Part of the “If you were going to start GMing” series
The TL:DR Answer: Know thyself and thy group.
Picking the right game is all about making sure you and your group are gonna have fun. To do that you need to know yourself and your group. If you’re not sure about what would be fun for you, I have some questions you can answer to guide you to a game you’ll enjoy.
The Questions
What kind of games do you like playing?
Tactical battles, dungeon crawling, heists, mysteries, resource management, survival, exploration, dramatic interactions, world building, timeline building, deck builders, city builders, other kinds of games my brain can’t pull from its dark recesses.
What kind of game play do you think you’ll enjoy based on the games you like playing?
As a GM do you think you’ll like having the tactical play of grid based combat? Would you rather facilitate the unraveling of mysteries while the players try to solve things before a timer runs out and the bad guys get away with it? Do you want to craft places for your players to break into and steal stuff from, where heat gets generated by their actions and if they cause too much trouble or take too long they blow the job or get caught? Are you more interested in games that are about narrative storytelling about the characters and their lives? Games that are more on that dramatic side where phrases and motivations on their character sheets change over time as you provide those dramatic situations they’ve let you know they’re interested in before and during play? Is it about building or building up kingdoms, worlds, universes, or even timelines with your friends, either through prompts or resource management? There are games that do all of these things and more.
What’s your favorite genre?
Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Romantasy, Post Apocalyptic Fantasy, Muppet Fantasy (It’s called the Land of Erm [1]), there’s a lot of Fantasy out there. But there’s also Cyberpunk, Pirate adventure, Arthurian Fantasy, Space Opera, Soap Opera, Horror, Super Heroes, Super Anti-Heroes, Interpersonal Drama, Political Drama, Hospital Drama, a Drama Drama, Shakespearean, Espionage, Police Procedural, Hard Sci-Fi, Splatter Punk, Steampunk, Artpunk, Altpunk, I mean if you can think it there’s probably a insert word-punk version of it somewhere. I’m sure I’m missing a few thousand of these.
What’s your favorite tone?
Goofy, serious, grim dark, whimsical, satirical, adventurous, epic, horror, hopeful, bleak, eerie, suspenseful, romantic, tragic, comedic, satirical, gritty, mysterious, heroic, melancholic, nostalgic, unsettling, lighthearted, intimate, surreal, stonered. Stonered is probably not a tone but Dude Where’s My Car [2] might beg to differ.
Do you want a bunch of support for the game you’re going to run?
Dungeons & Dragons 5e and 5.5e has the most because it’s everywhere, but there are plenty of subreddits, Discords, YouTube videos, and blogs for other games out there. Call of Cthulhu if you want some 1920’s cosmic existential mystery horror, but it can also do modern. Delta Green [3] is a smaller game but has a lot of community support if you prefer a more modern take on existential horror with tragic drama and spy game play. Daggerheart [4] is newer but has plenty of people writing about the game and making content for it if you want a different flavor of kitchen sink fantasy that’s not D&D. The Marvel Multiverse RPG [5] is decently supported if you want some super hero game play. There are many others, especially a lot of the OSR (Old School Renaissance) or NSR (New School Revolution/Rules) games that have very active communities, which I would say the BORG games fit inside. That’s MorkBorg [6]. If that’s too weird for you, check out PirateBorg [7].
Do you like complex or lighter rules?
This one’s a little trickier but I’m gonna say Dungeons & Dragons is in that medium complexity so we have a starting point. It has classes and subclasses for your player characters. There are three kinds of d20 rolls. Spell casting can get to be a lot of load management for players at later levels. There’s a lot of simple math, adding up several numbers from dice and modifiers off your character sheet. There’s also a number of edge case rules. So lots of potential rules packages in feats, spells, class features to layer on top of the core rules. That’s medium complexity to me.
Also medium. Blades in the Dark and other Forged in the Dark games. They have lots of procedures to be followed and require you to understand position and effect so you can improvise many answers to situations based on dice rolls made. The procedures also have a lot of actions that players can take which the GM will need to react to. There’s also a part of the game where away from the table the GM should be updating the factions and what they’re doing as part of the prep.
Lighter would be other PbtA games. (That’s Powered by the Apocalypse) They do require a lot of spotlight management, so controlling the flow of play since who gets to take their turn is entirely dictated by the GM, but the rules are mostly up front and contained on a small amount of move sheets and playbooks. It only requires rolling 2d6 and adding one number along with potentially advantage or disadvantage. The most complex thing is understanding fictional positioning as a concept and leaning into it. The Borg Games and Shadowdark are also pretty easy to pick up and play.
More complex would be games like Pathfinder 2e and Draw Steel. They have more mechanisms to learn and understand, more resources to potentially manage, and more difficult action economies and player builds to deal with, along with complex adversary mechanics. Draw Steel has a subsystem for longer challenges and a subsystem for negotiation on top of its very involved combat system. Pathfinder has bigger numbers and math than a lot of games, with some moving target number threshold play where criticals come into play. The vast amount of material and character build concepts also can be a lot. That said, they’re great games, and would be great picks for you if that kind of play is enjoyable.
Putting it Together
- What kind of games do you like playing?
- What kind of game play do you think you’ll enjoy based on the games you like playing?
- What’s your favorite genre?
- What’s your favorite tone?
- Do you want a bunch of support for the game you’re going to run?
- Do you like complex or lighter rules?
Answering these questions should give you a decent starting place for finding a game you’ll have a good time GMing. Now you need to find some games. The internet is a great place for getting some help figuring that part out. Just Google, Edge, Bing or whatever search engine you prefer some questions about what you’ve learned by going through these questions. For instance:
What Tabletop RPGs do Space Opera?
I hit enter on Google and some of the top results were Starfinder, Traveller, Stars Without Number, Scum & Villainy, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and Star Trek Adventures. I wouldn’t classify all of those as Space Opera but it’s a space to start.
So I followed up with “Which ones are Rules Light?”
That’s when I went in and started reading some reddit posts, websites like RPG.net [8], watched a few YouTube videos at 1.5 speed, checked out some posts from RPGG [9] (RPG Geek).
I still wasn’t there or happy with what I was reading and seeing so I added a mechanic to my question which was: what games do small ship to ship combat?
The one that kept coming up in the different places I was reading was Tachyon Squadron for a more cinematic aerial combat maneuver game. A description of Top Gun in space sold me on checking it out but I put Warbirds with their Space Age expansion, Stars without Number, and Scum and Villainy on my list just in case I didn’t like Tachyon Squadron. Now it was time to do a little reading.
Find Your Joy
The questions are starting places for you to find your joy in gaming. While answering all of them gives you some pretty decent insight into what you’ll probably enjoy, you’ll still need to find out if your friends would also enjoy the game. If you want to find out what they enjoy you can just ask them these questions too and figure out where your enjoyment overlaps.
I hope this helps at least give you a place to get started when it comes to finding a game you’ll want to GM. Also, let me know how you figure out what games are your joy. I’d love to see other methods of getting games we can enjoy to the table.