batman in "Young Justice"
Another good one along the plans angle is...
Plans are worthless, but planning is essential.
U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower
He used many versions of this same quote over the years and it is questioned if the quote is really his.
For those looking for a written list of the games, here you go. But make sure you still watch and see why you should play these games.
1. Blades in the Dark
2. Symbaroum
3. Deadlands Reloaded
4. The Song of Ice and Fire
5. Hot War
6. Cyberpunk / Shadowrun
7. Ten Candles
8. The Expanse
9. Call of Cthulhu
10. Night Witches
I'm surprised they don't have that in the video description, along with links to them. I suppose it's due to them just having them to create this, and they are certainly cranking out content.
Aww man no GURPS, guess he picked some super popular games and a good amount of obscure ones.
Omg thank you for making this list
Thanks for the post! Here are the time stamps:
01. BitD 00:45
02. S 05:11
03. DR 06:20
04. tSoIaF 08:11
05. HW 11:27
06. C/SR 14:03
07. 10C 16:34
08. tE 21:19
09. CoC 24:39
10. NW 27:12
@@jimn4315 Today (!), GURPS is not a good system. It used to be, but from both design and gameplay perspective, it aged and continues to age badly. (I'm not saying it doesn't work nor that it doesn't serve well to those who already play it and like it - it just isn't a game to recommend to new players anymore).
Also Shadowrun is great setting and its older editions were good at the time, but it's long term decline in design throughout last 3 editions (4, 5, 6) is sadly well known in its fandom.
Fate Core should be in the list. So should Savage Worlds. And GUMSHOE, probably, at least in some of its iterations (personally I'd pick Ashen Stars, but Trail of Cthulhu would be a safe bet). Hillfolk too. may be 13th age?
Frankly I'm not really much impressed by this list :/
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
-Moltke The Elder
"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth"
- Mike Tyson
I like that one even more.
I love it when a plan comes together
Col. John Smith aka Hannibal
Love it
My ex Army roommate says this us true AF
Steampunk? Purposely playing the badguys? Retcon skill checks? Excuse me I need to go find this game
Plus it has a sci-fi offshoot called Scum & Villainy which is great for anything from Star Wars to Firefly.
@@DrakeAurum There's also now a Cyberpunk/Climate fiction hack for it called Hack the Planet where you can play as cyberpunk stormchasers who can hack nanite infused superstorms.
There's also a Fantasy Apocalyptic War one called Band of Blades where you play the last surviving human military trying to stop world ending undead/ evil demigod
And Adam Koebel is making a psychedelic space wizard's hack
Do it! My friends and I have had such a blast with it!
Great video! Needs a part 2: Ten *MORE* RPG'S that aren't Dungeons and Dragons!
Part 2 better have goblin quest
Best have Mork Borg in there!
Please!!! Part 2!!
I hope mouse guard will be in the presumeable second one
West End Games' ("D6") Star Wars, Ars Magica, Feng Shui, Runequest, Pendragon, Delta Green and Unknown Armies, the second edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and its WH40K brother, first edition Dark Heresy ... and _of course_ The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The ASOIAF game sounds as if owes a lot to Traveller, Pendragon and Ars Magica. All of the White Wolf games are mixed bags, with uneven quality and some issues to work around, but the same is certainly true of Shadowrun and Deadlands. Munchausen is the boozy old dad of GMless, highly-structured round-table games like Ten Candles (and for that matter Werewolf).
Paranoia! :-D Who remembers the insanity of that one? Been a few years since I played it, but maybe I need to change that. :-)
There is a video game coming out, soon
Oh man! lol I am curious to see how that plays out. :-)
I'm sorry but you aren't of sufficient clearance for those memories. Report to the Happy Center of Bliss for a gentle mindscrub. Activate a new clone.
LOL! @Silvadel Shaladin knows the drill! ;-)
Send in the clones, baby!
I thought I had no money left after buying dozens of dice sets for D&D.
And then I watched this video and .... I now have ten more RPGs being delivered next week.
@@Glassboxgames I do play them... not as often as I'd like.
But let's put it this way: if I were a dragon, tabletop RPGs would be my horde.
What job do you have ?
My top three would be
1. WH40k Dark Heresy
2. Exalted
3. World of Darkness (Mage and Werewolves specifically)
Werewolf is a great game
Which edition of Dark Heresy though?
@@jiriz0r 1°
Uff, I thought I'm some wierdo that the best games I know didnt make it to the list. Dont get it wrong, the list has quality entry but what about Fate and Burning Wheel?
Sure the game released only in my country wont make it here but I mention it anyway: it's called Střepy snů which means Dream Fragments. It's narrative system and the setting is base on dreams. Or the Dreams that control life of humans, their longing, feeling and so.
I just got Dark Heresy from a humble bundle and it’s so good. My friends and I can’t get enough of it.
My games growing up were:
1. Star Wars The Role Playing Game from West End Games,
2. Rifts from Palladium, and
3. Vampire the Masquerade from White Wolf.
And if you're not into Vampires, White Wolf has a whole series of beasties.
Werewolf: the Apocalpyse (for those of us who want to play eco-terrorist werewolves)
Mage: the Ascension
Changeling: the Dreaming (for those of us who want to be fairies trapped in human bodies)
Demon: the Fallen
Hunter: the Reckoning (for those of us who REALLY liked Supernatural)
Etc.
West End Games Star Wars. Quixotic jedi. Good times...
h3lblad3 you forgot wraith the oblivion, for those people who thought vampire wasn’t depressing enough.
I played two ongoing campaigns 'back in the day', one was a homebrew setting using the Rifts system, the other was a mash-up of Mage and Shadowrun, so similar background to you. Also played a bit of Werewolf, Cthulu and Kult, and also larped V:tm and Changling, currently I'm playing a homebrew fantasy game, so I have dabbled in a bit of everything, but I have never actually played DnD!..
Loved Star Wars The Roleplaying Game. I just started putting out videos taking about this game.
I'm a massive fan of Shadowrun, but that series is in need of an editor. Any editor. A single proofreader, anything.
Shadowrun is amazing and great, but i refuse to play 6th edition, made it way way too simple
Yeah I played a recent version and it was just... utterly terrible. The rules and some other stuff was so problematic that about 2-3 sessions into the campaign we got to the point things got so bad we just all decided to up and walk away from it. Bear in mind this had nothing to do with the GM, or the story setting, or characters, or players. It was due to the game itself.
We always played w GURPS rules.
