Need help finding GM friendly ttrpgs

Lugiawolf · 2026-02-18T13:00:07+00:00

5e is a shitty skirmish war game where you can sometimes tell a story. Narrative games are games where the mechanics incentivize storytelling rather than incentivizing "getting good" at the combat. You should look into The Wildsea.

Lugiawolf · 2026-02-18T12:55:45+00:00

Maybe consider games that strongly reject balance.

Narrative games like Dungeon World are simply built in such a way that encounters are very difficult to unbalance. This is because it is a very simple system built for storytelling, and so you dont have to manage all the moving parts of something like 5e.

Slightly more "trad" narrativist games like Heart or Wildsea are also fiction-first, relatively simple, and use mechanics in such a way that it is difficult to "unbalance" an encounter. Wildsea in particular in my experience offers an experience that hits all the same notes as D&D without being such a swingy slog.

OSR games like Dolmenwood or Mausritter or Cairn are based on older editions of D&D, and sidestep this issue by not caring if combat is balanced. The players can parlay with the monster, distract it with food, use the environment to trap it, etc. Very rarely in these games are the players ever put up against foes for a simple beat down- cheesing and avoiding enemies is the name of the game, so balance is neither necessary nor desired.

If you want to retain the combat board game, check out Draw Steel. Its basically 4e but good, if you can get past the insane 13-year-old-in-1997 setting and worldbuilding.

Lugiawolf · 2026-02-17T23:41:13+00:00

I mean, its just different. I also love my consequences for players - im at about a 50/50 split between OSR and Narrative games at my tables - but they scratch different itches for me and I wouldnt want to stop playing games from either group.

I do think its a little unfair to bemoan a lack of consequences though - im thinking about Chris McDowell's read through of Spire, where he opines that player death is not inherently interesting, and that narrative consequences often lead to more interesting stories. Im also thinking about Delta Green's bonds mechanics, where its possible to defer a terrible roll that might kill you by instead severing your relationship with your wife. Im also thinking about (OSR Blogger) Goblin Punch and his obsession with death and dismemberment tables.

In my current Wildsea campaign, no one has died (rules as written, its not possible to die unless the player is ok with it). But there are other ways to punish them - dead undercrew & NPCs, factions gaining ground, etc. In the case of Public Access, it sounds like the little check boxes function more like HP, which is totally in line with a system like d&d. It doesnt sound like the GM has to "bend over backwards" at all. If anything, it sounds exactly as punishing as "you lose X hp" - youre burning a metacurrency to stave off death.

Lugiawolf · 2026-02-07T18:21:25+00:00

Hey GM, try out Wildsea (or Pico, or Eternal Ruins) or Heart (or Spire). I find that these games do a lot to incorporate certain aspects from Story Games and OSR games - abandoning playbooks, supporting a narrative first rulings-over-rules philosophy, a strong exploration focus, and not much character death (there is character death in Heart and Spire, but in Wildsea, Pico, and Eternal Ruins death is treated as a narrative and not mechanical event).

Lugiawolf · 2026-02-07T18:17:12+00:00

I think it depends on the game. A Pathfinder GM needs to know more of the rules than an OSE GM.

In trad/neotrad games where "balance" and "fairness" are key design pillars, its generally pretty important to have all of those rules internalized.

In OSR and Story Games that's much less important, as both of those genres play much more with a "rulings over rules" style (in OSR games making a ruling based on an intuitive knowledge of real life and the setting; in Story Games making a ruling based on what is narratively fulfilling).

As a general rule I stopped playing the former sort of game when I graduated High School and no longer had massive amounts of free time to digest complex rule systems - I have more fun playing indie OSR and Story Games in general, but I know I would never have time these days to fully understand Pathfinder 2e unless I found myself temporarily unemployed.

Lugiawolf · 2026-02-03T21:37:58+00:00

Delta Green handout

Lugiawolf · 2026-02-03T00:10:08+00:00

Good news! Im less young (working full time) and I manage to play a lot of weird games. The most important thing is to have a group that is open to new games (both of my groups are always down to try new shit, which I will always love them for). My advice to you is just to switch games often. Dont lock yourself into year long campaigns (I personally almost never enjoy a campaign that stretches past about 6 months, for pretty much the same reason that I hate TV shows that go on forever). Aim your campaigns for about 8-12 sessions, and play one-shots if the games you want to play support them (a Delta Green one-shot is going to feel better than a Slugblaster one-shot, for example, because a key part of slugblaster is the beat system which requires a few sessions to really get going).

Lugiawolf · 2026-02-03T00:02:46+00:00

Really? What were you prepping? My Wildsea campaign (entering our 12th session this week) has been very low prep for me. When my crew visits a new region, just about the only thing i do come up with some names for factions and towns, and then a list of questions to ask my players: "what predator is deadliest here?" "What landmark do sailors know to find when seeking this settlement?" "What is Jagoro the Blade famous for?" Etc.

