Re: Looking for 'literary' RP without a complicated game system
In reply to Dread Pirate (msg # 1):
I can understand your concern, and recommend some game systems that are relatively easy to get into.
I think you'd find a lot to like in the Powered by the Apocalypse system. It's extremely minimalistic system based on the core idea that roleplaying is a conversation, and that the mechanics should only come up when needed. The biggest limitation of it, in my opinion, is that games using the system tend to be built around specific genre conventions, which can make any single one very difficult to adapt to a genre very different from the one it was intended for. Worldbuilding is a collaborative aspect of these games, and they tend to be sandboxes where the story is driven by the players.
The original was the namesake, Apocalypse World, designed for gritty post-apocalyptic settings. It's still held in very high regard, and for good reason.
Then came Dungeon World, which effectively takes Dungeons and Dragons-style high fantasy and uses a Story Games system to manage it. I'm particularly fond of the Inverse World setting for it, which I have another topic on this board about.
Monster of the Week is designed for games that range from the style and tone of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The X-Files. I'm not very familiar with it.
Monsterhearts is for the genre the creators lovingly describe as "supernatural teen sex horror"- not my cup of tea, but I can see a lot of merit and uniqueness in the system and design, so have a look if you're a fan of the YA supernatural romance genre. (Or of sparkly vampires, high school witches, or soft-hearted teenage werewolves.)
Worlds in Peril is for the superhero genre (and arguably for a very specific presentation of that genre), and it's a very sleek, innovative, and versatile system. It's definitely flawed, but there's also a lot to love in it. I've made a topic describing a hacking of the system in the Game Proposals board, so you can check that out if you have an interest in the premise of Transformers.
Legacy: Life Among the Ruins is a recent release in the system that I'm very, very excited for, where you play with both a line of individual characters across generations and a large scale "family" at the same time, in a post-apocalyptic setting that goes the "Sufficiently Advanced" route of making magic and technology indistinguishable from one another.
Sagas of the Icelanders is a very interesting mytho-historical game that does a lot to explore gender relations and life in a particular ancient society, even doing things like giving you the chance to play as a child and eventually grow into another role, and giving you "Gendered" as a stat describing how well you conform to social expectations of your gender.
There are, of course, many other games using the system, both free and published, that I'm less familiar with.
If you want something that has a few more fiddly bits and mechanical systems to explore, go with FATE Core, which if I'm not mistaken you can download free from the website. It's popular, versatile, and it's all about making you exchange agency in the narrative for interesting troubles.
Nobilis is probably still my favorite game by far, a diceless game where you play reality-warping personifications of a particular idea or concept, who have power over the world that supersedes normal physical laws or even causality.
I would also suggest looking into Microscope, which is less of a traditional RPG and more like a collaborative history building game where you freely move back and forth along a timeline and zoom in and out between universal, political, and personal scales and collaborate to tell stories that answer continually-rising questions about the world.