@@keithb6344 Everything on this list is better with GURPS rules
1st edition Shadowrun included a note from the author claiming that, while the matrix was a great idea, something like it would never work in real life. Aaaand they also had a Poofreading Department who (in addition to failing to spot the typo in their own job description in the credits) managed to spot the missing O in Intruder Countermeasures (which made it sound rather rude).
*casually forwards this to my players*
As a long term RPer I never thought RPing would become so popular, what's more surprising to me is that D&D is the game capturing new players' attention. Personally I loathe it.
Caitlin RC I literally just did this
Lol yuuuup
Me toooo
I tried convincing my players for ages to at least try somethign that is not DnD (or Pathfinder wich really is just DnD with a different name).
Hope you got better luck than me.
Tales from the Loop. I absolutely adore the 80th feeling it conveys.... A simple system to develop a story together.
So ten candles is like a kobayashi maru exam of table top RPG games
@Kaushtubh chauhan-- Exactly such! Where Call of Cthullu and Kids on Bikes gives you a chance to possibly survive, you go into Ten Candles KNOWING the PC you make is gonna die. Honestly i can see where the charm lays in it. Your making a PC that you know has a finite time in the world, giving you the freedom to make a character you normally never would. That type of bleekness isn't for every game group,however, so i'd run it by your DM/players first.
Played this a couple of weeks ago. Everything was going 'great' for us, right up 'til the end, when everything went to shit and we all died within a few minutes. It was Glorious! (But not something I'd want to play very often.)
There was a few different games run from another stream, probably easy to find searching for Ten Candles, that I thought were REALLY REALLY good!
It SUUUUUUUUCKS. The best way to play is to throw the game in the trash and never play it.
Just a minor word of warning. The first time I played a
I bought 'long life' candles. It was a complete disaster. 6 hours into the game only one candle had gone out - and that's because someone opened a door to quickly on the way to the bathroom.
Test your candles - mapmaker sure they burn for about 3 hours
Rifts/Palladium RPG will always have a special place in my heart.
Same here. Nothing says epic like a Titan Juicer throwing a Coalition hover tank at fire prepped Glitterboy. Once they plant that spike, they cant even dodge!
Damn right!
I love the setting of RIFTS but I hate the rules. Which is why I love savage RIFTS. With savage worlds ruleset running the game is so much easier. Playing it too. I remember playing palladium rules and going back and forth between three books trying to definitively figure out how ranged combat works.
@@cody-adricharper5848 Part of what I like about it is the rules and character creation.
@Scott Whatever the setting is only as good as the GM.
An absolute must-play tabletop system is Paranoia. It makes for some of the most fast paced, hilarious one shots a role-player can play.
Far in a dystopian future, society scrapes by in an underground complex run by a single all powerful yet thoroughly broken AI known as "Friend Computer". The players are a team of "troubleshooters" tasked with solving some problem for the computer, such as eradicating horrible mutants or exposing a treasonous secret society. Luckily, on such a dangerous mission in such a dangerous world, each player has a series of clones for the inevitability of their demise. The catch is, every player must hide that they are one of these mutants, and also a member of a treasonous secret society.
One shot? But you get 5 clones...
Kevin Sullivan The computer is your friend, the computer creates clones so that if you die a valiant hero of the city you may live on in spirit if not in body. Honest citizens run these risks freely, frequently and with great enthusiasm friend citizen. Not to do so is cowardice and friend citizen cowardice is treason. Please report for termination immediately friend citizen, have a nice day.
I have known a group starting with fresh 6 clone sets need to recreate characters within an evenings play...
@@davidwright7193 I've been in games where I've run out of clones before getting to the mission briefing... and where I was not the only one to run out of clones on the way to the mission briefing. Ironically... those sessions were the most fun.
This is absolutely great content for this channel. I'd love to see one-shots of each of these games to see how they play.
I really want that myself.
The way Will talks about Ten Candles just makes me wanna see a playing-in-the-dark session
This definitely needs to be a thing. Lots of other tabletop channels have, like, long running campaigns and stuff or various game system reviews, but I don't know of any channel that spreads its attention like that and runs plenty of one shots of several games. That is definitely something I'll be into
A one shot of each of these would be a great way for player/purchaser 'tasters' and at least for me would go down a treat!
I can only give one like!!!!!!!! Yes!! For the love of 8 pound 5 ounce baby Jeeezus, please do this.
@@NomNom1970 commenting because I can't like your comment twice.
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth - Mike Tyson
Pretty sure Moltke predates Tyson
Alf Clark the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry
Robert burns
Predates Tyson and moltke
A kick to the balls then a sword in the throat will defeat giants. - Leonidas I of Sparta, 490 B.C.
Predates the Roman Empire.
@@arimill1045 For Moltke, substitute "France" for "mouth".
Note to self; Plan for getting punched in the mouth.
I love GURPS. It's very complicated but you can play anything you can possibly think of. Half cyborg half vampire cat sure once I've played one. Jedi adept with no legs in medieval Europe sure. Dwarf techomancer news anchor yup.
I was wondering if this system is still viable these days.
The game is "front loaded"; character creation can be as complicated as you care to make it, but playing does not have to. I find it if anything easier than D&D, certainly easier than Pathfinder.
@@svennoren9047 True, in my experience a gm playing with people new to GURPS is best off making some character templates that fit setting, offer them to the players and discuss during character creation on some specifics.
GURPS is really just a pared-down version of HERO; most of the creation, action and dice conventions of both games are identical. What Steve Jackson had was an in with the S/F-Fantasy industry which got him all kinds of resource books: Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, Ringworld, Vorkosigan Saga, Auto-Duel (a rift on his own Car Wars game), WildCards, The Prisoner, etc. But the game-play is really indistinguishable from HERO (i.e., Champions).
And as with HERO, if you're any good a math, you can make a 75-point character that is at least as powerful as what most people would be able to make with 200 points.
Good game, but there are an easy dozen that I'd put before it an any list....
@@lunavarion Very much so, it can be as simple or complicated as you like. Any genre/setting, the only boundaries are set by the GM.
"You can be dogs". Say no more! 10 Candles, here I come.
10/10 candles
But they’ll all die
Pugmire if you don't want them to die
@@geekwithglasses2897 Silly Geek, doggos don't die, they go to an amazing farm north of the country, with wide space, lots of squirrels and my favorite uncle, who I haven't seen in over a decade
I heard that too, and the gears in my mind started turning.
My favorite RPG is Mouse Guard. It has such a fun dice system that is pretty quick and the "conflict" system that can be used up and beyond commanding armies, to having a bake off or a staring contest. What is really unique and fun about this is that each player is a mouse with unique skillsets and a core belief and instincts that will be challenged through the campaign. I highly recommend checking it out!
