Lasers & Feelings Chat: Feats 101

Special guests and RPG beginners Mark Soloff and Ashley Davis join us to discuss just what to do when you've never played an RPG before.

Here are our recommendations for D&D4e's player types!

Actors

• Golden Sky Stories: A focus on developing your character as a complete (and cute) individual

• Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, Nobilis - in both games, your character is literally center stage, and the world revolves around them. Advancing your character is based around developing the desires and the responsibilities they gain from their newfound powers.

• Becoming - everyone plays as the same hero, and the goal of the game is to flesh them out and determine how they overcome challenges and why they are a hero.

• FATE (Core and Accelerated Edition): A game engine based on playing to your character’s aspects, for good or ill.

• WWWRPG: Of all the *World games, none gives you a stronger character role to play with.

Explorers

• Eclipse Phase, Ashen Stars, Malifaux, and other games with strong established settings

• Last Stand: All the GM advice is built around setting up unique fight scenarios and cool locations and big flashy one-time events

Instigators

• DANGER PATROL: Leap into action, don’t bother thinking about it! That is the core mechanic of Danger Patrol: the more danger you are in, the better your dice rolls get.

• Costume Fairy Adventures: Causing shenanigans is the goal of the game and how you win at being fairies.

• Everyone is John: This is like Becoming, above, except extremely silly and the goal is to Kill John.

Power Gamers

• D&D 4e: Fully customizable, robust character classes, with potential for fun synergies.

• Double Cross: Probably the best point-buy supers game currently on the market!

• Last Stand: It is a save-the-world fightgame where you rip apart giant monsters!

• Strike! RPG: A simplified battle system designed for quick fights and lots of ‘em

Storytellers

• 13th Age: Encourages characters to have relationships with the established setting

• Breakfast Cult: Cooperative and competitive; each player has a secret objective for plenty of intrigue

• Fiasco: The perfect game for telling a story where everything goes wrong. GM-less.

• Final Bid: For the exact same reasons as Fiasco.

• Monster Hearts: If you want to play Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the RPG, this is where it is, and it hits the sense of drama perfectly.

Thinkers

• Retrocausality: This game is all about time travel, and the core mechanic is messing with the time stream in a way that gets you what you want out of it, but without causing unintended consequences

• The GUMSHOE line: Various games all about finding information and piecing it together to solve a mystery.

• The Quiet Year: This is a game where everyone has to spend a year preparing for a horrible disaster that they don't know what it is, and do what they think is best to save their community from the coming disaster. Problem solving is the name of the game.

• Microscope: Microscope is a game you play before another game. Microscope is a collaborative worldbuilding game where everyone works together to figure out what elements of the setting everyone cares about and wants to explore, and building a setting around those ideas.

Watchers

• Apocalypse World: no turn order, meaning players can play whenever they feel comfortable

• Dungeon World: Same reasons as Apocalypse World, except for people who want the classic D&D feel. DW also has probably the best handouts of any *World game out there, which are nice for beginners.

• Law’s Out: the players are actors on the set of an Old West movie-- games are as fun to watch as they are to play, and the auction mechanic is good for beginners or those uncomfortable with number-crunching.

Six Feats Under Presents: Lasers & Feelings

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