[mcv]

No real other option? There are dozens of other excellent RPGs available that rely more on imagination than sight. D&D is merely the gateway game.

There are of course D&D spin-offs and clones like Pathfinder and 13th Age, old school (OSR) "retro-clones" like Dungeon Crawl Classics, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and many, many others. Then there are the classic non-D&D games like Shadowrun (in its 5th edition now), Traveller, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (4th edition just released), and GURPS. There's Savage Worlds for fast-paced pulp-style adventures, FATE for absolutely anything you can possibly imagine (including publications for Dresden Files and others). There's FFG's excellent Star Wars games (Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion and Force and Destiny), and dozens if not hundreds of smaller indie games, many of which are completely free.

We are truly living in a golden age for roleplaying games. D&D is merely the most visible and best-known one.

[hellepardo]

Ah, sorry, you are absolutely right. When I said 'no real other option' I was missing the numerous other RPGs that are out there. I did not mean to denigrate them by omission. I meant more that we were forced away from computer games.

[pull_my_finger]

How about MUDs? There are a lot of choices with screen reader support these days.

[lscotte]

Nice to see mention of Traveller, I thought I was the only person that even knows about it anymore. I think I spent more time designing ships than actually playing it, but I have fond memories of both Traveller and Car Wars (and still have the sets along with my AD&D books and modules).

[mcv]

Traveller definitely still exists, but I have no idea how many editions there are these days. I'm not sure anyone knows.

[SaulOfTheJungle]

What non-D&D game would you suggest to someone who enjoys D&D but would like to explore other systems?

[dpatriarche]

I’d like to recommend checking out Numenera, from Monte Cook Games. It’s kind of a sci-if/fantasy mashup. It takes place on Earth one billion years in the future. Eight great civilizations have appeared and disappeared in that time, leaving the world full of ruins and starnge technology, all of which is inscrutable to the people who live there now. The game materials have high production values, on the same level as the D&D books, and about the same level of complexity of game mechanics. The thing I particularly like about Numenera is its emphasis on exploration and discovery rather than killing things. There is still fighting, if you want there to be, but the focus of the game is on going out into the strange world and uncovering it’s weirdness.

[dagw]

If you like the basic 'fantasy' setting of D&D, but want a game with a more gritty and 'low' fantasy feel I very can highly recommend trying to find a copy of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying.

If you want a game which is more realistic and almost entirely 'straight' historic medieval Europe, but where magic, as they believed in it at the time, is real, go check out Ars Magica. Ars Magica is especially recommended if you like playing mages and want a game with one of the most fleshed out and 'realistic' magic system ever seen in a role playing game.

[mcv]

There are way too many options to give a simple answer to that question.

If you want to stick close to D&D, Pathfinder and 13th Age are obvious choices. If you prefer something a bit more raw, less polished maybe, deadlier, where survival is a goal in itself and combat may be better avoided, try one of the OSR systems, like DCC, LotFP, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, etc. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is weird horror and explicitly 18+. If you want the feeling of D&D but with a system that focuses more on the story and the experience than on all the numbers in D&D, then try Dungeon World. A lot of people lauded Dungeon World for recreating the feeling they had when they first played D&D.

If you want to get further away from D&D, well, what direction do you want? Fantasy? SF? Cyberpunk? Historical? Martial arts? Horror? Steam punk? Espionage? Military? Old West? TV shows?

[SaulOfTheJungle]

> If you want to get further away from D&D, well, what direction do you want?

SF or Cyberpunk

[e12e]

R Talsorian Games' Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 is a nice retro (think William Gibson Neuromancer) game.

https://talsorianstore.com/collections/cyberpunk

But if I were to recommend a single (set of) games, it would be the classic World of Darkness games, like Mage: the Ascension 20th anniversary Ed:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/149562

For a game with some interesting mechanics, you might enjoy Underground:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/2873

And for something... Different, we've had a lot of fun with Microscope:

http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/

[saalweachter]

Shadowrun is the canonical cyberpunk RPG.

Starfinder is, I believe, Pathfinder in space.

GURPS is setting-agnostic.

[naravara]

>Shadowrun is the canonical cyberpunk RPG.

Aside from the dated and weird essentialization of Native American cultures, Shadowrun's setting is really good and fun.

Unfortunately it's hard to run a game with a decent narrative flow just because the combat system is so complicated. My group decided to shame people out of playing mages or riggers just because we didn't want to have to deal with simultaneously doing combat in cyberspace and the astral plane at once. It really puts a damper on having a fun game that flows. I wouldn't recommend it for someone new to pen&paper RPGs.

On the other hand, the tedium of combat gave us a strong incentive to talk our way out of problems instead of going the murder-hobo route.

[C1sc0cat]

GURPS works better in some eras trying to do modern you have dozens of skill's to keep track of.

[mcv]

If you want pure cyberpunk, take a look at R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020.

If you like fantasy mixed in with your cyberpunk, Shadowrun is the gold standard. A word of warning: Shadowrun has a rather heavy, complex system, because it does absolutely everything. But I like it a lot.

Generic systems like GURPS and Savage Worlds can do cyberpunk of course, although I don't think GURPS Cyberpunk has been updated to the 4th edition. No doubt something exists for Savage Worlds, but I have no idea what.

There are other cyberpunk systems that I know very little about, but others are enthusiastic about, including Eclipse Phase (seems to include space and transhumanism, so it's probably not pure cyberpunk, but it might suit your taste), or Ex Machina.

Sprawl seems to be the Apocalypse World/Dungeon World adaptation for cyberpunk.

SF is much broader. The original SF RPG is of course Traveller, which is somewhat retro; the game predates computers and doesn't have many (any?) robots either. But if you want to travel around in a space ship, this is great.

Stars Without Number is an SF game that translates ideas from the OSR movement to the SciFi setting.

There are of course several different Star Wars games, including the original d6-based game by West End Games (recently republished by Fantasy Flight Games), the d20 (D&D-like) Saga Edition, and the Edge of the Empire-style games by Fantasy Flight.

GURPS is great at SciFi, and I'm sure Savage Worlds does it too.

Diaspora is a small but really cool hard SF game based on the Fate system. I love how you first generate the worlds together and then generate the party together. In space combat, dumping heat is a major concern.

Paranoia is weird dystopian funny SF. The Computer is your friend.

Starfinder is the SF version of Pathfinder. I assume the system is therefore D&D-related, but I honestly don't know.

Dark Heresy takes place in the Warhammer 40K universe.

But there are dozens if not hundreds of others.

[dmoy]

In addition to the three listed above, Alternity (if it's still in print?) is a reasonable SF system.

Oops, not in print since 2000... yep.

[jsjohnst]

Your list is excellent, but wanted to throw one more out there: Cyberpunk 2020.

[mcv]

Definitely a great game too. But there are dozens, if not hundreds, of games I have omitted. There's a lot out there.

[jsjohnst]

I’d probably say thousands of games we both omitted, but it wasn’t my intent to list them all and very likely not yours either.

[mcv]

Yeah, I have no intent to try to list them all. It's better to point to RPGgeek.com[0], which lists nearly 10,000 RPGs. (Though that's counting different editions of the same game as separate games.)

[0] https://rpggeek.com/browse/rpg