In the style of the social media meme of your top ten books, what are your top ten RPGs? You can use any metric you like, and you don't necessarily need to rank them.
Here's mine, as they come to mind:
D&D BECMI: My first RPG and the one that got me hooked. Still awesome after all thee years.
Heroes Unlimited: Yes, it's a Palladium game, but it opened up the world of a RPGs to me -- you can play super heroes, too?!
Mayfair DC Heroes: It did not take long to move from HU to DCH, thanks in large part to the Daily Bugle ad/supplements in Dragon Magazine. There are arguably "better" supers systems (I like both M&M and HERO) but none other has ever managed to emulate the source material for me.
AD&D 2nd Edition: After BECMI, this was the D&D I played most and most deeply. It's art esthetic and open attitude toward rules along with its vast array of settings really makes it D&D for me. It is the reason I like 5 E so much -- it reminds me immensely of 2E.
WEG D6 Star Wars: pitch perfect play. Deep lore that brought the SW universe alive. No Star Wars game since has exceeded it.
Exalted: I wrote for this game and that experience was awesome.
Gamma World (all, with special emphasis on 4th Ed): I love the post apocalyptic genre, and GW is the perfect distillation of that genre for me. Now, I never ran it is a wacky and wahoo way, but rather a "even weirder Fallout" way, for which it works perfectly. My favorite iteration is 4th Ed, but they all have their charms. I also worked on the d20 GW PHB.
Alternity: This game was so well designed and both the Star Drive setting and the Dark Matter setting were top notch. It is too bad it died with TSR. This game had potential.
D&D 3rd Edition/d20: D&D 3.x had its strengths and weaknesses and I have gotten to a point where running Pathfinder is too much. Even so, that family of D&D is very strong and fun to play and managed to defib what was an otherwise dead game.
FATE: there are lots of rules light, new school games that I have tried, but FATE is the best of them. It's story focused rules and narrative mechanics make running dramatic and cinematic games fun and easy. There isn't a genre I would not run with FATE and a few I would only use FATE for.
What are your top ten?
Here's mine, as they come to mind:
D&D BECMI: My first RPG and the one that got me hooked. Still awesome after all thee years.
Heroes Unlimited: Yes, it's a Palladium game, but it opened up the world of a RPGs to me -- you can play super heroes, too?!
Mayfair DC Heroes: It did not take long to move from HU to DCH, thanks in large part to the Daily Bugle ad/supplements in Dragon Magazine. There are arguably "better" supers systems (I like both M&M and HERO) but none other has ever managed to emulate the source material for me.
AD&D 2nd Edition: After BECMI, this was the D&D I played most and most deeply. It's art esthetic and open attitude toward rules along with its vast array of settings really makes it D&D for me. It is the reason I like 5 E so much -- it reminds me immensely of 2E.
WEG D6 Star Wars: pitch perfect play. Deep lore that brought the SW universe alive. No Star Wars game since has exceeded it.
Exalted: I wrote for this game and that experience was awesome.
Gamma World (all, with special emphasis on 4th Ed): I love the post apocalyptic genre, and GW is the perfect distillation of that genre for me. Now, I never ran it is a wacky and wahoo way, but rather a "even weirder Fallout" way, for which it works perfectly. My favorite iteration is 4th Ed, but they all have their charms. I also worked on the d20 GW PHB.
Alternity: This game was so well designed and both the Star Drive setting and the Dark Matter setting were top notch. It is too bad it died with TSR. This game had potential.
D&D 3rd Edition/d20: D&D 3.x had its strengths and weaknesses and I have gotten to a point where running Pathfinder is too much. Even so, that family of D&D is very strong and fun to play and managed to defib what was an otherwise dead game.
FATE: there are lots of rules light, new school games that I have tried, but FATE is the best of them. It's story focused rules and narrative mechanics make running dramatic and cinematic games fun and easy. There isn't a genre I would not run with FATE and a few I would only use FATE for.
What are your top ten?
