Most influential RPG

[mamba]

It is totally fine that you have decided to.use personal preference based definitions that don't reflect how things actually develop. Just don't expect other people to accept them.

You can argue that me using game design influence as the criteria for influential to be personal preference, I would not consider the exclusion of OSRIC under that criteria to be purely personal preference however.

You can nominate whoever you want, I am not expecting anyone to follow along, I am just saying that under my criteria, which I consider to be the same as that of the OP, OSRIC does not qualify. If you want to nominate it, go right ahead In that case, I suggest 3e for the SRD itself and the subsequent spread of making licenses available for many TTRPGs

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

what is it the design innovation it introduced and spread?

As opposed to standard d20-based OSR games, the players roll 99% of the dice, there are fixed numbers they're trying to hit, it uses defense rolls and gets rid of traditional armor class.

Obviously there are several Borgs around now, so there probably is something... I am not familiar with them, the layout / style makes me avoid Mork Borg / * Borgs

There are easily dozens of games using the Borg engine out there, possibly approaching 100 such games. The style varies although most of them are still more art-centric than D&D has ever been.

I think both Pirate Borg and Vast Grimm -- the two biggest derived games -- are much more legible. Castaway, which I backed, is completely legible and very stylish.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It will also be interesting to see how influential Mothership and Shadowdark are in the future. Each are being used as the basis for new games. Cloud Empress, based off of Mothership, is already a successful game line of its own, and it seems like there's a new RPG using Shadowdark rules on Kickstarter every week (this week: a Western RPG).

 

[MGibster]

Anyone remember that show Connections? It was a television show produced on an obscure European island that looked at how different events, discoveries, and inventions were used to build new inventions. It's kind of like the game of Civilization where the tech tree shows you masonry and mathematics leads to currency. I know you're thinking, what's that got to do with anything, MGibster? Well let me connect the dots (see what I did there?).

It's amazing to me how difficult it can be to determine what was influential. Part of the problem is that not all of us have played every game. I've been gaming since 1988, and I've never played Traveller, Paranoia, I didn't play Call of Cthulhu until after 2010, and there are some other classic games I'll likely never play. It's hard for me to judge influence from because I'm coming from a place of ignorance. I'm just a mere mortal, I'm no Snarf.

It's really difficult to look back at the body of work and figure out which games were truly influential. Ghostbusters versus WEG's Star Wars has been mentioned. Was Ghostbusters the most influential or was it Star Wars which likely had a much wider audience? (Seriously, I wish I could get my hands on the Ghostbusters RPG again.) And in what way are they influential? Someone else already mentioned a game might be influential because of how it was marketed or it opened up new genres to explore.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

So far my list would be something like this:

D&D
The Fanstasy Trip (GURPS dady)
Champions
Traveller
CoC
Vampire
Ars Magica
Sorcerer
Burning Wheel
Savage Worlds
Fate
Apocalypse World

What other games would you include? What would you remove from the list? Why?

I love Burning Wheel, but I'd have to drop it in favor of Dogs in the Vineyard and The Riddle of Steel, both of which prefigure the changes Crane makes in Burning Wheel Revised, and I think are probably more directly responsible for BW as it currently exists and BWHQ's subsequent games than BW itself is for anything else. BW feels idiosyncratic to me, almost like a neat little game design cul de sac.

I'd also be inclined to add Pendragon, which sometimes strikes me as everyone's favorite game that no one's currently playing (except for Morrus, apparently). Greg Stafford was a genius, and the careful structure of play (including Winter Phase) is a precursor for structure of the play loops in Mouse Guard, Torchbearer, Stonetop, and (I'd argue) Agon and Blades in the Dark.

 

[MGibster]

I'd also be inclined to add Pendragon, which sometimes strikes me as everyone's favorite game that no one's currently playing (except for Morrus, apparently). Greg Stafford was a genius, and the careful structure of play (including Winter Phase) is a precursor for structure of the play loops in Mouse Guard, Torchbearer, Stonetop, and (I'd argue) Agon and Blades in the Dark.

Did the personality traits, Virtues and Vices, such as merciful/cruel, proud/pious, valorous/cowardly, etc., etc. have any influence on other games? It's the earliest game I can think of where players rolled to determine how their character might react to a situation.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I love Burning Wheel, but I'd have to drop it in favor of Dogs in the Vineyard and The Riddle of Steel

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Did the personality traits, Virtues and Vices, such as merciful/cruel, proud/pious, valorous/cowardly, etc., etc. have any influence on other games? It's the earliest game I can think of where players rolled to determine how their character might react to a situation.

I'm not sure. This is conjecture, but there might be a line from Pendragon > The Riddle of Steel > Burning Wheel from the Traits and Passions of the first, through Spiritual Attributes in the second, into Emotional Attributes and Steel in the third. I'd have to read The Riddle of Steel more carefully to see if there actually is a throughline.

 

[Theory of Games]

An influential ttrpg impacts how other ttrpgs are designed. Usually the influential ttrpgs is copied by other designers. Like how D&D has so many copycats retro-clones.

Where people can get turned around is thinking a ttrpg is doing something innovative when that game's designer has actually borrowed elements from an older, lesser known ttrpg. Like how Fortune Points from the Top Secret ttrpg basically gave birth to the modern usage of Metacurrencies.

One of the cool aspects of this site is the community of ttrpg design fans that chat here. I learn a lot.

 

[Jahydin]

I haven't seen any mention of Lamentation of the Flame Princess. I know it gets a lot of hate now, but there's no denying its impact on the OSR, how it set a new bar for adventure writing, proved high quality books were worth doing, and Zak's Art Punk/scrapbook style that's still popular to use today (e.g., Mork Borg).

Kind of the first boutique RPG company really.