Transcription
So no, not “DONE” like never again trying a new tabletop roleplaying game. But after trying 30 different games, mostly as oneshots—a single session of play—I am “DONE” with this QUANTITY over quality approach.
In a weird way, this two-year journey since the Dungeons & Dragons OGL wars—playing and game mastering over two dozen unique tabletop RPGs—has mirrored my journey of playing and “mastering” Dungeons & Dragons 5e! As a beginner, I was filled with excitement! And the more I learned and experienced, the more confident I became in both my knowledge and skill as a player and game master.
But eventually, I found myself a mix of frustrated by how much there truly is to learn, and more importantly, underwhelmed by how further study was not yielding any additional fun! It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s the Pareto Principle, it’s the fact that I personally have always had more fun just making stuff up with my friends than memorizing how… this “spellcaster character feature is actually really different from this other spellcaster character feature because you can combine it with this other thing!”
And no, this is absolutely NOT a video against trying new roleplaying games as oneshots! It was super fun, and I’ve learned so many new ways to have fun with TTRPGs! So this video is more like my report, where I give to you the single BEST lesson I learned from each of these thirty games, and at the end, I’ll tell you about the FIVE new RPGs I am most looking forward to trying in 2025… but ideally not as oneshots because I’ve done enough for a year!
Okay, and before number one, as I was just moving to my next spot, I found this area where deer were probably just chilling during the snow because there’s no snow on these random patches! That’s really cool. Nature!
NUMBER ONE, the first TTRPG I ever played… not really a game, it was a totally homebrewed game where my GM technically HAD the 5e player’s handbook, but we just made everything up! Look at this spell I had: “Bear Arms - 2/day - 1d8+4+Melee+WIS.” And yeah, we used character sheets from different editions of D&D because we had no idea what we were doing, but it was amazing!
And the single most important thing I learned from that game that got me hooked on tabletop RPGs was that my character could TRY ANYTHING!... within reason according to the GM. To beginner-me, that’s what separated D&D from Elder Scrolls. And to this day, if I’m playing a TTRPG where my character cannot even TRY to… climb a tree because I don’t have the tree-climb skill, then I’d rather play a video game!
Game TWO! D&D 3rd edition! I played this game in 2016 because it happened to be the set of D&D rulebooks that my then-girlfriend, now-wife, Grace World Destroyer, found at a used bookstore. And that’s relevant to the lesson! Because the one or two arguments that Grace and I have EVER had were over the rules of D&D 3rd edition! Thus, I learned to never again take the detailed rules of any GAME so seriously that it ruins the fun. Period.
And frustratingly, it was at that point that my microphone started intermittently cutting out, and I didn’t realize it until after recording another thirty or forty minutes of footage, umm. Yeah, I had plenty of battery. I think it was just too cold out. It was 20-something degrees (F). Thankfully, it seems like no permanent damage done, but here we go, the show must go on…
THREE! D&D 5e 2014. This Player’s Handbook is the first RPG rulebook that I ever owned, and studying it for years on end taught me many great lessons! But as we transition these lessons to including game mechanics that I love and look for in other games, it’s got to be advantage and disadvantage! ‘Roll twice and take the better or worse result’ is so clean that I can’t believe it took D&D 40 years to figure it out, but I’m glad they did!
FOUR! Dungeon Crawl Classics! Abandoning chronological order of when I tried these games, DCC is a “D&D-like” that strips back the DETAIL 5e characters and monsters, and instead, focuses PURELY on the tone and themes of pulp fantasy adventure! Like 5e, many great lessons from this game, but perhaps my favorite is to make monsters mysterious! I have a lot to say about that, so I made a whole video about it, linked below, where you can also find affiliate links to most of these RPG books if you want to check ‘em out and support the channel! :)
FIVE! XCrawl Classics! Same core rules as DCC, which is basically the same core rules as D&D, but firmly planted in a post-apocalyptic future setting where dungeon-crawling is a televised deathsport! And that is also relevant to the lesson! XCC’s Grandstanding and “Mojo” points are essentially a version of Hero Coins or Luck Tokens, through which players are incentivized to TRY heroic, or downright foolish stunts, even forgoing an attack in combat, and this drastically increases the likelihood of creating those memorable gaming moments with your friends.
