Photonics Engineer by day, indie RPG writer by night, especially interested in open/CC games.
See my stuff here: http://awkwardturtle.games
Rather than a specific system or style, I think the important thing is what gets you and your players excited. Pick a genre or theme that you are your players are into, then find a system that matches that. Once you get into it a bit more you can start digging into different styles of RPGs because you’ll have more context for what it all means and some idea of what you all like.
I like rules light systems because they’ve got a shorter “time to table”, but if everyone is very excited to play DnD, then DnD works because it’ll keep everyone motivated and engaged.
Some ideas:
Sci fi horror game along the lines of Alien: Mothership
Hardscrabble, fools forced to delve into dangerous dungeons and weird woods to make a living: Cairn
Grannies solving murder mysteries a la Miss Marple: Brindlewood Bay
A gang of thieves in a Dishonored-esque whale oil powered city: Blades in the Dark.
A gang of thieves flying a space ship in a star wars or firefly styled galaxy: Scum and Villainy
A doomed world undergoing heavy metal apocalypses: MÖRK BORG, or CY_BORG for the cyberpunk version of that.
Buffy and friends taking down vampire threats, or Mulder trying to find the truth that’s out there: Monster of the Week
Personally I’ve had really good luck introducing new players with Mausritter. The physical version is gives people a tactile card based inventory, the digital version is totally free. It’s super easy for people to get into the head space of tiny mice! There are also tons of fantastic modules to run which makes your job as a DM a lot easier.
This comment got a bit away from me, but I’ve run and played a ton of different systems, so if you have some idea of what you think you and your players will be into I can maybe point you in a more specific direction.
Mausritter is also great at getting people into the “old school” adventuring mindset. It’s easy for people to get that they’re a tiny moues, so they need to be careful, be clever, and run away from dangerous situations.
Plus it’s got fantastic first and third party adventures to run.
Might not be sufficiently fantasy magic for the brief though?
I played Earth for the second time Sunday night (after my usual RPG night was cancelled/postponed), this time with 4 rather than my first game with 2.
It’s a really interesting game, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. I originally took a look because it kept coming up in discussions around Ark Nova (which I tried and disliked), Wingspan, Terraforming Mars, etc.
I can see why people say Ark Nova is a bad comparison (I agree, very little overlap) but absolutely see why people compare it to Wingspan so often. So many of the mechanics in Earth seem to be directly pulled from Wingspan and then vaguely re-themed to be plant based. It really feels like they started with Wingspan as a base design, and then reworked it into their own concept.
Pros:
Cons:
Overall, very interesting game. I had fun, and I’m looking forwarding to digging into it more on future plays.
The GM section at the end of Electric Bastionland is, for my money, the single best collection of GMing advice you can get a hold of.
Most of it (maybe all?) is also free on Chris McDowell’s blog but having it curated and in print is great.
My favorite, and most played game is absolutely Arboretum.
It plays quick, it’s small enough to stash in a bag, it’s easy to teach, and it feels like it has endless play and variation. The game also lets me do one of my favorite things in a board game, which is let me go for high risk high reward “shoot the moon” strategies. Absolutely lovely bit of tension and backstabbing fun, but concentrated all into the reveals right at the end so it doesn’t drag the entire experience. Great at every player count, especially at 2 players which is important given that most of my board gaming is just with my wife.
Plus you get to look at lovely art of trees while you playing (with the original edition at least, the newer one has worse art IMHO).
That’s a fair concern, although it sorta sounds like you’re currently in a position where both shy and bold players aren’t interacting with the system, so maybe getting just one group in is an improvement? Haha.
If you want a sort of radically different approach to the same idea, take a look at how Burning Wheel does it. There’s a Circles stat that characters have, and you roll it like you would any other check to try and declare you know someone useful. A failure likely means they exist but they hate you (or similar), so there’s a built in check against using it constantly.
Yes, it’s all up on github, although it was private until just a moment ago because I barely know how to use the website and didn’t realize that was the default.
I have a similar-ish mechanic in Meteor, where you have “Undefined Skills” which you define on the fly. They’re included for some similar reasons as you give, reduces analysis paralysis at character creation, gets the game running faster, and gives player a chance to suddenly declare they’re good at something.
I’ve not really had issues getting players to spend them, but most of my playtests have been in one shots, so I might just be side stepping the hoarding problem. The other potential difference is that I’m usually running high tensions, life or death scenarios, so being able to say, “actually I’m Skilled at this thing” to avoid a difficult roll (or just be able to roll it better) is valuable enough that players will jump on the chance.
As for ideas to make players more likely to use them:
I have run and played so many different systems, but I’ve really settled on the Into the Odd/Cairn/Electric Bastionland core as my bread and butter. I’ve even got two separate hacks based on that ruleset in the works.
It’s fantastic, for me, because it’s streamlined down to bare minimum functionality, strips out a lot of what annoys me about other RPGs, but provides a stable base for me to build back on top any bits and pieces I miss or a given group of players will enjoy. Small enough that I can fit the entire system in my brain at once, while still sharing enough common language and concepts with more traditional d20 systems that running any random module I pick up is a piece of cake.
Yeah, I don’t know if that tracks. Wingspan has sold more than 1.3 million copies (as of September 2021) which is way way way more than the average board game sells.
I’d far more believe that they couldn’t keep up with production than they were intentionally limiting supply.