I've been thinking about this for a while and talking with my brother about the perfect TTRPG or if it's even possible. I'm mainly talking about in an Elder Scroll-like setting with magic being slightly rarer. By perfect, I mean a system that balances out mundane and magical characters where the damage in combat is kept even as they level up or improve their characters/ I've been homebrewing my dnd 5e setting for about 2 years now, and my players like playing in the world but I have a hard time running higher level games. I am trying The Riddle of Steel now, but it still has its problems, mainly how hard it is for new people to get into the rules. Can anyone think of the "perfect" TTRPG?
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You're asking for D&D 4th Edition.
Everything is balanced to frick where the only "broken" combos rely on your entire team building around them to make super squads.
D&D 4e is easy to teach but a lot of the finer nuances and leveling up can be painful for casuals without the digital tools that WotC discontinued
TTRPGs exist to fill niches, the perfect RPG existing is like the perfect vidya existing. Even a perfect FPS that can be modded to perfectly portray everything from scifi of a dozen varieties to magic and pre-gunpowder combat is a shit game for someone who wants to play a JRPG. Likewise if you want to play a game built around ancestry and knights being knights if someone presented 4e DnD like you should violate him with a lead pipe as punishment.
Reminder that every time someone posts about 4e like this the amount of people who would potentially play it decreases.
You want Symbaroum or the ASoIAF RPG.
*ahem*
>d-dude just make your OWN system with my garbage modules
uh no
>just tune the game to the way you want with all my playtested content which is adaptable to every content I have
uh yes
no flavor. no fluff. garbage
>no flavor. no fluff
>Banestorm
>Technomancer
>IOU
>Goblins
>Madlands
>All of the historical setting
>All of the book adaptations
>Monster Hunters
>the entirely of Infinite Worlds
lol
GURPS outside of just using it for character building feels incredibly flat and hollow to play. I don't know if I'm missing something, but I found it incredibly thrilling to build characters, but the system would always kill the fun by making them not feel satisfying even if they were built for their purpose properly.
I found it more fun just doing RP that was more free form in it than running combats or social encounters when I tried running my zombies and DF stuff.
>no flavor. no fluff. garbage
moron energy. moron mindset that's led to so many rulebooks being more flavor than rules.
An RPG book should be pure rules and procedures. Flavor? It's called a novel you like.
Generic systems are meant to be used with any setting. They're not for everybody, some people prefer games that include a setting. But "flavorful rules" makes you sound like a redditgay who spends more time reading kickstarter PBtA books than playing games.
>when the rule says a club does 1d4 damage
Why is it always the demon pyramid?
SJG is up to something
Its only as much work as you make it. I’m a newer GURPS GM and I genuinely enjoy it. Unless you have something particularly “realistic” in mind, players only need to read GURPS lite. The biggest hurdle is Character creation, however there are multiple files which have prebuilt abilities, Lists of enhancements/drawbacks/etc, and other tidbits in one location. I get universal/modular systems are ironically a “niche” product, and aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. However, I think most of the shit flinging about the system is due to people replying to honest questions here with “run GURPS lol”.
>Note: ‘niche’ is meant to be not as high grossing as WoTC, Paizo, Chaosium, or Reddit-fueled heartbreaker projects on kickstarter
As long as GURPS exists nobody has the right to b***h about TTRPGs. You can make whatever game you want with as much depth as you'd like, and the only thing holding a GM back is laziness.
>spend hours trying to tailor the game to your liking
>realize 1 second turns and a character system that encourages autistic savants are bad.
As far as I know 1 second turns can be abstracted, and they're made easier digitally.
Your players don't have to make autistic savants, you can use/make templates, or rig up a lifepath system if you really want to, or have limitations where it's -# to IQ if not within this or that context, or you can cap IQ to since the real life maximum IQ is somewhere between 13 and 15 and use skills instead. I think I remember someone splitting it up too.
>As far as I know 1 second turns can be abstracted, and they're made easier digitally.
You can do the comic book thing where you monologue between individual punches but the akshun econony heavily favors move/attack/use power over other forms of interaction since those things might as well take you of out the fight entirely.
>you can use/make templates
Templates just make you marginally less autistic due to the massive number of skills you need to succeed at everyday tasks.
I guess that's funny to that guy but most of the time it's just a boring game of counting how many beans you can discard in favor of getting slightly better at your main thing instead.
>He doesn't want to play an autistic savant
The GM finds ways to get me to roll for shit I didn't spec into and hilarity ensues. I find ways to roll for shit I did spec into and hilarity ensues.
I can shoot a fly off the end of your nose, but can't talk to girls, boys or too sapient animals. It's a gas.
An RPG system is a tool. A good system should not only provide just and fun rules, but also amplify the atmosphere and themes of a given campaign genre and convention. If you want a dark, gritty campaign with death lurking on every corner you should pick some low power level, high danger system. If you want something heroic and epic you should pick something that allows the PCs to hack through entire squads of goons easily. If you want a campaign with heavy focus on the PCs psychology or a campaign that focuses on stealth you should pick a system with mechanics specifically for these things. And so on. A system that allows the players to roleplay as gods and a system that allows them to roleplay as cowboys will have completely different mechanics, which does nor mean that one of them is worse than the other.
