Most influential RPG

[Scribe]

Snarf's Inarguable List of Top 10 Most Influential TTRPGs!

I feel I need more detail and history on each of these options in a Snarf approved length.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Didn't say it had no influence.

Said that figuring out "most influential" is tricky, and picking "first" may miss the mark.

Well, I think people today may forget how popular WEG Ghostbusters was at the time. So I will repeat- the immediate commercial success of WEG Ghostbusters allowed WEG to pivot completely to TTRPGs, and they chose to use the system they had created for it in their other systems ... including reskinning the system for use in Star Wars. Why? Because they were licensing rights to RPGs, and they used the system they had designed for GB that was successful to make Star Wars.

And later the d6 system as a standalone. Simply put- without it, there is no WEG Star Wars.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I feel I need more detail and history on each of these options in a Snarf approved length.

Sorry- already posted an essay today.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I waffled for a long time on that one.

My personal feeling is without DotV, the entire indie RPG scene is both significantly smaller than it is now, and looks very different, and probably PtbA/Apocalypse World doesn't exist, because they're both by Vincent Baker, and without both the success of and his dissatisfaction with DotV, he probably wouldn't have written AW.

But I think both DotV and PtbA are so important to what RPGs look like today that despite them both being by the same person and not even a decade apart, you kind of do need both. JMHO YMMV etc.

 

[numtini]

Can Mork Borg be considered OSR or it's another different beast?

Of such questions are holy wars fought. Some think OSR is only d20 clones. Others would include Mork or Dragonbane. Despite being D20 some would exclude DCC or Shadowdark. The term NSR seems to have been coined partially to defuse the question for OSR adjacent.

 

[J.Quondam]

8. Lasers & Feelings. (2013)
I'm giving L&F the nod here as the game that kickstarted the "lite rules" revolution. Not every game has to be less than three pages - but this started the process of asking, "Why not?"

I don't really follow gaming history closely, but I know there were tons of lites and ultralites long before this, an obvious one being Microlite20 in 2006. And there were "official" lite games published in the same timeframe, and probably before. (e.g., I think Fate Accelerated came out in 2014, though I suppose it could have been an early reaction to the rules lite craze.)

So I'm curious why you chose L&F specifically. Do you feel there was some threshold passed in the wider gaming community tied to that particular game or at that particular time?

 

[Piperken]

Hum. It seems to me Into the Odd has a deserved place.

 

[mamba]

By that logic it’s Brownsteins all the way down and nothing else matters.

I would say there are some that did things that are sufficiently different from D&D to be included here, but OSRIC certainly is not one of them. Guess it depends on what you want to see as the influence, from a mechanics perspective it does not belong here, from a 'first to use the SRD to recreate an old D&D', it can be on it. I do not much care for the latter perspective and see this list as games that added new innovations that turned out to be popular - and yeah, I think the original list has some entries on it which I am not sure deserve their spot.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Can Mork Borg be considered OSR or it's another different beast?

OSR isn't a single system.

And the Mork Borg system is definitely a break from traditional TSR-derived systems that make up most of the OSR and the Borg system has been used to create dozens, maybe hundreds, of other games since it came out during the pandemic, some of which, like Pirate Borg, have gone on to be big commercial hits of their own.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

OSRIC is just D&D, not sure why it would need to be added

Because its publication directly led to a significant portion of the RPG market in the years and decades after. If that's not influence, then nothing is.