How many existing game system families are there? E.g. grouping broadly similar systems… I’m pretty new, but the ones I see are maybe:
- D&D-like (stats and crunch)
- PbtA (more narrative driven)
- Fate style? Attribute driven?
- Card-prompts (For the Queen, The Quiet Year)
Might be grouping them wrong, I haven’t played all of them…
- Dread-likes: Super lightweight, story- and character driven, with an unique mechanic that abstracts the whole rule book into a jenga tower.
Seriously: if you have never played a round of dread, you are missing out.
I think those categories are so broad that they disguise how many systems exist.
I don’t think I’d for example call DND extremely crunchy when systems like GURPS exist. And GURPS also has derived systems like Traveller.
Then you’ve got the various Gamma World editions that vary from “basically just reskinned DND” to “I took a bunch of ketamine while watching math tutorials”.
You’ve got insane systems like FATAL, where even wholly putting aside the gross content, the actual system is actually insane in how it insists on statting basically everything. EVERYTHING. So it takes like ten hours to create a character.
More playable you’ve got games like Inquisitor which are almost more skirmish wargamey in rules and require the players to push the RPG elements themselves. Yet at the same time the homebrew Inquisitor community has popularized “Inquisimunda” rules to make the game even more wargame like. Is that more or less crunchy? Kinda both I guess.
You’ve got sibling systems like Call Of Cthulhu and Pulp Cthulhu which people sometimes interchange depending on the session or they mix-n-match to make some kind of hybrid homebrew creation.
Good points (and good writing).
I guess my aim in trying to (loosely) categorise game systems is that I would like to try a bunch of diverse systems, so that I can figure out which types I like. These categories help me map out the space of all existing games, which helps me find example games that also match themes I like.
I know I CBF with anything much crunchier than D&D, except maybe reading about it out of morbid curiosity. Fatal sounds horrendous 😂
Depending on how you define family of systems while there is a finite way on how to roll the dice but at least for the main one, you miss
-
Dice pools with D10 (World of Darkness), D6 (Shadèwrun, Star Wars)
-
Skill (Chtulhu, Basic RPG)
-
Diceless
-
Playing cards (Deadland, castle falkenstein)
Then there is hundreds if not thousands of combination of these option making every game unique, so hard to make a count or a list
Thanks! Yeah, I know there’s a million variations of each, but I guess if you’ve played one variation you at least get a bit of taste of the mechanics.
I forgot about dice pools, I’ve listened to a Dogs in the Vineyard podcast. I haven’t come across the others yet.
guess if you’ve played one variation you at least get a bit of taste of the mechanics
The thing is that there is more than just the rules, I feel like a Shadowrun or DnD player, the kind who enjoy crunch and gear will find Eclipse phase system quite OK, while a COC player will struggle with it (despite the base being almost the same, a percent roll under a skill). A bit like heavy metal and Flamenco heavily relies on guitar but are very different.
However, the more rpg you played the easiest they’re to get, with 4-5 questions, you know enough to pay a session without fooling stupid
-
You’d pick up group theory and see how many are there actually
Eh? I did a group theory (topology) course at Uni, I dont see how it’s related? You’d need a categorisation system before you can do treat anything meaningful with groups, and there are hundreds of plausible orthogonal ways to divide up the space of all TTRPGs
Did everyone read The Myth of Sisyphus recently? Feel like I’ve been seeing this pretty obscure quote referenced a -lot-, what the heck happened (awesome tho, it’s an amazing book. Just curious how it got in the cultural consciousness…)
Someone made a streamer-bait frustration game where you played as Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill with increasingly difficult obstacles. Was very popular a few months back. Kind of like Only Up but with boulder pushing.
The quote was also used in a fast paced first person movement shooter called Ultrakill, as one of the bosses is Sisyphus. His in game description had the quote at the very end so it quickly spread among the community. So it may have also had an influence.
MANKIND IS DEAD. BLOOD IS FUEL. HELL IS FULL.
“BLOOD IS FUEL… FOR MY COCK” - Civvie11
…chaosium and palladium both beat steve jackson there by several years, too…
![One must imagine Steve Jackson happy [TTRPG community]](https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/b369d5e2-a85f-47ed-b33a-ece160f37956.webp){kind=link}