Revisiting crusty old games

[Nagol]

Alright, bonus points for the 70s games, guys.
There's no actual bonus points, though. (Except for the secret bonus points you get on ENWorld Elite.)
@Nagol, you know you can just play Ars Magica 5th. It's not like they've changed anything to the game in five editions, seriously. It just lost a lot of magic.
- End of rant. -

I've played 2e through 4e. 2e is a small simple book. 3e was a bit ore problematic. Although the designers added a bit of neat stuff, they buried it under a lot of cruft, abandoned formatting and cross references, and layered on weird rules sets to try and tie the game more closely with their other properties. 4th reversed a bunch of 3e's damage, but requires more effort to adjust magic to a feel more in line with what I prefer than 2e did. So I run 2e by and large. I'll run a modified 4e if I ever run into a group where the players don't already own 2e and I bother to finish my house rules.

You know what? Scrap this. More Ars Magica rant. Did you know people who did play it back then? I have a theory. The theory is that the reason why Ars Magica is raved about, is that nobody actually ever played the game for more than 3 sessions and/or not in any actual workable "seasons/covenant" form. What's your take on this?

My first Ars Magica campaign went 2 years and it was my shortest. It covered a new covenant in England circa 998 - 1012. It was leading up to the Danish invasion when the PCs had a falling out and pretty much TPKed themselves My longest went about 5 years and covered maybe 15 years of covenant time for a covenant in Russia (passage of time was slower because we met less frequently and more adventures happened). I'd never try to run a short one-shot of Ars Magica; it really is not designed well to handle it.

 

[Rolenet]

My first Ars Magica campaign went 2 years and it was my shortest. It covered a new covenant in England circa 998 - 1012. It was leading up to the Danish invasion

Well, theory disproved. Did you encounter big issues with aging Magi power creep? How did you enforce regular seasonal activity?

Funny because the campaign I'm running right now is set in Ireland, began in 1001, and with a Danish runewizard. Good thing is it avoids powercreep because hedge wizard cannot be as powerful as hemetics (well, mostly...).

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I have fond memories of Gamma World’s zaniness.

I ran a 1e campaign for about a year. Some of the group liked it, particularly those that grew up playing it. Even though it started off strong, the new-school players weren’t as fond, and most just stopped showing up until 5e came out. Had it gone well, I had planned to move onto 2e for a bit.

Some months back in a 5e session, I did a flashback to the history of an abandoned elven tower. But rather than just be an infodump, I ran it as an adventure in white box OD&D, with pregens (I was going to give them their choice, but they preferred random selection). It was so fast-paced and fun. I think even the new school heathens enjoyed themselves.

There are a number of older games I want to revisit as one/two-shots after I finish Out of the Abyss. Top Secret/S.I., Talislanta. oWoD, another return to OD&D all spring to mind. And if I can ever find a copy, Empire of the Petal Throne. My brother and I had it when we were younger, but it disappeared in the intervening years.

I’d also like to break out some of the classic wargaming stuff I’ve got, like Ogre and Car Wars. But I’d have to get back up to speed on those often intricate rules, and finding the time for that isn’t easy.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Alright, bonus points for the 70s games, guys.
There's no actual bonus points, though. (Except for the secret bonus points you get on ENWorld Elite.)
@Nagol, you know you can just play Ars Magica 5th. It's not like they've changed anything to the game in five editions, seriously. It just lost a lot of magic.
- End of rant. -

You know what? Scrap this. More Ars Magica rant. Did you know people who did play it back then? I have a theory. The theory is that the reason why Ars Magica is raved about, is that nobody actually ever played the game for more than 3 sessions and/or not in any actual workable "seasons/covenant" form. What's your take on this?

hehehe, I could get credit for a LOT of 70's games, except I'd have to actually get them out and play them...

I have Metamorphosis Alpha! Boot Hill! Boot Hill is still a good game if you just want to play disposable characters for a couple hours, hehe.

I never even HEARD of Ars Magica until people talked about it recently. If it was played "back then" (whatever time period that is exactly) it wasn't all that big a deal.

The appeal of Gamma World 1e... Its just so incredibly campy. I mean, really, you could have an endless ongoing thread of people just rolling up characters. The mutations are a work of utter comic genius. "Poor Dual Brain!" "Water Soluable Skin!" HAHAHAHA! (those are just bad ones, but those were the most amusing kind). Half of them were just utterly deadly, either to you, or to everyone else. Extra body parts, wings, I mean you could have anything, and you got a LOT of mutations. If you found radiation you'd get MORE mutations. And the monsters. Giant rabbits that turned everything into rubber? YEP!

Then there was the intro. "People of the Earth, We have the power! The choice is yours!"

