Best RPGs for Three Players?

[JohnF]

Fate Accelerated is very beer & pretzels and you don’t need a VTT.

Cogs, Cakes, and Swordsticks for light steampunk fun (light crunch, light theme).

5e with each of 2 players running a PC and sidekick (but probably too much).

 

[Mannahnin]

I always found that Vampire and similar character-heavy drama games work best with 2-3 players, as they each get more spotlight time and you can get a lot deeper into individual plots than you can with a table of 5-6 PCs. That being said, it doesn't seem ideal for your point 2.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Any Apocalypse Engine game. I’m partial to original Apocalyse World or for that new tangled flavor, Blades in the Dark.

Edit: I meant to type "new FANGLED" flavor, but "tangled" is actually deliciously appropriate to your average Blades in the Dark game!

 

[Arawn76]

Mythras works well with any number of players and hits all three requirements.

 

[pemerton]

Cthulhu Dark: http://catchyourhare.com/files/Cthulhu Dark.pdf

Wuthering Heights: http://www.geocities.ws/soner_du/files/wuther.pdf

 

[John R Davis]

I'd say all ( nearly all) RPGs should work with three players. A couple of my groups have lost a player or two and I'm finding the experience way better with just 3 or 4 players. Play a wide variety so yeah any game should adaptable

 

[Piratecat]

Swords of the Serpentine hits all three criteria. Build the heroes with the point-buy for 3 players (even if you occasionally have a 4th); and it's designed for episodic play, like chapters in a paperback book full of swords & sorcery stories. It can do deep mysteries, but there's no need if that's not what makes sense in your game.

Swords of the Serpentine

A GUMSHOE roleplaying game of swords & sorcery! by Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner When it’s summer, you smell her before you see her. As you come around the curve of the Serpentine river the scent of the open sea is replaced by the stench of low tide, of boat tar, of rare spices spilled from a...

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[Ath-kethin]

I've run D&D games for decades with 2 or 3 PCs. No sidekicks, no hirelings, just the party members.

It requires a little more out of the box thinking that people like to pretend D&D allows, but it's not any kind of a problem.

I also run DCC games with only 2 or 3 PCs (and will be doing so again on Sunday), and I've run them with as few as 1 PC. Again, no multiple characters per player, no "sidekicks," no nothin.'

I think that many people get very wrapped up in the idea of character classes being a list of things a character can do instead of merely a way to classify a character concept. Nothing prevents a character from trying anything, and a chatty, seductive barbarian can be every bit as rewarding as a dumb-as-nails wizard or a moody, taciturn bard.

These days my recommendation for anybody looking for a game is DCC. It's fast, flexible, easy, inventive, and you can get started with free rules form the publisher. Hard to beat IMO.

 

[Jer]

1) A game that doesn't require specific party roles to function properly. [D&D and adjacent games require a lot of work if you're missing certain character classes.]
2) Something built for episodic, beer-and-pretzels play. [I'll lose them on deep mysteries.]
3) Works well on VTT (especially Foundry)

If you like superhero games I'd look at Icons - we use it as a failover game when we can't get a quorum to attend our sessions and it's great for episodic play. The supers genre in general plays fairly well episodically IME, but a lot of supers games are very mechanically crunchy and aren't as suitable for pick-up games unless the players are all really into learning new systems. Icons is traditional and "crunchy" enough that everyone in my group is on board with it but lightweight enough that nobody feels like they have to learn an entirely new system. Don't know how it works on Foundry - we play over Roll20 but we don't use anything special with it (we use Google Docs for character sheets).

Depending on what you mean by 'episodic' and how your players handle "mission-based" sorts of setups, I might also look at doing some kind of Star Trek inspired game. Either the Modiphius 2d20 Star Trek game itself (which we haven't played yet so I can't really comment on it, though it looks pretty) or using something like Star Frontiers to run a Star Trek inspired game. IME Star Frontiers works very well with mission-based high action sorts of SF games, though I doubt there's much in the way of VTT support for it. And IME mission-based games generally go over well with folks who are there to show up and game once every 6-8 weeks and don't have a lot of time to spend on thinking about how they want to start finding an adventure for themselves.

 

[dbm]

We have two groups in my gaming crowd - one of six (GM + 5 PCs) and one of four (GM + 3 PCs).

Games that don’t have strong niche protection work better at lower numbers, and also games where PCs are a bit more capable from the outset (though you can always start with experienced characters for any system, of course).

I ran a Savage Worlds campaign for the smaller group for a year of weekly play via Fantasy Grounds and it worked really well. You could run a session with two or three PCs in SWADE (Savage Worlds Adventure Edition - the latest one) with ease, and the game also works well with ‘henchmen’ given the way non-Wildcard characters are handled, so you can still run big fights when you want to.

Make an episodic campaign and roll with who can play each session and this could fit into your requirements. I think there is Foundry support - SWADE is well supported in multiple VTTs.