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[Mithras]

Fiasco:
Haven't played it yet, but it is deffinitly interesting by the looks of things.
It's a GM-less RPG that plays in a few hours. Heavily story based. There's a video of Will Wheaton and a few other people playing it (from the web-series Table-Top http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/).

That game really relies on having a like minded gaming group, I played a quick game with a few random gamers I knew and it got insane quickly, I'm talking Al Gore using the blood of puppies to power a rainbow-puppy powered machine which fixes everything insane.

My current rpg obsession is Pendragon, it uses d20s and is designed specifically for playing various interpritations of the Arthurian legends. The main attraction are passion and personality statistics which have an affect on the game and are influenced by PC actions.

Edited for accuracy.

[SalmonGod]

My current rpg obsession is Pendragon, a d20 system designed specifically for playing various interpritations of the Arthurian legends. The main attraction are passion and personality statistics which have an affect on the game and are influenced by PC actions.

I didn't know Pendragon made the jump to D20.  I'm pretty sure I demo'd that game at Gencon the year before 3rd Ed D&D was released.

[Mithras]

My current rpg obsession is Pendragon, a d20 system designed specifically for playing various interpritations of the Arthurian legends. The main attraction are passion and personality statistics which have an affect on the game and are influenced by PC actions.

I didn't know Pendragon made the jump to D20.  I'm pretty sure I demo'd that game at Gencon the year before 3rd Ed D&D was released.

Roll d20, if its under the score then you succeed. If its an opposed roll whomever has the highest roll while still being successful wins. That's d20 right? Cheesy rules for skills over 20.

What did it used to run on?

[Ringmaster]

Some more suggestions:

My Life With Master - A tabletop RPG where the players are all minions serving under an evil master (Think Renfield in Dracula), they all have qualities that define them as monstrous and qualities that elevate themselves above other humans, and the overall aim of the players is to get enough support from their friends outside the master's influence for them to be able to overthrow the master. Games are usually short, but fun.

Misspent Youth - Another RPG focused on oppression, the player characters are all teenagers/young adults in some kind of dystopic world where they rebel against authority, it's got an interesting system for generating scenarios, where each player asks another a question about their character's interactions and use that to create conflicts. There's also a scene setting mechanic which encourages different players to frame each scene.

[neotemplar]

I can recommend maid rpg.

One of these days I need to really work out my ideas for a fantasy fur trader rpg.  In which players hunt unicorns and other magic critters to sell their body parts in a colonial world.  (Yes clubbing merpeople on the beach wold be amusing.). Sadly I have yet to find a workable system.

[Nadaka]

My current rpg obsession is Pendragon, a d20 system designed specifically for playing various interpritations of the Arthurian legends. The main attraction are passion and personality statistics which have an affect on the game and are influenced by PC actions.

I didn't know Pendragon made the jump to D20.  I'm pretty sure I demo'd that game at Gencon the year before 3rd Ed D&D was released.

Roll d20, if its under the score then you succeed. If its an opposed roll whomever has the highest roll while still being successful wins. That's d20 right? Cheesy rules for skills over 20.

What did it used to run on?

no that isnt really the d 20 system . It is roll a d20 add modifiers, if thart is higher than a difficulty, then it succeeds.

[Draco18s]

I see Blue Planet hasn't made an appearance in this thread yet.

Despite the game's mechanics, the core books never offered a wider variety of race choices other than "human, dolphin, orca."  Nearly anything you can think of would fit into the rules.

The one game I played the GM had said "if you want it, I'll do it" and I played a komodo dragon.  (My) boss was a polar bear.  Don't remember what any of the other players were, it was a long time ago and I haven't seen any of them since (having gotten into an argument with the GM* where I declared him as "the worst GM to ever be" and blocked all communication).

In any case, bad experience aside, I really enjoyed the Blue Planet system.

*So we played via voice chat/text chat on Yahoo IM.  Due to party split, the GM was taking actions via private channel and ignored the main channel entirely without telling anyone.  Myself and two other people grew so frustrated at this, we quit the game.  When I tried to talk to the GM about it later, he wouldn't respond to my messages entirely, and eventually gave me some ridiculous excuse (I think it had to do with rushing to the hospital).  Again tried to talk to him about it, verified that he had the time, was currently in front of his computer, and had no reason to be anywhere, and would you please answer the following question.  No reply.  Half an hour later.  No reply.  Forty five minutes after that.  "Yes."  Yes?  What the hell does "yes" mean?  I didn't as a yes or no question!  No reply.

