The world of tabletop roleplaying games is a hobby that may appear somewhat niche, but upon further examination, have a history of innovation and diversity dating back to its roots. The last five years or so have seen a boom in the popularity of TTRPGs – both mainstream and indie – and this explosion has resulted in a variety of games and design philosophies becoming available.
Many of the items on this list are relatively recent. In part, this is due to the recent boom and also to the unfortunate lack of RPG history available. A lot of this hobby's history of design took place on now-defunct forums, private internet groups, and in other lost spaces. Consequently, there may be influential games now lost to modern audiences. However, the games that are still accessible offer a glimpse into how the hobby got to where it is and where it might be heading.
10 "Little Wars" Was An Early Example Of Wargame Innovation
Published in 1913 by famed science-fiction novelist H.G. Wells, this little book offers an interesting early example of game design – iterating on existing games to get at something more. The rulebook opens: "LITTLE WARS is the game of kings – for players in an inferior social position." Wells was a known pacifist, and through Little Wars he wove an anti-war message with rules for simulating combat with toy soldiers and projectiles, building on existing miniatures games that were often used to teach military tactics to prospective officers.
9 "D&D" Is The Elephant In The Room And The Undisputed Top Dog
It's impossible to talk about the history of TTRPGs without mentioning the most popular of them: Dungeons and Dragons. For better or worse, D&D has absolute market dominance over the RPG world, and it has since its early days. D&D's roots aren't easy to pin down as it evolved slowly from medieval wargames with fantasy elements slowly peppered in. Writers like Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson are credited with "inventing" D&D in the mid-1970s, but their work was very much an aggregate of a thriving hobby moving from tactics to storytelling.
8 "Traveller" Was An Early Example Of Non-Fantasy Gaming
This game, first published in 1977, demonstrates how RPGs have been interested in genres other than fantasy since the beginning. Traveller, misspelled intentionally, is a science fiction roleplaying game influenced by various novels of the 60s and 70s.
It relied on a totally different engine to D&D, using exclusively six-sided dice and a life-path character generation system. Traveller is still in publication today, having seen numerous updates and new editions in the intervening years.
7 "FATE" Was A Big Player In The 2000s
Although it was building on an existing engine – the Fudge system – upon its release in 2003, Fate was a landmark publication in the world of generic roleplaying game systems. It set itself apart from previous generic systems like GURPS by being extremely streamlined and using narrative aspects and tags in place of crunchy skills. The Fate system, including later iterations like Fate Accelerated, formed the framework for dozens of independent RPGs in the early 2000s, as well as some high-profile licensed games like Atomic Robo and The Dresden Files.
6 "Pathfinder" Marked A Split In The D&D Fandom
Pathfinder is often regarded as an alternative to D&D, and its origins are very much tied to this perception. Pathfinder was published in 2009, immediately following the release of D&D's fourth edition. D&D 4e was a departer from 3.5 in some major ways, and this departure came with a lot of backlash.
Pathfinder intentionally set itself up as the spiritual successor to 3rd edition, signifying that classic D&D's particular approach to fantasy roleplaying had a draw that was actually powerful enough to break brand loyalty for many players.
5 "Apocalypse World" Introduced An All-New System That Is Still Big Today
Arguably the most influential indie RPG ever published, Apocalypse World by D. Vincent and Meguey Baker introduced what would become known as the Powered by the Apocalypse system. This narrative-centric engine prioritizes story, characters, and genre-emulation over hard numbers and complicated rules. First released in 2010, it was born of a forum known as The Forge, where discussions about game design and publishing took place. The Forge has a complicated and controversial legacy, but the Powered by the Apocalypse system is still one of the most widely used frameworks for narrative RPGs today.
4 Virtual Tabletops Like "Roll20," "Foundry," And "Fantasy Grounds" Facilitate Remote Play
While not games in their own right, platforms designed to facilitate online play have had a huge impact on how RPGs are played, including how they're designed. Most of these programs are designed around games that require maps like D&D, but they're used for all kinds of remote gaming, bundling together shared documents, video and voice chat, dice rolling, and more. Virtual tabletops became exponentially more popular and important during the Covid-19 pandemic, and their popularity is continuing to grow.
3 "Blades in the Dark" Was A New Wave In Narrative Games
Representing another tidal shift in narrative game design, Blades in the Dark was funded on Kickstarter in 2015 and fully released in 2017. Its author, John Harper, cites games like Apocalypse World as hugely influential but introduces a more mechanical spin on storytelling.
Like Apocalypse World, its engine is now useable by other games, giving rise to a new genre known as Forged in the Dark games. These games keep a fiction-first approach to gaming, but also incorporate some crunchier action resolution systems, as well as mechanized downtime systems.
2 "Dream Askew" And "Dream Apart" Move Towards A Diceless Future
First funded on Kickstarter in 2018, these two games of "Queer strife amid the collapse" and "Jewish fantasy of the shtetl" respectively introduced a new RPG engine now known as Belonging Outside Belonging. This system, written by Avery Alder, is designed around stories of community, marginalization, and the subaltern. It encourages play with "no dice and no masters." Belonging Outside Belonging and the philosophy that drives it is used in many new storytelling games, including the wildly popular Wanderhome.
1 "Avatar Legends" Shook Things Up Before It Was Even Published
In the summer of 2021, Magpie Games launched a Kickstarter campaign for an officially licensed Avatar: The Last Airbender RPG. It surpassed every one of its stretch goals, raising over 9 million dollars and becoming the tenth highest-funded Kickstarter campaign of all time. Seeing an officially branded RPG from a major franchise making use of material like the Powered by the Apocalypse system is very interesting. It demonstrates that games like these have made the leap to being corporately viable, rather than underground projects. The campaign also raised some concerns from members of the design community over whether Kickstarter was the appropriate place for a massive company like Nickelodeon to crowdfund their products.