I read through 3rd edition and didn't care for how they gimped the rules. I like 2nd edition for the most part, using a fusion of some first edition rules. So in my main (really good) group, psionics were first edition, hand to hand was from 2nd edition Oriental Adventures (still the best PnP hand to hand system ever made), monks were also from Oriental Adventures, Psionicist class was first edition from an old Dragon magazine, Special sub-classes from Unearthed Arcana, and magic was a fusion of the two... example, fireball/lightning bolt were first addition while protection from fire/ice was 2nd... along with stoneskin and a majority of spells.

The world we used was a variation of the Forgotten Realms with some aspects of Greyhawk thrown in... along with the Cthulhu mythos from the first printing of Deities and Demigods (they were forced to remove Cthulhu & Melnibonian mythos in subsequent printings as they had no license to use them). Ravenloft was also added at one point near the end, but the group split up as we all moved away. Never found another group where all the players knew the rules like the back of their hands again... sad really.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!! :ahhh:

Seriously that's sums up my D&D experience almost perfectly

I couldn't vote, there have been too many great gaming sessions with several different games for me to vote on.

D&D: See quoted post, plus a few additional house rules. I "grew" up on this game. It seemd to us (my gaming group) that each new addition gimped character play style, so hence useing the rule set that best fit our group.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying: That was a fun game and had what D&D seemed to lack. Quick battles (sometimes one shot kills), injuries that affected characters. Sort of Call of Cthulhu meets D&D.
Call of Cthulhu: Brain over brawn to finish gaming sessions. And your character could go slowly insane if you "saw" too much Great mystery type game with monsters. Based of off H.P. Lovecraft's stories.
Cyberpunk: Dark (near) future game. A hacking and or shooter type game.
Shadowrun: Cyberpunk with magic. Sounded lame first time I heard about it, my friends finally dragged me kicking and screaming into a gaming session ... loved it.
Stormbringer: Based off of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné series. Summon demons and bind them into weapons and armor (hmm .... sounds familiar ). One downside was battles could take too long with both an attack and parry skill.

:foodndrink:

Hey Spite, ever play Paranoia? That was a fun one too.

Nope, first time I've heard of it Although after reading the description and seeing the word mutant, I was reminded of

Champions: Create your own superhero/villian and go beat people up (and no you dont have to wear spandex ... unless you really want to). Battles where somewhat like chess ... with lasers .... and fire .... and magic ... and vehicles getting thrown at you ... and martial arts ... and ... well you get it.

I'll nominate one that is so obscure that it will never win.

Dark Conspiracy by GDW c. 1994
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Conspiracy

A great near future horror game where the haves have and the have nots don't have. The haves work for coroporations, which are often run by space aliens, who in turn are often controlled by Darklings from a different plane who feed on misery (caused by the have/have not chasm).

Great variety of character classes from rock star to Ph D. to SF. Simple d10 rule set with the suggestion in the rule book to take scenario ideas straight from the Weekly World News. Batboy is in the game! :laugh: The game for some rolicking good times

Um, and in jest, I'll nominate Macho Women with Guns, Batwing Bimbos from Hell, or Renegade Nuns on Wheels :bolt:

eidt: wowzers, others have played Twilight 2000? Rock on for 1st ed.!

From my first post in this thread

D&D 3rd ed.

I found the character system to be much more flexible (both the feat system and the simpler multiclassing) but some things did feel rather meager. I also think they really overdid it with prestige classes which quickly became as unbalanced as 2ndE Kits which is impressive given how poorly made some of those were. Two of the primary things I first look at in a system is how flexible character creation is and how well the non-combat aspects work. In my opinion 3rdE set a good foundation for the latter although it needed a lot of modification to really work well, and it did alright with the former.

3.5 irked me for a number of reasons. It brought back a number of things I didn't like about earlier additions (like different weapon damage for different sized opponents) and also made odd, sometimes superficial, changes to things that worked fine before. They also changed the rules just enough to make 3rdE books difficult to use, at least from a rules standpoint, but not enough that it wasn't easy to confuse how the two did some things. Originally the 3.5 core rule books were going to just be 3rdE with all of the official errata included in, a small number of additions made important by later books, and all new art - instead they got something that seemed to have the worst parts of a new edition without the benefits of such.

I own one 3.5E book, the Book of Exalted Deeds, which I think they did a fairly good job on. But then I've never actually used it in game


I avoided Forgotten Realms for a very long time, I didn't like how many super-powerful characters there were. I had a number of Forgotten Realms sourcebooks, including the wonderful Forgotten Realms Adventures book, but hadn't use the setting itself.

When we tried 3rdE our DM did a Forgotten Realms campaign and he used all of the depth of the setting but largely threw out the super-NPCs and we had a great time.


Ken Rolston, who was the leader designer of TES III and IV, did a lot of work on the second edition of Paranoia (and maybe some on first edition too? I'm not sure). I've never played it but it sounds like the campaigns he ran at Bethesda were a lot of fun

1979 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I loved how the manuals were written before political correctness took over. There were demons and devils and topless female monsters. Deities and Demigods had topless goddesses. It felt like I was researching real entities. It was like reading about another world.

The 2nd and 3rd editions cleaned up a lot of obscure and unclear rules but the way the manuals were written made it felt like I was just playing a game, not actually "being there."

This.

