Quote Originally Posted by Dragnar View Post
Hmm... Well Xefas, you seem to have experience with a decent variety of RPGs. So, which one(s) do you think are the best put together mechanically? Just curious.
It's hard to say. Don't Rest Your Head, Fiasco, Apocalypse World, Free Market, Burning Empires, Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, Burning Wheel (Revised or Gold), Mouse Guard - these are what immediately spring to mind.

They may spring to me just because of my taste, though. I have experience with them, and they're all-around solid. (I know Vincent Baker considers Poison'd to be the pinnacle of his game design, even above Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World. I think he's loony, but whatever.)

There're games that are a bit more 'out there', in terms of what they do. They're great games both conceptually and design-wise, but I don't expect everyone to want to play them.
Blazing Rose - the first romance RPG.
1001 Nights - you roleplay people that are roleplaying as other people.
Grey Ranks - crushingly depressing game about child soldiers in occupied Poland.
Steal Away Jordan - you play African slaves in the pre-Civil-War American south.
Silence Keeps Me a Victim - work through your (the player's) childhood trauma with deeply unsettling imagery.
Tales of The Fisherman's Wife - sort of what you're thinking it is.

And I have to give a sub-category to well designed but very light games (die in a fire, RISUS): Primetime Adventures, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, Kagematsu (I would actually consider running a PbP game of this here, if Lix would be our Kagematsu =P), In a Wicked Age, Dread, Cthulhu Dark.

I'm probably missing some, but that's my info dump off the top of my head, as it is. And suddenly I realize I didn't mention Lady Blackbird, which might be a great game, but I might also just have an insane fascination for it. It's freely available on the internet, like several of the games I've mentioned (link), so you're welcome to judge for yourself. It might be awful, I just...I just don't know.

Quote Originally Posted by Kyeudo View Post
My own games have had few problems getting the system to do what we want.
This is what's so often the hard part to explain, but I'll give it a try and hope you believe me. You can 'get' anything to 'do' anything. I can force Monopoly, Parcheesi, or Settlers of Catan to have courtly intrigue. But that doesn't make it a roleplaying game about courtly intrigue.

The reason it's hard to explain to people that are only familiar with D&D, is because they're so used to shoving what they want into a game that doesn't do what they want. D&D is a game about violent hobos wandering around murdering and stealing things. But they want it to be heroic, Tolkienesque fantasy, so they force that into the game.

And then they wonder why they have so many problems. And it's not Wizard imbalance. I'm talking about all those threads you get constantly about "Help me punish my DM/Players/Family", or "Huge Rant About DM Fiat Incoming", or "Why is everyone in my town a stupid ****weasel?! - Rant on PvP", or "Is It Okay To Stab People That Take Out Their Cellphone?" and so on and so forth. All these things are a symptom of people playing a poorly designed game that is not designed for what they want. (See my previously linked game theory video, specifically the part about "The Game Makes The Community")

When you play a game that is well designed for the task you want, not only can you do what you want, it's easy. It just happens, and it's (difficult to believe, I know) more enjoyable.

Think of every moment in an Exalted game where you, not necessarily were having a problem, but that you (personally) weren't actively being consumed by joy. Those moments are the difference between a good and bad game. I played D&D for many years, through many editions, and with many groups and people. And it was fun. We kicked down doors, we slayed demons, we dined with kings, ventured to the ends of the earth, gazed upon things so wondrous and evil that it shook us to our core, and threw open the gates of heaven to give the gods a big ol' middle finger.

That was fun. Of course that was fun. Those parts are going to be fun. So why did I start playing Burning Wheel? Because those parts were also fun in Burning Wheel, but so was every single moment since we sat in our chairs. (Cellphone? DS? You couldn't force me to take those out in the middle of a Burning Wheel session.) It was a transcendent experience that engaged me like nothing else. I could not possibly have imagined what it would be like until I played it. I know this because I fought tooth and nail (almost literally) to not play it. I defended D&D to the very last vestige of nostalgia that was in me. And it could not hold.

And now I cannot play D&D. It's akin to going over to a friend's house, and he's still using Internet Explorer and has no ad-block. But times a thousand. Slaying the dragon is still fun. But those moments between dragons grate on me. Waiting for the fun is like claws in my mind, because I know it's not necessary.

Exalted is the same. Slaying the God of Things That Cannot Be Easily Slayed is cool, but the hours leading up to that point are not that sort of all-consuming enjoyment that you get from Apocalypse World or Don't Rest Your Head. And it's an unreasonable amount of work for the GM to even get to that point, besides.