What RPG should you play?

TL;DR: Going to talk about a bunch of mega nerdy sci-fi games.

A friend had a saying about me at conventions: “You've played and forgotten the rules to more RPGs than most people have ever heard of.” I tried to argue against it, but when you've been playing RPGs for around two decades and going to conventions for fifteen, you end up trying all number of games, published or not. When someone would ask me to recommend an RPG for them, I really had to struggle to scour through the ether in my head and pluck out what game system/setting would be appropriate for them.

I'm going to sum up a few of the systems I still have committed to memory, and what I like about them, as well as the top few pros and cons. All of these are able to be procured right now. If you're a lazy RPG player, I'll include a TL;DR section for each one. Right now I'm only covering Sci-Fi RPGs, if people seem interested in this kind of thing I'll do a couple more posts on other genres.

Eclipse Phase

Want to play a super intelligent octopus hacker? Sure, Want to give that hacker the ability to speak Swahili and make them a journalist? Go ahead. That hacker can also learn parkour, have a college degree, and be best friends with an AI.

Eclipse Phase takes place in the far flung future, where the earth went to pot after some rogue AIs Skynetted the shit out of the everything, and most of humanity ran off-planet. In this future, we have shit like replicators, body swapping, cool robot parts and AI besties. However, we also face horrifying things like rogue software hacking our brains, and body horror psychics picking apart our delicate minds.

The players take on the role of sentinels for the multi-world group known as 'Firewall,' and they fight through political intrigue and the horrors that alien science has wrought. They can do anything from exploring ancient alien ruins to planet hopping through alien gateways. All along the way, the players will be making choices that may effect the future of humanity, sometimes at a personal cost to themselves.

The System: D100/D10s based, characters are build point with certain set minimums to be spend on skills. Pretty free form, gives you a lot of character flexibility and has a dearth of options to make custom characters that have evolved mentally and physically from just about any scenario.

Pros:
-Cool robot parts.
-Lots of gadgets.
-System is open enough for players and GM's to fudge rules if they need to.
-The horror aspects of the game can be fairly creepy because of the creators' knowledge of science and psychology.
-This game is free!!!!! Seriously, go to the creator's site, and he will let you download every book so you can try it out as long as you want. https://robboyle.wordpress.com/eclipse-phase-pdfs/ If you like it though, please consider supporting it.

Cons:
-Open systems are rife for opportunity to exploit.
-This is not a system you want to play with if you have Munchkin players, as it devolves into an arms race of rule knowledge. I've seen players argue that they could sneak in the above robot body.

What to expect: Lots of reading about the various aspects of the world. Expect to have some of the most eccentric characters you've ever seen. Also, space whales surfing the solar seas

TL;DR: Future Cthulhu style existential mythos in space. Asking all of the important questions: Who am I? Why am I here? How many lasers can I stuff in my body cavity? (Answer: If you run out of space, get more bodies)

Shadowrun

(MST3K jingle starts) In the not too distant future, six decades from now AD, there will be a team of players, pretty different from you and me. The get hired by a guy in a white suit, just another cog in the institute. They do a good job shooting up the place, but their bosses won't like them, so they get ready to betray!

This in a nutshell is Shadowrun. By default, you play as operatives, “shadowrunners,” in a politically and economically corrupt world that's rife with boardroom scuffles, a la Robocop. There's even giant robots with machine gun arms with terrible AIs. Some of those robots are even addicted to drugs.

In the future, all is corrupt. Giant multinational corporations run society with an iron fist, trying to screw everyone and everything over for reasons that are beyond our ability to know. Alongside this, the magical nature of the world has awoken, and now there are dragons and Tolkien-esque creatures/races mucking about. This game was birthed from an era where people liked two things simultaneously, and the obvious choice was to combine them as hard as possible.

This has been my baby for a long time. I've probably put the same amount of energy into reading up on the mythos of this game world as some people put into the Star Wars EU. I love this giant mess of a game if for no other reason than it gives me a chance to see rail tech wielding dwarves dealing with magic trolls inside a meeting room aboard a Zeppelin. Or Cyber psycho orks getting in pit fights while cranking magical drugs to defeat shapeshifting monks.

