Tell me about "Any RPG" from before 1990!

[Knightfall]

Oh, and you have read your Lovecraft, didn't you?

No, I've never read Lovecraft. CoC isn't something that I've considered until now. Mainly, I've read books and stories by Isaac Asimov, Neal Barrett, Jr., Robin Hobb, Robert Jordan, Edward Keyes, Fritz Leiber, Dennis L. McKiernan, Jack Vance, and Timothy Zahn, and I've read a lot of the Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and (the earlier) Star Wars novels.

I've just started to get into Glen Cook, Steven Erikson, D.J. Heinrich, Robert E. Howard, and Brandon Sanderson.

 

[Krensky]

If you've never read Lovecraft, be very careful with CoC. The tone can be easy to get wrong, and you'll be suprised by how the game plays out.

Basically, the players are destined to loose. Death, insanity, or something worse awaits all PCs in CoC. Each PC has a count down timer the minute their made, called Sanity. Once play starts this number starts going down. Sometimes it trickles away, sometime it all disappears in a heartbeat, but it will run out. Once it's gone (or before it's gone a lot of times) the PC is gone.

 

[Knightfall]

If you've never read Lovecraft, be very careful with CoC. The tone can be easy to get wrong, and you'll be suprised by how the game plays out.

Basically, the players are destined to loose. Death, insanity, or something worse awaits all PCs in CoC. Each PC has a count down timer the minute their made, called Sanity. Once play starts this number starts going down. Sometimes it trickles away, sometime it all disappears in a heartbeat, but it will run out. Once it's gone (or before it's gone a lot of times) the PC is gone.

Hmm, that doesn't sound like my kind of game.

 

[Henry]

Hmm, that doesn't sound like my kind of game.

Now, given, you CAN run it slightly more optimistically, and still keep Lovecraft's tone -- Dunwich Horror is a little more "heroic" than that, though most of Lovecraft's stories are of the "Old Ones Rise. Everyone dies." variety. However, Call of Cthulhu is a great game for one-shots, and for short campaigns if you use the default that stopping one of these eldritch horrors nets you some sanity points back. People forget that there are heroes who DON'T die like mewling kittens even in the Call of Cthulhu Eponymous short story.

For a one-shot, though, feel free to cut characters to pieces like meatloaf in a wood chipper.

 

[rkwoodard]

Hmm, that doesn't sound like my kind of game.

I love Lovecraft's stories and the CoC mythos. But the game is not for me either.

RK

 

[Krensky]

People forget that there are heroes who DON'T die like mewling kittens even in the Call of Cthulhu Eponymous short story.

True.

Some die like raving madmen, some die in the belly of some monstrosity, some retire and die in an asylum somewhere, and some are just horribly emotionally scarred and then discover they're turning into fish-men.

Mythos is good for a short, tight campaign, or one where you can rationalize high turnover. It is not a "Let's go slay the monster, huzzah!" setting though.

The system in CoC, Basic Roleplaying, is quite usable for all sorts of things though.

As a side note Knightfall, if you want to get a more mechanical grasp of what SAN looks like, without learning the game, look at http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/campaigns/sanity.htm. If memory serves, it's CoC's mechanic basically bolted onto D&D.

 

[kitsune9]

Oh, the years run together...

Warhammer RPG - much the game today but rules tended to fall apart as characters advanced in their careers. What stood out, grit and know that a character could get kill, it put caution in the player's vocabulary. It also gave us a fantastic setting in the old world. It sort of gave me an alt to D&D, as I was questioning use of levels and hit point vs monsters, leaning to a skill point driven game and greater character diffentances.

GhostBusters - I had fun with this game, it was comic relief and just a good sit down and have fun game.

I agree. Warhammer was really fun, but advanced careers and "higher level" adventures were too hard to run because it was just too deadly or no challenge at all.

 

[kitsune9]

Hm. My personal favorite was probably Marvel Superheroes.

Marvel Super Heroes (role-playing game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marvel Super Heroes

We were all comics geeks, and the game did a pretty good job of giving us the comics world in a way we could play.

I had a blast running and playing MSH and the SAGA version (the one with the cards). Both editions were a lot of fun.

 

[kitsune9]

Time for a new thread topic yet related to my other "tell me" threads.