Okay, and I didn’t plan to have any props for this, so now I’m going back and forth, grabbing books. Bear with me.
SIX! Shadowdark! Another D&D-like that strips back the crunch, but this time, focusing on SPEED! The main clock that keeps your Shadowdark game flowing is the 1-hr real-time torch timer, combined with the lesson that RPGs are just more thrilling when no player characters can see in the dark.
SEVEN! Index Card RPG! One of the FIRST D&D-like RPGs to strip back the detail of 5e, thus influencing numerous indie RPGs since! So it’s kinda cheating to choose only one lesson from ICRPG, but I will go with the one that has changed my game the most, and had a noticeable influence on others like Shadowdark: simplifying movement and distance to “Close, near, far.” Squares are cool too! These approaches are good for different styles of play, but my style works a lot better with abstract maps. Yeah, I’m really only ever gonna use squares again if I have to.
EIGHT! Is Crown & Skull! The modern fantasy RPG intentionally subverts the familiar core of D&D! The one thing I immediately latched onto is how it handles monsters! Technically still working on how to use this lesson in other games, but you just roll to see what the monsters do, saving your GM-brain much space for cooler ideas, and making it impossible to feel like an adversarial GM, so I like that!
NINE! EZD6! Way outside the mechanical core of D&D using only six-sided dice, my favorite part of this game is the exploding crits: roll max damage, and you roll again, and possibly again and again!! Similar to XCrawl’s grandstanding, these exploding crits create those exciting and memorable moments with your friends!
Kay, and since I’m testing the mic, can you hear me all the way when I’m out at our bookshelf? Hoo-hoo! What am I gonna bring next??
TEN! Skate Wizards! Super simple d6-based gameplay with lightning-fast character creation because… you’re a skateboarding wizard, with mostly randomized spells! And that’s it! This game, much like Dungeon Crawl Classics and others, was an important step on my path of embracing randomization! Surrendering to the dice!
'Cause when you roll a “rando spell” called “Rad Revealing Sound Armor” and you just get to decide with the GM what that spell can do? …It’s RAD!
And now we’re just on a sidebar, but Skate Wizards is THE reason that I started collecting audio cassettes because it came with one! My point is, there is an unforeseen beauty in trying a new RPG! Ya just don’t know where it’ll take you!
And another example of that, ELEVEN! Corny Gron! Another super simple fantasy RPG, but this one is for SOLO play which I had never done before outside of a little bit with Call of Cthulhu! And when I stayed up late one night excited to complete this solo one-shot journey, I learned that I CAN have a lot of fun playing a fantasy TTRPG without even one other player!
TWELVE! Deathbringer playtest! So not actually this version, but I did learn that Professor DM is a master of Scottish accents. Though the real lesson was that any one-shot adventure is made 1000 times better when you give the player characters individual secrets and goals!
THIRTEEN! Vagabond playtest! I don’t have a prop for this one. Another D&D-like that strips back SOME detail of contemporary D&D, and like Dungeon Crawl Classics, focuses on pulp fantasy! But I most enjoyed how Vagabond incorporates Luck! You don’t just spend it before a roll to boost the roll, you can also spend it after a roll to automatically turn a failure into a success—but then you can’t crit if you use it that way. So it’s an interesting tradeoff/twist on a pulpy mechanic that I already like! :)
FOURTEEN! Cairn 1e! And it was PLAYING, not reading, but PLAYING this super simple d20 fantasy RPG in early 2023, nearly 10 years after that first make-it-up-as-we-go campaign—playing Cairn reminded me just how few rules I need to have fun playing D&D with my friends!
