Random Rpg Game Recommentation

What this generator is for

Most people who play tabletop roleplaying games have played one. There are hundreds, and a great many of them are doing something the famous one cannot do at all.

Press Generate and you get the name of a game. A few of them:

• Call of Cthulhu
• Traveller
• 7th Sea
• 13th Age
• A Penny for My Thoughts
• RuneQuest
• Apocalypse World
• Blades in the Dark

Some of those are enormous. Some were written by one person and fit on a few dozen pages. One of them is about losing your memory, and it works because it will not let you decide what you remember.

Drawing a game

1. Press Generate for one title, then go and read about it before you dismiss it.
2. Ask for several to build a reading list rather than a decision.
3. Type into Contains to search the names.
4. Copy to keep the shortlist.

How this list was assembled

Tabletop roleplaying systems, gathered and checked by hand, from the household names to games that sold a few hundred copies and changed how everybody else designs. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

The rules are the genre

Here is the idea that took the hobby about twenty five years to work out, and it is the reason this list is long.

A game's rules are not a neutral machine for resolving whether you hit the goblin. The rules decide what the game is about, because they decide what you spend your attention on and what earns you a reward.

Take the obvious case. Dungeons & Dragons has detailed rules for combat, careful rules for hit points, and almost no rules for a conversation with your father. So D&D games are about fighting, not because anybody at the table prefers fighting, but because the fighting is where the interesting decisions live. Try to run a courtroom drama in it and you will find yourself inventing rules, which is the game telling you that you brought the wrong tool.

Now take a horror game where your character's sanity is a number that only goes down. That single rule guarantees the story. Nobody has to decide to make it tragic. The arithmetic makes it tragic, and the players spend the whole game arguing about how much truth they can afford to look at.

Or take a game where the rules only ever ask you to roll when you are already in trouble, and where a partial success on the dice means you get what you wanted and something goes wrong anyway. You cannot play that game safely. It will not let you.

This is why people who love this hobby get so tiresome about systems. It is not gear obsession. Changing the rules genuinely changes what stories your group turns out to be capable of telling.

Fifty years of people rewriting the rules

The whole field is a fifty year argument about the previous paragraph.

It began in 1974 with one game about going into a hole and coming back with treasure. Within a few years people were writing games that did not fit that shape at all. Science fiction games where you could die during character creation, generating an entire failed career before play began. Games where magic was tied to a specific invented culture rather than to a spell list. Then, in 1981, a horror game built on the premise that knowledge itself is the danger and that your characters are going to lose.

In the 1990s the argument turned personal. Games arrived that were about being a monster and hating it, where the mechanics tracked your slide rather than your progress. In the decade after that, a wave of small, sharp designs came out of a long and frequently unpleasant internet argument about what games are for, and they were built on the assumption that the rules should be pointed directly at the emotional situation you wanted rather than at the tactical one.

What comes out of that history is the list you are drawing from. Games with no dice. Games with no referee. Games that last one evening and are designed never to be played again with the same people. Games where you play the town instead of the hero, or the ghost instead of the living.

Nearly all of it exists because the first game left so much undone.

The month the hobby found out who owned the rules

In 2000, the publisher of the biggest game did something unusual. It released a licence that let anybody publish material compatible with its rules, without royalties, without permission, and without oversight. Whole companies were built on that licence over the next twenty three years.

In January 2023, a draft of a new version leaked. It would have required publishers to register their products, report their revenue, hand over a slice of any crowdfunding campaign, and grant the company broad rights over anything they made. Most alarming to the people who read it carefully, it claimed to withdraw the old licence that everybody had built on.

What followed took about three weeks. Publishers who competed fiercely with each other announced a joint licence instead, deliberately structured so that no company could ever own it, drafted with the help of the lawyer who had written the original licence in the first place. Subscriptions were cancelled in enough volume to be visible. Fifteen thousand people answered the company's own survey, and the answers were not ambiguous.

The company apologised, tried a softer version, was told no again, and then gave up entirely. It left the old licence untouched and released the core of its own rules under an irrevocable Creative Commons licence, meaning it can never take them back, and neither can anybody who buys the company later.

It is worth understanding what that episode revealed. The rules of a game can be property. For twenty three years nobody had to think about that, because the arrangement was generous and stable. When it wobbled, an entire hobby discovered in about a fortnight that it had been renting the ground it stood on.

Most of the games on this list were never on that ground at all. That is the quiet argument for reading past the first name you know.

Running something that is not D&D

The main obstacle is not learning a system. It is that you have a group who know one game, and switching feels like proposing a house move.

A few things that make it easier.

Run one evening, not a campaign. Most games outside the biggest one are designed to be finished. Say to your group that this is a single night and that it ends when it ends. Nobody has to commit to a Tuesday for two years.

Do not read the whole book. Read how the dice work and how characters are made. That is usually thirty pages, and the rest is examples and setting you can look up while playing.

Pick a game whose subject is not fighting. If you run another combat game, everybody will compare it to the one they know and it will lose, because the one they know has had fifty years of polish. Run something where combat is not the point and the comparison never arises.

Let it be bad. The first session of a new system is always slightly wrong, and everybody looks up rules on their phone, and somebody misreads the initiative order. That is the price. It is a small one.

The reward is finding out that the way your group plays is not who your group is. It was the rules all along.

Questions people ask

What should I try first, coming from D&D?

Something with a small book and a clear subject. Investigative horror travels well, because your group already knows how to search a room and be frightened. Avoid anything that advertises itself as a heavier tactical system, because you will simply be comparing spreadsheets.

Do all of these need a dungeon master?

No. Some distribute the job among the players, some rotate it, and some remove it entirely and let the rules do the refereeing. Playing one of those once will teach you more about what a dungeon master actually does than ten years of being one.

Can you play alone?

Yes. Solo roleplaying is an old and real practice, usually driven by an oracle, a table or a deck that answers yes-and-no questions so that something outside your own head keeps surprising you. It looks strange until you have done it once.

Are the small games any good?

Some of the most influential designs of the last twenty years were written by one person and sold for the price of a coffee. Book length is a fact about the publisher, not about the game.

References

1. Open Game License, including the 2023 dispute and the release of the rules under Creative Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game_License
2. GeekWire (2023). After fan outcry, Wizards of the Coast will leave its original open license in place. https://www.geekwire.com/2023/after-fan-outcry-wizards-of-the-coast-will-leave-its-original-open-license-in-place/
3. Gizmodo (2023). Paizo Announces a New Gaming License Amid Dungeons & Dragons' OGL Controversy. https://gizmodo.com/paizo-wizards-of-the-coast-dnd-open-rpg-ogl-1-1-1849982443