More and more I've been thinking about RPGs that existed before I began playing D&D. I cut my teeth on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition. Before that game, I neve knew much about gaming beyond seeing a friend's copy of 1e Oriental Adventures, which made me catch the gaming bug.

I knew nothing of other games. I lived in a small, isolated town with a very limited gaming scene. I knew nothing of Ars Magica, Battletech, Cyberpunk, Elfquest, GURPS, Harn, Palladium, Pendragon, Rolemaster, Runequest, Shadowrun, Skyrealms of Jorune (*), Space 1889, Talislanta, Thieves' World, Traveller, Villains & Vigilantes, Warhammer, Wilderlands (*), etc. *I'm now a huge fan of these RPGs.

For me, AD&D 2e was gaming and that shaped my love of the game and gaming. I gained a lot of exposure to other game systems after I moved into the city in 1992, but I rarely bought anything besides D&D 2e.

I gained an interest in some of TSR's other RPGs. Gamma World was great, but I only bought a few of the sourcebooks for Fourth Edition. I soon knew what Boot Hill, Star Frontiers, and Top Secret were and Marvel Super Heroes as well. I bought books for Amazing Engine and Buck Rogers - XXVc The 25th Century but I eventually let them go, and the Gamma World books too. (I kept several "key" Alternity books, however.)

I dove into FASA's Earthdawn and dabbled with Battletech. However, I never convinced my friends to play those games. (I didn't push very hard. I had enough trouble getting them to play D&D.)

Now... it's 2009, and I'm starting to gain a real interest in Old School games. I've been delving into The Acaeum and Wayne's Books & Old School Games web sites.

However, there is so much that I'm getting lost in the maze of products, especially on the Wayne's Books site. There are still many of the RPGs listed on that site that I've never heard of (i.e. Bushido; High Fantasy; Living Steel; Man, Myth & Magic; Midkemia; Powers & Perils; etc). Plus, I know very little about the other games I've listed. I guess I've been a D&D fanboy for far too long.

So, what I'm looking for on this thread is advice. Tell me about your favorite RPG that came out before 1990. (Heck, tell me about your favorite non-D&D RPG that came out before the year 2000!) What was good? What was bad? What was so bad that it was good?

Let the mayhem begin,

Cheers!

Knightfall

The game that exposed me to roleplaying games was Traveller. A couple of kids at my school were playing it and I watched the whole session. My parents got me the red box D&D Basic set that Christmas and I've been into rpgs ever since.

Other games pre-1990 that I really enjoyed was Star Frontiers, Top Secret S.I. and Marvel Super Heroes.

Before 2000 I really enjoyed Star Wars (WEG), Fantasy Trip, and ran a Top Secret campaign for 2 years instead of AD&D.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to play many other games outside of D&D in the 00's because my current group of 9 years has been a D&D only club and my only non-D&D game time has been at cons. Since I'm married now, cons are out.

 

[meomwt]

Tunnels & Trolls

This was were I started with role-playing.

The idea was simple. All you needed was some paper, a pencil and a bucket of d6. The Rulebook is there as a guide, but you don't often have to refer to it in play. Indeed, it's there to fire imagination rather than to slavishly follow.

The rules are simple. Generate a character with 6 Ability Scores: Strength, IQ, Luck, Constitution, Dexterity and Charisma. Strength, Luck and Dexterity will help in combat, and Constitution equals hit points.

There are four character types: Warriors (who hit things, hard); Wizards (who can cast spells); Rogues (who can cast a limited selection of spells and can also fight in melee); and Warrior-Wizards, who are exceptional individuals who can fight and cast, but with some restrictions.

There aren't skills, but in 5th Ed, the Saving Throw system came to your aid. Decide which ability was important (if you couldn't, then use Luck - that was what it was there for), and how difficult the task was. For a L1 Saving Throw, the DC was 20: roll 2d6, add the ability score and hit 20. Easy. If you got doubles, roll again and add (and keep doing so until the doubles stopped), which meant that the higher, harder to hit numbers could be achieved through luck (L3 SR had 30 as the DC, and each level increased by 5).

Combat was throwing lots of d6, adding them all up. Higher total won, subtract lower total, that's how much damage the losers take - share around evenly if more than one opponent. Rinse and repeat.

And that's pretty much it. The system's USP was a series of solitaire adventure books. Decide on a course of action and go to the appropriate paragraph, do what it says there, next choice, etc. Great for solo gamers (as I was a teenager ).