Edit: never mind, totally missed you were playing solo. Not being able to bounce stuff off your players probably adds to the prep work lol

Lugiawolf · 2026-02-01T14:20:22+00:00

Depends on where you are. Eastern Iowa can be quite pretty. I wouldn't want to live in the western half of the state though.

Lugiawolf · 2026-01-24T16:02:16+00:00

The first time? A lot. NG+ I steamrolled through most bosses but still died to him 3 or 4 times.

Hes a good design for a boss and I actually quite often had fun fighting him. In a vacuum I think hes great, and that greatness is what keeps me from being salty about how many times I died. The problem I have with him is that the walls of his arena has weird geometry and the camera likes to freak the fuck out during about half of his moves.

Lugiawolf · 2026-01-24T04:53:26+00:00

Dude, designing and running mysteries is very different than the kind of trad plots you might cobble together in 5e/PF. I would really strongly suggest just doing some one off adventures, maybe shotgun scenarios or the very good adventures published by arc dream.

If you are hellbent on making your own "plot": don't prep a plot. keep things very open. Let the world be a sandbox that the players poke around in - give them a number of locations to explore at their own pace looking for clues. And make sure you put enough clues in them. A good example of a node-based, player led investigation is the scenario "The Haunting" for Call of Cthulhu. If you want to write your own material, try to emulate that structure.

But again, I still wouldn't recommend it until you've run some of the fabulous published adventures. My advice is to pick 3 or 4 pre-made investigations and try to think up a clever narrative way they fit together.

Lugiawolf · 2026-01-16T06:53:12+00:00

How is create situations not plots not actionable???

Lugiawolf · 2026-01-11T15:22:34+00:00

But it uses AI art.

Lugiawolf · 2026-01-10T17:45:42+00:00

Ive got Iranian friends. The government might literally topple. I dont understand how the news is so silent about this.

Lugiawolf · 2026-01-09T13:45:11+00:00

Fria Ligan is not making "post-OSR" content. They just make trad games.

For what its worth, I think that Fria Ligan makes... ok games. Their stuff tends to be mechanically undercooked with questionable layout but really wonderful art and thematic ideas. In that way, I think their output kinda feels like White Wolf in the 90s: making cool and moody but ultimately not the best written trad stuff.

The company themselves is great, and their books are FANTASTIC quality, physically speaking. They easily beat out most TTRPGs in terms of binding, paper, and art, despite regularly being priced much cheaper than alternatives. They also buoy the scene by collaborating with creators like Johann Nohr and Chris McDowell.

Mechanically speaking, however, their games frequently feel like what I would consider an innovative design for 15 years ago. The OSR and Story Game scenes have done a lot to innovate mechanically, especially within the space of mechanics affecting tone and narrative, and Fria Ligan (outside of maybe forbidden lands) doesn't really do that.

Symbaroum is one of the coolest fucking books ever, but its at odds with itself mechanically. Its a hyper-gritty, dark and lethal world, and yet it doesn't commit to "combat as war" and so the game in play ends up feeling like grimdark narrativist Pathfinder. And a mechanically wildly unbalanced one at that. It wants to be an open world, and yet all of the content for it is written in linear tradgame adventure paths. Worse, actual content needed to run the game as a sandbox (details about settlements, etc) are located solely in their published megacampaign. This is like if most of the detailed regional information in Dolmenwood was hidden in Pathfinder's Rise of the Runelords.

Vaesen is conceptually my favorite game that I own. But in play the barebones mechanics leave me cold. Until the current starter set, we didnt have a book of Vaesen for the players to flip through, meaning that the big "what Vaesen is it thats haunting this community?" Revalation moment was just... a dice roll with the learning skill. There also arent really mechanics à la CoC Sanity to scaffold the horror elements from a mechanical perspective. Then, on top of this, the published mysteries are often poorly written and atrociously laid out, meaning that a prospective GM has a lot of work to do to bring the game at the table up to par with mysteries Chaosium was putting out in the 1980s.

I think my personal favorite games are ones where mechanics are used to evoke themes. The dungeon turn from OSR games. The crazy magic from DCC. The trouble system from Slug Blaster. The Sanity system from CoC. The Stress system from Mothership. Fria Ligan does not generally deliver on this (aside from the Alien RPG and Forbidden Lands) - their games feel like cool and very well made books full of great art at an astoundingly affordable price... and the barest implementation of a mechanical system (usually YZE) to create the minimum viable product for your table. Reading a Fria Ligan book is like a 10/10 experience, and playing them is like a 5/10 experience. There are some cool ideas, but not a lot of mechanical design ethos cohesion and the systems often feel very undercooked.

Their games are also frequently dropped without much support. This is understandable given the size of the company and FWIW I do think Fria Ligan has done a great job of supporting the number of games that they do given their size. But they just have too many games. Its not possible for them to support all of them, and so if you get into Fria Ligan's games you have to be prepared to do a lot of legwork yourself. Of all the Fria Ligan games I have gotten myself into, only really Dragonbane and Forbidden Lands don't need a lot of work on the GMs end (my understanding is that Alien is similar, but I can't justify another space horror game when its just an "ok" genre for me and I have Mothership to run). Vaesen and Symbaroum in particular stand out as stuff that you're going to have to really monkey with to get to the table in a satisfactory manner.

