If ever you get tired of responding to questions about "rp-forward" games with verbosity and pedantry (which, to be clear, heaven forfend you do, I love reading those posts) may I humbly suggest the (in my opinion highly entertaining) alternative of telling people "Good Society will probably work for you" and refusing to elaborate?
You know for a fact that if I ever resorted to a bit like that it would be Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.
#I am only vaguely familiar with the game #why would recommending Chuubo's be a bit in this case? (via @moltensludeinbrainattack)
The structure of the game manages to hit a remarkable number of features that folks who think "RP forward" actually means something and isn't just a marketing phrase would typically regard as categorically excluding a system from being "RP forward", while looking nothing like the kind of game you'd tend to picture based on those features.
You don't want the mechanics sticking their nose into every little thing? Chuubo's is so intensely preoccupied with mechanising the mundane that forming intentions to do things is a rules-mediated action. There are specific target numbers for stuff like "do it correctly", "look like you actually know what you're doing", and "be happy with the result", and without a relevant skill or resource expenditure, the best outcome you can ordinarily achieve is "make everything worse".
You want to do stuff because it "makes sense for your character", and not because it gives the most points? As far as Chuubo's is concerned, those are the same thing. Just living your everyday life is framed as a kind of quest, with milestones and XP triggers and whatnot; this is a game where you might actively look for excuses to "have a conversation in a poorly lit place" or "gaze contemplatively over a large body of water" because your personal quest line awards XP for doing that.
You want a game that will let you make up whatever character you want and doesn't expect you to faff about with "classes" and "levels" and such? Not only does Chuubo's effectively have both of those things, it's so strongly opinionated about what sorts of characters are appropriate that it recommends you use pregenerated characters until you get a good feel for the milieu. One of those pregens has a character sheet that's twenty pages long ā and you might assume that means most of it is just a big tedious lore dump, but it's not.
And on top of all that, it's not combat focused (because it has no formal combat system) and doesn't ask you to roll dice all the time (by dint of the technicality that it's a diceless system), so it can't readily be dismissed as "not RP forward" on any of the usual grounds. It's a slice of life game about adolescent gods attending high school. The kid who owns the titular Wish-Granting Engine can turn into a giant snake.
@caseyuptobat replied:
The only reason to actually play this game beyond novelty is if you have a supreme case of writer's block and are running behind to turn in a manuscript of an azumanga-esque 4koma chapter
Not true.
It's also a very solid choice for running Homestuck.
It's me. I ran a Homestuck game using Chuubo's when it first came out, through a mixture of play-by-post and chat, and it was shockingly effective.
