"Gateway Drug" Part II, the attraction

[Walking Paradox]

I wanted to post this as a followup to a thread that I started last week, asking people what their first non-D&D RPGs were, but I did not want this to get buried in a thread that already has dozens of replies, and it should have been in this forum instead of the D&D one where I posted it. Besides, this is interesting enough a topic on its own.

What is it that made you want to stop playing D&D at the time that you started playing something else? Was it just the genre or did you find something lacking in D&D? Conversely, did you find something overwhelming about it, making you want to try something simpler?

In my case, it was both genre and the rules. I wanted to play something other than plain, ordinary fantasy. That is what led me to Gamma World and from there to TMNT, Traveller, Twilight 2000, and others. However, the attraction of Rolemaster was its flexibility and its skill basis; I liked how each and every character that I created was more unique than one that I could have made with the pre-Unearthed Arcana AD&D 1st Ed. rules.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Early on, it was almost all about genre.

I got into D&D because I loved fantasy and mythology.

The guy who introduced me to Traveller and other sci-fi games was, like me, as much into sci-fi novels as fantasy ones, so playing a sci-fi RPG was the next logical step.

I got into Champions because I was into superhero comics.

The only exception to the "love the genre, try the rpg" issue was The Fantasy Trip. The reasons I got into that game was speed & portability. It grew out of the Melee and Wizard fantasy combat boardgames, and as such, was (and still is) one of the most rules-light game ever made. PC generation can take as little as 3 minutes if you know the rules and what you want to play. This meant that it was dead simple to get a group up and running within 15 minutes. And since the pieces for the underlying game were flat cardboard, it was incredibly portable.

IOW, TFT was the perfect game for me & my RPG playing buddies to play at lunch in school...or anywhere else where carrying all those books (a DMG, MM and PHB, oh my, what a load!!!) was an issue.