Best Licensed RPG: Discuss the Best Adaptation of a Movie/Book to an RPG that You've Ever Played!

[Maxperson]

1. TSR Marvel (aka FASERIP). It's hard to explain just how incredible (amazing? monstrous? UNEARTHLY!!!) this game was in the 80s, but it combined a good level of abstraction and a great ability to just get to ... clobberin' time.

I was going to say Star Wars, but then I saw this and I had completely forgotten that game. It was amazing and is definitely my #1. Star Wars would be #2, and I haven't played a third.

 

[Retreater]

My most nostalgic (but probably the worst designed gameplay) was TMNT and Other Strangeness.

 

[Ulfgeir]

I think most of the MERP lore/adventure material was on point and really, really well done. Rules... are debatable.

That is a charitable interpretation of the rules. I remember there being a rule that said that only really exceptional individuals like Aragorn, would rise above a certain rather low level. The official adventures had tons of characters of higher level. Not to mention that magic was ubiquitous...

 

[Zardnaar]

Not really into licensed stuff that much. Star Wars D6 and SWSE.

Bought Firefly never got around to running it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

GURPS has done the best-researched licensed RPG supplements I've seen, even if the system hasn't always been up to it, they make great resources.

The two that stood out for me were Humanx and Urth of the New Sun - presumably because they're something obscure enough no one else'd ever do an RPG of them, and I was a huge fan of both.

d6 Star Wars also seemed to capture it's subject better than most licensed RPGs. Attempts at Star Trek, OTOH, just awful.

I agree on all points, also holy jebus there was an Urth of the New Sun GURPS supplement? I need to get hold of that. GURPS was amazing for reference supplements, as you say. Rules... not so much (oddly some non-adapted GURPS books did have excellent rules). Star Trek is always awful because they never take a narrative approach, and Star Trek is a show about telling stories, whereas Star Wars can work much more easily because people just want to be in the SW universe, and the stories SW tends to be about are more in line with traditional adventuring and adventure-hobo behaviour. I got the new Star Trek RPG and was faintly disappointed. I think it really needs a PbtA/DW approach.

I feel like a lot of the games mentioned in this thread actually didn't really do much justice to their properties. I was never particularly impressed with the James Bond RPG (well, nor with James Bond himself, I think that's a generational thing, so maybe that's it), nor with Stormbringer/Elric (it didn't feel like either), and I've played tons of CoC, but I'd never put it as a "good" adaptation of Lovecraft's material. But it was enjoyable. Less so now, having played it more recently it feels retro in a bad way.

My top ones would be:

Marvel FASERIP - Lots of mentions of this, it was a game before its time, a game happy with letting the party balance itself, a game that just let you say "I want to be Spider-Man", and the DM handed you the information, and POW, now you were Spider-Man. No effing around. No filling stuff in. Just straight in there. I also notice that people were really happy to just play the characters they wanted to. No-one was really jealous of the dude playing the Hulk, even if he was technically "just better" than their character, because he was the Hulk. It was just a really good system that actually felt like the Marvel comics of the era. I might not use it to reflect Marvel comics in this era, many years later, but it was excellent.

Marvel SAGA - The Marvel card-game one. This was also extremely excellent and terribly fun, and got people really, really involved when they should have been old enough to know better. A game that relatively elegantly handled using an semi-conscious Mr Fantastic to whack Johnny Storm into unconsciousness is a game that has my respect.

d6/WEG Star Wars - It had a lot of problems, a LOT, but somehow was extremely good at actually feeling like Star Wars, and it loved the minutiae of Star Wars, and added to it massively in ways that often stuck (even post canon-reset), and it also had one of the best pre-written campaigns in gaming history (to this day), the Darkstryder campaign, which was utterly incredibly to play through, particularly the Ars Magica-esque playing multiple characters deal.

Amber was also totally amazing and really opened my group's minds about RPGs and how they could work and what they could be about. Never played enough of it, though, and we played the RPG before we read the books (it is what lead us to them).

 

[Tony Vargas]

I agree on all points, also holy jebus there was an Urth of the New Sun GURPS supplement? I need to get hold of that. GURPS was amazing for reference supplements, as you say.

Yeah, I was stunned. It was quite a while ago, like 90s, maybe? (Google says 1999.) A GURPS-fanatic friend bought it for me as a gift or I'd've never known it existed.

I feel like a lot of the games mentioned in this thread actually didn't really do much justice to their properties. I was never particularly impressed with the James Bond RPG (well, nor with James Bond himself, I think that's a generational thing, so maybe that's it),

Back in the dark ages of the hobby, I tried to run Top Secret and it was a disaster, I thought "the next time I watch a James Bond movie, I'll pay careful attention to the plot, and steal that!"

So I did.
And there was nothing to steal.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And there was nothing to steal.

Hahaha right? Random stuff happens whilst Bond makes dubious quips to some woman whose name is an innuendo isn't really a plot. Hell, the Fast & the Furious has more of a plot. You'd have better luck with an episode of The Man from UNCLE.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

DC Heroes 1e/2e was IMO the best licensed super heroes game I've ever played. MSH was good and I played a lot of it, but DC did pretty much everything better.