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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Simonpaulburley" data-source="post: 7721237" data-attributes="member: 6900352">#RPGaDAY 2017: 7) What was your most impactful RPG session?Way back in the early days of RPGs there was just D&D. Other games started to come out - Runequest, Tunnels and Trolls, Traveller. I was on the look out for something to become MINE - something I could run that other people didn't have. I came across a game called Superhero 2044. Great! No one else had a Superhero game!I bought a couple of Superhero comics and discovered Claremont and Byrne's X-men. That REALLY got me excited. I started buying comics. X-Men naturally but also Marvel Two-in-One and Marvel Team-Up where the Thing and Spider-Man, respectively, each teamed up with a different guest star each week. (I called this research.)So I tried to run games of Superhero 2044, I really did, first at Nottingham University and then at Birmingham. It didn't work. The game just didn't simulate the comics.After one particularly fractious session at the Birmingham University Games club, the players rounded on me - after their "Heroes" had been blasted to pieces with shotguns and lasers - and told me, in no uncertain terms, why they thought it was so unsatisfactory. I'm afraid I didn't respond very well. Programmed by the D&D  mantra of encounters being appropriate to the level of the characters, I thought "They just want to be able to do whatever they want!"(That WASN'T the most impactful session.)So to teach them a lesson and show them why they were so wrong, I went away and did a quick "hack" of Gamma World (which had just come out) and threw together a scenario based on an issue of Marvel Two-In-One (The Thing and Moonknight versus "Crossfire"). Then I came back, let them make their characters and ran them a game where I didn't care if they steamrollered through hordes of thugs, smashed through walls and lobbed fork lift trucks about. I expected them to see that, without challenge, there was no fun.Thing is - they LOVED it and demanded another game. And I enjoyed it too.(THAT was the most impactful session.)Figures were converted and painted and before I knew it, I had a Superhero campaign. Of course, the rules needed refining - and I was helped by one of the players who was a rules genius. People started asking for a copy of the rules and so I scrounged some artwork, had them typed up professionally and printed and Golden Heroes (later to be published by Games Workshop) was born.And I became a games author.</blockquote>

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