I've run Pbta, Swn and Traveller games quite successfully. It helps to have some guidance on how you play in and out of combat (async, concurrent turns). Avoid 5e, PF2 or super crunchy systems.

Just claim that is how they spelled it in Ye Olde Tims

Maybe the healthy move is to admit it’s fine to love games you’ll never run. To say: “This one I’ll play. These ten I’ll pillage. The rest are just pleasant ghosts on my shelf.” Not failure. Just abundance. Still, maybe don’t back the next 5E tie-in. Probably. Maybe. 8/8

Buying bundles we’ll never use isn’t entirely foolish. Reading games you won’t run is how you learn what you could do. The hobby is half playing and half being a strange little librarian of unrealised campaigns, filing ideas you might one day steal from yourself. 7/8

Publishers aren’t daft. A GI Joe or Doctor Who logo will sell more than “Generic System #14.” The tragedy is that many of these games are actually good and then vanish beneath the avalanche of next month’s Very Good Game You Also Won’t Play. Quiet successes, quiet deaths. 6/8

We live in an age where you can play barbarians in mythic Bronze Age Greece, space bears rebuilding on a trauma planet, or Rangers piloting colour-coded mechs. The real constraint isn’t rules or imagination; it’s “can we get four adults in the same call twice a month?” 5/8

Horror’s having a moment too. Trail, DG, Vaesen, Cthulhu, FiveEvil. All saying: “What if your character is fragile and doomed?” Meanwhile half the table are ex-D&D players asking if they can long-rest the trauma away and respec into a better backstory. 4/8

Licensed games are wild. “Do you want to be an Autobot / Witcher / Power Ranger?” Yes, obviously. “Do you want to read 300 pages of medium crunch to do that?” Ah. Less obviously. They capture the feel beautifully, and then quietly suffocate under their own page count. 3/8

5E is now less a game and more a conversion layer. Conan 5E, Doctor Who 5E, horror 5E, Ikea Assembly 5E. Each one promises “cinematic story-driven play,” then hands you an initiative order and 80 pages of ways to whittle hit points differently. 2/8

gg hope you got a backup

Pray for your sake they have low INT

Slightly longer form for those who want it: blog.monkeyx.games/2025/10/24/c...

Hard enough to get a Traveller group to stick for me... This has some nice ideas but not sure it's going to get enough people excited to make it a game you play sadly

Aegean - mythic Greek heroics