Jeremiah | The Direpug Storyteller

This storyteller does a great job on-boarding new players for Daggerheart. They provide a solid campaign world foundation while also allowing for Player world building. I recommend them for a good time!

A popular joke in D&D communities is that groups expect Lord of the Rings, but gameplay turns the game into Monty Python. The One Ring gives you that cozy, perilous, and familiar feel of Lord of the Rings. There aren't extensive mechanics to get lost in; there's just enough depth and variance to make unique Tolkien-esque characters come to life. When I need a rules-lite adventure RPG, for playing with little cousins or casual gamers, this is my go-to for maximizing the fun at the table while minimizing the extra work of running RPGs. I love the cycle of Adventuring, Council scenes, and Fellowship scenes in the game, and the gameplay loop is enough to keep the players engaged in a Middle Earth story.

If you are playing an RPG, if it isn't D&D then odds are it's going to be Vampire the Masquerade. One of the more dominant game systems of the 90's and beyond, VtM captures the eternal love affair we have with vampire fiction and allows you to play it in your own way. I've played just about every iteration of Vampire from the World of Darkness lines, and this 5th Edition does a great job of capturing the best parts of the older editions while implementing new lessons from NWoD and contemporary systems. Their Hunger Dice mechanic alone is worth the edition switch. But like all VtM, this game excels at gothic horror storytelling. The loss of Humanity, disappointing your mortal Touchstones, and watching your morals get crushed under the machine of Camarilla/Anarch games of Status and power are all in there. Want to watch yourself grow in monstrous power as the memory of humanity within you dies? Play Vampire.

Rebels desperately pushing their starships to their absolute limit in a dogfight with Imperial TIE-Fighters... Two Jedi and their fallen master draw and ignite lightsabers against each other amid the sunset on Clone Wars-torn Mygeeto... A crew of scoundrels, seeking amends, smuggle and smooth-talk an old Republic Senator past a First Order checkpoint... These are all scenes that fit in with a Star Wars movie, and anything you can do on the big screen is exactly what this system is made for. With an intuitive dice-upgrade system, the different outcomes from a single die roll is enough to keep you on the edge of your seat. Players will have direct narrative control over the scenes through use of Destiny Dice, Talents, and victories achieved through dice Success, Advantage, and Triumph. And with a Talent-Tree style of character creation & progression, it is easy to adapt for players familiar with more video game style RPGs. Does it bend genres well? Not really, not moreso than the spinoff books or shows. But you play this game to *feel* like you are in a Star Wars movie and, with the right Storyteller, that's exactly what you'll get.

Ah, dear and sweet Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition, aka DnD Next, aka D&D 2014, aka D&D 5e. When this came out the culture was right in the middle of Game of Thrones fever, the MCU was just getting started, and we were just finishing up franchises like Underworld and the Hobbit. Critical Role, Stranger Things, and D&D's rise in popularity was just around the corner! I loved running D&D 5e, and the more I learned about the core system the more I enjoyed it. The key, for me, was limiting the Player tools to strictly the contents of the Core Rulebook so that they would discover that pretty much *everything* in D&D 5e revolves around utilizing the Spells, especially in higher level play. Alas, just like editions before it (except 4e, which was murdered by snobbery) 5e is dying a slow death by bloat and "what-do-you-mean?-WotC-said-buy-books-and-D&DBeyond-so-i-get-to-play-whatever" type of mentality. While D&D 2024/5.5/whatever they want to call it makes a valiant attempt at correcting the ship, the brand-based greed of "jk, just include everything you want from 2014" destroyed all of that goodwill of a reset. I run it because people know it, its popular, and it does a lot of things well in an RPG (until it doesnt...). But personally, all things being equal, I'd rather play Pathfinder.