Play Something Else

[Thomas Shey]

Solution is always the same when it comes to conflicting preferences. Sit down and talk. We are talking about group of friends here, people who like and respect each other. So open and honest discussion and you find common ground.

I'll be very up front here: if you think its that easy even for the majority of people who are friends, you seem to have been living in a different world than I have for the last half century.

 

[GrimCo]

I'll be very up front here: if you think its that easy even for the majority of people who are friends, you seem to have been living in a different world than I have for the last half century.

I'm going with couple of presumptions. First one, people you play with are reasonable adults open to discussion and finding mutually beneficial solution. Second, friends are really friends, not just good acquaintances or work buddies or something like that, but group of people who share love, confidence and respect for each other. Then again, i can count people i consider friends on the fingers of hands and have some spare.

If you can't find common ground about which game you will play in free time with people closest to you outside family, i don't know what to tell you.

Sorry, English isn't my native language, so there may be some linguistic and cultural differences when using different words.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm going with couple of presumptions. First one, people you play with are reasonable adults open to discussion and finding mutually beneficial solution. Second, friends are really friends, not just good acquaintances or work buddies or something like that, but group of people who share love, confidence and respect for each other. Then again, i can count people i consider friends on the fingers of hands and have some spare.

I think this is, at least (and you kind of acknowledge this), a narrow definition of "friends". I have perhaps three people in my life (used to have four) who fit all three of those criteria, including people I have known for decades and like quite a bit. And even one of those I also share a pretty fair lifetime set of friction with at the same time, and I've known him for more than 40 years.

So you can easily have friends who have serious trouble communicating in a really good fashion with. Heck, people have trouble doing this with people they marry in many cases, why would you assume most people can do it automatically with their friends?

If you can't find common ground about which game you will play in free time with people closest to you outside family, i don't know what to tell you.

Sorry, English isn't my native language, so there may be some linguistic and cultural differences when using different words.

No, I don't think its a language problem, I just think you have perhaps a limited understanding of how hard this sort of thing can be with most people, sometimes even with people they're quite close to. If that's never been true in your life, you've been quite fortunate.

 

[Reynard]

So in the spirit of the thread: what game did you play that really made an impression on you and changed the way you looked at playing RPGs in general, or even the way you looked at your favorite game.

When I played DC Heroes for the first time, it was my first "point based" TTRPG (after playing D&D and Heroes Unlimited) and it BLEW MY YOUNG MIND. That degree of character customization was a paradigm shift for me.

Much more recently, I never "got" PbtA or FitD games until --after a couple threads here -- I gave Scum and Villainy a try and fell in love. But what really did it was a combination of watching Season 2 of Me, myself and Die where he plays Ironsworn, and then me playing Starforged. Complete mental shift on why people love that style of no/low prep, play to find out, narrative game.

Honorable mention: 2d20, for a specific element: I have adapted the Momentum and Threat pool to every game I run with a metacurrency. it works especially well for Bennies in Savage Worlds and Force Points in WEG Star Wars.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

So in the spirit of the thread: what game did you play that really made an impression on you and changed the way you looked at playing RPGs in general, or even the way you looked at your favorite game.

Games where you built in disadvantages for your characters. GURPS and Champions specifically. My first thought on encountering the idea was something like "Why would anyone want their character to have disadvantages?" It was one of the things that broadened my understanding of role playing.

Honourable mention for Rolemaster. Hooray for spell point systems instead of the whacky Dnd method. (I don't think I heard the term "Vancian" until I started frequenting this forum.) Also for all the laughs from the critical tables.

An honourable mention for Traveller. Character can die before the game starts? LOL.

Not so much a game but an adventure. Conan Unchained for adnD 1E. First time I encountered the concept of game metacurrency, although I believe the adventure called them Hero Points.

The Battletech RPG. Coming off the back of the popular tactical boardgame the designers must have said "Well, we could design a skill system that meshes easily with the existing game but to hell with that." Idiots.


I'm sure some others will occur to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So in the spirit of the thread: what game did you play that really made an impression on you and changed the way you looked at playing RPGs in general, or even the way you looked at your favorite game.

RuneQuest.

No classes, individual skills, anyone could learn magic, skills advanced separately, and you had procedures, either overt or by implication for doing pretty much everything. Coming out of OD&D, this was all mind blowing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Games where you built in disadvantages for your characters. GURPS and Champions specifically. My first thought on encountering the idea was something like "Why would anyone want their character to have disadvantages?" It was one of the things that broadened my understanding of role playing.

As the person who created the prototype for Hero Disads, that's exactly why it bribed you with them; because I could quite see how unlikely it was most people would take such things without some tradeoff for them, and in superheroes they're endemic.

 

[pemerton]

I did NOT like Champions Fuzion when it came out. How dare they get rid of all those lovely numbers!

Fast forward about 25 years and my house rules for Champions are looking very Fuzion-esque. I should really re-visit it to see how I feel about it now.

I've never played Champions and know nothing about Fuzion. But I enjoyed this story of evolving taste in RPGing.

 

[Campbell]

So in the spirit of the thread: what game did you play that really made an impression on you and changed the way you looked at playing RPGs in general, or even the way you looked at your favorite game.

When I played DC Heroes for the first time, it was my first "point based" TTRPG (after playing D&D and Heroes Unlimited) and it BLEW MY YOUNG MIND. That degree of character customization was a paradigm shift for me.

Much more recently, I never "got" PbtA or FitD games until --after a couple threads here -- I gave Scum and Villainy a try and fell in love. But what really did it was a combination of watching Season 2 of Me, myself and Die where he plays Ironsworn, and then me playing Starforged. Complete mental shift on why people love that style of no/low prep, play to find out, narrative game.

Honorable mention: 2d20, for a specific element: I have adapted the Momentum and Threat pool to every game I run with a metacurrency. it works especially well for Bennies in Savage Worlds and Force Points in WEG Star Wars.

Vampire and Exalted were very instructive games early on. The idea that you could start play with all these existing connections to the setting (Mentor, Allies, Contacts, etc.) and that should matter to play. What really got to me was the idea that who the character is personally and mentally was a thing that a game could like represent and that it could be central to play really struck a chord with me.

The next set of games that really sort of blew my mind were the early scene framing games (Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard and Burning Wheel). Like not could we make who your character is and how they relate to the setting matter, but like it can be the entire point of playing the game. They also helped me realize that players can take on a more active role in helping to define the setting and that we didn't have to prep everything or direct the game to any particular ending point to have a compelling narrative.

Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts and Masks really helped refine my sense of how to telegraph threats and how to let things snowball. The overall soft move / hard move GMing structure has really improved the way I run games by encouraging transparency of what success and failure mean. The call to be generous with the truth and to stop being so coy has also had a very strong impact. Embracing saying the quiet parts out loud and using my descriptions as way to indicate what an NPC is not saying has really helped remove that grasping at straws feeling I have experienced in the past.

Recently the Bridlewood Bay games have kind of taught me that you can have a mystery without solving the mystery be the entire point of the game.

 

[Wolfpack48]

RuneQuest.

No classes, individual skills, anyone could learn magic, skills advanced separately, and you had procedures, either overt or by implication for doing pretty much everything. Coming out of OD&D, this was all mind blowing.

Armor absorbing damage, 5 levels of success, parries, spirit combat, resistance and comparative success to determine contests. Combat feels right.