What rough beast?

Barbarian: So Much for Subtlety / Pure Big Mad Boat Man

Bard: Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival, The / Unfortunate Conflict of Evidence

Cleric: Prosthetic Conscience / God Told Me To Do It

Druid: You Naughty Monsters / Limiting Factor

Fighter: What Are The Civilian Applications? / Frank Exchange of Views

Monk: Prime Mover / Death and Gravity

Paladin: Ethics Gradient / Congenital Optimist

Ranger: Eight Rounds Rapid / No Fixed Abode

Rogue: Cargo Cult / Honest Mistake / Unacceptable Behavior

Sorcerer: I Blame My Mother / I Blame Your Mother

Warlock: Youthful Indiscretion / Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill

Stuff like “I ignore 80% of the rulebook and constantly fudge dice rolls, that means I’m a strong independent GM with a clear vision for my game” – like, yes, that may well be true, but that you’re having to do all that is a pretty clear sign that you’re using a wildly inappropriate system for the kind of game you want to run.

Basically, game rules are not unopinionated. Any game that claims to be universal is lying to you; yes, it’s true that a given set of rules can be reasonably setting neutral, but even the simplest rules bake in a huge number of very specific assumptions about how the game ought to be played. They have to, because that’s what rules do.

Of course, whenever the rules and the GM disagree about how the game ought to be played, the GM is going to win, but that’s not necessarily an argument you need to be having. To draw a parallel, it’s totally possible to start with the rules of soccer and gradually rewrite and pare away bits and pieces of it until you have miniature golf, but you’d have saved yourself a lot of headaches if you’d just started with miniature golf in the first place!

And the thing is, I don’t think most novice GMs are getting themselves into this position on purpose. A lot of folks seem to be getting misled – sometimes by overzealous advocates of this or that popular system, and sometimes just by their own inexperience – that there’s basically only one kind of tabletop RPG, and if the the game they want to play is anything other than that very specific game, it’s on them to figure it out from first principles.

Which just plain ain’t the case. Tabletop RPGs are a hugely diverse hobby, and whatever your perfect game is, there’s probably something very close to it out there already, no matter what it is you’re dissatisfied with. There are tabletop RPGs without dice, tabletop RPGs without GMs, and even tabletop RPGs without player characters – and all of those are totally separate considerations from how complex the rules are. If your ideal game is a highly structured three-hundred-page tome about Regency era comedies of manners in the mode of Bronte and Austen?  That game actually exists – as do countless others.

(Plus, even if you prefer to hack your own systems, you can benefit from expanding your horizons and seeing how other people have approached the subjects you want to take on. As a game author myself, I’ve frequently found myself in the position of having spent weeks or months bashing my head against a particular piece of game design, only later to discover that some game I didn’t know existed had solved that problem thirty years ago!)

And just so nobody can say I’m being a grump without offering any constructive alternatives, there’s an annotated rec list of forty-odd free or pay-what-you-want tabletop RPGs under the cut. If you want to take my advice but have no budget for expanding your library, check any of these out!

Tabletop RPGs’ baked-in assumptions about how the game ought to be played include assumptions about what kinds of stories you ought to be telling. For any given game, there will be stories that the framework of play encourages and facilitates; stories that are neither helped nor hindered because the framework of play simply has nothing to say about them; and stories where the framework of play actively gets in the way. What stories go in which buckets is different for every game.

The upshot is that there’s no such thing as a tabletop RPG that’s “story-focused” in principle. A particular game may be set up in a way that encourages – or at least fails to obstruct – the kinds of stories you want to tell, yet presents a huge gnarly obstacle to some other group’s stories. Rules that “just get out of the way” for me may be getting all up in your business in ways that would never even cross my radar, because the places where they’re tripping you up are places my games never go!

Garden  -   Jan de Vliegher , 2018

Belgian, b.1964-