Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

Today I wanted to talk about another one of my own particular interests and that is playing tabletop roleplaying games or TTRPG’s for short.

I have gone through quite a few different game systems and have some thoughts on each of them, so I thought that I would talk about the ones I have played the most and give my general thoughts about them.

I have been very fortunate in having a steady play group where I have been a player and a DM/GM with for almost a decade now, and they really do make playing these games a lot of fun.

With all that said, I’ll talk about the three systems that I am most familiar with, and maybe another time we can talk about less well known systems that I have played.

Dungeons & Dragons (5e)

Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, probably one of the first tabletop games that people think of and plenty of people use D&D as a short hand to say that they are going to play a tabletop game, even if they aren’t playing D&D at all.

While not technically my first foray into tabletop games, D&D is the system that I have played with the longest and am the most familiar with as a player and as a DM.

Overall I find that D&D as a system does well enough in what it’s aiming to do; have a system that is both easy enough to understand and grasp for new players while having some interesting builds for more experienced players to mess around with.

I think that the biggest strength of D&D as someone who has played a lot of it is that, if you know the rules well enough, you can tweak the system to fit your desired play style without altering the rule set in a major way.

It’s why there are a lot of custom settings that use 5e as a framework. Experienced players understand the base mechanics and can alter things to fit their play styles, make custom classes or spells or magic items that can be tuned to your preference, and if you are able to have a steady play group can have a one shot set up in less than half an hour.

It is not a perfect system by any means. Rangers are the class that has had to have a lot of rules changes and, in my opinion, is in a weird space of trying to be three things at once but struggles to do even one of them effectively, Warlocks are basically Hexblade and Eldritch Blast or bust, and the usual martial vs. spellcaster discrepancy as you go through higher levels.

That being said, I have been a player in a game that reached level 20 and I have DM’ed a game all the way from level 5-20 and it was a lot of fun doing so.

It’s a solid system and while I haven’t played any 5.5e, I have looked at it and have things I like and things I don’t like, but seeing as I haven’t played it, I can’t say how I feel about the system as a whole properly. I’d rather not judge a system until I have played it.

Pathfinder (1e and 2e)

To talk about my actual first foray into tabletop games, we have to talk about Pathfinder.

For those who don’t know, Pathfinder is similar to D&D in that they are high fantasy TTRPG’s that have a lot of overlap in how the mechanics work, Pathfinder is a system that is what people describe as “crunchy”, meaning that there is a lot of depth to the rules.

My first ever TTRPG character was a gnome bard for Pathfinder 1e a little after high school where a friend of mine took me to a friend of her’s place to play Pathfinder. I did some research on Pathfinder, found a character generator, “found” some of the source books for Pathfinder and was ready to play my character.

We barely played at all.

That didn’t deter me, and I thought that if I wanted to play a TTRPG then I would have to be the one who ran it. So Pathfinder was also the first game I ever DM’ed.

It was a bit of a train wreck and I do appreciate my friends for humoring me and playing, and while we had a good time, we only had one session.

Part of the problem is that Pathfinder 1e is very dense with rules and mechanics that can be overwhelming to newer players. I had to make my friend’s character’s for them because they were having trouble with it and I was the one who happened to have the most grasp of the rules, which was not saying much.

Fast forward many years later after having a lot more TTRPG experience, I decided to get Pathfinder 2e and try it out with my usual play group. It was a good learning experience, and while 2e streamlined a lot of aspects and things I liked, it still wasn’t the best system for our group.

I liked the degrees of success, the modality of character creation, actual item creation rules and prices, the three action system are all excellent aspects but it felt like unless you did a lot of research on the classes and feats they had available, you would fall into a build that is not fun to play (I personally dislike Counterspell in Pathfinder 2e).

Pathfinder can be a complex game where a single feat or ability can drastically modify how your character is played and keeping track of every single modifier can be pretty exhausting.

I do know that Pathfinder 2e had been remastered to change a lot of aspects when they switched to the ORC license and while I am willing to give them another shot to see how much has changed, but that may have to wait a while.

On an interesting note, however, I am currently in a modified Pathfinder 1e game that uses the base Pathfinder rule set but has been modified to be in the Final Fantasy universe to include classes, items, and other things and my play group has been having a lot of fun with that.

I enjoy the systems of Pathfinder now that I have more experience with TTRPG’s, but it can be a bit daunting for less experienced players who don’t have a guiding hand to help them out, in my opinion.

Call of Cthulhu (7e)

This is the game that I have the second most experience in playing, more particularly in running.

Call of Cthulhu is a game that doesn’t use the conventional d20 system that D&D and Pathfinder do, rather they roll a d100 and check to see if you roll under your skills, with lower rolls actually being better.

The theme of the game is that for all intents and purposes, you’re playing a regular person who is trying to manage what’s going on because weird things are happening and it affects your Sanity, effectively giving you two sources of health to keep track of.

Hits can be lethal, damage is severe, and if your character gets shot by a gun odds are that they will die painful death after getting shot once. It is a highly lethal game where the stakes are high and the characters are squishy so it changes how players have to approach problems.

In games like D&D or Pathfinder, if you see a monster or a group of monsters you can just fight them and not have to worry much about lethality unless it is a big monster or one that uses magic. In Call of Cthulhu a single zombie has the potential to kill a player if they aren’t careful, and that’s the small time monsters.

Some creatures when looked upon cause you to lose Sanity, and if you lose all of your Sanity then your character is driven mad and is for all intents and purposes dead, even if they are still alive. It is a highly lethal system that calls for players to be clever as to not die immediately.

While I do enjoy that aspect of the game, as someone who has run several Call of Cthulhu games, that can also be a major detraction. I love games that have consequences to actions, but if a player keeps on dying and having to make a new character, then the game isn’t as fun.

It can also cause players to be over cautious, where they don’t want their characters to die or go insane so they take every action with so much precaution that it can slow the game down to a crawl.

This is ironic because Call of Cthulhu games tend to work better as short to medium length games, and while long term games can be possible they can feel like they are dragging on too long without really achieving anything.

A fun system that can be tough to run sometimes while also struggling to maintain a very long term campaign going without feeling like a slog.

In Conclusion

TTRPG’s have been a massive part of my life and I am incredibly fortunate that I have a play group that has been as steady as it has been for nearly a decade of my life.

I do love playing TTRPG’s and while these three are the ones I have played the most, I have played many other systems and if you guys would like, I could talk about them at some point in the future.

Until then, thank you for reading, see you all next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual