I have various RPGs I quite fancy running, but they all seem to come with a lot of caveats! My brain is getting old and curmudgeonly and isn’t prepared to put in the effort it used to.
Candidates:
Terminator The first caveat is I’m NOT running this online. Too much stuff to keep track of, which would work better with piles of tokens on the table. Also fiddly system may require GM to physically point at stuff. That dice there. No THAT one… The second is that the stat blocks for NPCs are scattered thru several splatbooks. Advantage: I kickstartered it and it comes with a pile of scenarios.
Lost Fleet Would work online, because there is next to no heavy lifting for the GM (its a PbtA variant). Caveat: the monthly Sunday game started a campaign of this, but I gave up after about 3 sessions because we still hadn’t finished the ‘PC relationships’ bit of char gen due to player cancellation. So NOT running this unless the group does ALL of chargen in session zero.
Gods of Metal: Ragnarok - not to be confused with the video game (that’s God, singular). This looks daft and fun. Very player facing. Caveat: I could probably only run a very short mini-campaign of this, as the over the top vibe may get wearing.
Strontium Dog (using Haunted West ‘quick fire’ system). Had great fun running this for the Tuesday mob, and as one-offs at Stabcon & North Star. Caveat: the system is fairly swift and streamlined, but character gen is long, drawn out and laborious. I may have to do the bulk of chargen on the players’ behalf and hand the sheets over when they get to the freebie points stage.
Star Cops (based on the TV series, using the Blade Runner system). Caveat: can I think of enough police procedural plots to sustain this for a decent number of sessions?
Hack the Planet Caveat: I’d be using another system - maybe Genesys/Shadow of the Beanstalk? I didn’t get on with Forged in the Dark, and neither did the Tuesday group. But I liked the setting and all the factions.
Doctor Who - try out the most recent version of the system.
I have run a couple of Doctor Who adventures and quite like the system for reasonably fast-moving TV action with occasional thinky bits. (They did a version for Primeval but I don’t have that.) Not super deep character generation but GURPS isn’t on the table. I’d be tempted to hack it for Star Cops, tbh.
I’ve played in some of your Haunted West one-shots and it feels a little baroque but basically workable. Not sure it offers much that BRP doesn’t to a grognard like me.
I know nothing about the Blade Runner system.
Since that Lost Fleet game I’ve become less of a PbtA fan. I think it can work with the right group but that’s mostly not people I know and may not be me.
I was partly responsible for the Lost Fleet fiasco, not having understood how important the inter-PC relationships were meant to be. Also, the character personality description system really didn’t work for me: it’s clearly meant to be evocative, but I just found it confusing.
I think I was down a different player every session.
PbtA seems to want players to pick character personality/motivation during char gen, rather than job description. PbtA wants you to say “I’m a charismatic, square jawed hero, who happens to be a fighter pilot”. Most other games want you to say “I’m a fighter pilot who happens to be charismatic, and square jawed.”
It’s a variant of the recent edition of the Twilight 2000 system*, made less crunchy and with rules to make it feel more police procedural. Like the day is divided into 4 chunks, and the evidence you sent off to the forensics lab will always take one chunk to get results.
*Itself a variant of Aliens. But with roll 2 dice (from d6 to d12) not a bucket of d6s.
All the NPC stats I need to know are they are either -10% chance to hit (mooks, angry guard dogs), -20% chance to hit (gang lieutenants, angry tigers, etc) or -40% to hit (gang boss, angry T-rex).
