What game system have you tried that made you go WOW!

[billd91]

Dread - love the questionnaires

Mutants and Masterminds - love the damage save

 

[Ariosto]

TSR's Empire of the Petal Throne ("... the most beautifully done fantasy game ever created. It is difficult for me to envision the possibility of any rival being created in the future." -- E. Gary Gygax)

Dave Hargaves's The Arduin Grimoire Vols. I-III. (Maybe a "You had to be there" thing; I'm not there now. It sure blew my mind back then, though!)

GDW's Traveller (the stars, my destination ... marvelously constructed to inspire, rather than take the place of, imagination)

Chaosium's RuneQuest, and then Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer and Pendragon (all rooted in the same "system", but far from "generic")

TSR's Gangbusters (excellent work all around, and a departure from the conventional assumption that players are on the same side)

Kevin Siembieda's Mechanoids trilogy (robots and magic, a doomed last stand, a wainscot society aboard an enemy's starship ... a dense package of great, wild stuff, with the richness that seems to distinguish works derived from actual play from those designed in isolation)

TSR's Marvel Super Heroes (First reaction: "too simplistic". After actual play: "This rocks!" It really simulates the genre excellently, IMO.)

Paul Elliott's Zenobia and Kenzer & Co.'s Aces and Eights ("It was born a conjunction of form and function," to borrow a line from another context. In this age of turning out assembly-line "product", it's refreshing to see people go back to the drawing board and really design a game.)

 

[Lancelot]

Dragon Warriors

• Simple, old-school rules (I'd probably play this rather than BECMI if I ever decided to get nostalgic someday, and I *love* BECMI).
• Awesome campaign setting. The setting alone is worth the "price of entry", and is something that could be adapted to other game systems. I've already stolen elements for one of my current 4e campaigns.
• A dark, gloomy tone to many of the published adventures. Sometimes (in fact, most times), all the PCs can do is salvage the best of a situation. They can't save some of friends and patrons, who have already doomed themselves by their own choices.
• PCs are easily killable at all levels, which adds an element of real danger.
• No attempt to balance magic with steel. Spellcasters are rare, but terrifying.

It's about as "old school" as it gets, except for the fact that the campaign setting is something that even modern games could learn from. It's medieval Earth as seen through a warped and smoky lens, and with a hefty dose of realism.

Some of the above probably resembles Warhammer (...must be an English thing), but there are key differences which make Dragon Warriors appeal to me. The campaign setting is much less "fantastic" (it's hugely human-centric, and there are no Chaos Hordes or Elven Armies or Skaven). The ruleset is simpler and more elegant. The PCs start out as reasonably competent and can succeed on most things that you expect them to succeed on, but never get to the point where they can ignore even a pack of wolves or peasants armed with pitchforks. And it's more focused on the deeds of heroes, rather than the clash of armies.

Other games that have made me go WOW...

• Star Wars Saga Edition: At least initially. My excitement has dulled since, but at the time I thought it was a great improvement on the 3e ruleset.
• Axis & Allies War at Sea: Yeah, it's a minis game... but what the heck. Surprisingly deep rules (especially with the upcoming new starter set), terrific minis, and a huge range of units.
• MERP (Middle Earth Roleplaying): I never liked Rolemaster, but I thought MERP was a great basic-level compilation of the core rules (...and yes, the critical hit tables...) merged with a terrific setting. It didn't quite play out that way, and I'm not sure that I'd ever run it again. But at the time, I loved it.

 

[Thanee]

Hmm... let's see.

#1 Shadowrun
#2 Deadlands (now refered to as Deadlands Classic)
#3 Amber Diceless Roleplaing Game
#4 HERO / Champions
#5 Tales from the Floating Vagabond
#6 The Morrow Project
#7 RIFTS

Bye
Thanee

 

[Acid_crash]

For me it's Wild Talents and the sheer awesomeness of the dice system, and it plays fast. Rolling once to determine initiative and reaction speed in combat, how much damage done and which hit location, it simply can't be beat. I love it, my favorite system.