These things and more go on as deckers hacks and shamans visit other planes of existence, manipulating the very spine of the world. With such a variety of things that can occur, this game has had a lot of fun and humorous moments during play.

The System: SO MANY D6, These are used for everything in a similar fashion to World of Darkness' Stat+Stat rolls, but can also have other pools added to modify things. Character builds use a unique “Priority system” that lets you select a great array of character options. This has existed through a greater part of the games existence. which also saw iterations of point build systems.

Pros:
-Did you read the above statements? Seriously, if you can deal with a lot of reading and have a crowd of players that are into rules and wonky battles fought from multiple fronts. Do yourself a favor and get into this world.
-The rolling mechanic introduces the interesting concept of 'glitches' wherein it is possible for a character to succeed and fail at the same time, often with ridiculous results.

Cons:
-This game could honestly be three games, you could take them all apart and not know the difference.
-Players and the GMs have a good deal of reading ahead of them. Due to this, Shadowrun has borne many “The decker's hacking, let's go get a pizza” moments.

What to expect: This image sums up many experiences with this game

TL;DR: If cyborg trolls contesting Native American combat shamans isn't going to motivate you, I don't think we'll ever be able to be friends (above art is unofficial and belongs to http://angusmcleod.deviantart.com/)

Of all the games published, this one had to walk through my door. It had style that went up all the way to it's spin and the English degree to match. It'd been around the block a few times, taken a rap or two from Johnny “natural 1s” Malone and still came out aces. Technoir is a game of words, and a game of risk, a game that invites you into a back alley and smokes a cigarette to tell you its story in between draughts of whiskey.

As with my other cyberpunk entry, Technoir takes place in a callous future that is probably always raining, where the players are there to solve a mystery, smoke a pack an hour, and take a few blows to the head on the way. The system rewards the players for taking risky actions, it challenges your literary skills because of the need to create 'adjectives' on the fly to describe the scene and control it through them.

This newer RPG came about as part of a Kickstarter and saw a limited run, only appearing at a few comic stores and through direct orders. This is an ideal game for people who like to talk and solve mysteries and puzzles in unconventional ways, i.e. not kicking in the door and going in shooting.

The System: Player characters are constructed pretty simply by picking three 'jobs' that fall into their background and set their character's base 'verbs,' things they can do, lastly they pick out a few items and descriptors for them. The actual game involves players and the GM rolling and trading a small pool of dice to create effects that impact the game. The only way characters can develop though, is by taking negative effects, so this creates a perilous 'risk/reward' system.

Pros:
-As a system that is very conducive to creativity, it rewards the more literate players.
-This system also really captures the Noir feel of getting hurt and coming back for more.
-This game can end with nary a fight, just battles of wits and smarmy quips

Cons:
-You need to have a decent vocabulary to get this game going, as you'll quickly end up reusing adjectives.
-Players with the “Maybe I'll need it later” attitude may hoard the limited pool of dice used to manipulate the story and thus, stunt it.

What to expect: Expect to see things other people wouldn't believe. Attack ships over the seas of Manhattan. You'll watch C-beams glitter in the dark over the Twin Cities Metroplex. All those rolls will be lost in time, like, HP… being drained… Time to die...

TL;DR: If Humphrey Bogart fighting a hopeless battle against an all powerful corrupt system using a thesaurus and a computer is your idea of a good time, this is the game for you.

Dark Heresy and the rest of the Warhammer 40K set

“In the grim, dark future of the 41st millennium, there is only war.”
That quote right there will basically tell you if you will like this game or not. This game is set in the Warhammer 40K universe, a universe of demons, cyborgs, mutants and aliens. Wherein you know you are doing your service to humanity if you fight back evil, and die in obscurity.

If you haven't gathered, Warhammer takes itself so seriously it cache overflows into giving no fucks. This is pretty much the universe that Blizzard based a lot of their huge shoulderpad games off of but filtered through the cultural lens of the denizens of the Blighty.

Due to the fact that there's literally tens thousands of worlds to explore, the players and GM have all manner of mischief they can get into. That mischief may end when an apex, psychic, feline predator made of venom crawls into their nightmares and eats them from the inside. Or the Psyker tries to use a light spell and is possessed by a demon that promptly kills the party. Truly, this game is the epitome of storytelling.

