Revisiting crusty old games

GOLDEN HEROES!
Sorry about the caps, it's just you kind of have to deploy Movie Trailer Guy voice whenever you talk about GOLDEN HEROES. Great game.

In terms of board games - Judge Dredd, Cosmic Encounter (albeit the new very expensive edition), original Talisman, Dragon Warriors, not forgettign the absolute classic use of playing Fighting Fantasy again. Not tried the RPG version as a "grown up" though.

Wouldn't mind having a go at Toon again, just to see if it is as bad as I remember.

Of the 70s games, the one that still holds its appeal for me is Traveller. I have several of my original little black books, added to judiciously over time as well as some newer Mongoose publications. It's still an evocative system which I enjoy running, and now has added nostalgia value.

There are a whole bunch of games that I played a little bit in the early to mid 80s but now remember almost nothing about. The ones I remember, I know I don't want to play now. But the ones I can just barely remember have a certain draw... Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, Skyrealms of Jorune, Tunnels and Trolls and Golden Heroes are the ones I can think of.

Well we had a 1e game that ran at the local shop from summer 2012 - summer 2016.
It started off as just a couple of us vet players & the store owner farting around on a dead slow day. And then over the next few weeks it grew as some of the magic players expressed interest. Then we added another former 1e player. Then the two magic players brought in a friend - who in turn brought in another friend.... By the end of 2012? We had a stable group of 9 (counting the shop owner) & numerous others sat in for a session or two.

Every other year at GenCon I make sure to play Dawn Patrol. It's a chit & chart based game of WWI bi-plane combat. Definitely not an RPG.
Likewise at GC I almost always squeeze in a game of Rail Baron - a railroad board game from Avalon Hill that we played as kids in the early 80's.
I'd love to play these throughout the year, not just 1 week in August, but local interest just = 0.

Ars Magica? I finally got to play in a game of this a few years ago. If the guy running it had stuck to the system & genre? I think it'd have been awesome. But he didn't, his game was crap, & he effectively poisoned the well to the point most of the group won't touch the game again.

Tunnels & Trolls is a hoot, though even if you’re playing the latest edition, you really need players that get old-school play.

Never played Skyrealms of Jorune, but the ads in Dragon back in the day seemed so exotic and mysterious, so unlike D&D.

chaochou said:

There are a whole bunch of games that I played a little bit in the early to mid 80s but now remember almost nothing about. The ones I remember, I know I don't want to play now. But the ones I can just barely remember have a certain draw... Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, Skyrealms of Jorune, Tunnels and Trolls and Golden Heroes are the ones I can think of.

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The Grassy Gnoll said:

Wouldn't mind having a go at Toon again, just to see if it is as bad as I remember.

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Toon was utterly awesome, and far ahead of its time. I think that style of game has advanced considerably since then, so its maybe not an ideal expression of the whole concept at this point. Still it was a LOT of fun. You just had to roll with it. This was not a game you played week after week as your bread-and-butter RPG.

I still play 1st edition AD&D...

AbdulAlhazred said:

The 4e GW is certainly pretty wacky, which makes it a step up from some earlier versions that tried to be more 'tame' and just sucked the life out of the game. I still prefer the original though. I think maybe one way to improve it would be to graft it onto the 5e core rules (you'd just have to make up 4 'classes', PSH, Mutant Human, Mutant Animal, and optionally Mutant Plant). I wouldn't really bother with 'races' as such, and GW never had any concept of anything like 4e classes.

Now just drop the old 1e GW mutations and equipment right in on top, with minor tweaks to match up with 5e core rules (IE assign save types and whatnot to various items and effects). I think it would play pretty well. Characters would start out fairly fragile, but they'd also be starting with low-tech stuff (swords and whatnot). Graduate the game to crossbows and basic firearms after a few levels, and then fold in the increasingly deadly high tech items as the characters delve into the remains of the Apocalypse.

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http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?381522-Gamma-5-fan-made-Gamma-World-5e

Fun fan take on GW for 5e. Not exactly well suited to long campaigns, but I never really though GW as a whole was well suited for long campaigns. The time they tried to make it such is exactly when they sucked the life out of it.

Paranoia was a work of genius, and perfect for short campaigns.

The first edition of Earthdawn was great, and did more to inspire my worldbuilding than D&D ever did.

But I would play AD&D over and over, even today, warts and all. The last time I played it was in 2008-ish.

Ben

oknazevad said:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?381522-Gamma-5-fan-made-Gamma-World-5e

Fun fan take on GW for 5e. Not exactly well suited to long campaigns, but I never really though GW as a whole was well suited for long campaigns. The time they tried to make it such is exactly when they sucked the life out of it.

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Eh, 1e GW wasn't unworkable as a campaign game. There were a series of modules that formed a fairly coherent campaign. We played a few 'GW Campaigns', which admittedly didn't last years, but some of them spanned months, or even a year.

The real problem with 1e was just that low tech stuff and melee combat didn't work, so the GM was pretty heavily motivated (and also for thematic reasons) to introduce higher tech stuff. At that point the characters pretty much went from nothing to stupidly powerful very quickly. Since your attributes and basically anything but your high tech equipment mattered little (aside from mutations, if you had some of the bad-assed ones) and there was no real meaningful character XP/HP/etc progress, the game had trouble with long play.

Now, dropped onto a 5e system core, where you have levels and XP and you start with lower hit points, defenses, and armor, etc then all of that is fixed. You have a viable combat system and other mechanics that obviously DO work for low-tech settings. Swords and whatnot are effective weapons, so you can progress gradually to the nastier stuff only at high levels. The characters themselves progress nicely, so there's an actual power curve, etc.

At the same time, you can keep the crazy and highly random mutations. Yes, it will unbalance some characters and make others pretty unplayable, but players will manage to sort that out. There will be some crazy wackiness and a playable campaign structure as well.

I met one of my current groups when they went into a shop and asked the owner if he knew someone who could run a 5E game for them, as they were all new to roleplaying.

We're currently playing a 1E A&D campaign and I've also introduced them to Basic D&D, Car Wars and MERP.