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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RareBreed" data-source="post: 9172540" data-attributes="member: 6945590">This is an interesting perspective on something I've always pondered:  why so many gamers only play D&D?When the OGL fiasco happened, I was kind of stunned going to many YouTube sites where different creators were offering alternatives to D&D.  The number of comments of people who said that they didn't even know other RPG's existed kind of blew my mind.  I thought, "do these people only play on VTTs or at a friend's home?  Why don't they know of other games through a FLGS?".Then I suppose there are people like yourself, that just loved D&D and didn't really give other games a chance.  Fair enough.  But I had the opposite experience. My very first RPG game was around about 1980 and I was very young.  Believe it or not, I started out with AD&D and learning it as well as I could on my own.  We only played a handful of games with 3 other school mates before there was a long dry period until 1983.  At that time, I started playing historical miniatures with my father, mostly American Civil War and Napoleonics.  One fateful day, the other gamers couldn't make it, and the hobby store owner where we played at had a son about my age. I had just bought Car Wars because it seemed cool (remember Mad Max was pretty new), so we wound up learning/playing Car Wars and creating our own little gaming group.Another boy who was about our age who had just started playing the historical miniatures also played with us.  After a few Car Wars sessions, another slightly older boy in his mid teens got us playing RPG's again.  But not AD&D.  He got us into playing Champions which we loved, which then got us into Justice Inc.  Two other older guys joined us temporarily, and we did play a few AD&D sessions, but by this point, we realized there were so many other fun games out there.  In the mid 80s, Twillight 2000 was our jam.  But if it came out in the 80s, there was a very good chance we played it.And speaking of GURPs, technically it came out in 1986, but, its true direct descendant was a game called Man to Man that came out in 1985.  It was meant to be a mostly hexagonal based tactical mini game and had pretty much all the basic combat rules from GURPS. And unlike its direct ancestor The Fantasy Trip, it had the same 4 attributes that GURPS does, and the same passive and active defenses that GURPs did.I didn't play GURPs a lot, but I did like all the supplements that came out for it.  As I recall, we played a couple of Vietnam era game sessions with it before I came up with a homebrew using the Phoenix Command Combat System.  The thing that kind of troubled me about GURPS though, was that they billed themselves as the generic system, and yet, it seemed like you needed some specialized one-off rule for everything.  But I kind of viewed GURPS like I viewed Osprey books for historical gaming: you bought it for background information and ideas, not for playing itself.</blockquote>

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