The System: D100/D10s, and lots of failures. Character creation, at least in the base game can be handled almost entirely at random. Which is really quite handy as even a perfectly rolled character can be instakilled by whatever horrors lurk in the shadows you delve into. The combat itself is heavy and fierce, but involved, just like the wargame. Also, Orks are 50% muscle and 50% bullshittium.

Pros:
-This pays a lot of respect to the source material. Lots of worlds to explore so GMs have plenty of room to write big, horrible adventures in exotic locales… locales that will probably destroy the characters in more ways than one.
-The character leveling system is unique, having paths that give the game a well constructed route for characters to develop.
-Combat is genuinely fun, with hits feeling big and threatening.

Cons:
-This stays reeaaallly close to the source material, as in close enough that the fragility of human life is a constant factor. Expect to die or worse.
-Occasionally having to look up various powers can slow the game down.
-If faux gothic writing offends your English glands, then you should probably steer faaarrr away.

What to expect: Big muscles, big guns, big adventures in big settings. Also big, made up words, big curses and bigger green dudes holding bigger guns.

TL;DR: Do you like Warhammer 40K? Did any of these images interest you? If yes, greetings citizen, may the god king emperor's light shine upon you.

Too Long; Did'na Grok: WAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Gamma World

Take every single character in every other game on this list and put them in a “Mad Max” style future that was brought about for reasons. Reasons that vaguely involve quantum physics and bullshit. In this future, gravity controlling, hillbilly cockroaches can get in drinking contests with Napoleonic badgers controlled by terminator overseers on the moon. A game where giant, super-intelligent, KFC mutant chickens rule alongside robot overlords and demons from hell, and it's up to the players to drive lifted trucks through them and cause as much trouble as possible.

This game takes the aspects I like about the 4th edition D&D system, the tactics and simplicity of compressing it to a board game, and kicks the derp dial into overdrive. It celebrates the strangeness of RPGs and at the same time, in its own weird way feels like pen and paper satire. This is the right type of game to crack open beers and enjoy on a Saturday night. Characters stay simple, the tasks, easy and the tone is lighthearted.

In the post apocalyptic world brought about by science gone awry at the LHC (as I said, bullshit) all possible realities converge into one, and all the D&D Monsters, futuristic monsters, and weirdness that comes with that battle in a world ruled by whatever the DM thought might make for a funny climax.

The System: D&D 4th edition, it's a board game, it's an RPG, it's a barrel of fun. All characters are randomly generated and the levelling is very streamlined. What sets this apart is the fact that in every new scene every character is dealt an “Alpha mutation,” as in that moment, the character is a slightly different iteration from a parallel universe. Loot is also simplified by compressing the good loot into “Omega tech” cards, dealt out at certain points in the adventure as characters find it.

Pros:
-This game is batshit insane and overall fun.
-Like a Saturday morning cartoon, it doesn't take itself too seriously, and is just a blast to play.
-Characters/monsters cap out at level 10, which means the game doesn't overstay its welcome.

Cons:
-The only issue I'll bring up is the buying of the cards. You are given a pool of them to start but you may want to buy a few boosters to add to your collection of goods and strangeness that can be dealt to the players.

What to expect: Expect to have a beer, kick down the door, and beat up zombies attacking you with keyboards. Keep it light and keep it fun.

TL;DR: D20 filtered through the lens of Hunter Thompson on one of his drug benders. I feel the above Penny Arcade comic says everything

Honorable Mention: Rifts

I love this game as much as I hate this game. It's a rules lawyering mess that at times shouldn't be even lumped together with my other favorites. It treats itself with such sincerity though, that I can’t help but smile when I see it on my shelf. If Rifts were one of my children, it'd still be making me macaroni art at age forty and I would smile and hug it every time and ask if it wanted warm cocoa.

Super serial robot design in Rifts

Fat, dice eating, cat tax

Don't let this creature anywhere near your dice, he'll gnaw on them endlessly

FP Edit: Wow... Since people seem to be interested in this sort of thing, I'll do a couple more of these over the next two weeks. The next post will have some fantasy games, promise! Thank you to everyone who's suggested games to me. Special thanks to the folks who pointed out my English mistakes, 150 years of conventions and I should know better!