TBT: The Games That Changed You

[Reynard]

It's Throw Back Thursday, so let's reminisce fondly!

What game changed you? Maybe it changed your perspective on gaming. Maybe it literally changed your life. Maybe it taught you something about yourself, or taught you something about how gaming impacts the world. Maybe it just showed you there was more to the world than dungeons or dragons.

It doesn't have to be your first game, your first non-D&D game or anything like that. It can be a specific campaign in a game you have played a lot, or new game you played once at a con and can't even remember the name of.

 

[payn]

Diplomacy. A simple game that requires participation and competition for all players involved. No fancy Fantasy Flight traitor gimmicks, no simple 1 on 1 chess dynamic, just an old fashioned game of persuasion and tactics. Easy to learn, difficult to master. No two games are alike.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Well, Rolemaster taught me more about figuring percentiles than school ever did.

43 years of gaming here, but it's just a hobby. Not my oldest one; certainly my cheapest one. But change? I would have to say no.

 

[overgeeked]

Over the Edge taught me that simple systems can be wonderful and evocative. That lighter systems create engaging and fascinating game experiences and stories far better and easier than heavier rules systems.

Diplomacy taught me Realpolitik, that not every part of a game needs mechanics, and to respect the boundary between player and character in RPGs.

Axis and Allies taught me that finite games with finite rules and finite win conditions often do have a short list of best strategies and there is a best, most optimal, way to play.

 

[Mezuka]

Cosmic Encounter had a great impact on me. The asymmetry exploded my brain. Brilliant.

 

[Aldarc]

Fate.

I was mostly playing D&D and systems with similar structures (e.g., fictional authority, GM Prep, etc.). The first time that I read Fate, it was alien and weird. I read it, but I didn't really understand it. Fate felt as if it was written in a completely different language from what my D&D-conditioned brain was used to: fudge dice, aspects, stress/consequences, fate points, invokes, etc. I put the free PDF copy on the digital shelf for about half a year before returning to it after seeing more people talk about it.

Something must have changed between the first reading and then, because that's when it began to click. It was a paradigm shift from how I was used to thinking about roleplaying games, including the role of the players/GM, the fiction, mechanics, rules, etc. Fate was the game that really got me looking at other games that were outside of my comfort zone. Aspects were a huge wake up call for me.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Dune. I loved the ruthlessness of it, the (not quite total) lack of randomness, and the different yet roughly equivalent abilities of the factions.

Empires in Arms. Like Diplomacy for realpolitick but with more interesting economic, combat, and diplomatic options. I admit I never played in a game that actually finished...

Champions and Marvel FASERIP. Two very different ways of rpging super heroic spandex silliness.

 

[practicalm]

Battle of the Bulge (AH 1965) First war game I played and first time I realized my father and uncles used to play games like this when they were kids. Still need to play my uncle sometime.

Tammany Hall (StrataMax 2007) A faster and more brutal diplomacy type game. Described as a knife fight in a phone booth. Really needs to be played by 5 people for the best experience

Basic D&D (TSR 1977) First time ever playing an RPG in middle school when it first came out. Ended up being the DM in most of my gaming groups but also went and played at a lot of conventions to see different RPG styles

GURPS (Steve Jackson 1986) An RPG that let you mix and max genres with a focus on validating values as best as possible in the real world. Fun to create characters from different times and throw them together in play.

 

[Blue]

Mike's games. Huh, what's that, it that an RPG? Well, it was collection of overlapping Champions and AD&D (later AD&D 2e) campaigns run by a friend of mine. It's where I really learned to roleplay. Mike ran like 3-6 games a week. And the D&D ones were all in different parts of his Forgotten Realms, and the Champions ones where all in his world as well. (He was later published for Champions, a number of products like Foxbat for President.) Our games were glorious soup opera dramas as well as high adventure of the appropriate sort. Who hates who, who's dating, you name it. There were frequent crossovers between groups, it was just this huge pot of characters and rivalries and love triangles and death and marriage and whatever. He later became more hidebound as a GM and too in love with unintended consequences (meaning negative consequences) of every action, but those years in our teens and 20s were glorious.

Spirit of the Century. Never got to play it, but it opened my eyes to RPGs that could be different than D&D. When I first saw it, I think it was FUDGE/proto-FATE, though Wikipedia says it was FATE3.

Secret Hitler. Okay, horrible name. Not quite my first hidden sides game, I think that was a Battlestar Galactica boardgame, but the whole social deduction of it I really enjoyed as a new type of game. Just like when a cooperative boardgame laid out new ground, so did this. Still, the name, but what can you do?

 

[aramis erak]

In order...
AH Outdoor Survival - first map-and-counters
1776 - first map and counter consim
D&D - first RPG...
Night Driver (A2600) - the videogame that I played way too long. (You can wrap the score...)
Traveller - which was my second SF game, second non-D&D game, and was for many years my favorite setting.
T2K 1E - the brutal, and in the hands of a group of HS kids, silly, world of WW3...
Hero System - where I learned a lot about my gaming preferences.
Burning Empires - the process of BW/BE really upped my skills as a gm