Lancer is, to quote the book: “a mix of gritty, mud-and-lasers military science fiction and mythic science fantasy, where conscript pilots mix ranks with flying aces, mercenary guns-for-hire brawl with secretive corpo-state agents, and relativistic paladins cross thermal lances with causality-breaking, unknowable beings…players adopt the roles of mechanized chassis pilots — mech pilots — comrades together in a galaxy of danger and hope.”
The system itself is quite rich. With a defensible claim to the most strategically balanced RPG currently available, Lancer is a system that requires careful consideration of forethought, resource management, teamwork, and luck.
I described FATE as a system earlier; but my description was a poor one, abbreviated to get to the point I wanted to make. The actual rules of FATE are more detailed and interesting than I perhaps first made them sound.
Characters in FATE Core have two fundamental things that influence their abilities: aspects, and skills. Skills are simple enough; they’re what your character is good at and have a numerical value from 0 to +5, usually.
Richly Gothic in tone, Blades in the Dark sees you and your fellows playing scoundrels in a wrought-iron steampunk city, working together to score heists, claim fortunes, and establish yourselves in positions of power in the city. The world is well designed, providing a fertile ground for intrigues, cloaks-and-daggers, and unseen dangers. Character design is detailed, including character sheets for each individual as well as the gang as a whole. You pick your backstory, select your class, put points into your skills, and set out to make or take your fortune.
GURPS is technically not an RPG, but an RPG System. It’s a distinction without much of a difference; an RPG is at once distinct-from and inexorably-linked to the ruleset used to play it. It could be said that D&D is a system, while settings like Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, or Ravenloft are the actual RPGs.
At the same time you could call Greyhawk a game setting, and say that The Keep On The Borderlands module that you’re playing is the actual RPG.
What If We Kissed calls itself the “same genre of thing as Dungeons & Dragons,” and I understand the mistake.
As I said before, for better or worse D&D is the entry point for most anyone who is curious about RPGs. Unless they have a friend who is both well versed in RPGs and believes D&D is an imperfect introduction to the medium, a newcomer is first going to take a look at D&D.
Dungeons & Dragons, as you may know, is an RPG.
No, that’s doing it a disservice. D&D is the RPG.
Arguably the first of its kind, D&D certainly became the definitive example of the medium. It has dominated the cultural dialogue about RPGs to the point that even if you know nothing about RPGs, you’ve still heard of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s difficult to explain how ubiquitous D&D is as a concept, not just a game in and of itself: It has spawned books, clones, parodies, movies, and even a children’s cartoon show, although we can probably blame that last one on the ethos of the 80s more than any inherent merit.
You probably have an image in your head about what Table Top Roleplaying Games “are.” Even if you’ve never played one, you have a shape in your head, defined enough that you can see a group sitting around a table with dice, paper, pencils, and a cardboard screen and say “ah yes, that is an RPG. I saw it on Stranger Things.”