But perhaps the best RPG rules lesson I learned from Cairn is that always having the target number, or DC, on your character sheet takes a HUGE burden off the game master!
FIFTEEN! Into The Odd! This is a groundbreaking system that inspired Cairn and, uh, what feels like countless other RPGs at this point—even Draw Steel is taking its ‘always hit’ combat mechanic from Into The Odd! And that is a fantastic lesson, but my favorite is probably what the author wrote when I got it signed: “Stay Odd!”
Because as someone who loves LOW fantasy, it’s easy for me to accidentally make my fantasy world kinda mundane, but this lesson takes the DCC lesson of mysterious monsters and lays it on EVERYTHING! Which is a really important reminder for me.
SIXTEEN! Mausritter! One of the many RPGs based on Into The Odd, you play little heroic mice in a big weird world, and this game proved to me just how simple an adventure MODULE can be! This two-page digest spread took me maybe 15 minutes to prep and provided my group with a couple hours of fun!
SEVENTEEN! Cats of Cathulhu! --Mice, Cats, what a segue!! This super simple d6-based RPG where you play essentially mundane cats in a big weird world reinforced another lesson I learned from Cairn, Into the Odd, and Mausritter: that is, limiting how much gear you can carry leads to extreme creativity!
Specifically, Cats of Cathulhu has the rule of one thing, where your cat can only carry one thing that fits in its mouth! Genius!
EIGHTEEN! CALL of Cthulhu! I first played this solo in 2019 because I love the stories of HP Lovecraft and I was already looking for games in contrast to 5e, where instead of playing a superhero, you play a pretty normal person who faces incredible challenges!
But Call of Cthulhu taught me… that I’m kinda bad at running horror games! If it’s not clear, I like to laugh, I like to goof around a little bit, and each time I ran it for myself or others, it was too hard to not lean into the comedy that always seems to emerge at my game table.
So, NINETEEN! Candela Obscura! Same vibe as Call of Cthulhu, and my same issue with tone, but this game showed me that I can enjoy some eldritch horror-comedy gaming with a much simpler set of rules!
RPG number TWENTY! Ten Candles! Thankfully, Grace World Destroyer is much better at running horror, so she ran this one, and wow! I learned just how good my game group is at collectively building the world as we go!
Ten Candles is a very unique game and experience in general, and if I’m not mistaken, it’s designed exclusively for oneshots, so it’s definitely something you should try out next Halloween!
Along with... TWENTY-ONE! Goons & Ghosts! …this is my kind of horror game! Simple rules, obvious ghostbusters tone, and designed by friend of the channel JP Coovert who also knows how to make extremely simple scenarios that take minutes to prep and provide hours of fun!
But the main lesson for me, Goons & Ghosts inspired part of the character creation method in one of the handful of TTRPGs that I will—someday HOPE to publish…
TWENTY-TWO! My unnamed Pokémon-inspired d6-based RPG! The only other thing I’ll say about it for now is the lesson I learned by playtesting it: no matter how many times you check the math for something, or how cool it seems on paper, sometimes that thing just doesn’t work how you thought it would when you finally playtest it!
And if you’re curious to know more, my wonderful supporters on Patreon WILL be the first to see more about this Pokémon-inspired RPG. 'Cause I’ve been sitting on a draft for about a year while working on Delve, literally just a Google doc, but I think just posting that doc for Patrons will help me get back on the ball this year!
Patrons also get bonus videos each month, so please consider joining through the link below!
--And now my camera’s about to die. Already went through my first battery out in the woods super fast, I think because of the cold, so probably gonna have to pick this up later--
And we’re back, TWENTY-THREE! Monster Of The Week! It’s exactly what it sounds like, uses the Powered by the Apocalypse system, and it taught me that the Powered by the Apocalypse is not quite as simple as everyone on the internet makes it out to be! But thankfully I had a great game master, so it was a lot of fun!