Mouse Guard RPG.
Donnie Chase I second this. I really like how you’re a mouse in a world with owls and foxes. You’re society is the underdog and while you are basically screwed on the surface, some how you always pull through with sheer will alone. I played first before I read the comics and again after I read them and both times it was magical. If you don’t like mice you can also try torch bearer which is based on mouse guard but is more traditional fantasy.
Such a good game! 🗡 🐁
Isn't the game system an adaptation of the Burning Wheel?
@@vojtechpribyl7386 yep! I've never played burning wheel though.
*REDWALL INTENSIFIES*
For anyone who wants a full list of the games discussed, and a small summary to remember which is which:
1 - Blades in the Dark - Steampunk heist game, with
2 - Symbaroum -Dark creepy forest RPG
3 - Deadlands - 'Weird West', the wild west with creepy, crazy magic
4 - A Song of Ice and Fire RPG - Gritty medieval houses and politics in the world of Westeros
5 - Hot War - Alternate History UK, cold war gone hot. Keep society from plunging into darkness, also mutants. Dice rolls affect characters permanently
6 - Cyberpunk (2020 or Red) - It's Cyberpunk, not too distant future, corporations have major power. Hacking is a thing.
7 - Shadowrun - As above, but with magic and fantasy races.
8 - Ten Candles - Tragic Horror RPG, the sun is dead, society is failing, everyone is going to die. One-Shot RPG
9 - The Expanse - Based on the books (and show) of the same name. Sci-Fi fun times in a gritty version of the future where humanity has colonised (in every sense of the word) the solar system.
10 - Call of Cthulu - H.P. Lovecraft is problematic, but his works are spooky. Eldritch horrors are coming and you have to investigate how, and why.
11 - Night Witches - Based on actual history, be some soviet women in WW1 planes throwing bombs at nazis and maybe dealign with sexism.
"No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength" - Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.
(Yup, I'm a pedant even at six in the morning)
And I love that you are 😂
Never read the full quote in English before and I'm so happy I finally found a version.
Kudos to you, good Sir!
Me at the start of the video: “Blades better be on this list.”
Me 40 seconds later: “Chiodini, you beautiful scoundrel.”
There are three pretty good ones I can suggest, each more different than the last:
Vampire: the Masquerade,
Fiasco,
Mutant Crawl Classics
HELL YES, FIASCO! There is so much material to cover in Fiasco. You can even make your own playset, and the open source content is really wonderful.
I love playing Fiasco! Excellent game!
@Scott Whatever I'd say that the differences between V20 and V5 are a little more complicated than "V5 is garbage". Don't get me wrong, V20 is better overall, but V5 did a decent job of updating the setting - something the game was in dire need of - and introduced some new mechanics that actually work fairly well. Where V5 falls short is in the fact that, in trying to streamline mechanics which, over 20 years of editions, had gotten a bit clusterfuck-y, they went a little overboard and simplified it too much (mostly in regards to abilities, skills, and disciplines). That said, V5 is easier to learn than V20 as a result, and is therefore a better introduction to the setting for a newbie so they're not getting bogged down by the mechanical complexity right out of the gate. The same thing happened with the progression of DnD editions from 3.5 to 4th Ed, and now 5th Ed is a happy medium - I can see that happening easily with VtM.
Dread?
I've never actually found the White Wolf system (Vampire, Mage, Changeling, etc) all that good. The setting is interesting, but when I've played, the rules have some serious issues and some of the stuff is so vague it's always causing "fights" in the group.
Though to be fair, I haven't seen the latest 2 versions, so who knows. But with WW now being a dead company, who knows what the future of their properties will be like.
Rolemaster! My god, the crits! THE CRITS!
I was going to cite Rolemaster myself. For me personally, it is RMSS where the system came into its own.
Rolemaster is my all-time favorite RPG. (As well as M.E.R.P.)
Played 1st through 4th editions, 3E and 4E are my favorites.
Greatest game ever!
Glad to see I am not the only one missing this on the list, I loved building ships in Space Master, ICE Games were great
You mean "Rulesmaster." Consult 9 charts to see what your strike did. I did like the various levels for Spells and Skills though. Rolemaster's level of "crunch" would put a modern "minimalist system advocate" in a coma!
Shot goes in one ear, out the other, all earwax removed. Instant death.
Fun fact: The Expanse actually began life as a play-by-post RPG before it became a novel series.
I was about to say this same thing. :D
I thought it began as a design idea for an mmorpg
play-by-post?
@@brettdibble2763 play-by-post is when you play an rpg on an internet forum whenever people get around to posting throughout the week rather then everyone playing at the same few hour block of time.
Play-by-post originates in snail mail. You would join a group, mail in your planned activity, then receive the results a bit later. It was adopted by BBS, Usenet, and forum members in the time real-time computing wasn’t capable of hosting multiple players at once. Play-by-mail games backed by mainframes (often a university’s “powerful” mainframe) were also called “batch games” since all the player turns received in a certain time frame were input into the mainframe all at once (in a batch) and the results calculated and sent out to the players.
(Showing my age: mail and post were interchangeable prior to the 1990s: hence “post office”)
nothing from World of Darkness? Vampire the Masquerade? Changeling which has probably one of the most unique settings and worldbuilding? :(
Agree! I can't believe they left these out!
Too childish
WoD is my go to..... can't believe that it was left out.
@@jamiefultz3921 i went to me rpg store yesterday and of all the games listed to start soon there was NONE from WoD. it was all shadowrun, dnd and star wars. i asked why no WoD and the naswer was a simple "there are no GMs interested".
im seriously thinking on starting a table now, this scorn cannot continue
I run Mage the Awakening every Saturday myself
H.P. Lovecraft is probably the _best_ example of why it's important to separate the art from the artist. Yeah, he was a terrible person, but he still created one of the greatest horror stories ever written which is why he's remembered. If he hadn't written those books, pretty sure nobody would ever mention his name.
People's morals are messed up.
Lovecraft may have been a racist, but the Soviet Red Army committed literal genocides (before WW2) just because they didn't like the cut of somebody's jib, or because they were political opponents--and listen to how they're described in this video.
It's not even mentioned. They're called "amazing". Pretty sure genocides are a worse crime than writing racist poems.
Boggles my mind. 🤯
@@DangerRifai Sorry to hear you don't think the night witches were amazing because some people who weren't them did bad things.
For that quote Mike Tyson’s version is my favorite: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”
GURPS: generic Universal role-playing system, is a role-playing system developed by Steve Jackson which you can play literally anything there are tons of other sourcebooks that you can play it's a really fun RPG.
