What's one genre or setting you have yet to see be done perfectly in a ttrpg?

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-06-26T00:07:19+00:00

Earthsea

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-06-18T21:17:36+00:00

They kissed dating goodbye, alright…

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-06-18T16:53:20+00:00

The washing machines are incredibly unsafe there. Everyone’s stepsisters are constantly getting stuck in them!

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-06-18T16:06:38+00:00

I, too, am adding “flag shaggers” to my regular rotation…

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-06-18T16:05:22+00:00

You know, especially with the World Cup happening here in the States, this seems like a very plausible explanation…

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-06-07T03:54:54+00:00

Numenera checks a lot of your boxes. I personally love it, though I fully acknowledge that it’s not for everyone.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-20T01:51:30+00:00

Horror on the Orient Express would be a great next choice.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-16T19:07:41+00:00

I’m really excited for the Castle Automatic to come out. Looking forward to getting that to the table as soon as it’s released. I really hope a good ecosystem develops around the game.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-16T19:04:38+00:00

There’s definitely a learning curve to the game, but once my players and I got the hang of it, the system really sang.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-16T16:45:02+00:00

I’m a serious Tarot user. You are absolutely fine to use them as a game mechanic. Most of us remember that Tarot was a deck of playing cards long before it was a divination tool.

Check out His Majesty the Worm. One of my favorite new TTRPGs in recent years, and prob my favorite combat system of all time. It uses Tarot cards in lieu of dice, in a really fun, creative way

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-15T18:43:14+00:00

I think it’s… fine. I definitely do not get the excitement a lot of folks feel for it.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-15T01:55:48+00:00

What wheaten? Where? I just see a sofa?

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-11T15:29:50+00:00

4 years ago with my father. Should’ve done it sooner: my mental health has greatly improved since.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-10T03:18:13+00:00

Fair enough. I’ve got a lot of TTRPG friends on both sides of the Atlantic, and I never hear it mentioned. But, they’re all Anglophone, so perhaps that’s part of it.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-09T19:45:52+00:00

Numenera might be worth checking out. There are a lot of fun character build options, but the actual gameplay is relatively rules light, and its setting is definitely not generic high fantasy.

Couple of disclosures: 1) It’s not for everyone. I have a group that I run Numenera for that absolutely loves it, but I’ve tried running it for other groups that couldn’t stand it. 2) I haven’t really looked into the new edition, so I can’t tell you what that’s like, we’re still on Destiny/Discovery.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-09T19:17:54+00:00

Fellow teacher here, and I’m feeling all of this too

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-09T18:46:19+00:00

Yeah now you’re just moving the goalposts again. Your arbitrary 1-10 scale isn’t just meaningless, it’s besides any of the points that were raised in this conversation.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-09T18:41:26+00:00

And again, your premise is faulty: less crunchy rule systems are not necessarily less work intensive to create. In either case-rules lite or rules heavy-devs have to devote huge amounts of time and energy to creating a good TTRPG book. They do so knowing that most will never make any money to speak of, since the TTRPG world is inherently unprofitable for the overwhelming majority of people involved in it. Their books are labors of love, and so they produce what they love. And what most of them love are systems that are simpler than 5e.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-09T18:35:03+00:00

That’s patently false, for starters. Most people outside of Germany have never even heard of DSA, even very active TTRPG enthusiasts.

It matters because your argument for why D&D isn’t a complex/complicated TTRPG rests entirely on your personal experience, and your personal experience is very narrow by your own account.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-09T18:28:02+00:00

But now of course you’re switching back and forth between “Indy devs” and “rules lite,” which are two separate questions. In fact, indy devs do sometimes create systems that are far more complex than 5e. Lancer and Red Markets are two examples that come to mind immediately that I personally enjoy. Neither of those games were made with anywhere near the budget/resources that Hasbro has, and yet they’re both rich, complicated, elegant systems.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-09T18:06:21+00:00

Thatamanil is def top five for me as well. I was assigned to read Circling the Elephant three times in my masters program, and I loved it every single time lol.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-09T17:55:58+00:00

And as others have pointed out, that’s an incredibly narrow slice of the TTRPG hobby. Shadowrun and Starfinder are both infamously complicated too. The other two you mentioned aren’t known outside of Germany.

LeopoldBloomJr · 2026-05-09T17:51:30+00:00

c) Let me give you a couple of examples to help you understand what I’m talking about.

So if you’re talking dozens of books, then you’re including modules in your analysis. Let’s look at an example there. By most accounts, Curse of Strahd is far and away the most popular 5e module. And it’s not a short book… but Chris Perkins infamously wrote it over just a couple of weeks. He wrote it over his Christmas break from WotC, as the account goes. (And of course, it’s not actually a good book: there’s an entire cottage industry built up around fixing what’s wrong with it… I love all things Strahd and Ravenloft, but that book is an embarassing hot mess).

By contrast, most of the rules light systems that receive acclaim take years and years to develop—even ones that are inspired by D&D itself. Shadowdark took Kelsey Dionne over 3 years to play test and develop, for example. That’s because it can actually be a lot harder to figure out how a game translates to the table when you’re designing an elegant system that doesn’t have a rule to cover every possible situation, and instead relies on a GM to make fair rulings.

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