I play PF2e primarily, though I’m not quite satisfied with it. I want more fantasy sandbox rather than fantasy combat sim, so it doesn’t quite satisfy what I want on a purely mechanical level. But I do love my heavily armored magicians… shame what happened to the battle oracle in the remaster.

Right now I’m playing an imperial sorcerer with the Wood Kineticist archetype, and I just hit level 4 where I ascend to “Ikeamancer,” summoning trees and woodshaping them into cheap edifices and furniture. In two more levels, I’ll get the ability to make wood armor to wear that is usable without proficiency, and a regenerating shield. And one more level after that, I’ll have a funky little flying platform to rain spells down from above from. Good fun.

As for the character himself, he’s a total bastard (in both senses of the word) who has defected to another country and just absolutely cannot get over how people are being nice to him for some reason. He now feels bad about his family’s harm inflicted on these same people, and the prejudice he displayed during his meeting with them.

Out of the systems I’ve actually played, I’ll always love Lancer. I usually play young characters inspired by whatever I’m really into at the moment (for example, my latest Lancer is somewhat of an expy of Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion).

I’ve only really ever played Pathfinder (I forget the version we played), and DnD 5e. The types of campaigns I like to be part of are really fast-and-loose numbers-are-a-suggestion type heavy on the storytelling and roleplay. I’ve played some amazing campaigns, and I love sharing all the crazy stories.

One fun one that comes to mind is a 5e campaign which was anime mech fighting high-school themed… I played a “warlock” character who was a deadbeat street thug who schmoozed and lied his way into the academy to try and move up in the world even though he had no mech fighting or other relevant experience, and my patron was a significantly older otaku who would channel their years of expertise through me via sat phone/an earpiece to pilot the robot. Out of everyone in the campaign, I had the smallest, weakest weapon, a simple dagger, but I was able to manipulate the images reflected off the dagger’s blade and did most of my damage and combat via psychological warfare and manipulation (which were canonically things that I had tons of experience with from my time on the streets). I ended up getting like full-mech active camo as a logical extension of the blade-reflection-manipulation and went towards a stealth build which was fun.

After all the people I played with all moved away and we stopped playing, I tried to go to a game store and find a campaign. I found some people who were looking to start something, and I built a Kenku alchemist/rogue with a whole tragic backstory with a bunch of various villains I gave to the DM if they needed anything to tie in. I 3D printed a bunch of little percussion instruments, made a custom not-obnoxious utility sound-board on my phone, and even made a custom Guiro with differently-spaced ridges that the sound of was supposed to be my “real kenku name”… Nobody cared, everyone was annoyed at my insistence to be thorough in roleplaying, the wizard was a min-maxing Timmy rules lawyer who’s only character trait was “Hat that slowly gets bigger without you noticing until it’s a really fucking big hat”, and needless to say I only played like 2 sessions lol

I run one-shot games at conventions, mostly FATE and Dread. At the conventions I tend to join a lot of Mork Bork and Numenera games, although I’ve never GM’d them.

I also play in longer D&D campaigns with friends, but we’ve played other campaigns in Firefly (Cortex) and Star Trek Adventures.

FATE is my favorite for the flexibility. People tend to focus on making the story good as opposed to trying to work against the restraints of their character. Unfortunately most people in my friend group are Pathfinder/D&D focused, so we tend to go that direction.

Meanwhile I probably run No Thank You, Evil! the most lately, just because my household has become overrun with kids.

I recently received Triangle Agency, so I’m excited to try that.

I tried playing a warlock and it ended up that he was way more into the patronage thing than the patron was. He made a big Fullmetal Alchemist style summoning gesture to hand the MacGuffin over to the patron, only to ne told “dial it back” by Lord Azazel.

I still swear by Pathfinder 1e, I just recently finished GMing a campaign that ran for over 10 years. I haven’t found another system that offers the sheer amount of options to play exactly the character you want that pathfinder does.

Toss up between Warhammer Fantasy RP and Pendragon. WFRP has a reputation for grimdarkness and brutality (fair). Pendragon has a lovely system that plays fast and really encourages actual roleplaying in Arthurian Britain.

And the most brutal thing I’ve ever seen happen in a RPG was in Pendragon. The standard start includes some training exercises with your squire characters, including a joust with practice lances (break easily, no points or metal heads). You get to this within 10 minutes of starting, after 30-60 minutes of character creation.

One of the players suffered a critical hit to the face with a “safety lance” and was killed instantly. Had to roll up a new character, but was laughing the entire time.