 

[Nagol]

Well, theory disproved. Did you encounter big issues with aging Magi power creep? How did you enforce regular seasonal activity?

Funny because the campaign I'm running right now is set in Ireland, began in 1001, and with a Danish runewizard. Good thing is it avoids powercreep because hedge wizard cannot be as powerful as hemetics (well, mostly...).

I found power creep is a feature not a bug for the genre.

I didn't need to enforce seasonal activity so much as have few adventure hooks available. We used a slightly modified troupe system in that typically each player would run a mage or a companion on an adventure. The grogs were available, but the players rarely wanted to run them. A typical adventure would have one, maybe two mages and about four companions and the group went on one adventure a season, on average. A few parties had zero mages and I can remember two in which all the players brought their mages.

 

[Rolenet]

RE: Gamma World, for a long time I thought it was a very serious game. I realize I was mixing up with Aftermath, or something. So when GW 4e came out, I found it odd that they reframed it as a tongue-in-cheek game!
(Btw I recently used the GW cards for a DArk Sun game which ended pretty much in a spaceship with tech items and radiation. Being almost 4e-compatible, it's easy to introduce.)

 

[Campbell]

I have a deep and abiding love for RuneQuest. I have only played more modern versions of the game though (Legend and Mythras).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

RE: Gamma World, for a long time I thought it was a very serious game. I realize I was mixing up with Aftermath, or something. So when GW 4e came out, I found it odd that they reframed it as a tongue-in-cheek game!
(Btw I recently used the GW cards for a DArk Sun game which ended pretty much in a spaceship with tech items and radiation. Being almost 4e-compatible, it's easy to introduce.)

The 4e GW is certainly pretty wacky, which makes it a step up from some earlier versions that tried to be more 'tame' and just sucked the life out of the game. I still prefer the original though. I think maybe one way to improve it would be to graft it onto the 5e core rules (you'd just have to make up 4 'classes', PSH, Mutant Human, Mutant Animal, and optionally Mutant Plant). I wouldn't really bother with 'races' as such, and GW never had any concept of anything like 4e classes.

Now just drop the old 1e GW mutations and equipment right in on top, with minor tweaks to match up with 5e core rules (IE assign save types and whatnot to various items and effects). I think it would play pretty well. Characters would start out fairly fragile, but they'd also be starting with low-tech stuff (swords and whatnot). Graduate the game to crossbows and basic firearms after a few levels, and then fold in the increasingly deadly high tech items as the characters delve into the remains of the Apocalypse.

 

[Rolenet]

GW's Judge Dredd. Had a nostalgia fuelled rebuts to those a couple of years ago.

I knew I had seen that shield somewhere...

Oddly, I have nothing to contribute to my own thread. I have my fair share of 80s games in stock, but it never seriously occured to me to play them again, because I know I would be disappointed, at least by the playing style.

However, I did make a remixed, simplified for-one-shot version of Paranoia 1st a few years ago. And I did play Pendragon last month... it was 5th ed, but you wouldn't tell...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I knew I had seen that shield somewhere...

Oddly, I have nothing to contribute to my own thread. I have my fair share of 80s games in stock, but it never seriously occured to me to play them again, because I know I would be disappointed, at least by the playing style.

However, I did make a remixed, simplified for-one-shot version of Paranoia 1st a few years ago. And I did play Pendragon last month... it was 5th ed, but you wouldn't tell...

Honestly, if you widen things to just general 'games from the 80's' or even 70's there's a lot we still play. A rabbit ate my original Cosmic Encounter, but I still have a pretty ancient copy that we trot out at regular intervals. Its easy to teach, so it makes a great game for non-gamers that is still pretty cool. Nuclear War (and its expansion, Nuclear Annihilation) is another one that still sees a fair amount of play. The humor is a bit dark perhaps, but there are always plenty of people willing to gleefully unleash Skippy the Super Germ!

There are a few others that have endured as having good repeat play value. King Maker, a bit long and the play options get a little stale eventually, but its good for a game every few years. Likewise Samurai can be amusing (the Japanese equivalent of King Maker). Merchant of Venus is another one that manages to get good replay value.

I'd say some of the more modern Eurogames are a bit slicker than most of these, but there are still a lot of very solid games from the first wave of what I would call RPG and wargame experienced game designers moving back into the more general entertainment games.

There are also some grey area games, like TFT that are sort of RPGs, (and TFT definitely grew into being an RPG) but were originally designed to play a more limited kind of game. TFT or its microgame versions is still kinda fun, though my copies have given up the ghost at this point.

There's still a lot of classic RPG-related wargames that are good too, like GEV/OGRE, and Car Wars (almost an RPG itself).