Ahem. Yoko Kanno is not a “he.”

There are issues with that, as it requires balancing things like bows and arrows with advanced plasma weapons or high-velocity sniper rifles in the same rules set. Going logically, if an arrow does say 1d8 damage, a sniper rifle should do maybe 10d8 with an insta-kill if it’s a called shot to the head, which is not so…

We did have a system which was rolling a 1 meant you got to roll on a critical failure table, but half or more the table was just “you fail,” and the rest was a mixture of “you fail hard” and “you just fail, but there’s a complication.” It wasn’t immediately, “you roll 1 with a vorpal sword so you chop off your own…

WEG Star Wars does have some 1980s-isms, but most of these can be easily ignored (like fixing the ship is something you should only be rolling for if you’re under attack, or if the GM is using it as a story-generating event). The thing I like most about it is how it doesn’t reflect the fast-paced nature of combat in…

Yes. The idea in the fiction is that the timeline is exactly the same up until the same day as Gettysburg, when a would-be sorcerer makes contact with the Reckoners, powerful spirits, and they unleash supernatural forces into the world. The dead start rising, magical creatures like wendigos enter the world and people…

Yeah, they did a Kickstarter last year and delivered a few months ago. I have a huge boxed set with the main rulebook, a second campaign guide, dice and an adventure, and I also got the Horror at Headstone Hill adventure boxed set, which looks very nice.

An immutable truth of D&D since 1978 is that it is entirely possible to learn the game and run hundreds of sessions over dozens of years with many different groups without once looking at the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and certainly these days there are so many monster stats listed online you don’t really need the Monstro…

Yup, and there’s nothing wrong with that, just as there’s nothing wrong with systems which focus instead on the R aspect either. Sometimes you might want to watch Die Hard, sometimes you might want to watch Three Colours Red and RPGs can be the same.

Palladium were great fun but deranged even by the standards of the 1980s. Still, I had great fun with their Robotech game.

Shadowrun is infamously a fantastic setting which has always been looking for a good system to run it. The OG system in the 1980s was acceptable because that was how most RPGs were back then, but time has marched on and left it behind. Shadowrun 5E is probably the densest and most complicated high-profile ttrpg on the…

Free League are doing a lot of relatively rules-light RPGs based around streamlined gameplay and emphasising the collaborative storytelling of roleplaying: the phenomenally popular Tales from the Loop line even suggests making PC death impossible (the spin-off Tales from the Flood line does make PC kills more likely).…

The new Deadlands edition just came out and is as great as ever.

I’ve found a good recommendation in the past is the Star Wars RPG (particularly the streamlined WEG original version, but reportedly the current Fantasy Flight version is okay) because, well, it’s Star Wars. Everyone knows what’s what. That doesn’t work if someone hates Star Wars, of course, and there was always the…

A key weakness of D&D in presentation is how it is presented by both many players/DMs and the written material as a roleplaying game, where the game aspects - killing things for XP and loot - is frontended in importance. I think that’s a legacy of its origins and also in how some people who are uncomfortable with the…

Shadowrun’s latest edition is one of the relatively small number of modern RPGs that is more crunchy and complex than D&D, and is not a good alternative to it, even though “D&D in Blade Runner” is a good premise and a good line to sell it. The rules are horrible, to the point you’re better off adapting D&D to the…

Something I’ve noticed is that a lot of D&D-only-players assume any other game will be even more complicated to learn, and it’s joyous when they realise they’ve already conquered one of the most complicated TTRPGs in existence and almost everything else they’ll play will be more straightforward in comparison.

It’s why I think Deadlands - “it’s a Western but with magic and steampunk!” - and Star Wars - “you’ve seen the films, right?” - are both enduring TTRPGs across huge spans of time as well as D&D, because you know the archetypes well enough to jump right in. Modiphius’s Star Trek game as well, and I have high hopes for…

I think there’s an impression that D&D and Pathfinder aren’t crunchy because crunchy is conflated with complicated or inaccessible, and D&D and Pathfinder are two of the most common “my first RPG” games in the business (D&D inarguably is the TTRPG more people got into the hobby with than any other, or all others…

It’s on GoG and is occasionally patched up to keep it playable. The graphics have not aged well (it used the Quake 2 Engine, which was ugly even in 2001) but the gameplay is pretty good and the ideas are just brain-meltingly good, like your mouse cursor being an actual cursor-shaped AI drone which is present in the…

A game that much more badly needs updating is Anachronox, which was an SF 3D CRPG that came out three years before KotOR and is surprisingly similar in structure, though different in tone (more comedic), universe (an original one) and combat (turn-based). IIRC, it was even fully-voiced, which KotOR wasn’t, which was…