For setting, the one that wow'ed me the most was Earthdawn, and how interrelated the disciplines were tied with the world and how each race really seemed to fit and the history and just how really really GOOD the setting was. Not a bad system either, but the setting was, just WoW.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Earthdawn. The concept of waxing and waning levels of magic caught my attention in Shadowrun. But the concept that it could reach levels so high that extra-dimesional horrors popped into the real world made me go WOW! Also the loose ties to Earth via hints that Earthdawn was some other time in line with Shadowrun. And the gameplay was fun. Talents were the precursors to todays powers.

Torg. Alternate realities crash-land on earth! Fighter jets vs. dinosaurs! The Cyberpope! The drama deck! Even the cool multicolored d20 that came in the box set!

 

[ArghMark]

In order -

1. Call of Cthulhu. I was blown away that you could even use roleplaying for horror.

2. Godlike. Gritty ww2 superheroes. Nothing like playing Australians for once without feeling at all out of place.

3. WFRP2e. Just started reading and playing. Wow. So very awesome. And there's a bunch of sample adventures that are good when I feel like a break!

 

[ruemere]

Kult, 1st edition. Mature players only... disturbing on many levels (though you may get a lot of gore, too). There was also this adventure where you had a good reason to kill Jim Morrison.

Castle Falkenstein, fairies and steampunk storytelling at its finest.

Amber, granddaddy of storytelling games.

Regards,
Ruemere

 

[kitsune9]

It's a generic game system, but at the time (1997 or so) it was the only game system I had seen with character creation governed only by the cooperation of the Storyteller (GM) and the other players.

Players were actively encouraged to define their player using only words, then work with the Storyteller to assign traits to those words. This meant I didn't have to level up several times to play a seasoned veteran of war or a world renown professor of archaeology. And I didn't have to worry about bookkeeping like I did in point-buy games.

The Window was also my first brush with a "step-die" system of any kind. System-wise it has a lot in common with Tales From the Floating Vagabond (it even uses a d30). It plays very fast and loose, much moreso than other step-die systems that I've had experience with (including Savage Worlds).

Back in the late 1990s, this (fast play) was a huge thing for me as I was drowning in AD&D, Shadowrun, and Rifts, respectively (all of which were chock full of rules, rules, and more rules). I guess, The Window was the first truly complete "rules light" game system I stumbled across.

Attached is a copy of the most recent revision. Just ignore the godawful intro. I pushed really hard to have that removed this time around (and the original author has since said that he dislikes it nearly as much as I do), but fandom won out. Damn fandom.

There are some interesting (albeit poorly translated) notes on Shadowrun conversion here, which is what initially piqued my interest in the system.

Hey, thanks for the game!

 

[gribble]

Initially? Just about every game I've played. Maybe I'm just easy to wow for something, but my time is scarce enough that unless a game wows me on a read through I probably won't bother playing/running it.


The ones that really stand out for me though (in chronological order, not order of preference):

• TMNT. This is the one that got me into roleplaying, over 20 years ago now... I was a big fan from the B&W comics, and when I first saw the game I mistook it for a big comic book (it didn't help that it had comics in it). Then after reading it I was like "Wow, I can actually play this like a game! Cool!"
• Shadowrun. Encountered this after the TMNT buzz wore off and I had been playing a lot of D&D and Rolemaster/MERP. Was something different and fresh, and really wowed me. Also, the new 25th anniversary edition is a work of art.
• Continuum. The whole concept of this game is that you're a band of time travellers, moving back and forth through history trying to save/repair time and space itself from a group of "bad" time travellers called narcissists (that doesn't really do it justice, but is the precis version). The concept really grabbed me and the way the system worked was that you could pretty much do anything you wanted (much like mage), although anything you described you later had to go back (or forward) in time to arrange. Could really do your head in - the only game I played lasted one session before one of the players threw his hands up and said he just couldn't get the game and we switched to something else. But I loved it and would really like to give it another go someday.
• Alpha Omega. For a number of reasons. Firstly, it's the most visually gorgeous RPG book I've ever seen. Secondly, while on first glance the setting appears to be a mish-mash of Shadowrun, In Nominae and Fallout, it meshes together into a very compelling and interesting story/world. Thirdly, the system is something very different. This is the one game I haven't yet played that I really, really want to.
• Rogue Trader. Ok, so I know it hasn't been released yet, but from reading the previews this looks like the Warhammer 40K RPG that I've wanted to play since reading the original Rogue Trader wargame back in the day... no offence to Dark Heresy, which is also a very good game. I can't wait to give it a go.