I've been playing tabletop RPGs for 20 years, and these are the D&D alternatives I recommend

This week, Robin used his roleplaying expertise to recommend a bunch of alternatives to D&D. There are some good choices in his list, though I'd skip Pathfinder if you aren't a hardcore numbercruncher.

While I'm still playing D&D myself (a Spelljammer campaign, running for a few months), I thought I'd sneak in a bonus recommendation based on my own roleplaying experience—even if, at a mere 19 years with dice in hand, I'm Robin's junior.

World Wide Wrestling is, like it says on the tin, a tabletop RPG about wrestling. Normally fights between players are discouraged in RPGs, and as a young dweeb I played some bad games where PCs turned on each other, but intra-party conflict can be fun if played right. World Wide Wrestling ensures that'll happen.

The wonderful thing about wrestling is that it makes fighting both low-stakes and the most important thing in the world. Nobody's expected to die, so finally you can have villains return without the players groaning, and almost every session will involve party members taking each other on. Grudge matches, rivalries, and enemies turning into allies are rich sources of story, and World Wide Wrestling makes them all happen with a light, low-prep ruleset.

Even people who don't know that much about pro wrestling can get to grips with it. I'm no wrasslehead, but the simple explanations of terms and illustrations of moves like the chickenwing crossface made it easy for me to fake it. And faking it is what wrestling, like roleplaying, is all about.

It's a momentous day, my friends, because we can finally answer the most controversial question in videogaming: Does Gordon Freeman wear a helmet? It's all thanks to a fan-made ray tracing mod for the original Half-Life that increases the game's moody lighting quotient by a factor of 10, and finally, finally lets you get a look in those bathroom mirrors. For whatever reason, I always seem to be more impressed by ray tracing when it shows up in golden oldies than when it's applied to modern releases, and that's no different here. Half-Life looks astounding draped in the latest lighting tech: Zombies seem much more foreboding when they're lit from below and smattered in shadows, and watching Vortigaunts become subsumed by green light as they charge their attacks is genuinely intimidating.

Whether you're quitting Dungeons & Dragons entirely, or just looking for something new to try, it can be difficult to know where to go next. There's an enormous number of brilliant tabletop RPGs out there these days, catering to almost any taste, but sifting through them all to find the one for you isn't an easy task. You know what is easy? Sitting back and letting us do the hard work for you! Over 20 years in the hobby, I've played and run an awful lot of games, and below I've put together a selection of what I think are the best D&D alternatives—gateways for stepping outside of Wizards of the Coast's kingdom and into the wonderful wider world of RPGs.

This is one of the oddest big-budget games I've played in a long time, filled with as many good ideas as bad ones, almost like it's been made without a filter. Everything went in. The game's influences are numerous—Westworld, Fallout, Arkane's Prey—but the one that looms above them all is BioShock. Atomic Hearts' narrative-focused opening is like a communist version of Columbia and the grandeur of its sprawling research institute, a utopia-gone-wrong showcasing the best of retro-futurist Soviet robotics, makes for one breathtaking vista after another. But the influence runs far deeper than aesthetic. Combat is built around a plasmid equivalent, several of which are directly lifted from BioShock, while the narrative style of first-person talking heads, radio logs, and companions is straight from the Irrational playbook. At times Atomic Heart almost pulls it off.

Instead of doing something useful with our time, we've ranked all the Geralts we could think of. You know: Witcher 3 Geralt, book Geralt, Polish TV series Geralt, Tub Geralt—the Geralts. It's not worth thinking too much about why we decided to do this, because the reason is really just that someone said "let's rank all the Geralts" and no one said no before it happened.