Bizarre Love Triangle

I'm in the middle of a nasty love triangle, and it's getting out of hand. On one hand, I have a love who lets me be who I want to be. She doesn't confine me nor define me. She's open to whatever I'm in the mood for, and she just makes everything fun. But, on the other side, I have a new love, and she really reminds me of a junior high infatuation, but all grown up and infinitely sexier. What's a guy to do?


My quandary. Except I'm a dude. With a beard.
Otherwise, very similar.

So right now, I'm trying the John Ritter Three's Company strategy: I flit between the two, trying to balance one with the other so nobody gets hurt (especially me). But it's starting to get out of hand, and I feel this stupid urge to commit to one or the other.
My lovely ladies:





Hippie Chick.

 Savage Worlds is the one who never seeks to constrain me or tie me down. With Savage Worlds, I can whip up a Ghost Busters campaign, a Wild West campaign, a Star Wars campaign, Cthulhu (yeah, lots of Cthulhu)...hell, players have even revamped the Battletech RPG so it's actually playable...all from a single, fairly thin book. At this moment, Savage Worlds GM's are adapting every imaginable IP into slick, smooth-running games. And if you don't want to use someone else's setting or idea, write your own: it's easy with Savage Worlds. Really, really easy. Even better, the system has tons (literally tons) of licensed settings, ranging from the Weird West of Deadlands to the awesomely grim Saxon-inflected desperation of Hellfrost. 
The flexibility of Savage Worlds springs largely from it's generic framework. It's not GURPS, but it relies on character creation and rules mechanics that are common to any setting. Shooting skill is shooting skill: if you're in Mad Max, it's a gun, but if you're playing Doctor Strange versus Cthulhu, it may be arcane energy squirting out of your eyeballs. Regardless, it's aiming something at a target, and you adapt it as needed by the setting and common sense. Likewise with magic/powers/etc. A magic missile and a ray of frost are pretty much like Gambit's ability to shoot plasmicated playing cards at bad guys; the rules provide a trappings concept that customizes the framework to make it fit the application. It sounds clunky, but it sho ain't. It's smooth, and damned near effortless.

Adolescent crush. Grown up.

  But the we have my other new love: 13th Age is everything I ever loved about Dungeons & Dragons but revamped for maximum playability and fun, the love of my adolescence all grown up and made over. Unlike Savage Worlds, 13th Age is straight fantasy, and mechanically tied into an implied setting; but that setting is pretty awesome, so I'm not complaining.
It's the love-child of Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo, of D&D 3rd and 4th edition fame, respectively. According to the foreword, they got together to make a game that combines everything good about both editions, and dumps everything else into the garbage. Not only are the rules pared down, there are actual mechanics in place to encourage player agency and kicking ass: for example, you don't level up by killing little XP nuggets in the form of monsters. Instead, you fight, you play, you carry on in the face of adversity, and, after a big fight or two, you get an incremental advance to the next level. One of my favorite tweaks is discarding the voluminous skill lists for your character. Rather than picking a load of specific skills, you pick backgrounds, and you use those backgrounds to role-play why your character has specific skills. If your character has the 'wharf rat' background, you just tell the GM, "Of course I know how to mend a net, I grew up on the mean docks of Blehtown" and it's up to you to sell it to the GM and the group. You make up your backgrounds, you determine whether or not they apply, and the GM and other players are there to throw a bullshit flag as needed.
Tweet and Heinsoo also differentiate the character classes: some are mechanics light, allowing a new player to roll dice and slay kobolds without a lot of overhead, while others are heavy on the crunch, allowing an experienced player to use specific rules to really tailor their characters abilities and skills.
That being said, every rule in 13th Age is geared toward maximizing the collaborative story-telling aspect of the game, without resorting to the diceless, 'story game' extreme. It's still dice-rolling, but with a lot of player collaboration, all in the service of story. This is a massive positive, but can also be a problem. When I tried out 13th Age at the table, my group was a little overwhelmed. It can take a while to break habits of "DM presents, DM describes, I react, roll dice, DM interprets". This game heavily relies on players taking charge of their actions and story, and that requires some adjustment from some players. It is definitely not for lazy players.



So here I am, with two very different, very attractive games pulling me in two directions. My gaming time is limited, and I have a group that doesn't switch easily...but it's whiny of me to complain. There are definitely worse problems to have. We'll figure it out somehow.

Just so long as they don't hook up behind my back.