I’ve shared numerous positive experiences on these boards over the years. While nothing has been 100% perfect, I’ve had good times with games. I’ll stick with ones I’ve played this calendar year so we know it’s not nostalgia.
Pigeons Eleven
In this light-hearted one-shot we played birds pulling off a heist of a casino buffet. My character was the absent-minded “mastermind” of the operation, who had escaped from a magician’s stage show in Vegas and thought he was a dodo bird. We had lots of laughs and played an entire adventure in around 2 hours.
The system is basically presented in a Zine format. You can teach the system and make characters in 9th Level Games’ Polymorph system (also used in Kobolds Ate My Baby).
Dread
I’ve never had a bad time playing or running Dread. Even though it uses the simple resolution mechanic of a Jenga tower, it has a rising tension that’s awesome for one-shots. Most recently, we played a convention game of Dread where we played YouTubers making a video about a haunted house. In the end, I ended up blowing up the house in a pyrotechnic calamity so my friends could escape with their lives.
Daggerheart
Both above examples were games I wasn’t running. Both were also extremely rules-lite one-shots. Let’s talk now about Daggerheart. I’ve got a biweekly Daggerheart game I’ve been running since last fall using the Motherboard campaign frame. The characters just reached 5th level (halfway through the game). They just uncovered that they’re in a alternate history future where the Gilded Age titans of industry are now in literal titan bodies (Carnegie is in a walking robotic crab operated by a cult of monastic librarians.)
The other Daggerheart campaign, which was weekly, just wrapped up recently. Set in the Witherwild, it was more of a traditional fantasy game inspired by Princess Mononoke. We had some emotional clashes IRL recently towards the end due to some real life trauma filtering into the game, but we worked through it.
I’m planning a new Daggerheart campaign for the group that just wrapped up that campaign. The system is medium-crunch. The goal of the system isn’t to create balanced encounters to test character and player skill, which is a different approach from most traditional RPGs and why it feels like a good fit for me.
Vampire 5e
I have long been averse to trying Vampire, I guess because I remember the 1990s and the types of fedora-wearing LARP people I associated with it. Well, a friend really wanted to run it, so I put aside my preconceived notions, and I’m really enjoying it. Set in the 1980s in Chicago, our vampires are getting caught in a political turf war. My character is a Nosferatu who lives in an abandoned tunnel, is a defender of the immigrant community (remembering his immigration from Germany) and has a strong connection to his Catholic roots. He has a Phantom of the Opera/Nightcrawler feel.
Honestly, we aren’t interacting with the rules a lot, but they’re not overly confusing when we need to do so.
Delta Green
Another friend ran me through the first chapter of Delta Green’s Impossible Landscapes, which took several weeks. I won’t get into the story of the mystery here for potential spoilers, but it is trippy and just very creative. The percentage system makes sense and it’s pretty rules-lite compared to other games. There were moments that kept me guessing after the session and I found myself wanting to return to the game just to uncover the secrets of what was happening. It was so much more compelling than “let’s see if we can beat the monsters in this dungeon room” – which is most of what I’ve been playing.
Dragonbane
I played a couple of sessions to try out a GM’s Dragonbane variant with pirate-themed classes and aquatic ancestries. The low complexity system kept us moving right along while the GM’s macguffin quest and epic finale presented a roller-coaster like experience that saw us able to test the content in the limited amount of time we had available.
AD&D 1E Tournament
To throw some love to the OSR crowd, I have to mention the great experience I had at GaryCon’s AD&D 1E Tournament, where my group placed 2nd out of 18 teams – and it was my first experience playing 1st edition. I was the thief, so I was dealing with traps and puzzles. Of course, we were playing like 9th level characters who were well outfitted with magical gear, so we didn’t have the issue of one-hit kills if you face a kobold. We had tools and abilities to solve the issues – we weren’t dung farmers in a 0-level funnel.
We had a large group of like 8 players, all discussing strategies with our caller, who spoke to the DM. And when we got to the end to face the undead sorceress and regain the king’s treasure, I felt like I had accomplished something. That was one of the best “D&D” experiences I’ve had in many years.
So, as you can see, I’ve had many positive gaming experiences. These have just been ones I’ve had in the past 6 months. I do have strong opinions of what I perceive as failures in gaming design, and most of that is due to what I see as incongruency between the perceived design goals and the rules.
I may not like Pathfinder 2, but it does what’s on the tin. It’s a collection of granular abilities and requires tweaking actions, buffs, and equipment to face situations that are so balanced that the better you can adjust those granular abilities, the better you can handle the balanced encounters. And you’re going to be tracking bonuses, penalties, counting squares, etc. Because that’s what PF2 says is important to the system. It’s not for me – as I’ve come to discover over playing it for around 5 years – but it does what it sets out to do.
But there are games that I clash with what I think the idea of the game is and how it’s implemented, not giving me the experience it says or the tools to actually do it. (Pathfinder 2E does give the tools for a granular, tactical experience, even if that’s not what I want.) So I look at Savage Worlds – “fast, furious, fun!” I’ve tried to run the game several times since 2016 (when Savage Rifts was first released). I’ve played it with other GMs – including experienced ones at conventions. I’ve never seen it go quicker than a combat in D&D 5E. Many times, it’s a boring stalemate. I’ve had an encounter last an hour. To me, that’s unacceptable.
Pirate Borg, Shadowdark, to me those aren’t what made old-style gaming fun and memorable. I don’t look back fondly on my character with 1 HP who had to sneak around and not fight anything. What do I remember? I remember my gully dwarf thief in 2E who sullied Strahd’s cape collection to be used as bait. Who was such a bad scout because he couldn’t count above “two” and couldn’t accurately count the number of zombies in the room ahead. Who found his bravery to sneak past his fallen comrades to recover the blessed crossbow bolt from the well of the naga.
That’s what I remember. Not expendable characters made by scanning a QR code, where lives are thrown away and you have no connection to the rest of the party or the world you’re exploring. Where the only distinguishable characteristic is rolling on a chart to see if you get a facial tattoo or have chronic flatulence.
If I come across as hating gaming, it’s because I actually love it. I want more from it than I usually get.
