Many thanks for your suggestions and good advice! And to Alex for his very informative post!
By the way, here are a few suggestions I acquired at another forum:
- FATE Core/Accelerated - This has gotten the most suggestions/"votes".
- Dungeon World - This come number two in terms of votes, but there seems to be divided opinions as to the freedom within the 'Classes'.
- Basic Roleplaying - BRP - This came third in counts of votes.
- BareBones Fantasy Role-playing Game - This was suggested only once but looks really tempting to me.
- Savage Worlds.
What are your thoughts on those candidates?
Well, personally, I am not a big fan of FATE. It isn't without some good ideas, and what I have seen of the setting books (like Dresden Files or Spirit of the Century) was really good. But it also has some really bad ideas, from my point of view, at least. FATE plays with a resource called (unsurprisingly) fate points. You get and spend fate points by having "aspects" (key words that describe your character and the scene he is in) invoked. For instance, you can get a fate point by having your "Drunkard" aspect compelled (it could be either you, the GM or another player who compels it) while you are in a tavern so you would start drinking. You could spend a fate point on the same aspect by having your character fit in the tavern when an enemy NPC came looking for him, giving you the ability to either add 2 to the result of a roll or rerolling.
My problem with this is that this is an awfully complicated way to do stuff that in a normal game would be just common sense between players and GMs. In Gurps, for instance, I would point out to the GM "Hey, you said this is a pretty dark alley, right? I figure this merits a bonus to my sneaking skill... or maybe a penalty to the police's perception rolls?". Here, you need instead to tag the "Dark" aspect of the alleyway in order to get a bonus, and spend a fate point while doing that. For my tastes at least, the mere fact that the alleyway having an effect or not depends on whether you spent fate is enough to leave a sour taste on my mouth. But besides that, it also feels pretty artificial. This is the kind of stuff that doesn't need hard rules in my opinion. Of course, if you feel this might be something fun for you, go ahead!
I haven't took much of an in-depth look into savage worlds, but all I've seen about it make it look like a simplified Deadlands. I mean, I know you would prefer a simple system, but certain stuff in the game is made simpler by being "gamey", which is something I would recommend you to avoid. The damage system in particular seems pretty annoying.
About Dungeon World, I initially was really hopeful about this project, but the result made me realize that what I had been hopeful for was a bit impossible. Let me try to explain, DW took as its base a game called Apocalypse World, a rather nice game about (surprise) trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Anyway, the interesting thing about AW (and, I expect, DW, though I never actually got to play it) is that the rules it use are rather open ended. They are more like guidelines and principles than actual rules, though there are dice rolls, of course, and when those happens, they define something important about the world. For instance, one of AW's moves is "Seizing by Force". When you try to take something by force, you need to roll 2d6 and add in a specific attribute of your character. If the result is 6 or more, you manage, but with complications, if it is nine or more, you manage it as you desire. What seizing means can vary with the context, it could be a physical object, an area during a fight, attention, or something of the kind (force here means strictly violence, though). Whenever someone might be doing something that would be considered seizing by force, the game stops being just imaginative, and the dice decide how this effort goes. There are, of course, other moves that represent other kinds of important actions.
All this makes for a very interesting game. However, I hoped that DW would manage to integrate it with the more "player skill" driven approach of certain games, many of which happen to be older. But these things kind of get in the way of one another. Moves are the heart of what makes DW and AW themselves. And you can make the moves so that they require some kind of player skill. In AW, the move for influencing people requires that you have some kind of leverage over them, something you can bargain or threaten them with. And gaining this kind of leverage can be challenging. But in the end, if you really want the game to be all about coming up with crazy plans and logistics, then the moves get in the way. For this kind of game, they are better stated as GM advice instead of hard rules.
All in all, I figure DW might be a good game to begin with, but I wouldn't want to keep playing it for very long, I think. Not only because of what I mentioned above, but I feel they didn't support late gameplay all that well. The spell list and stuff like that is rather limited if compared to D&D too. On the bright side, classes in that game can get abilities from other classes, though they aren't as good as the other class. Well, technically, I guess you could only take one such ability, but there isn't much problem in allowing two or more... You can always multiclass later on too.
I haven't read Barebones Fantasy, but
this review on RPG.net make it seem like a simple RPG done right.
Basic Roleplaying Game is a good game, using rules based in those used in the old Runequest, Pendragon, Call of C'thulhu and several other games by Chaosium. My only reservation is that those rules are a bit complex sometimes, and while you can certainly treat the most complex ones as optional, you might need to do a little more reading than you might want to.
so we'l see how it goes.
