Technically part of a largeseries of RPGs, Vampire: the Masquerade is the most popular of White Wolf’s World of Darkness franchise. So if you want all of the excitement of a samurai epic, I recommend you polish off your katana and your d10s and give L5R a shot. You don’t need to know anything about actual Japanese history beyond the basic, and heavily romanticized stuff that’s common knowledge. As an added bonus, while the setting is obviously meant to resemble Japanese history, it’s also specifically NOT Japanese history. There’s minimal, if any, generic rules language that forces you to figure out how it adapts to a specific situation because the rules are written for the specific situations that game puts you in. Because all of the mechanics (aside from the basic roll and keep mechanic, which is used by some other RPGs such as 7 th Sea) are engineered to play within the setting, everything functions pretty smoothly. The game being built entirely around a specific setting has a lot of advantages.
You can play several different styles of samurai, shugenja (mages), and courtiers (the social class) from different clans, giving you enough character options that no two characters need to be very similar.
With that said, though, the game has a solid balance and manages to give the players a lot of options even with the strict adherence to the setting. Like Mutant Epoch above, L5R is a kind of specific taste because the setting is very specifically to the Feudal Japan-inspired Rokugan, and there’s not a lot of room to play a character who doesn’t fall into that setting’s Samurai style. Legend of the Five Rings is one of the few RPGs I can honestly say that after multiple sessions I’ve never had a bad experience with.
If you want a post-apocalyptic high-stakes survival adventure, this is the RPG for you. When I played, the strategy we took to getting the group balanced was to just have people roll characters until there was something that vaguely resembled a balanced party and it was a ton of fun. Now, the potential that this gives the players is awesome, but infinite possibility means very little stability and making a game with this much randomization work and be fun for everybody takes a particularly deft GM. The reason this is so crazy is because it means that a party can be wildly out of balance at level one, with Player 1 rolling a stock human kitchen slave who can’t read and has no useful skills, and the other players rolling Combat Clone soldiers and Cyborg Maurauders and Mutant Space Moose Gladiators. Your character is then thrust into the world, usually with a debt looming over their head. Everything but name and gender are determined by the dice, including race, profession, dominant hand, whether they can read, count, and swim and so on. It’s a wild and crazy game that makes for some wild and crazy game nights but the reason it doesn’t rank higher on this list is because it has a few quirks that make it unique and awesome, but also make it kind of a specific craving.įor one, the game has your characters be completely randomly generated, and I mean completely. It’s set against a post-apocalyptic, Fallout-style wasteland where mutants and cyborgs and clones are running around everywhere. Let’s start with…Īlright, look, Mutant Epoch is about as far from Dungeons and Dragons as you can get. There are some great games out there that didn’t make this list because they are too similar, either thematically (such as Dungeon Crawl Classics) or mechanically (Such as other d20 games) or both (Lookin’ at you, Pathfinder) to provide a real change of pace. Today, though, we’re going to look at some RPGs to break out when you’re played out on raiding dungeons and slaying dragons and need a change of pace. It makes sense, D&D is the original and it’s still the biggest brand in the industry even after 33 years. Dungeons and Dragons is pretty much the standard whenever you’re trying to form a new group.
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