Yeah, but it's also not very good.
@@AspelShuyin sorry you can't do math
@@kabronex9877 it's not the math that's the problem. If anything, the character creation is the part I like, even though the auditing and number crunching is way more than necessary, as are the billions of skills and how they might transfer to other skills. Where the math is a problem, the issue isn't the difficulty, it's the volume.
But no, it's the core mechanics that I'm not fond of. I don't like the way combat is a bunch of missing unless you explicitly never use the basic attack, and I don't like the division of traits, and I don't like the need to budget character points, or the way that the same character concept can often be created in more and less efficient ways. I don't like how players have the memorize it look up tables, like how strength correlates to damage, or more obscure things. I also don't like how the base magic system uses Fatigue, meaning wizards are better when they're beefy. I don't like how do much of the game that you're expected to spend money on is a bunch of needless mechanical garbage that won't ever get used, and so much of what does get used is just minor variations of other things, or it's overly complicated stuff that all but the most annoying GMs who get turned on by recording dice rolls will simply handwave.
I don't dislike GURPS because I can't do math, I don't like GURPS because I don't want to do math when the end result is a game with too many rules that doesn't do enough to make one setting feel different from another.
@@AspelShuyin lol wat r u? Casul?
@@kabronex9877 Yes. I want to have fun, not balance a budget.
No Traveller? The original science fiction RPG. Very detailed game universe. Best version was MegaTraveller. Out of print, but still obtainable.
He is way to young to have been exposed to Traveler.
@@kevinsullivan3448 I pity the young people today.
While I was fanatic for MT during its heydey, I've played/GM'd all the versions published since 1978 and switched a few years ago to the Mongoose version of Traveller. MongTrav v1 was a bit rough but MongTrav v2 seems to have polished the rough edges a bit.
@@kevinsullivan3448 Then he shouldn't be making videos like this. Not mentioning Traveller because it's old is like not mentioning ST TOS because it was from the 60's.
@@DennisMoore664 That's the best reason not to mention STtOS. If you weren't alive to watch it the first time you shouldn't sully it with your eyeballs.
Paranoia was always one of my favourite d&d's
Have you seen the new edition by mongoose? It's pretty dang cool.
Friend computer is always right. Saying otherwise is treason. Knowing the rules (which edition) is a treasonous activity and should be terminated immediately. Here is your ticket to self termination booth.
Jovan Adriel Have a nice daycycle!
@@dragonjaw95 Friend computer?
Shoutout to Numenera. Amazing RPG.
I love the cypher system. The games of Numenera I’ve played were like being in a story that would’ve been drawn by Moebius in the pages of Heavy Metal. And the system made everything flow nicely without too much crunch. Great for focusing on roleplay and storytelling.
I like the world, haven't played it yet. Interested what Dicebreaker thinks
Props for posting about Deadlands! It's one of my favorite RPGs that almost nobody has heard of. You missed one of the big highlights though. It gives people a great reason to do terrible impressions of various American accents. ;)
Shout outs to my favorite tabletop games.
Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars RPG - the buy in is a little hefty but i LOVE the narrative dice system.
And Mutants and Masterminds - anytime i can play a Super Hero/ villain i am there. Crunch is hefty though.
Definitely was hoping to see FFG Star Wars on this list! Would love to hear Johnny's opinion of it. The narrative dice is my favorite dice system just because of the scenarios it can create and how well it captures the essence of the Star Wars movies.
@@Thwarten I was hoping to see it too, but he did make a point of saying he wasn't a big one for RPGs in established properties, so that may have been a barrier for him moreso than The Expanse and SoIaF. But who knows, if enough people ask for it, he might give it a proper review on here.
Edge of the Empire is definitely my favorite RPG because nothing can beat the fun factor of force points and the utility of the scene as opposed to long/short rest system. That and skill trees are muy nice to track character growth.
Along those lines I'm sad to see Genesys didn't make the list.
Through the magic of Kickstarter, we got to play Blades in the Dark while it was in development. We had a truly lovely (if that word can be applied to a game of Blades) game and a ton of fun building up our crew. Blades to us always felt like we were right on the edge of disaster and hanging on by the skin of our teeth. I particularly LOVE LOVE LOVE the flashback mechanic and think it is one of the best design elements I’ve seen in an RPG in a very long time.
Ten Candles is one of those harrowing experiences as an rpg player that leaves you walking away from the game going, “what just happened? Did I have a good time? Or should I seek therapy?”
Another game that’s just coming out that is truly brilliant is Icarus. I got to play it with the developer and it is one of the most intriguing and novel games I’ve seen in a very long time. I highly recommend checking it out.
I could ramble on about more games and the games that you talked about but people don’t really want to hear that.
Cheers,
JiB
Rolemaster by I.C.E is amazing, surprised its not even mentioned.
I played Spacemaster for about 5 years. The Rolemaster systems are still one of my favorites
Rolemaster is my all time favorite, beating out DnD, in my mind, back in the 80s. It also had Tolkien's Middle Earth as a setting available, so double win.
Loved Rolemaster after my group "graduated" to it from MERP in the late 80's - early 90's. If I did it again I'd probably leave out every Companion past 3, maybe even 2 though.
i had to modify the armour so it gave protection, otherwise, great
Hate those damage tables though
Just saying: go look up Grant Howitt. He's produced a ton of strange little RPGs with neat ideas and light-hearted theming
Also, one page!
Spire is glorious and has is one of the most evocative settings I've ever read. The Appendix for Goats is gold and I love the Art Deco inspired designs they used throughout the book.
The old Marvel role playing game had an amazing system that really worked well! You should check it out sometime...it's amazing they created a workable system that can handle such a diverse universe full of different power types and sets. They also had a karma system so good characters lost karma when they did bad things and gained it when doing good things...like experience points that can also be taken away; you could also spend karma in an emergency to modify a role as a last resort. Amazing system from top to bottom.
FASERIP - The best acronym of stats from any RPG.
Only problem I had with it was the complete reliance on so much randomization of powers and stats. Every party I ran with had two or three near useless characters and one who had Monstrous level stats and universally useful powers.
But let's be real here. The best RPG is "Macho Women With Guns".
Why?
Because women, and guns.
Hard to argue that logic
I dunno. Hobomancer might have it beat. I mean, just look at that name!
I have the entire set. "Renegade Nuns on Wheels" is one of the best titles EVAR!
"From the depths of hell in silence
Cast their spells, explosive violence
Russian night time flight perfected
Flawless vision, undetected"
Sorry couldn't help myself.
Hmm an excuse to play Sabaton during a game.
Good music taste right there.
