Without saying anything negative about D&D 5e, let me tell you about two of my personal favorites:

The Dark Eye

Under the name “Das Schwarze Auge”, this is one of the most popular systems in Germany and has existed since the mid 80s and the latest edition has been available in English for about a decade now. There are dozens of source books and hundreds of official campaigns and standalone adventures, all set in the same world and a single ongoing canon (apart from a few early works that have been retconned). There are decades of detailed in-world history that you can use as a background for your own campaign if you want or selectively ignore if you want to focus on your own interpretation of what the world should look like.

Mechanics-wise it’s a lot less board-game-like than some 70s/80s/90s systems while not going the full “storytelling first” route that many more moderns systems seem to prefer. On top of the eight basic attributes, characters can select from a pool of skills and feats that cover everything from combat to magic to social interaction to crafts and hobbies. The system focuses a lot less on combat than other high fantasy systems and it’s absolutely viable to have a group of purely social-focused characters that never get into a single fight but still get to use a lot of the system’s mechanics.

Overall it’s relatively complex if you want to use absolutely every rule but at the same time very versatile and can be customized to your playstyle.

Opus Anima / Opus Anima Investigation

Sadly out of print and never officially translated to English so I’ll focus on the one thing that works without the official setting: it’s one of the simplest systems I’ve ever seen. It uses a pool of D2s (odd/even on D6, coins, red/black cards, whatever you have on hand) where the number of dice is determined by a basic attribute and a skill that can be combined however the situation requires. Dexterity + mechanics to build something, perception + mechanics to recognize a mechanism, knowledge + mechanics to understand the underlying principles or remember who invented something. To avoid experienced characters failing an easy check out of pure bad luck, everything over 10 dice is not rolled but gives half a success (rounded up) automatically. That’s it. That’s the whole system.

• Encounter design and balancing is easy for the busy GM
• Teamwork is highly encouraged through class and ability design

ngl, you’re selling it.

Anything that improves combat is a win in my book. I’ve switched to Cyberpunk RED, and I’m discovering that good combat is hard to make in either system, but encouraging teamwork is a nice way to take a little load off the GM.

Exactly! Play the system everyone wants to play.

I’d love to give Shadowrun a shot at my current table, but nobody else wants it so we settled on Cyberpunk RED. I’m GM, so I can port most of the stuff I like from SR to RED. Everybody wins!

I was recently introduced to Death in Space.

Things that I like about it:

• it’s a simple system
• it’s got cool lore (the universe is dying, aberrations are infiltrating the local solar system, all ships and technology is scavenged)
• it’s got some overlapping mechanics with 5e, which makes introducing it simple (advantage, d20 checks, etc)
• it’s got some nice rules for ship combat, space walks, etc
• combat turns are basically just go next if you have something, then the enemies do their thing, and players coordinate on whatever works best for them

My fiancé was running it, but lost the time to continue running it. I might take over with my own group soon.

If you’re looking to run a cyberpunk setting with Pathfinder, I’d recommend checking out Starfinder 2e. It’s currently wrapping up playtesting, and will be out in late July. It uses the core PF2 rules and is fully compatible with them, but a new set of classes, ancestorys and equipment for a science fantasy setting. If I ever run Shadowrun again I’ll probably use Starfinder as the rules.

I looked into playing briefly but it seemed more complicated and confusing than 5e which my players can already barely handle.

I’d argue it’s not more complex, just different. Once you play 3 action combat you’ll never want to go back.

People get intimidated by the depth of PF2e, but just remember that DnD5e/N is also a fairly complex system where you only reference specific rules when you need to, same as PF2e. The advantage is that PF2e is (in my opinion) more cohesive and better covers edge cases.

Any play podcast recs? Maybe listening to a few games will give me a better sense than just reading.

The downside of PF2 is if you try to engage with the core of the online community with this “rules for if I want/need them” attitude, someone will come out of the shadows to shank you.

There’s a rabid “by the rules, and all the rules” cohort within the community, and they are pretty effective at chasing new players away.

Hells Rebels on the Find the Path Presents feed. Hands down.

If you like a little more silly/lewd Glass Cannon campaign 2 is a lot of fun.

I’ve always felt the community was extremely kind and welcoming, personally. The publisher even goes out of their way to support and represent LGBTQ+ in their official worldbuilding.

There’s always going to be elitists in every hobby of course, they do exist in PF2e as well. But it’s not the majority by any stretch.

The bestiary is also really good (and free!). There are thousands of enemies, most of which have solid gimmicks that tell you straight from the stat block how you can best run the creature. And the they’re balanced to the same levels as players, so encounter power budgets are very intuitive.

The game gets a bit of a bad rap for having “nitpicky” rules, but people often seem to fail to recognize that the rules are spelling out how people already usually resolve things, rather than introducing something novel. It’s written in a very systematized way, and people aren’t used to reading about their intuitive experiences in systematized language.

The game’s broader community’s obsession with rules orthodoxy doesn’t help…

I don’t know. My experience with the community has been a lot of people yelling “You’re playing my fantasy XCOM board game wrong. You should probably play a rules-light game,” and no one stepping up to challenge them.

Hmmm, I’m very sorry to hear that, honestly. I’d say the average PF2e player takes it a bit more seriously than the average DnD5e/N player, but not a whole lot.

Perhaps it’s the part of the community you engaged with? Obviously every forum/chat server is going to have it’s own flavor. The older communities that started with PF1e and still focus there are going to be more elitist in general just because of how PF1e came to be and it’s target audience. But PF2e is much more widely targeted.

Discord isn’t free, private, or open source, but it does host several great PF2e communities I participate in if you’d like a recommendation. But if you are just sharing your personal experience and aren’t looking for a “solution”, that’s totally valid and I completely respect that.

Mortals & Portals is very good. They made the decision to use PF2e like 2 weeks before they started recording, and learned the game on the fly. Sometimes they trip over the rules, but they also illustrate how to fail forward in that regard.

They also run it as a Theatre of the Mind game, which a lot of people will try to convince you isn’t really feasible. They fease it just fine, so I like it as an example.

Narrative Declaration also has several campaigns on YouTube. Rotgrind and Rotgoons are campaigns set in a gritty homebrew world. They had an aborted Abomination Vaults campaign that started off with the game’s beginner box. They’re currently running Rusthenge, which is a different beginner’s adventure. They also have a series of “teaching Pathfinder 2e to VTubers” campaigns, which… They’re good, but they’re just the beginner’s box over and over again, with different cartoon variety streamers. They use Foundry, and play gridded combat.

Yeah, I’m mostly just… warning people to be prepared. The Paizo forums and the subreddit both house a significant number of people that actively chase people away for treating the game as a general purpose fantasy RPG. And as someone who champions PF2 as a really solid roleplaying game, and not just a tactical combat game, I’ve been repeatedly and harshly told I’m doing it wrong.

We’re RPG player, we have a long tradition of trolling each others, AD&D player will tell that Vampire is the opposite of a RPG while WOD player will reply that AD&D is a boardgames and that it misses the role play element to be called RPG.

But all this trolling tend to be all fun, and not many people would straight up refuse D&D game (even I, play it like once a decade, there is so many other game out there and so few time)

For anyone (thinking about) playing The Dark Eye:

Check out the character manager/creator Optolith, it’s wonderful!

thousands of enemies, most of which have solid gimmicks that tell you straight from the stat block how you can best run the creature

That’s exactly what I want. I spent so much time looking at https://www.themonstersknow.com/ when DMing 5e. I like encounter design, but I feel like I had to work hard to make it passable, rather than work hard to make it excellent.

Neat! Thanks for mentioning that.