[MrWiggles]

My current rpg obsession is Pendragon, a d20 system designed specifically for playing various interpritations of the Arthurian legends. The main attraction are passion and personality statistics which have an affect on the game and are influenced by PC actions.

I didn't know Pendragon made the jump to D20.  I'm pretty sure I demo'd that game at Gencon the year before 3rd Ed D&D was released.

Roll d20, if its under the score then you succeed. If its an opposed roll whomever has the highest roll while still being successful wins. That's d20 right? Cheesy rules for skills over 20.

What did it used to run on?

d20 system isnt a roll under system.

[Mithras]

I'd assumed that d20 system just meant a game that used d20s for most of its mechanics. I stand corrected.

[Draco18s]

I'd assumed that d20 system just meant a game that used d20s for most of its mechanics. I stand corrected.

No, the "d20 system" is a very specific "d20+modifier, roll high" type system.

[ndkid]

Pnx mentioned in the happy thread about putting together a gaming group with a friend, but not knowing what to run.  I started putting together a list of unique games in my collection as potential inspiration and decided this deserved its own thread.

I always want to know what the players of an RPG want before I start making recommendations, because saying "I want to play a tabletop rpg" isn't much less generic than saying "I want to play a computer game". It's certainly more generic than saying "I want to play a computer rpg", and that still covers a lot of ground!

If you like pseudo-historical settings and/or are interested in fairly chunky magic systems, Ars Magica is the system I've run the most over the past five years. By default, it takes place at the start of the 13th century, and has a lot of the notions of group storytelling that White Wolf has made part of its core, but blended in a way I find more attractive; both feel like they're trying to tell a group narrative, but AM has a strong sense of more equal collaboration among players in figuring out what they want their game to be, and players being able to shift roles throughout the campaign.

If you want a generic system that can do many things, with a focus on the skills of the characters, I think this is where GURPS reigns surpreme. I prefer 3rd ed over 4th ed, but YMMV. If you want a generic system with an emphasis on powers (good for fantasy, sci-fi, and superheroes), I then lean toward HERO. (One day, I will sit down to take the time to blend these two generic systems together into a cohesive whole that does both powers and skills well!)

If you want a fantasy game of a less western flavor, I am a big fan of Legend of the Five Rings. It has a very well fleshed out universe with a great deal of history. It has a lot of eastern motifs. It has the range to do both very high and very low fantasy. It has d20 versions if you're into that sort of thing.

Speaking of d20, if you put a gun to my head and made me play a d20 flavor, I'd go with the Song of Ice and Fire d20 variant that was put out 5-10 years ago. It doesn't quite go far enough to smooth out the obscene d20 power curve, in my opinion, but it tries hard, and it provides quite a good amount of new chrome onto the system (like its influence system), all while using an IP that, at the time, wasn't nearly as mainstream-popular as it is now. (I'm saying this is a Hipster RPG: it liked GRRM before he was cool.)

If you're into things that are more tactical and less about the narrative, d20 is the popular choice, but I'd actually hop on the wayback machine and recommend Birthright, an AD&D splinter that had the standard D&D stuff, but also a strategy level where the characters are major players in the world who generally control important sections of the world, whether guilds, sources of magical power, strongholds, or, at the high end, entire kingdoms. Thus, there are seasonal moves at the strategic level, where, sometimes, the players decide to go off adventuring for a while.

Also easy to turn into blended tactical/strategic/rpg games are Battletech if you're into Mecha, Heavy Gear if you want a slightly more realistic giant robot setting, or several different systems and system blends I can think of for space.

FWIW, here's the books I have hard copies of, and can thus provide greater specific insight on:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/ndkid&tag=RPG&collection=-1

[Draco18s]

Oh, I forgot about Scion.

A game where you can be anybody from Hercules on up to Zeus, and everything in between.

There are three books: Hero (Hercules), Demigod, and God (Zeus), and generally speaking you can run whole campaigns with just the one book.

A friend of mind said "screw that, we're doing one campaign from Hero to God, doing it in 10 weeks."  (For a rough comparison, that's like saying to a party of 1st level D&D adventurers, "in 10 weeks, you'll be level 30.")

They totally destroyed the universe.

One of the players was totally the first one back when it restarted (ah, Epic Manipulation: "If my friends destroy the universe, I want to be the first one back when it restarts.")

