How to choose a TTRPG your whole group will actually play

Choosing the next game is the quietest way a campaign dies. One player is set on D&D 5e, another wants something weird and rules-light, the GM wants minimal prep, and someone hasn’t said a word but will absolutely bail if it’s another dungeon crawl. The conversation spreads across three Discord channels, nobody wants to be the pushy one, and two weeks later you’re either defaulting to D&D again or not playing at all. This is a guide to actually deciding — fairly, fast, and in a way nobody resents.

Split vote. Five people, five favourites, no majority — so the most stubborn person wins by attrition.
The vocal minority. One firm “I’d really rather not” quietly kills an option everyone else liked.
Paradox of choice. There are thousands of TTRPGs now. Past a handful of options, people freeze instead of choosing.
Undefined scope. “What should we play” means something different for a one-shot than for a two-year campaign. People vote differently when they don’t know what they’re committing to.

Pick the one that fits how your table actually behaves:

1. Quick consensus — best for small, agreeable groups. Someone proposes two or three options, show of hands, done. Fast, but it falls apart the moment opinions genuinely differ.

2. Approval voting — the best default for most groups. Everyone votes for every game they’d be happy to play, not just their favourite. The option with the broadest support wins. This is the one that kills the “stuck playing something I hate” problem, because a game only wins if most of the table is at least OK with it.

3. Everyone pitches — best for passionate groups. Each person gets two minutes to sell one game. Enthusiasm is contagious, and people often warm to an option they’d have skipped on a list. Then vote.

4. Ranked choice — best when the options are similar. Everyone ranks their top few; if nothing has a majority, the lowest drops and its votes flow to second choices. Genuinely useful when, say, two OSR games are splitting the same voters.

For most groups, approval voting is the sweet spot: low drama, no vote-splitting, and the winner is something the whole table can live with.

Session Zero is built around approval voting, because it’s the format that holds up with real groups. Add your players (just names — no accounts), everyone browses a catalogue of 51+ systems with honest, human-written summaries, and each person flags the ones they’d genuinely be up for. The results page shows a shortlist ranked by votes. Pick the winner, or argue over the top three over pizza — except now you’re arguing over three games everyone already approved, not starting from zero.

Half the stall is just not knowing what’s out there. A few directions, by what your group is actually after:

Prep-light, pick-up-and-play: Cairn, Mausritter, Mörk Borg — rules you can teach in five minutes.
Story-first, low-crunch: Blades in the Dark, Heart — mechanics that push the fiction, not stat blocks.
Horror for a tense night: Mothership, Call of Cthulhu — two very different flavours of dread.
One evening, no commitment: The Wretched, Last Tea Shop — one-shots that resolve in a single sitting.
Playing solo or between sessions: see the best solo TTRPGs.
Old-school dungeon energy: see OSR tabletop RPGs.

Define the scope first. One-shot, mini-arc, or open-ended campaign — say it out loud before anyone votes. People commit differently to three sessions than to three years.

Let people veto, not just vote. One honest “I will not enjoy this” is worth knowing before session one, not halfway through it.

Timebox it. Give the decision ten minutes and a hard deadline. Endless deliberation is exactly how the default option — D&D again — wins by exhaustion.