By Elijah Peters
When it comes to tabletop role-playing games, often all you’ll hear about in the discussion is Dungeons and Dragons, the most famous and longest-running tabletop role-playing game.
This tends to create a vibe where people think it’s the only type of game like this and it chokes out and monopolises the market, which I think is not cool, because there’s a whole bunch of other ones.
So here are a couple of my favourite non-Dungeons and Dragons TTRPGs, from a variety of different genres such as sci-fi, urban fantasy horror and a new spin on traditional fantasy.
So you can dive into a new experience, learn new rules, and be immersed in a customised story.
No.1: Daggerheart
Daggerheart is a system that will feel familiar to people who have played Dungeons and Dragons, but also different in all the best ways. It is a more story-based and streamlined version of D&D in a way that makes it its own creature with its simpler character creation-involving cards and a fresh hold-based damage system. It’s good if you want the same tactical combat of D&D without a lot of the headache of spacing in enemy turns.
No.2: Call of Cthulhu
This game is a cosmic horror blast with a history almost as old as D&D. It utilizes the D100s percentile die, and due to the themes of sanity and the fear of the big scary monsters your aim is to get low numbers.
No.3: Everyone is John
Here’s a TTRPG that’s so simple it doesn’t require any experience to play. Your friends will play as voices in the mind of John and fight for control of his body to do hilarious and crazy things. All you need to play is the rules page, some paper and D6s (standard six-sided dice). I would call it the absurdist comedy of TTRPGs.
No.4: Monster of the Week
Monster of the Week is a system powered by Apocalypse dice-rolling system. I find it useful because they give you certain moves with average outcomes that you can use as a sort of menu for your options when in the game, as well as allowing you to do just the general random rolling stuff. Its simplicity and simple premise work well with a sort of serialised, episodic play style that wraps everything up tightly in a bow every session.
No.5 Public Access
Public Access is a very new system that uses a similar style to Monster of the Week, except it focuses more on analogy horror and the collaboration between players to create what they fear by putting it in the world themselves. It uses moves, but when they do them, they are asked whether they would want what they don’t want to happen, what they’re most afraid would happen when they fail a role. If they fail, they succeed, and it happens, meaning that they decide their own stakes and they are encouraged to make it as terrifying as possible, specifically to them.
Featured image: The range of dice used in these alternative table-top games is, like D&D, almost endless. Photo: Needpix