[Viken]

On that note, a D20 deviant called Mutants and Masterminds is pretty cool.  Ever wanted to play your own custom superhero, or perhaps a crazed villian hell-bent on taking over the world? That's the game for you. XD

[Cthulhu]

On the weird and obscure RPG front:

In a Wicked Age is a single-session roleplay heavy game with a very simple ruleset involving dice and cards, most of the scenarios that come out of it have a pulp fantasy vibe a la Conan the Barbarian (Or Gor, if you're playing with the wrong group)

Microscope is a system for collaborative worldbuilding, taking its name from the way focus shifts from overarching plots inward to actual roleplayed encounters.  One playtest involved a galaxy-spanning Juggalo empire.

EDIT:  The name is How to Host a Dungeon.  A single-player dungeon building RPG.  You use big layered sheets of semitransparent wax paper, or other contrivances if you don't want to buy weird paper, using dice to set up an initial cave system and then again using dice to play through the history of whatever race built the dungeon (Dorfs by default, but there are other options with more complex rules).  Can get a little unwieldy later in the game.

Nobilis is one Janet showed me but it wasn't my kind of thing.  I'm not sure how to describe it, something vaguely in the neighborhood of Exalted.  The players are demigod-esque entities with a theme that can be pretty much whatever you want.  One combat description involved the Power of Squares, who did things like blocking attacks with a big square and throwing lots of small sharp squares.



Legend of the Five Rings is pretty cool.  I had a plan for a bitchin' one-shot but it never came together, for one because somehow one of the premade characters was literally identical to a character in the example adventure I never read, though I guess that isn't such a big deal.

Basically it was gonna be set up as a murder mystery, all the players are using premade characters, holding winter court with a Lion Clan daimyo.  He gets murdered and nobody knows who did it.  There's a tacit assumption one of the players is the killer, and since all the characters are premade I had engineered things to go all Hamlet by the end.  One player was the Daimyo's favored vassal, who effectively has no alibi since his alibi is that he was on a forbidden tryst with the daimyo's daughter, who is engaged to another PC.  Third PC is a scorpion clan shugenja with his own motives, who secretly saw the encounter.  I can't remember what the other PCs were going to be, but those three alone are enough to pretty much guarantee an intra-party drama clusterfuck, which is exactly what I wanted.  Icing on the cake, the killer is an NPC.  What a tweest!

The vassal's dilemma is identical to that of an NPC in the example adventure, murdered daimyo, mackin' on his daughter, no alibi, obviously hiding something, which for some reason bothered me a  lot because I came up with my idea without knowing this guy existed.

----------

Some more I just remembered:

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is a post apocalyptic RPG where dinosaurs are around.  I got this as some kind of /tg/ prank, a rar file that was supposed to be something else.  Never played it, obviously.  The ruleset sucked.

Creepy Wall is something /tg/ cooked up, I never actually had access to the rules, they seem to have vanished.  Based on a story about an RPG a guy ran where the players were guards posted on a giant wall.  The enemy never showed up, they  never saw anyone else, and things steadily became more surreal and dreamlike.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Also, I'm apparently DM... I've never done anything like this before, any advice for me guys?

Yes. Talk with your players and ask what each would really not want to play. People can get over not playing their favorite thing, but it's harder to get over playing something you can't stand. Hopefully you end up with something that nobody hates. Here's an example: last gaming group I assembled had two people who said they didn't want anything modern with guns and cars and stuff. That rules out a lot of games, but leaves a whole lot open. Remember you can also skip over a "modern" feeling game by going straight to scifi. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (and vice versa).

Pick a refereeing style. You need to answer these questions for yourself:

1: Will I ever change the result of a die roll to suit a player? Will I ever change the circumstances of the world materially to suit a player?
(Saying that the forest has some oak trees because the player wants some acorns isn't a big deal. Saying the Thieves' Guild will accept the player Thief even though they have a strict no-men policy is a big deal. Putting a Frost Sword in a treasure hoard because a player has voiced that he really wants one. Adding or removing monsters from a dungeon after the party gets there because they're too strong / weak for it.)

2: Is it okay for a player-character to die permanently? How about the whole group? How about a player losing all his treasure (such as from a disintegration spell or being digested)?

3: Is it okay for the players to fail? Is it possible for them to succeed?

4: Is it okay for the players to skip portions of the adventure if they figure out a way around it or just bypass it by plain luck?

5: What do you do if a player-character becomes a lot more powerful than the others? How about if the whole party becomes very rich for their level? Or gains a bunch of extra levels through some fluke?

I'm not dogging on any playstyle here, these are just questions to figure out so everyone can be on the same page.