What is your favourite tabletop RPG and why?
I’m going to do the thing where I cop out and give two answers, but. I think I have two answers, one for if I’m playing or writing a creative homebrew game and another for if I’m just playing/running the game out of the box.
For the former, I’m going to go with 5e D&D, which I know is the boring stereotypical answer, but it really is at pretty much the perfect level of crunch for me. Obviously there’s a fair bit of lore built in because it’s D&D (which I actually like bc it gives me a good jumping off point for character creation or campaign building), but I’ve seen it adapted to a variety of homebrew settings with different tones with minimal hassle. It has a fairly robust rules system, combat runs pretty smoothly, and I rarely come across a situation where it’s difficult to find some appropriate roll to make, but it’s also not too hard to learn. Obviously, it has plenty of shortcomings, but all in all, I infinitely prefer it over rules-light (or extremely rules-intensive) systems.
Out of the box, my favorite game is Timewatch. It’s an RPG where you play “time agents” who have to stop villains who are trying to alter the course of history. The premise is fairly specific, but it’s so much fun to play, and all the lore provided is excellent, and it allows a ton of player creativity both in using time travel to solve problems and in terms of being able to create characters from any point in past, future, or alternate history. (There are canon psychic velociraptors. It’s awesome.) I also really like the mechanics of the game. It’s based on the GUMSHOE system, which is meant for investigation-focused games, and it has this nice mechanic where characters can automatically learn clues related to their proficiencies without rolling but can then spend points to do extra cool stuff related to those proficiencies. The preparedness mechanic is also legitimately one of my favorite RPG mechanics of all time--it basically lets you roll to see if you have a certain items on you (or if your future self has gone back in time and arranged a situation to your liking). It cuts down on a lot of tedious planning bits of RPGs, and I think more games should incorporate something similar.