TWENTY-FOUR! Thirsty Sword Lesbians! It’s exactly what it sounds like, uses the Powered by the Apocalypse system, and taught me that when you’re trying a new game system, the game master and the players’ energy is way more important than the game system itself.
Like, it’s fair to say that me and most of my group do not fall in the target demographic of Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but we all came ready to have fun, Grace ran an absolutely killer one-shot, and it was easily one of the most memorable RPG sessions I’ve ever played!
TWENTY-FIVE! Mothership! To be reductive, it’s Call of Cthulhu in space, but it gave me a game-changing lesson about RPG character skills! Even though it has a lot of skills, and it’s a horror game where you’re supposed to HIDE from dangerous aliens on derelict spacecraft, there’s no skill for stealth because the designers of Mothership don’t want you to just “roll stealth.”
They want you to roleplay and describe how your character does the thing! And that experience confirmed for me why exploration is infamously boring in D&D 5e, so I made a video about it! Check it out.
TWENTY-SIX! Earthwild playtest! An indie RPG based on the Destiny video games! It’s the first game I ever played with actual zones for combat, where the battlemap is neither squares nor abstract ranges, but broken into these uneven polygons roughly based on elevation, terrain type, and size.
That was cool, but the main lesson was Earthwild’s core roll: d12 dice pool, rolling high AND low—you just don’t want dice to come up as like 5s, 6s, and 7s… you want low numbers and high numbers, and that was neat!
TWENTY-SEVEN! Cypher System! I played one cyberpunk-themed session with this seemingly super flexible d20 system, and similar to Earthwild, the most memorable part for me was the core roll, or maybe, the psychology behind the core roll?
Instead of adding bonuses to INCREASE your result, you apply skills and gear to DECREASE the target number. Also neat.
TWENTY-EIGHT! The One Ring! The officially licensed Lord of the Rings TTRPG, which I feel obligated to mention has a 5e conversion by the same publisher, but this original version was built from scratch to fit the tone and themes of Middle Earth!
So aside from that lesson of “system kinda does matter,” the real lesson that I learned was that I really like how One Ring players always know the target number to roll because it’s on their character sheet!
And you roll HIGH! Most other games I’ve played where the DCs are on the character sheet want you to roll UNDER those numbers, but in my head: “big number good.”
TWENTY-NINE! The Zone! Drifting into board game sort of territory, this is a highly improvisational weird sci-fi fantasy diceless roleplaying game where you draw cards and delve into some unknowable tear in reality, The Zone, teaching me that RPGs CAN be fun without dice… which is really the same lesson from…
Number THIRTY! For The Queen! No dice, no board, just draw cards and answer questions to develop your characters and the details of their mission: escorting the queen to a neighboring monarch.
Again, completely improvisational, but surprisingly fun. I even used this game WITHIN my DCC campaign to let my players determine some facts about the queen of my setting!
Aaaand thirty-one, thirty-two, 'cause I’ve already played some oneshots of Daggerheart and DC20 as playtests, but those are two of the NEW games I want to see MORE of in 2025!
Some kind of mini campaign like three to five sessions would be perfect! And the other NEW RPGs I want to do that with are Draw Steel, Nimble—but those two might force me to use squares again, so we’ll…
…and Tales of the Valiant 5e… and D&D 2024 which both have new boxed set mini campaigns coming out this year!
And one of my PLAYERS actually wants to run a D&D 2024 homebrew campaign for their first time GMing! And I definitely want to run at least a mini campaign of DCC and Shadowdark… and kinda the One Ring…
Okay, but as far as oneshots go, the only NEW games I would currently try that way are Cosmere, at least one of Borgs on our shelf, and I know Grace wants to try Forbidden Lands…
So I don’t know if I’m actually gonna have time for all that, but I’ll let you know in about a year!
Thanks again to the Bob World Builder patrons for making all of this possible, and keep building :)
--Okay wait, and did I mention that even my tripod bag RIPPED today, just as I was leaving my car, out in the woods—this video might be cursed… stay safe out there.