Your Favorite Weird Game- Time To Talk About the Weirdest RPGs You Know!

[aramis erak]

I never thought Everway was weird. I still don't think the setting is terribly unusual. But the mechanics... I can see it. The author was trying something, a game where trust in the GM was a vital part of resolution. The mechanics as written explicitly require the GM to make a lot of decisions. Decisions I think a lot of GMs make, but in Everway, these choices were baked into the rules of play.

Cards were NOT the key mechanic in task resolution. A lot has been said of them in other threads, and I love the concept... but really the cards were written to be the backup mechanic. Task resolution relied first on whether the GM thought you reasonably could succeed at a task, then whether or not you should succeed by the beats of the unfolding story. If neither of those suggested a clear outcome, then the cards would come into play. A card drawn from the fortune deck would be interpreted by the GM. This could be as simple as good/bad, but the GM was encouraged to apply the cards' meanings, elemental influences, astrological influences, and other things, all to decide whether or not you sweet-talk that guard...

By that logic, the dice aren't in almost any GM'd dice-using RPG. Reductio in absurdum.

 

[Orius]

51 posts and no one mentioned Synnibar yet!? Unbelievable!

 

[Blue Orange]

51 posts and no one mentioned Synnibar yet!? Unbelievable!

I do feel remiss in not bringing that one up. It didn't deserve the hate it got IMHO...

 

[James Gasik]

How about Amber Diceless Roleplaying? Classic setting by celebrated author. Deals with characters who have at will multiversal travel. Can range from high fantasy to an acid trip, depending on which Shadow you've traveled to. Politics, intrigue, high adventure, or just screwing around in a world of your choosing.

Creating characters via an auction to determine not only who is top dog in your group, but also how progression will work, plus of course, needing absolute trust in your GM since they are the arbiter of everything, with the rules and the canon being only guidelines.

I loved it. I hated it.

 

[aramis erak]

How about Amber Diceless Roleplaying? Classic setting by celebrated author. Deals with characters who have at will multiversal travel. Can range from high fantasy to an acid trip, depending on which Shadow you've traveled to. Politics, intrigue, high adventure, or just screwing around in a world of your choosing.

Creating characters via an auction to determine not only who is top dog in your group, but also how progression will work, plus of course, needing absolute trust in your GM since they are the arbiter of everything, with the rules and the canon being only guidelines.

I loved it. I hated it.

I hated it. I merely disliked the playtest version of the Bugtown RPG (tied to the comic, Those Annoying Post Brothers).
It's different...
Which reminds me of another that foundered in the market...

Memento Mori's Theatrix. Another diceless RPG - but one with a flow chart mechanic for the GM. There's also an optional percentile roll option. It is a generic engine, too, and that didn't help.

Nor did the subject matter of its one setting book... Bill Willingham's Ironwood. Based upon his adults-only comics of the same title. Very naughty comics, but a good underlying story. The setting book is really only about R-equivalent, despite the X-equivalent comics.

 

[MNblockhead]

So, we've talked about "weirdest" games in terms of mechanics and lore, what about in terms of actual play?

From the stories I hear from friend that played Vampire the Masquerade in the early 90s, things got pretty weird. Not sure if VtM had/s separate LARP rules, because their stories sound more like late-80s goth culture parties and LARPs than a TTRPG.

I was out of gaming at that time and was more into the more wholesome deadhead scene at the time. ;-)

 

[Eyes of Nine]

So, we've talked about "weirdest" games in terms of mechanics and lore, what about in terms of actual play?

From the stories I hear from friend that played Vampire the Masquerade in the early 90s, things got pretty weird. Not sure if VtM had/s separate LARP rules, because their stories sound more like late-80s goth culture parties and LARPs than a TTRPG.

I was out of gaming at that time and was more into the more wholesome deadhead scene at the time. ;-)

Yes, the LARP is called Minds Eye Theater and the larp organizing group is the camarilla. Certainly a v large subset of the folks engaged with world of darkness in the 90's and aughts (and maybe even to this day) participate in the Larping side of things

I remember the one time very soon after V:TM came out in the early 90's, I was in a session 0 with the GM and a few other people. He was very excited about the fact that this game was very bleedy (not the term he used) - he was like "sometimes, I may actually bite your neck" - and I was like nope, can't make any of the future sessions.

Later turns out he was arrested for stealing computers from the local university...

In short, yes, V:TM could get weird

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I hated it. I merely disliked the playtest version of the Bugtown RPG (tied to the comic, Those Annoying Post Brothers).
It's different...
Which reminds me of another that foundered in the market...

Memento Mori's Theatrix. Another diceless RPG - but one with a flow chart mechanic for the GM. There's also an optional percentile roll option. It is a generic engine, too, and that didn't help.

Nor did the subject matter of its one setting book... Bill Willingham's Ironwood. Based upon his adults-only comics of the same title. Very naughty comics, but a good underlying story. The setting book is really only about R-equivalent, despite the X-equivalent comics.

Golly, I really liked both Ironwood and Those Annoying Post Brothers. I knew about Theatrix, but hadn't heard of Bugtown - something to look for in the wild I guess...

 

[Thomas Shey]

Continuum was pretty strange. It was a time-travel game, which is a weird start. It managed the problems of paradox and changing the past by requiring the players to keep extensive records of what they'd done (and had not done, in effect). From memory, accumulated paradoxes, called "frag" made it harder to do things, unless you went very far and became a "Narcissist" at which point you were an enemy of all other time travellers (known as "spanners") but you didn't have to keep records any more. Character advancement involved acquiring all sorts of psi powers that weren't directly to do with time travel. I never figured out how to run it well enough to try.

At one time there was work on a second game focused on Narcissists and how some of them weren't necessarily as bad people as apparently painted in Continuum, but it was apparently even harder to get to work right and at least never reached publication.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Memento Mori's Theatrix. Another diceless RPG - but one with a flow chart mechanic for the GM. There's also an optional percentile roll option. It is a generic engine, too, and that didn't help.

And the game system (and author) that lead to the development of GDS, and thus indirectly, GNS.