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Favorite TTRPG Systems

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Grand Master

IsabellaRose

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My favorite is still Cortex Dramatic Roleplay*, the system introduced in the Smallville roleplaying game.

I love the way it models the back and forth nature of relationships with the way your relationship to someone can get stronger or weaker as you play, and the nature of your relationship with each person changes as you learn more about them and interact with each other. I like that relationships and personal values have mechanical weight. I like that it forces you to decide who and what is important to your character and your relationships and motivations are the dice you roll to accomplish anything you need to do. 

I also like the mechanic where you can challenge a relationship or value. Each relationship and value has a statement. For example:

  • d8 Anna - "Anna is my most trusted friend."
  • d10 Truth - "I can't let anyone find out the truth about my inheritance." 
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Let's say Anna is trying to get details out of me about where this inheritance came from. I don't want to tell her. She rolls to try to get me to tell her. I could just give in and not roll, and she'd have to pay me a plot point. Or I could roll against her, try to beat her, and resist telling her. (Note: even if I lose, I don't have to tell her. I just pay her a plot point, take stress, and refuse to answer.)

Since she's my most trusted friend but I don't trust her with this information, I can challenge the relationship statement "Anna is my most trusted friend." When I challenge, I get to roll 3 dice instead of 1 for that relationship. So instead of rolling 1d8 Anna, I roll 3d8 Anna. After this contest, I reduce my relationship with Anna by one die size to d6 for the remainder of the episode. BUT one of the cool things is that I also get to add the original die size d8 to my Growth Pool to help me improve my stats at the end of the episode. If I lose, I take Stress. If she loses, she takes Stress.

At the end of the episode, we have Recovery scenes. Maybe my character's boyfriend broke up with her because he found out my secret, and Anna is there to make me feel better. During the scene where we broke up, I got d8 Insecure Stress. Anna tries to help me recover my stress. She rolls against my stress and if she beats it, my stress is gone and I get to add that d8 to my Growth Pool. 

When the episode is over, I can either leave my Anna statement the same and keep the lower die rating, showing that I still consider her my most trusted friend, but that our relationship has been lessened due to me not trusting her. OR I could return it to d8 and rewrite the relationship statement to something like "Anna wouldn't understand my secret" to reflect my new way of thinking about her. The I get to roll the dice in my Growth Pool to try to improve my stats or acquire new abilities.

 

I really like that part of the game, where your character grows by interacting with other characters, by caring about them and sharing scenes together, building drama and interpersonal relationships.

 

*But boy does the Alien game have a great mechanic for losing your shit when you're scared!

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Balthier

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I've always had a soft spot for Palladium/Rifts. It just felt so open and when I played, it was the first game I felt like it would let me do anything I imagined, especially going to it from AD&D back at the time.

The alignments made so much more sense, good, selfish, and evil categories. Experience points for role playing, and planning and resolving problems, self sacrifice, successfully using skills, not just for killing things. The first RPG I remember that felt like story was more important than murdering everything. The big selection of skills, random insanity tables if your character ever broke down from too much trauma, you could play monster races... There was just nothing like it I had played at the time. Combat was more interactive, magic system was more fun. So many good memories, from traditional fantasy to dimension hopping, to a long running Robotech campaign, it did it all, and was so much fun.

Edited by Balthier
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NewHere

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I really enjoy Mothership as a system, hard sci fi horror is great fun and the campaigns I've played of it have been great fun. It gives you the framework you need for basic mechanical stuff, and doesn't encumber you with lore so you can do more or less what you like. I also generally have a like for d100 systems which Mothership is!

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Grand Master

IsabellaRose

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6 hours ago, Balthier said:

I've always had a soft spot for Palladium/Rifts. It just felt so open and when I played, it was the first game I felt like it would let me do anything I imagined, especially going to it from AD&D back at the time.

I fell IN LOVE with Palladium coming from AD&D when I was a kid. I started with whatever books my brother had, and the first Palladium I played was Beyond the Supernatural. It introduced me to realistic alignment, experience and growth for something other than killing things and taking their stuff... all the good you said above. But that system was such a hot mess. It was a glorious mess filled with great ideas, but it just felt so imbalanced. And while I knew that "balance" I'd learned in creating D&D encounters felt wrong, I also knew that the Palladium systems felt very hodge-podge. It all made sense to me, but it was hard to get new players into it. But it did inspire me to create my first home brew system!

15 minutes ago, NewHere said:

I really enjoy Mothership as a system, hard sci fi horror is great fun and the campaigns I've played of it have been great fun. It gives you the framework you need for basic mechanical stuff, and doesn't encumber you with lore so you can do more or less what you like. I also generally have a like for d100 systems which Mothership is!

I still haven't played Mothership, but a lot of people have said it's amazing! Maybe you'll run us through a mothership game some time.

I found the Alien game had a great fear/horror mechanic. Maybe it was specifically for that setting, but when my ex-marine colonist lost her shit when confronted by aliens for the first time and just started shooting her full clip despite her training, it felt so much like something that would happen in one of the Alien movies. 

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Balthier

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The GM had to know what they were doing more so than AD&D I thought. The classes weren't balanced, but that was part of the fun. You could run a vagabond next to a dragon hatchling and still have great fun. But it wasn't balanced around combat encounters, it was definitely tailored for playing a character, and a story driven game. 😀

And that Palladium Fantasy setting, what a great world to explore!

Edited by Balthier
Grand Master

WritesNaughtyStories

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I've been kicking around the TTRPG community since Eldritch Wizardry was new so I've had a lot of favorites over the years.

Champions, look I get that it's a math problem. It's a super fun math problem though. Its ability to mod powers and customize characters led the way for GURPS. It's also the first place I saw relationships codified and given mechanical weight.