Me, every time you two post a new video: "Ooh, I should get that."
One of my favorites to play as an RPG is Rifts.
Rifts premise is lay lines pop up all over the world allowing for mutations and magic as well as odd occurrences.
The lay lines can produce different realities or timelines if you go into them. Which creates interesting and unique takes on any genre of RPGs.
Want a Superhero style character next to a mutant dog, next to a Terminator styled robot going into a Rift and appearing in a D&D styled world it's viable.
The Four Horsemen of Apocalypse roamed the lands of Africa, Mexico was controlled by Vampires, Atlantis rose from the sea, and is controlled by dragons. The options were endless.
Altantis is controlled by Splyncryth the Splugorth. The dragon's are just honored guests. 😊
Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG is awesome to play.
Ermagerdddddd .. Palladium, Rifts, GURPs, FUDGE, Paranoia, Space Opera. First RPG I ever played was Metamorphosis Alpha.
I'm a fan of paranoia funniest time playing a game!
@@adamwelch4336 Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
If you don't trust the Computer, you will be used as reactor shielding!
Also of note - *Earthdawn:* the fantasy world setting from far in the past of Shadowrun en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthdawn
*Amber RPG:* A diceless RPG set in Roger Zelazny's Amber multiverse en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game
*In Nomine:* Angels and demons playing out an eternal war on Earth, by SJG en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Nomine_(role-playing_game)
*Rifts:* A future Earth in which a catastrophe caused dimensional rifts to open all over the planet turning it into an apocalyptic Multiversal nexus en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifts_(role-playing_game)
*All Flesh Must Be Eaten:* A zombie survival RPG with a great game system en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Flesh_Must_Be_Eaten
*Paranoia:* Just an hilariously good time en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)
I LOVE The Expanse and all the AGE games.
Edit for context: The Expanse RPG uses what's called the Adventure Game Engine, which is a system that the company who made The Expanse RPG also used to make 4 other games. They're all 5 of them (mostly) compatible with each other, which means if you're playing Modern AGE you can have a weird one-off quest where you meet a character from The Expanse who somehow ended up in modern day chicago and you have to get them back into their proper world/time. I like some of them better than others, but they are all really fun. Please if you are reading this comment, do as the video says and check out The Expanse and its sister games. The Expanse, Modern AGE, Fantasy AGE, Dragon AGE, and Blue Rose.
Hello? White Wolf? Vampire the Masquerade.... I cannot believe you didn't mention it.
probably because The New World Of Darkness isn't THAT good and the new Old World Of Darkness seems to be quite......tailored for safe spaces? Dunno how to put it.
@@rikusschulze6249 I can't stand overly sensitive millennials, who want the world to be shaped to protect their feefee's..
@@jeffgrey9147 okay, why tell me?
@@rikusschulze6249 you mentioned safe spaces, I was basically just stating how what I think about the people who use them.
Ah, so you like games full of white men with lots of women available to shag? It's ok, we think your games are boring too.
I wonder if the flashback system from Blades In The Dark could be showed into Shadowrun, it could use something to make those painful "planning" hours go away.
I think it would be really easy. Just port the mechanic straight from BitD and substitute Edge for Stress.
@Paul Gauthier Sure, FitD Shadowrun would be ideal, haha! I keep meaning to check out the existing FitD cyberpunk game, but can't say I was super excited by the brief description. The Sprawl is pretty good and I've used it to run the CP2020 setting with some success, but those are slightly different animals on both counts.
The World Of Darkness games have been my favourite, with vampire at the top of those!
Also picked up a game called Cavemaster recently which plays using stones, which seems really evocative with the setting in the mechanics. In the same way that Fate Of The Norns: Ragnarok does by using runes instead of dice!
Yes, I had an ongoing World of Darkness group in high school. We played Vampire, Werewolf and Changling. I still have about 30 books from the 90s that I wish I could get more use out of.
Thanks, Torso!
For a game with a contemporary setting and a heavy focus on roleplay it's hard to beat the WoD stuff. Vampire was always my favorite. Very political to begin with and it was easy as a storyteller to scale your campaigns. Did you want more intrigue than combat tonight? Simple to do. More combat focus tonight? Also easy. I was never a stickler for dice, though we rolled a fair bit, but I always felt it was a strength of the game because it was just as fulfilling to have a single night mission as it was to have a year long campaign.
3 years later, in 2023, Hasbro has decided to burn D&D to the ground and this video is more relevant than ever, thanks, Dicebreaker!
Here's the games in case anyone wants a list.
1 - Blades in the Dark
2 - Symbaroum
3 - Deadlands
4 - A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying
5 - Hot War
6 - Cyberpunk
6.5 - Shadowrun
7 - Ten Candles
8 - The Expanse Roleplaying Game
9 - Call of Cthulu
10 - Night Witches
Thank You!
That is a very incomplete analysys of the Night Witches, but I'm hyped that anyone is even talking about the game.
I didn't know that game. As a flight combat simulator and RPGs lover I am interested in war planes pilot RPGs. Can you tell me something more about the witches game?
I also recommend Stars without Numbers
Very good sci-fi Rpg
I'm disappointed not to see anima and vampire: the masquerade
i was disappointed to not see any palladium rpgs
I used to know a parody of Monty Python's Lumberjack Song called "I Like Palladium (and I'm OK)"
You can suggest them yourself.
@@LadyLunarSatine Wait PA-R-R-O-D-Y!?! You mean it's NOT THE ORIGINAL!?!
I'm not surprised. Vampire can be a bit contentious and deals with a lot of topics that aren't everyone's jam. Anima on the other hand just isn't a very good game. It's super broken and not just because the translation is terrible.
Rifts is an awesome RPG. Anima is worth it just for the artwork but is also very fun to play. Dark Heresy has always been a favorite. Feng Shui and Paranoia were fun too heh.
Night Witches: also an absolute great song of the band Sabaton.
Shadowrun is the only P&P I played so far, it's very good fun. Ah, I've played also another game: Earthdawn. But what that one is is basically Shadowrun minus the cyber elements, set in a Medieval-esque timeline. But it plays in the Shadowrun universe, created by the same guy(s) afaik.
I'd love to get back into roleplaying...
Do you also know other systems, like The Dark Eye or The World of Darkness (Vampire and Werewolf), and if so, could you address these?
Thank you for this video, it's one of the formats I looked forward to the most when you started the Dicebreaker project.
true, there are strong hints that Earthdawn & Shadowrun are set in the same game universe. just that these settings are separated by 6000 years(or is it 12000?). one thing though, game mechanics very, very different from each other. for example, with Earthdawn, a player needs, at most, 2 each of ALL the types of dice(d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 & d20). Shadowrun, you MUST have the infamous 'cube of dice'. holds 3 x 3 x 4 d6's. 36 in total. pretty sure Shadowrun is the main reason why these cubes are sold most if not all gaming stores.