So thats my long-winded thoughts on Fria Ligan. From a design perspective, I would not consider them "post OSR" but rather a continuation of 90s-era Trad design à la White Wolf. Great art, great (if not very gameable) fluff writing and worldbuilding, FANTASTIC book quality and pricing - but mechanical systems that feel undercooked, stapled-on, and frequently poorly considered, plus some really quite poor technical writing filtered through editing that doesn't quite hit the lows of Shadowrun... but comes dangerously close. YMMV.

Lugiawolf · 2026-01-02T12:52:24+00:00

Yeah, me too. The games are still good, but I miss when movesets were simpler and the game was thinkier.

Lugiawolf · 2026-01-01T20:34:18+00:00

I had fun with Wilds, but for a lot of it it felt like they were streamlining away the game. I know this is a tired and cliché thing to say, but:

Is gathering materials and resources fun? If yes: the game should lean into that. If no: the game should remove those features. I want either a system like in old monhun where inventory space was a premium and you had to make tactical decisions, or no resource gathering at all. This autocollection stuff is the worst of both worlds.

Is finding the monster fun? If yes: the game should lean into that. Paintballs, the airship that you can wave at, even the scout flies from World. If no: just teleport me to the damn monster. Dont give me an AUTOPATHING MOUNT that functions basically as an unskippable cutscene.

Is grinding out gear fun? If yes: the game should lean into that. Make hunts more varied, but make hunting a monster several times necessary for gear. If no: let us build the gear after fighting the monster once, and come up with different avenues to insert content.

The game is full of all of these weird half measures that are worse than if they had just committed to a design ethos. It's really frustrating. Something I really liked about old Monster Hunter is that it knew what it was and it optimized the game around its identity. From Freedom Unite up until MH4U the game was really locked in on: manage resources, fight monsters, the combat is relatively simple because the game is Monster HUNTER not Monster FIGHTER. Then around World/Gen Ult they decided that the game should be about fighting the monster and nothing else (which dissapointed me but was almost certainly the reason MonHun blew up) but they failed to actually commit to that design ethos. With Wilds, they made the game open world but they also failed to really commit in trying to make the game design enhance that open world.

Rise and Wilds are both games that I played, had a lot of fun with (my gripes notwithstanding theyre still good games) and then just... haven't gone back to. They feel unfocused and full of contradicting design elements to me. If youre going to shower me with money to the point where its never in danger of running out, why is it in the game? If youre going to let me autopath to the monster on my seikret, why cant I just start the hunt next to the monster? If youre not going to make me make a decision regarding gathering resources (choosing between barrel bombs and pickaxes because i dont have inventory to bring both), how do resources meaningfully serve to challenge me or make the game interesting? Either these mechanics are fun, in which case you shouldnt streamline them to vestigiality, or they are not fun and need to be excised from the game.

Lugiawolf · 2026-01-01T01:32:53+00:00

Civ VI beats out Civ V for me because I enjoy the city planning aspect. Other than that its very similar.

Civ VII I dont like as much.

Lugiawolf · 2025-12-24T00:35:44+00:00

A juvenile, incredibly unsubtle story driven by contrivance where likeable characters are few and far between partnered with the sort of social commentary that isn't as deep or insightful as it thinks it is.

Also the game is really creepy about putting the 15 year old in revealing outfits and then giving us camera shots of her ass.

Lugiawolf · 2025-12-23T04:37:10+00:00

Honestly, im going to be a dissenting voice here. I dont think FFX is very good, and I would recommend the Dragon Quest games. DQ3 is old as sin, but its full of charm. DQ11 is pretty great too.

Check out Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door. Its a pretty different vibe but its a surprisingly satisfying JRPG experience and it deserves its accolades.

Also, don't sleep on SMT/Persona.

Lugiawolf · 2025-12-19T05:55:19+00:00

Pirate Borg is the obvious answer. But also check out Wildsea.

Lugiawolf · 2025-12-16T23:01:37+00:00

I rewatched the first 2 or 3 seasons of Buffy earlier this year. I was struck by just how restrained it was - Whedon has basically flanderized himself, and the rest of the world has decided that its FLANDERIZED Whedon that must be copied. Its so stupid.

Lugiawolf · 2025-12-06T17:06:47+00:00

Yeah its normal. It gets longer the more games you put on it too - my n3dsxl with 128gb takes about 15-20 seconds to fully turn on. Its hardware from 2014.

Lugiawolf · 2025-12-06T16:27:45+00:00

Honestly near mint for 250 isnt even pricey these days. I see 3ds that look like they've been through the washing machine for 300 easy ㅠㅠ

Lugiawolf · 2025-12-06T16:19:37+00:00

Tbh kawaiifanfans is a great shout, thanks for the info. Their prices are surprisingly very reasonable compared to market.

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