Apocalypse World taught me more about how to improvise well and follow players' leads than any other book. It also taught me about gamifying relationships between player characters. 

Rifts taught me everything I needed to know about, "Fuck it, it's your game. Play it however you want."

Ars Magica taught me that I can love mechanics but hate a setting. I love that magic system. Love. It. But Mythic Europe and the Houses of Hermes are miserable. Somehow the whole Mages pretend they're not magical pisses me off more than the Camarilla not being apex predators.

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Balthier

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On 10/02/2025 at 08:32, IsabellaRose said:

The only settings I ever used were the Beyond the Supernatural one and my brother had all these TMNT books. The Transdimensional TMNT book introduced me to time travel and multiversal roleplay and I built a whole campaign around it that I ran for 12 years. I did love those books.

Those were fun!

Palladium Fantasy is a gem of a setting.

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Balthier

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The background, in times barely remembered ancient civilizations having had to band together with all the numerous pantheons of gods and dragons, to defeat the cthulu-like old ones. The age of a 1000 magics, then Elf-dwarf war that ruined both civilizations. The milleneum of purification that followed... It has a rice background.

Details. Each region has it's own source book, so it they've just been able to add more details to each region. Trade routes. The only other fantasy setting I though came close to the quality was Kingdoms of Kalamar.

Rune weapons, that ancient and forgotten art of bio-wizardry.

The Wolfen Empire, and it's raising conflict with humanity... the failing Old Kingdom, pending slave revolt in Timiro. A Kingdom of Giants forming.

The Land of the Damned, where it's said the very land is cursed from the time of the battle against the Old Ones.

There's just so much crammed in there. While the system is older, it has the advantage of being developed over all these years, continuously.

Edited by Balthier
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Grand Master

IsabellaRose

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I love a well-developed world! I really loved Golarion from Pathfinder when I started playing. It seemed better than the Sword Coast, without all the... I don't know... D&D-ness of Sword Coast?

But lately I've been playing in worlds created specifically for the game I'm running. I've really got into collaborative world-building and the "yes, and" improv philosophy. It's great because you can add in things you like from your favorite settings and turn those individual parts into something entirely new. Like the Wolfen Empire and their conflict with humanity from Palladium Fantasy and the Kelesh Empire and their culture of slavery from Golarion? Use 'em both. Rename them if you want, add new elements, knightly orders from favorite books, whatever... 

I've always been a home-brewed setting person, but making them collaborative is my favorite. I could go on and on about the world I created with input from all the players in my last Pathfinder campaign. But I won't bore you with the details.

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Grand Master

WritesNaughtyStories

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11 hours ago, IsabellaRose said:

collaborative world-building and the "yes, and" improv philosophy. 

This is where Apocalypse World and Microscope really changed the way I play and run games. I rarely have anything but the barest sketch when I sit down at the table. I love the NPCs players come up with when I ask who they have to meet to get whatever McGuffin I've come up with.

The world-building that gets done in this little conversations is SO powerful. Everybody was there and it sticks and the stories take root in the world they know.

I'm going to open a world building thread, if that's okay, @IsabellaRose.

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Enthusiast

roll to seduce

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Microscope has to probably be one of my favorite systems. It's really one of the few games where the focus is to build on top of eachother's ideas. Especially like that the system straight up encourages to go fully nuclear, so that leads to some really interesting stories.

I also like The Quiet Year, similar in many ways, a little more contained, and a little more stressful. It's a cute little game.

I'd love to run either of those systems here.

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Grand Master

WritesNaughtyStories

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We've found that Microscope is more of a management headache than you'd think. Without a whiteboard or some other way for everyone to insert eras, scenes and whatnot, someone has to edit a main "game" post.

utgars-chronicles.app offers a purpose-built online tool that works well. Be advised that, while anonymous links to the game are available and you don't need to register to play, links are time sensitive and the game owner will need to send a link every time anyone wants to play or people will need to register.

All that said, I'm in.

Grand Master

IsabellaRose

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One of my favorite things ever is the world-building used in Smallville (of all things!) - There's a system (now adapted with only the barest of bare bones into Cortex Prime) called Pathways that has built my three favorite game worlds ever, and I've been playing in homebrewed worlds longer than some people here have been alive.

The system really works best for games where all the characters know each other and they will be adventuring in a set area - one city, one star system, and place where certain locations can be important to the players across multiple sessions (like a high school, a coffee shop, a superhero headquarters, a secret lab, a moon base, etc.). If you're going to be keeping things in one general area, this system is awesome (although I did use it for a multiversal game where even though it was all in one area, each of those areas could change depending on the weird variations in each multiverse).

Basically, you make a big relationship map. Everybody adds their character and links them a new NPC, specifying their relationship to your character. Next turn you link your character to a location and why its important, then you also link either your NPC or location to one created by someone else. IT goes on like that, adding new, linking existing, until your NPCs and locations are linked to a bunch of other NPCs and locations, and some of those are linked back to each of the PCs... it creates this crazy web, and people build off of what each other creates. It's makes an amazing, cohesive world that feels real.

In one game, I created the NPC of my twin sister and linked my character to another character's older brother as "ex-boyfriend". They linked my sister to them as "is dating". Then someone linked my sister to the dirtbike racetrack one of the PCs races at with a "always wins races at" link. My sister, who would have been a nothing NPC, maybe someone the GM could use to kidnap or threaten, was suddenly important to 3 PCs, dating one, and keeps beating another in dirtbike racing. By the end of the setup, she became the cornerstone of the adventure, an NPC so important that when she went missing, all the PCs needed to find their sister, girlfriend, best friend, and mentor. The GM barely had to work to get us invested - we all cared about those places and NPCs because we made them!

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