My thought on the list:
1. Blades in the Dark: a very changed version PbtA system. Recommending scum and villainy or hack the planet that build upon the Blades changed rule for scifi or cyberpunk style. There is also City of Mist that is also really interesting take on the system
2. Symbaroum: from the same developer that created Mutant Year Zero. There is also tales from the loop (detective story ala stranger things) and coriolis (scifi stories) from them.
3. Deadlands reloaded: well there are other savage world setting that s really good. There is also the deadlands hell on earth setting
4. Song of ice and fire: one problem with it is that it's quite easy to game the system if you put your mind to it. One system that I really like from the same publisher is Mutants & Masterminds 3E.
5. Hot War: never tried or read the rule so I don't know much, but it seems really good.
6. Shadowrun / Cyberpunk: I really love shadowrun despite all of its flaws & the massive ammount of d6 I need to carry for playing. Caution the rule can be really inconsistent sometimes. For Cyberpunk, there is also the Witcher rpg using the same rule.
7. Ten Candles: never know this exist. Definitely will check it out. but I love Fiasco, a game which the character also more or less almost always lose in some ways.
8. The Expanse: using the AGE system (Fantasy Age, Modern Age) that also powers Dragon Age RPG for more fantasy spin.
9. Call of Cthulhu: really good detective game. If you don't fancy the world setting but like the detective stories, there is the Gumshoe system that have more wacky (TimeWatch) or super power (Mutant City Blues) setting for the detective genre.
10. Night Wiches: another PbtA games. There is a lot of setting and genre for PbtA. My favorite is Mask and Monster Hearts. Have heard good things about other but haven't really played them only read through some of the book.
Other system that I like but not on the list : Vampire the Masquerade, Stars Without Numbers, Numenera (Cypher System), Capers, FATE Core
About the other systems you mention: VtM(WoD) is a very good game but you need the right kind of players for it to be good. Stars W/O Numbers and Numenera both suffer from weak rulesets. In Stars the game goes from if I get hit once I am gonna die to getting hit 10 or so times and looking at the enemy and saying is that the best you got. In Numenera, I built a character and without even trying as a tier 2, I was singlehandedly defeating tier 6 threats w/o hardly breaking a sweat. FATE Core is another one that requires a certain type of player for it to be successful.
Symbaroum doesn't use the Year Zero System. It is it's own thing. It has roll low d20 mechanics.The year zero system uses d6's. Regardless of the system, Symbaroum's setting is fantastic.
@@EricEsenwine ah sorry the one with year zero is the forbidden land. well I have just skim through symbaroum rulebook. Haven't got time to play. But it's from the same dev at least right.
@@dragonjaw95 ahh yeah... Jarningren the company that produced Symbaroum merged with Free League a few years after the games release. Its a different system but distributed by the same developers of the Year Zero system! Cheers
Man been ages since I thought about Monster Hearts, I've never played such absolute trainwrecks of petty awkwardness as playing a teenager as a teenager.
My favorite RPG-System is and always will be Dark Heresy. Some other people in the comment section have explained the setting already, so I won't talk too much about it.
What I simply love about it is that you are not some random guy like in most other RPGs. You are part of the Inquisition and you're in because you have exeeding qualities and skills. You are part of humanity's best 1 or 2 percent. And still the galaxy is terrifying. As the game progresses you either work your way up, joining the ranks of the 0,1% of the Imperium's most capable servants, or die trying. But the horrors and dangers won't end, they even became worse.
You can become insanely powerful. By level 6 a player character has the authority to command platoons of soldiers, give orders to high ranking police officers or demand audiences from planetary gouverners. But challenge keeps comming. You will never be save, never be powerful enough to vanquish all resistance. And most likely, you will die by horrible means. Pretty grimdark.
But I also love the rules. Your character seldom feels incompetent in what he should be good at. What was challenging or impossible at early levels becomes mudane later on, but new problem arrive which are much harder to deal with.
Combat is complex but not as rule-riddled like Shadowrun or DSA. You have a good range of interesting manouver choices and an easy way of implementing boni or mali into rolls. Equipment and skills increases your efficience in combat but won't make you invulnurable or unbeatable. Low tier weaponry won't be of any use later on but a chain sword will always be a danger to your character's life. Damage and healing is tough and will make you wary of running into combat mindlessly.
Special damage like falling is devastating, so no falling down a tower and walking away like in D&D. A few meters can break your bones, a few more will kill you. But the worst thing is being ablaze. Don't you ever catch fire in Dark Heresy. You will die...
Did I mention the 8 pages of rules all about maiming and spectacular death? Limb loss is no rare sight in Dark Heresy.
A mechanic that can break your group instantly is Fear. Frightening creatures and objects have a Fear Rating forcing you to roll Willpower when encountering them. Failling this test can have varying consequences from simple shaking over passing out to insane giggling and shooting comrads. It makes fighting a Daemon much more intense and challenging, as should be.
You can and will also accumulate Insanity and Corruption of the course of your campaign, giving you a sense of the horrors and deviance your character has witnessed. Insanity can be interesting to play and renders you immune to some frights, yet corruption has no benefit and will screw you over.
I could praise the system for ages... But I'll stop here. If you like or love Warhammer 40k and Pen&Paper, give it a try. The Inquisition demands your service, acolyte!
ever get to play Rogue Trader? or Deathwatch?
I'd recommend the game Paranoia XP. It's one of the few games I've played where death is solved through excessive cloning, and that the entire team isn't supposed to trust each other.
It’s funny how different Ten Candles is from Sixteen Candles.
And how different they are from fork handles.
XD
@@Paldasan Wasn't it Four Candles?
@@davidcopplestone6266 it was, but I thought if I wrote four candles rather than its homophone people might struggle to make the connection.
I'm genuinely surprised that Monster of the week wasn't somewhere in the mix, but man there are some titles I need to check out now!
I actually started playing and running RPGs with other systems and didn't try D&D until years later.
I love the Warhammer settings (both 40k and Fantasy) so when Dark Heresy was released I first read it mostly for the fluff. But after the "Inquisitor's Handbook" came out I didn't want to just read the splatbook so I found a group online and started playing. That must've been late 2008 and ever since that first campaign I was hooked.
Dark Heresy pulled me into the hobby and got me started as a GM too so I still love it to death but I did branch out and tried a ton of other systems too.
