Folklore wrote:
A lot of good itch.io bundles are coming with dozens if not hundreds of PDFs for various TTRPGs. If you have a few dollars to kick over for something like Ukraine of Trans rights, it's a charitable way to a bunch of games.
I got both those, and Wanderhome was even in the Trans Rights one! Itch games are genuinely fantastic.
Speaking of Itch.io games, I've recently purchased Monster Care Squad and am reading it tonight. My group wants to try it tomorrow. I'm very excited.
It's basically like Monster Hunter except instead of murdering everything in sight like psychopaths, you heal god-like creatures from a sickness that's making them crazy and causing them pain. There's different phases of play for diagnosing the problem, creating a remedy, and administering the treatment. It's a game about restoring the balance of nature and maintaining the connection humans and monsters have. I was sold on it by the premise alone. I'm very excited that my group has been interested in the more wholesome games I prefer.
KingoftheArrows wrote:
A few indie games I know of are:
Wanderhome, about nomadic animal folk who go on all sorts of adventures (think: Redwall but without much violence).
Coyote and Crow, a sci-fi fantasy alternative history of the First Nations where colonization never occurred (looks really good!!).
Lasers & Feelings, a one-page Star-Trek esque RPG that’s really fun and easy for beginners to get into the TTRPG scene. I like this one and have personally played it, but it might not be for you since you mentioned that you didn’t want the more genre-heavy settings (of which plays a big role in L&F).
Neon Saber, a cyberpunk hack of Beam Saber, with the focus on a ragtag crew.
I’m a fan of indie ttrpgs, especially with ones that take place in non-western settings. I’ll try and look for more systems, as I find them!
Wanderhome, about nomadic animal folk who go on all sorts of adventures (think: Redwall but without much violence).
Coyote and Crow, a sci-fi fantasy alternative history of the First Nations where colonization never occurred (looks really good!!).
Lasers & Feelings, a one-page Star-Trek esque RPG that’s really fun and easy for beginners to get into the TTRPG scene. I like this one and have personally played it, but it might not be for you since you mentioned that you didn’t want the more genre-heavy settings (of which plays a big role in L&F).
Neon Saber, a cyberpunk hack of Beam Saber, with the focus on a ragtag crew.
I’m a fan of indie ttrpgs, especially with ones that take place in non-western settings. I’ll try and look for more systems, as I find them!
Wanderhome was one of the systems I listed I owned in an earlier post. I even have a physical copy of it, though I'll likely never get to play it at a table. My group has tentatively approached it, though we're still figuring out what to make of it.
I mostly avoid heavy genre stuff because the status quo of a lot of fantasy genres just don't click with me (and have the habit of being offensive.) I might actually consider a more utopian sci-fi like Star Trek, but, Lasers & Feelings has always scared me off from it with the way it is often advertised. It might be worth a second look though, just out of curiosity.
At this point, every system I care to run or play in except for Golden Sky Stories is on Itch, ha.
SparksFly wrote:
Aardbei wrote:
hello my name is strob airy and i like to throw math rocks
So part of this post is a grievance. I don't like D&D, I feel absolutely smothered in D&D in TTRPG spaces, it's really difficult to get away from and everything essentially lives in its shadow. And contrary to what its stans will tell you, it is not, in fact, a one-size-fits-all that you can just magically homebrew into being what you want. To homebrew the things I dislike about D&D out of D&D would effectively be more work than making my own system from scratch, because it isn't just "this one thing" or "that one mechanic," it's a whole lot of its core rules (class systems, racial benefits, how xp works, how milestones work, the actual options for character creation on offer, EVERYTHING about its combat, the d20 system in general...
Yeah, when I say "I don't like D&D, I mean it. I don't like Pathfinder either since that's just D&D but again and with even more crunch.
"Okay, so what DO you like?"
I have found SO many cool game systems that I've fallen madly in love with, and that all my friends bounced hard off. Some of them don't even have combat, a lot of them don't have death mechanics, and all of them are way easier to deal with than D&D. (They often use simpler math, or success/failure rolls like FATE.) Unfortunately, all my friends want the crunchy bits that I abhor, and finding players for even one-shots has been a constant uphill battle.
I just want to know if there are any players out there like me, who like the structure TTRPGs provide, but have been turned off by how frontloaded game systems like d20 or d100 are? I'd love to actually build or join a community of people who are interested in indie systems, or simpler systems in general, and I'd be willing to GM some one-shots in the game systems I am interested in if anyone is curious but at this point I have interest in way too many to list here. I can at least say that most of them are a tenth the size of D&D's PHB so it wouldn't even involve a lot of reading...
But really, I just want to get this frustration out. I've vented about it in more TTRPG-centric places but those places tend to be filled with the kind of people who build mute bricks and min/max so it's not like I've gotten much in the way of relation there...
So part of this post is a grievance. I don't like D&D, I feel absolutely smothered in D&D in TTRPG spaces, it's really difficult to get away from and everything essentially lives in its shadow. And contrary to what its stans will tell you, it is not, in fact, a one-size-fits-all that you can just magically homebrew into being what you want. To homebrew the things I dislike about D&D out of D&D would effectively be more work than making my own system from scratch, because it isn't just "this one thing" or "that one mechanic," it's a whole lot of its core rules (class systems, racial benefits, how xp works, how milestones work, the actual options for character creation on offer, EVERYTHING about its combat, the d20 system in general...
Yeah, when I say "I don't like D&D, I mean it. I don't like Pathfinder either since that's just D&D but again and with even more crunch.
"Okay, so what DO you like?"
I have found SO many cool game systems that I've fallen madly in love with, and that all my friends bounced hard off. Some of them don't even have combat, a lot of them don't have death mechanics, and all of them are way easier to deal with than D&D. (They often use simpler math, or success/failure rolls like FATE.) Unfortunately, all my friends want the crunchy bits that I abhor, and finding players for even one-shots has been a constant uphill battle.
I just want to know if there are any players out there like me, who like the structure TTRPGs provide, but have been turned off by how frontloaded game systems like d20 or d100 are? I'd love to actually build or join a community of people who are interested in indie systems, or simpler systems in general, and I'd be willing to GM some one-shots in the game systems I am interested in if anyone is curious but at this point I have interest in way too many to list here. I can at least say that most of them are a tenth the size of D&D's PHB so it wouldn't even involve a lot of reading...
But really, I just want to get this frustration out. I've vented about it in more TTRPG-centric places but those places tend to be filled with the kind of people who build mute bricks and min/max so it's not like I've gotten much in the way of relation there...
I can’t remember all the details in order I say too much, but a while ago I found a fan made table top game for Halo that ran off of some D100 system. It took a good while to learn and get used to because it was very different from the usual d20 systems I handle but once I got the hang of it I ended up enjoying it somewhat more then any system I had used in the past, that’s not to say much however because I don’t goof around with too many table tops
TTRPGs are a bit of a Thing to get into. You basically need a dedicated group of nerds helping you on-board or it's daunting. Having said that, I know very little about the Halo universe, only what I saw of it when a friend was streaming a playthrough of the MCE, but honestly, I could see a TTRPG in that setting being really interesting. I'm a bit suspicious of systems that use more than a D6, but I could actually see a friend taking interest in such a system.
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