In short, the system is perfect if it's well suited to whatever you're trying to run. There is no such thing as an overall perfect system, just like there is no tool suitable for every single task. And sure, some generic systems may work decently enough for many things, but a well written set of mechanics made specifically for one sort of campaign will always be best
You are literally asking for 4th ed DnD and no one likes it. Because the only real way to maintain balance is to homogenize options.
Shadow of the Demon Lord, wait for Shadow of the Weird Wizard.
>inb4 shit jokes
Two spells and one creature type doesn't make up a whole setting, morons.
Dey pley da poopoo.
eet ees a sicknass.
>Two spells and one creature type doesn't make up a whole setting, morons.
I love and run SotDL but there's more than 3 mentions of shit in it and we both know it
If you don't tell your players that goblins eat shit, they don't have to know.
>shitshow of the doodoo lord
>>inb4 shit jokes
The fact that you felt the need to try to get ahead of it proves you know it's a more prominent thing than you're letting on. Having said that I'd actually like to try the system despite that.
Okay explain to me this meme. I thought pathfinder was the rpg with weird fetish inserts
There's just more references to actual feces in SotDL than almost any other game that isn't explicitly some fetish thing. Some spells cause peoples bowels to become loose, an item I think too. I want to say one or two semi-intelligence creatures eat feces. Stuff like that. It doesn't make up a huge part of the game, so it's not a deal breaker, it's just kind of funny how often shit is mentioned.
My group played Shadow of the Demon Lord for the better part of a year. It's actually a pretty fun system and my players really enjoyed how many class choices there were. The (literal) shit stuff was easy to ignore.
It's only prominent because people who haven't played the game latch onto it.
The simple D6 system.
The question is silly and I don't know how you spent any time typing it without realizing you've framed your whole thread incorrectly. You're looking for system recommendations, not "The Perfect TTRPG™"
Need more information about the setting, and tone, of your games to really give you a solid suggestion. However if you're just after something close to 5e, that doesn't go as high level, and magic and martial PCs are balanced well, try out Shadow of the Demon Lord. Checks all those boxes.
Have you tried playing 4e?
Have you tried playing Pathfinder 2e?
2e PF is like better 4e without the weird MMO-ish combat elements, and also doesn't feel nearly as bad to play in because the balance isn't as fricked, and you can try to reroll your 1/day abilities that require rolls.
It's truly surreal to me how the game who's entire existence was born from 3.5 grognards hating 4e based it's second edition on that game. Is that just going to be Paizo's strategy forever, copy whatever the last D&D edition did?
I wouldn't say they 'copied' 4e, it's just that having played both of them, it feels like they took some good ideas from it alongside other versions of D&D then built the system quite well from the ground up. Stuff like having better starting HP, relative class balance, etc. remind me of it in particular, but the way it's implemented in 2e actually feels good in practice compared to 4e. Plus, the combat actually feels like there's more debuffs you can put on people that actually matter, and how you actually have legitimate variety of ways to resolve your turn are very attractive. 4e turns kind of just feel like ass whenever you try to be risky because 90% of the time, due to poor calculation of defenses for levels, it just ends up with you losing a daily or encounter power to a miss and you have no recourse besides to sigh and go "Alright, miss, end of turn." Action points are literally just for at-will spamming and hoping you kill the tanky statblocks; the fact that they're such israelites about rerolls makes it feel fricking awful to play.
This is also to bring up the one official adventure I've been playing where there's been skill challenges and oh my fricking God, they feel like you're playing Fable trying to impress npcs with the social ones, but instead of guaranteed bonuses for the right emote, you just pray to the Gods you roll well on your trying to impress the NPC. Not to mention how fricking painful it is to fail the skill challenges because no rerolls and even with relatively minmaxed characters, you still have really bad odds to beat the level-appropriate DCs per their adventure.
don't reply to spam, moron
>perfect subjective experience
You're a fricking tard. There is no such thing as the perfect game, because enjoyment is subjective. You and I might disagree on what is and is not fun. Neither of us is wrong, because fun is not something that can be objectively and soullessly measured and quantified.
>Can anyone think of the "perfect" TTRPG?
Yes, and I spent the last two and a half years developing it. It’s finally in a shareable state.
No, you can’t have a link to it.
your ttrpg sucks
Yours sucks.
The perfect ttrpg was developed during my high school, it was:
Character sheet: 3 traits, 1 quirk, effects roleplay
Tests: 1d6 dm says the threshold based on situation
Combat: You can hit what you can see, 1d6 hit on a 5 or 6, unless defender is somehow protected, then 6 only, you get shoot you are out
Death: If you get hit, roll a d6, is the number of rounds until you die unless someone helps you, 5 you got wounded but it's kinda ok, 6 you are just psychologically out
>By perfect, I mean a system that balances out mundane and magical characters where the damage in combat is kept even as they level up or improve their characters
>roll 1d6
>on a 6 you do 1 damage
>if you’re a wizard, you roll 1d6 and on a 6 you do 1 damage with your magic
>as you level you do your 1 damage on a 6 - (your level -1) to a minimum of 2
here’s your perfect ttrpg, bro