The list in no particular order: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, Only War, Black Crusade, Mouse Guard, Paranoia (XP and the new one), Delta Green, Traveller (2008 edition), Kill Puppies for Satan, Dungeon World, 7th Sea and a AD&D 2E Birthright campaign.
I also decided to introduce my friends to the hobby by running a game of Pathfinder for them. Eight years later I'm still running that very same campaign where they just hit level 12... In my defence, we play maybe once every two months because scheduling a session with eight adults is a bloody nightmare.
"No plan ever survives its first encounter with the enemy." --Douglas MacArthur
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder actually. Prussian general in the 1800’s.
Yeah MacArthur was actually quoting Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. Sorry.
Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke was not so pithy as MacArthur's paraphrase: "The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon's saying: 'I have never had a plan of operations.'
Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."
@@philmitchell12 Love the full name AND full quote. 👍
I'd nominate Mouse Guard (I'm a massive fan of its "fail-forwards" mechanic), and Fate Accelerated Edition (story collaboration and world creation done on the fly with minimal rules).
rude_mech I picked up the original MG box set. It’s worth like 600 dollars now!! What a great game!!
I was slightly upset that Rifts, by Palladium Books, didn't make your list. The World is awesome. The system is hinky, but the breadth of characters is unmatched.
probably not grimdark enough
1.) Shadow of the Demon Lord. (Same creator of Song of Ice and Fire RPG)
2.) Shadow of the Demon Lord
3.) Call of Cthulhu
4.) Cypher system ( the strange, Numenera, God’s of the fall)
5.) Mage the Awakening
6.) Warhammer fantasy 2ed
7.) Mutants and Masterminds/Blood of Heroes
8.) Dungeon Crawler Classic
9.) Shadow of the Demon Lord
10.) Shadow of the Demon Lord
Named by the Namer I can’t believe you forgot to mention shadow of the demon lord
"No plan ever survives the first combat encounter." ~???
Is a lot like...
"Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth." ~ Mike Tyson
The saying dates back to 1871, though, and was originally said in German, so Tyson gets no credit for this one whatsoever lol....
Or Von Clauswitz's 1871 (as Kim Holtby pointed out) book On War's statement "No plan survives contact with the Enemy."
I really love The Burning Wheel. It was one of the first campaign I was in. To date it’s the game the party was responsible for a theatre burning down after we put on a puppet show. The reviews of the show were excellent though.
Also if you like Call of Cthulhu and The Expanse, you need to play Eclipse Phase. Existential horror, digital immortality, hardish sci-fi and you can be an octopus
I'm gonna say Eclipse Phase is fantastic while we are dropping names
I saw that EP is releasing a 2E, so I'm keeping an eye out for that since a lot of new editions that have come out this year seem to have streamlined a lot of their games (Pathfinder is one I'm thinking of in particular).
@@johnbuscher the physical is for sale I think. I know the PDF is up for the revision
@@nikkorocksalot5254 Oooh, I'm gonna take a look at the PDF, then. I like me physical books for reading seriously and appreciating the art, but nothing beats the convenience factor of just having a PDF on nearly any computer now.
Games mentioned that use a narrative-based system based on the Apocalypse Engine that adds specialized gameplay mechanisms. (They are so radically-different from the baseline Apocalypse Engine that they don't get the "Powered By The Apocalypse" badge on the cover.)
00:45 *_Blades in the Dark_* [One-Seven Productions, 2017] - A heist-based RPG.
27:13 *_Night Witches_* [Bully Pulpit Games, 2015] - A warfighting-based RPG. One mechanism is that the group each takes it in turn being gamemaster and the others play the characters. Another is that gameplay is divided into Day (for interpersonal conflicts) and Night (for combat missions).
Definitely going to try and run Ten Candles, I just looked up the rules and it seems amazing
I love shadowrun so much.
I miss playing it.
I love the transition quacks you've used for each entry and the ending.
I love Shadowrun, but I don't really like the newer editions after 3rd or maybe 4th. They need to reboot and get back to the roots of the game, it has become to fantastical in the story and world they have built with the newer editions and lost a lot of the gritty cyberpunk feel in my opinion.
@@O-D-X i haven't played in over 10 years but always wanted to get back into it.
OD-X I played a homebrewish version of the newest shadowrun. In it we were the police and it was just corruption left and right on multiple occasions we would get notes from higher ups telling us to ignore something or stop looking into a case. One time we didn’t follow the suggestions and we almost got blown up
blades in the dark is great! my sister adapted it for the Fallen London setting and its a lot of fun
My top 5 are
1 cyberpunk
2 vampire the masquerade
3 sla industries
4 paranoia
5 call of cthulu
I watched u for the 1st time and i enjoyed so i have subscribed an notified the bell icon and look forward to more to come
GREAT list, and mad props for mentioning SLA Industries. That setting is so damn good.
Through the Breach by Wyrd is easily my favorite although being a relative newcomer in the pool. Conceptually different enough that it feels fresh. Game play is relatively easy to understand. No dice, just fate decks. Character creation is not as straightforward and easy to understand as I would have liked, but once you figure it out, it is VERY entertaining.
Did I miss a joke?
Is there a reason for the quack?
I love it anyway
Monika Dietrich my best guess is either it being a tribute to the upcoming untitled goose game OR it is simply a bangin creative choice
It just reminds me of Caddicarus' Tips for Beginners of Bloodbourne video.
Quack
There’s always Donut County.
I think it's interesting how important it is to mention Lovecrafts racism, even though it wasn't something noteworthy back when Lovecraft lived, but not mentioning how horrible the soviets were or how the nightwitches also threw bombs into villages and killed civillians.
There have been Marxist professors infecting American university campuses since the 1930s, although now most are too young to ever have received checks from Moscow. They infected the minds of American youth, starting with the Hippies, and now decaying to the Antifa-types and the Millennials although there is resistance to their "obey my opinions for marks" plan. They think championing the causes of screamer-groups is more important than creating a strong, unified nation. Meanwhile, they excuse the 100 million murders from the Communist system.
Yep. Good spot
Night Witches? That's one of my favorite Sabaton songs. Now I actually know what it's about.
Hail of Bullets got there first with 'Nachthexen'
27:11 *Night Witches*
The planes they flew (Polikarpov Po-2 ) were actually a recent design, first flown in 1928 and used in military service until 1953 (and in Warsaw Pact training and reserve units until 1959). It was a double open cockpit design that was designed as a trainer (much like the similar British Tiger Moth 2). It was also used as a liaison, casualty evacuation, and supply aircraft .