In addition I would like to nominate Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition. To me this is the pinnacle of role-playing.

I enjoyed Spelljammer.

One of my friends DMed a lot of Spelljammer, it was a fun setting even if it wasn't really my cup of tea. (Given that I was DMing Planescape I wasn't really in a position to complain )

I think the setting we enjoyed the most as a group was Dark Sun.

I really liked the World of Darkness setting and rules (Vampire The Masquerade, Werewolf)

I haven't played many PNPs, but Vampire and Werewolf were my favourites.
(If I have to choose between Vampire and Werewolf for your votes, I go for Vampire. )

The 1st time I ever played AD&D, once I realized exactly what this new kind of game was, I said, "WOW! Do they have a Sci Fi game like this?" I spent the next year looking for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_(role-playing_game) Once I had a good set of books, that's mostly what we played. Once http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striker_(board_game) came out, we incorporated those rules.

Heavy emphasis on Asimov's Empire / Foundation

But what about Mage?

I played some Hunter: the Reckoning and enjoyed it. I couldn't get into the Masquerade, but it may have been the other people playing it. Scary.



Anybody ever play the 7th Sea roleplaying game? I sat in on one session, controlling the character of someone who couldn't make it but was necessary for the plot. It was pretty fun.

Nice! Hat-tip to him.

I'm adding a subset question for everyone concerning their PnP RPG.

How did you make it your own?

For instance, our Shadowrun campains were very realistic. The mutations were downplayed, as well as the overal magical environment, and no one ever just sees a dragon. The surroundings were extremely dystopian, with lower class living basically on Soyent Green, and cybernetics were still a little rarer than in the game (nobody was lobbing off both their arms to get cyber replacements fitted.)

So, I was just wondering..

Like, just messing with the ruleset a little; restricting things and such, or like our own campaign worlds?

yeah.. rulesets adaptions.. the flavour/texture that was carried in the game.. I mean, there's got to be a zillion ways to put down a DnD game. Maybe the dwarfs are presecuted, maybe orks need to pay for their uglyness (we had that, where orks, trolls and other 'undesireables' had to pay an ugly tax)

I can also remember our wounds/healing system being more than a little draconian, and spending a lot of time outside of the group, in a hospital.. I think my character ended up sleeping in his body armour...
that kind of idea.

Aye, that brings back a few memories. Had the rules, but never got to play it. Did play a bit of Star Frontiers :sick: and Gama World :thumbsup: Made a campaign off Woody Allen's movie, Sleeper. Ya, we were wierd kids :unsure:


We never did much with settings, but always tinkered with rulesets. When rules got to complicated and cumbersome, we just went with common sense and rolls against skills or attributes or a percentage with the GM assigning the appropriate dificulty. For instance, if an uncoordinated character wanted to free climb a building, we'd first smack the character in game, :slap: then the player as well in real life :slap: and he'd either have to do a dex check or roll 01 or 02 on a percent roll. Then we'd chuck a die at him on general principles, even if he succeded This method generally went across the board in all the RPG's that we played. I think this is what keeps many folks from PnP games, the rule complexity...not the :slap: part

One specific was using Car Wars rules for vehicle movement and combat in Twilight 2000 1st ed., but still kept the original damage location rolls (takes out...radio, range finder, etc.).

I nominate Lone Wolf because you can play it by yourself.

ooh ooh, here's another great question now that all the PnP players are somewhat in one place..

yer gonna hate me



how many campains, or adventures -having taken the better part of two months to write up, flow sequence, NPCs, maps, the works.. only to have one of the players come up with a left field, out-of-the-frigging-box solution, that basically left the adventure dead in the water after five minutes?

case in point -crap, I can't believe I'm admitting to this.. :facepalm:

Okay, basically a take-the-fortress adventure, with a nasty druglord kingpin living on the top floor of a project appartment block, completely gang comtrolled. The team can go in the front, come in from underneath quiet like, paradrop in on top if they feel really rambo aout it, or even infltrate as affiliated gangers, and take it from there.
Goal, kill the druglord.

I mapped out the entire project, surrounding sewers, wrote out satelite gangs, corp affiliates, and even flight plans flying over the metroplex, in case they were serious about paradropping.

What do they do?

First they check that all the old residents are gone, and only gangers live there. Which it was (my mistake)
Then the hacker chops through air-traffic control servers like hot knives vs the butter and ice scream brigade, links up with an unmanned cargo plane, hacks that security with the luckiest dice rolls in the known univrse, and crashes it into the building, killing everyone.

crap.

Luckily I had the presence of mind to realise that the hack would be back traced, and that the cops would come knocking.. and gave them hell all evening, turning it into a 'the-fuzz-is-seriously-after-you' adventure.

Ha! Nice one!

I never had it happen TO me, but I was that ass who would do the screwing up (bail out of iced plane 20 miles from where the party ends up which leads to a SAR in the frozen and yeti infested realms of Texas, accidently blow up all of the party's group gear and trans (scrap tonight's plan, need to resupply), pull out a weapon in a McDonalds when I can clearly see two armed guards and a cop having lunch in there (turns into a break me out of ail scenario). Ya, I could be a :spottedowl:

But those instances make for some really good times, as long as the GM can is inventive enough to cover the impromptu situations. Also, it goes back to the comfort one has with the rules, or how comfortable they are leaving the rules in the dust

Vampire the Masqurade