-★- Table top RPGs I've played! -★-
So I've played a lot of table top games, and here are some thoughts about them!
Dungeons & Dragons 5e
This was my first TTRPG experience and it set the standard for how I view games because it was and kinda is my default. Not that it's great or flawless but it's the one I got the most experience with.
What I like about it as a system is that it's fun and relatively easy (for a girl who memorized the rules) to have fun fantasy battles. All the rules are built around combat and you can add little bits of flavor in skills and backgrounds and tools for what your character is like outside of enacting violence.
What I like about playing dnd is that I get to hang out with a bunch of folks doing silly and serious in game stuff and pretending to be characters who have problems and all the theater of it. Fighting bad guys, navigating the world the DM came up with and the plot they invented. Not to mention you can play a wide variety of characters and embody them. And usually I'm playing friends too! Because my friends all know dnd and are down to play it. IT's fun spending a few hours with friends regularly.
Now maybe you noticed the difference between liking the system of 5e and liking hanging out with friends playing characters at a table. The best parts of 5e are the parts not in the rules, the parts that aren't even dungeons & dragons but are simply a part of ttrpgs in general.
So the things I don't like about 5e are that it relies a lot on the DM filling in the gaps. the premade settings and adventures largely aren't good and are full of issues, thus it becomes up to each DM to figure out how to complete the game by worldbuilding, coming up with how exploration works, elaborating on the nearly nonexistent social system and that's a lot of work. I've DM'd and it's… a lot of work. The stories the system encourages aren't stories I like to tell. It's about triumphing over things with the power of violence and anything outside of that is using the barebones pass/fail d20 skill system or entirely made up by the DM.
Worse than the inherent violence encouraged by the system bits are the fact that the default assumptions for dnd are built on a racist and colonial mindset. To explain, D&D races are bioessentially better or worse than each other, they are literally called races but changing the name doesn't fix the fact that it is built around "some races are born biologically superior to other races" that's racism plain and simple. There are fixes for this but the racial disparity and violence simulator is dnd, the more of it you strip away the less dnd exists and is simply the DM improving.
It's fun, but it's fun because its cathartic to do some fantasy violence against evil fictional characters while hanging out with friends who are down to play 5e because it doesn't require them to learn a new ttrpg system.
Shadowrn 5e
Shadowrun has all the racial dynamics of dnd, but it's not a system just about violence it has social rules, and hacking rules and rules for a bunch of other things! Unfortunately there are too many rules, and they are convoluted, hard to use in play, and make functionally playing the game impossible.
What I like about the system is that you can look at a catalogue of weapons and scifi gear that your character could have and use and they could be used for such cool things and highly encourage getting lots of money to get cool scifi tech.
What I dislike is that it's too convoluted to run or play and thus I don't actually get to do any of that.
It also has the fantasy racial issues, and a few more cause it’s the real world, but it actually has less than dnd 5e cause the fantasy racial effects have less impact over character creation.
Exalted 3e
Gosh this is such a fun system! you get to play as a larger than life demigod that does cool anime fights, but you can do much more than anime fights! It has rules for social combat that aren't terrible once you figure it out, it has rules for solving problems through crafting, stuff for animal friendship, leadership, solving problems by being the resident genius. In fact the game practically encourages the party to diversify on how they approach stuff so you have a demigod specialized in whatever thing you need doing—or you can all play anime fighters the system is versatile like that!
Better yet it's not super rules heavy and you get to roll lots of dice when you do your fancy over the top maneuvers, better yet, if you describe how you do it in a cool way you get a bonus to your action increasing your chance of success!
Oh and since it's not race&class based you can be whoever/whatever you want without any penalties, including furries! Also it has a premade setting that's weird but interesting.
Now there is a pseudo class in picking your exalted type, which is where your fancy demigod got her powers, the solars are typical shounen anime protagonists, impossibly good at what they do to the point they break physics. Whether that be punching, taming animals, cooking, seduction, or anything else.
But why play one of those when you can be an anarchist transgender furry exalted, the Lunar Exalted! Their exaltation gives them a spirit animal they can turn into, and also gives them a free gender transition into their ideal body, and the ability to gain more shapeshifting forms. They're not quite as potent as the solars, btu they're more magical, and shapeshifty, and they can be fox girls who turn into kaiju to battle the imperial realms mechas. Or you can be the edgelord abyssal exalted, the fascist dragonblooded, the punk infernals, the robot alchemicals, the exigents who are special snowflake exalted, and the sidereals who are basically the timecop CIA and they do cool stuff by glitching reality but are usually the bad guys along with the dragonblooded.
Wow that sounds amazing, what's the catch? Well the catch is it sucks to run, there's basically no support for the storyteller(GM) to actually run an adventure. 3e has very little world lore which stinks because it has a set setting baked into the game. There aren't many books out for it, and the systems are not all equal and can be clunky to learn especially if your game group has a bunch of folks with ADHD who hate crunchy systems.
Oh and you need a lot of d10s.
Vampire the Masquerade 5e
Only played two sessions, but it was fun! It uses a very similar d10 system to exalted's but is more streamlined in the rules department. It's about being a vampire in an urban fantasy setting and doing vampire stuff which seems fun, but I never played enough to find out.
Masks
A cool ttrpg about making a teen titans like character doing superhero stuff. It's rules light, the rules are more like suggestions on how to roleplay your character than actual rules. I didn't like it because it felt like we weren't playing a game we were just improving and is really bad for any party with ADHD folks because of the complete lack of focus.