Chebucto Regional Softball Club

In my experience when I've been playing any system for a long time and my players say "hey do something different" they are almost always looking for something very different from what we are all playing. I've spent the most amount of time playing Mage the Ascension in my rpg career, eventually my current group was hey Mage is getting a bit stale, let's do another game. So we did some Vampire the Masquerade, and it was too close in flavor to Mage. So we started playing some Pathfinder and that was the breath of fresh air we were looking for. Eventually we did switch back to mage, but one of my players decided to run their own campaign set in Star Wars which was a ton of fun. So forgive me for using my own experience of when my players have asked to play something different my understanding is they are looking for something more drastic that going from one Tolkien inspired fantasy game to another Tolkien inspired fantasy game or from one modern Gothic punk game with magic to another modern Gothic punk game with fangs.

I'm getting tired of eating Mac and Cheese all the time "have you tried Caccio e Pepe?" It's still pasta and cheese. If someone asked me for something other than dnd to play, I'd imagine they're looking to get out of the tolkein flavored medieval fantasy genre into something different and recommend something like World of Darkness, modern supernatural urban fantasy for political intrigue and melodramatics, or Blades in the Dark, victorian industrial fantasy heists. Not "grittier Tolkien flavored medieval fantasy."

Imo WoD I feel gets the right balance of RP and streamlined combat *with optional additional rules* if they are needed. I'm also generally a firm believer in combat means all other forms of diplomacy has failed. I also love that no matter how strong you are, *everyone* has 7 points of health they can take (but there are ways of getting around that *especially for mages*) And for all the good and bad that the 5e splats that Paradox is putting out, the "3 rounds and call it" philosophy of combat is something I enjoy immensely.