If you’re a fan of “Dungeons & Dragons”, and only “Dungeons & Dragons”, you will likely not know this… but there are more tabletop roleplaying game genres than dice in your collection! No really, it’s true! There is more to playing TTRPGs than just Fantasy, or different flavors of Fantasy (Gothic Fantasy, Steampunk Fantasy, Horror Fantasy, and so on).
There is more to TTRPGs than D&D, and thus there is more to TTRPGs than just what D&D offers you.
Anyway, as someone who has played pretty much every genre I can find of TTRPGs, I find myself often pondering which genre is the most interesting and lasting, other than the default of “Fantasy”. It’s pretty easy to just fall back on the old genre tropes of D&D and other similar games. Let’s not do that. Stretch your imagination, and let’s try to decide which “other” genre might be the best.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of “Horror”, especially of the “Gothic” and “Cosmic” varieties. But is that the best TTRPG genre? Probably not. It’s great for one-shots or short campaigns, other than maybe some of the more venerated horror games like “Call of Cthulhu” and “Vaesen”, but Horror isn’t really a very enduring genre for long-term play.
What about “Science Fiction”, then? Sure, you can certainly have some lasting campaigns with this genre, and you can do so many different things with it, but in the end it tends to spiral down into popular tropes like “Horror” or “Space Opera”. There’s nothing really wrong with that, mind you, but it also doesn’t really scream GREATEST TTRPG GENRE, either.
“Cyberpunk”? Too tired to dystopian themes, and rather restrictive overall. “Old West”? Even more restrictive, despite what some genre combinations have been previously tried with it. “Cozy”? This genre is rather new overall, and offers many options for interesting playstyles, but it also leads to limited campaigns. I could go on and on, but I won’t.
For me, I have found that “Post-Apocalyptic” is probably the best and most enduring TTRPG genre. You can literally do anything with it, since there are no expectations, and no boundaries on your setting.
- Standard Post-Apocalypse? “Fallout”, “Apocalypse World”, “Legacy: Life Among The Ruins”, etc
- Zombies? “All Flesh Must Be Eaten”
- Last People On Earth? “Lonely World”
- Fantasy/Sci-Fi? “Rifts”
- Cosmic Horror and Fantasy? “Earthdawn”
- Doomed world? “Mörk Borg”
My point is, you can do pretty much anything with a PA-based TTRPG, and each setting will feel distinctly different from the others. These games also tend towards lengthy campaigns, as while a one-shot PA game might be fun, in my experience people want to continue these adventures. They want to see what’s over the next irradiated hill, and what happens with their new settlement, etc.
Of course, maybe I’m wrong? Maybe people only want to play Fantasy and Fantasy-adjacent TTRPGs, like D&D and “Daggerheart”? While that’s fine, it would seem to me that many of these people simply haven’t stretched their imaginations, and stepped out of their little fantasy-focused perspective, to try something different for once. If they did, I expect many would find that they would eventually come to love some flavor of the Post-Apocalyptic genre as I do.