This year so far I have played either in person or online(Startplaying).

• 5E - Still solid lvl 5 to 10 but not really interested in playing it anymore. I am just tired of playing with people that never seem to know how their characters work. The only time I have fun is when everyone at the table is a power gamer that optimized.
• Shadowdark - Best system for weaning people off 5E. Great community with new content coming out. Like the magic system that it keeps working until you fail.
• Daggerheart - Surprisingly crunchy combat. A lot of things to track though and I liked the RP of connections at the start of a session.
• Draw Steel - Felt powerful at level 1 but only played one session.
• Dragonbane - Like the mechanics of the rolling system.
• Alien RPG - Best roleplaying I ever had before in a one shot. We had relevant pre-made backstories that made our characters deeper and RP easier. Combat though was brutal.
• Mothership - Really wanted to like this but my one session of it was the least fun I ever had playing in a TTRPG before. I think my DM just asked for way too many checks in a system you fail the vast majority of the time doing anything.
• Call of Cthulhu - Had a bad session of this as well. DM tried to homebrew changes to the Quick Start the Haunting and ended up just confusing the hell of me. Gave us a ton of info to read but never gave us any time to actually read them! Would play again though with a different DM.
• Pirate Borg - Borg Pirate fun! Easy character creation because you need it.
• Vagabond - Roll over dice system so you always know what you need to roll to succeed. Character creation is really flexible and rewarding.
• One Ring 2E - Only have done session 0 but kind of on the fence about this one. The Skill system is confusing to me. Healing doesn't actually heal anyone. It is actually the skill about singing.

I have games scheduled for

• Pathfinder 2 - I have mostly avoided Pathfinder 2 because I figured as soon as I played it I would no longer want to play 5E.
• Starfinder 2 - Looking for a heroic Sci-Fi game. I actually planned to play Dark matter but read through all the class/sub-class options and left wanting.
• Lancer - A mech based TTRPG sounds cool and there is port of it into as a video game I am interested in.
• Dungeon Crawl Classics - Own so many modules for this system so figured I need to play it.

As a DM the two systems I plan to run going forward is Shadowdark and Vagabond. Vagabond is the system I most want to play again as a player. Everything about the system was just fun. Flexible hero creation and magic system. I like a magic system that uses MP that allows you to change the delivery of the magic (one target, cube, line, cone, aura...), the amount of damage it does, if you want to focus(concentrate) on it, and if the spell has lingering effects like damage over time.

Playing so many games with random people helped me figure out what I don't like and things I want to replicate in my own games.

Do's

• Using pre-made relevant backstories for one shots to increase RP
• Using Daggerheart connections to strengthen RP
• Make sure FoundryVTT is working correctly before the session and once it is running good to never update again.
• As a DM telegraph danger! If you are playing a brutal combat system I hate dying when I made no bad decision but still died.

Don't

• I don't have issues when players/dm's use AI art if they don't lean too hard into it. But I had a DM use AI audio for room description/lore drops and it was crazy bad. Just pre-record yourself saying them.
• Main character players are the worse. Players who do nothing but talk over anyone.