They were modified with bomb racks and flown by light bomber squadrons from 1941, but the Night Witches were the only all female squadron. Most had been trained by the Komsomol youth organization to fly gliders and planes before the war. They were used as pilots because they could be used to free up male pilots to fly front-line aircraft. Like other Soviet military personnel they were not treated as prisoners of war when captured and were often executed (if they were lucky).
There is an excellent graphic novel ( _Night Witches_ ) by Garth Ennis that may have inspired the game.
Rifts? I'm not talking Palladium in general, but Rifts specifically.
I'm with you. I played it for awhile, and if you like something from one of the other Palladian games you can easily bring it into Rifts. Like I said. I agree with you
People forgot the Steve Jackson era of gaming!
@@adamwelch4336 you're right GURPS is what drew me away from D&D and steered me toward Palladium Books
@@mikebanks4195 The two times I played GURPS I didn't enjoy it. Hard to tell if it was the GM or the group or the system, but I went right back to Rifts. Still do, though I enjoy DnD and such just as much. Rifts was my first gaming experience.
Rifts? Fun game, terrible system. Savage Worlds Rifts is apparently quite playable (although I'm not a fan of Savage Worlds, anything is better than the palladium house system) but it's too little, too late.
Hmmm, I can see this video getting quite popular right about now thanks to the OGL1.1
Ryuutama is the RPG I’d like to throw into the mix. It’s a nice, easy to learn game about a group of villagers going on a journey. The GM “plays” a character that follows the group and writes down the story of their journey. It’s the only RPG I’ve ever gotten my wife to play because she could mechanically start out with a kitten to travel with.
"No plan survives contact with the enemy"
Someone, according to who you read in the comments.
"No plan survives contact with the players"
Helmuth Von Moltke the elder: No plan survives contact with the enemy.
Would love to see a review of that Warhammer 40k rpg Wrath & Glory
A lot of people say it's really bad. Most people would recommend the fantasy flight 40k games.
Try Dark Heresy. It’s pretty good. Warhammer Fantasy rpg is also great.
@@a40kweeb36 agreed
Rules are generally okay. The problem was that the book & art layout wasn't as good as most other high quality RPGs coming out these days. I also felt there was a lack of art in it. That said, I would prefer using W&G's system over the FFG version's d100 system which is overloaded with a bit too much DRM hell. I say that as someone who has loved WFRP since 1st edition which uses the same core. FFG 40k just adds even more crunching and numbers everywhere. I'll still keep them all, however.
I was surprised that RIFTS or any Palladium game was on this list...
SP4RH4WK high hoooo fellow palladium fan!
I've played Rifts. I totally understand why is WASN'T included. LOL.
Those who like it really do like it but I didn't like the power creep from one book to the next in the series.
They are too old! And Macro Saga > Rifts...
Dan Morgan what does power creep mean?
@@moguldamongrel3054 Things getting more powerful overtime. For example the base book for Rifts had all the races (RCC) and classes (OCC) to pick from. Great. Then the Atlantis supplement came out. Starter characters from that book could shred a whole party of base book characters. Then the England supplement came out and - wait for it - starter characters from that book could shred parties or individuals from the the Atlantis group. It went on and on. Whole character classes and races became utterly nonviable.
also, speaking of one-shot RPG's, literally anything by Grant Howitt is pure gold. Goblin Quest, Crash Pandas, and Honey Heist are all wonderfully silly games that can be played by anyone with minimal setup, and Goblin Quest is a DM-less system which is a huge plus.
The best tabletop rpg is the one you create yourself.
But also, shoutouts to BESM, Mutants & Masterminds, and FATE for my top 3 favorites.
BESM has been a mainstay system for years. Easy to pick up and amazing fun to play. Plus it is really easy to adapt it to any setting you like.
Creating your own system is difficult, though, especially if you have no experience GMing.
Mutants&masterminds gang
@@jonb4155 BESM is getting a new edition soon, the playtest is already out.
I'm quite fond of Vampire the Masquerade, as well as World of Darkness in general.
I'm a werewolf fan myself.
You didn't mention Stars Without Number, I am wounded.
To throw my recommendation out there: Riddle of Steel.
Riddle of Steel isn't a great system in lots of ways, but the combat is fantastic. It takes the super abstracted combat found in almost every other RPG, and turns it into an incredible minigame (well, a couple of minigames, really) that involves every cut, and every thrust.
It can be a little weird to get your head around initially, but once you do, combat starts to speed up a bit, and it leads to some very dramatic and emotionally charged fights, as every single move can result in death and maiming.
it has a few other good features, and a few features that are...not so good, but it's well worth a look. Especially if you were wanting something a little bit more visceral. The combat system is especially good for low magic, and historical, games.
Classic World of Darkness games.
As much as I love Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu, White Wolf Games still take the top spot.
Even better: Exalted.
@@bfish89ryuhayabusa
I like it, but I don't love it... on a scale of white wolf games, that is.
cWoD is the setting for me.
I was expecting to see Vampire The Masquerade but was disappointed when it wasn't mentioned. It's my personal favorite up there with Cyberpunk.
Our groups play in the Rolemaster system, and we have also played a long campaign in the same company's Spacemaster: Privateers rules.
I recall loving Rolemaster back in the day, along with MERP. I'm planning on picking up a few HARP books as soon as they finally get the Bestiary they've been working on out the door.
Here is my add list: I.C.E-Rolemaster, GDW-Traveller, Champions, Gamma World, Boot Hill, (already mentioned: Rifts). While I haven't played D&D since the 80's, I love how the industry is getting a second chance and the dozens and dozens of games I've played for the last 30+ years are getting a major come back!
there's a Night Witches game?? once I play that, all I need is a one-on-one romance plot between Lyudmilla Pavlichenko and Eleanor Roosevelt
That seems like it could be a great genderbent hack of the game Hot Guys Making Out
No, you can't be a half elf in Shadowrun, the races don't work that way.
Aye, was looking for that.
You either got the (UGE) meta-genes to be an elf or a dwarf, or you don't. If you do, but the mana is low, you don't develop as anything but a normal human (or awaken to magic, for that matter). If you do, AND the mana is sufficient, BUT a certain something goes (goblinization) odd (wrong, even according to elves and dwarves), elves become orcs instead and dwarves becomes trolls instead.
Born at the right time, your baby might've popped out knife-eared, due to elf genes you didn't know you had; then, you might even pop your own tusks, due to goblinizing the same genes. You don't do between.
Volume level of 99% of video: 30
Volume level of duck quack: 100
QUACK!
Great subject, though - I love that D&D is getting so much love these days, but it's never been my favorite system. Good to see some spotlight on worthy alternatives.