RPGaDay2015: Day Twenty

Favorite Horror RPG

It's a dark and stormy day in Houstopolis.  Probably a good one for talking about horror, a genre I have a complex relationship with.  See, I like scary stuff, but I kind of actively detest being scared.  I have to have horror movies vetted for me.  I don't go to live haunted houses.  But reading and gaming horror are usually at a sufficient remove for me to enjoy things.

A while back, I posted on Google+ about my love for Call of Cthulhu, how I defied parental mandate and good sense to undertake a 100 mile road trip to buy a copy when it first came out (I've still got it, signed by Sandy Petersen himself).  CoC was my introduction to horror RPGs, but it's not my favorite.

That would be this one:

The original Pacesetter edition of Chill.  I was working in a bookstore when it came out, so I very likely got the first copy sold in San Antonio back in the day.  The cover billed it as a "Frightfully Fun Role Playing Game," and that appealed to me.  So did the delightful Hammer-inspired cover art from James Holloway.

"Delightful" is a word I use a lot to describe this version of Chill.  It wasn't deep, the system was clunky, but the breezy approach to the rules and the all-inclusive, salad bar nature of the terrifying "Unknown" was terrific.

And the supplements were so great.  Things is still one of my favorite horror "monster manuals," ranging from the prosaic to the incredibly eclectic and horrifying.  And the Vampires guidebook did different breeds of bloodsuckers years before White Wolf.  But these were monsters, one and all.  That book actually gave me nightmares, thank you whoever wrote the Bhima Gupta chapter.

 The Mayfair edition has better rules, but a lot less charm.  I have high hopes the new one will hit the sweet spot, but I'm waiting on my copy to come before I take a deep dive into the rules.  This one's my favorite.  And the fact that I met my first serious girlfriend during a Halloween one-shot is purely incidental.

RPGaDay2015: Day Nineteen

Favorite Supers RPG

Hey, a subject right up there with "favorite kidney."

I've been playing Supers games since 1982.  I've owned most of them and played just about everything I owned. Mostly.  It remains the genre I'm best suited to GM and play on any given day.

It's also been a really long day.  I had to re-image my work computer and I don't feel like a long, detailed explanation.  Besides, my answer shouldn't surprise anyone who's paid attention over the last few months.

 Warts and all, baby.  Warts and all.

RPGaDay 2015: Day 18

Favorite SF RPG

Let's go with this one:

It'll do.

RPGaDay2015: Day 17

Favorite fantasy RPG.

Well, D&D is certainly the one I've played the most, and it utterly dominates my shelf space.  But it dominates my shelves by dint of many editions, multiple supplements, and the D20 Explosion. There are parts of the D&D experience I love (a good Forgotten Realms game, for instance).  But in the grand scheme of things, it's not my favorite.

I'm very fond of 13th Age, but more in theory than practice.  My one experience playing it was pretty terrible, to be honest, though that was on the GM as far as I'm concerned.  Also, it's brilliantly designed to handle one particular type of D&D-ish play, a weird love-child of 4e and 3x.  So, it's very difficult to hack it into something else.  Maybe if I get some long-term play out of it, but for now, it's an interesting diversion.

The simple elegance of Barbarians of Lemuria is a thing of beauty.  It doesn't try to be all games to all people.  It's a sword and sorcery game whee magic is an untrustworthy, dangerous thing, and it does that wonderfully.  Also, the simple measure of renaming Hit Points "Lifeblood" is genius.  That said, I've never played more than a one-shot of it.  It's a great game, but I need to play more before it's going to reach favorite status.

I am of the opinion that Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon is among the greatest RPGs of all time. The system is simple but not unsophisticated, and it's treatment of Passions, Loyalty, and Religion was ground-breaking.  The notion that all PCs are of the same class is likewise, brilliant.  It's also a very tough sell amongst the folks I've had in my gaming groups.  That lack of actual play experience keeps it from the top spot.

So, that leaves me with a tie.  Seriously, I can't choose.  My first exposure to RuneQuest was like hearing Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" for the first time.  Everything irrevocably changed.  I dove in to RQ and played nothing else for months, making my way through the minutia of Glorantha lore.  I immersed myself in Battle Magic, Strike Ranks, and sectional armor.  It was a deep and abiding love.

Then, Stormbringer came along.  In high school, I read the DAW Elric novels more times than Tolkien.  I remember walking into the game store at Central Park Mall (yes, by that point, there was a game store in the mall, called "Expensive Toys For Big Boys," and later "Intellectrics") and seeing that Frank Brunner cover on the original boxed set.  It was everything I'd hoped for: a faster, leaner version of the rules I was used to, the potential for crazy disparate power levels, and a game that felt like the gonzo craziness of Moorcock's greatest creation.  I got so much use out of it.  So many terrific games.  But I probably wouldn't have gotten it in the first place if RQ hadn't shown me a different approach to fantasy games.

So, there you go.

RPGaDay2015: Catch Up Edition

I missed yesterday.  My wife was attending an SCA event up in the Dallas-Ft Worth area.  The Boy and I tagged along to visit some geek shops in the area, most notably Order 66 Toys in McKinney, TX (as seen in the ads in Marvel Comics).  It's a toy store devoted to nothing but Star Wars.  New stuff, old stuff, highly collectible expensive stuff.  It's amazing, and I may have spent my monthly gaming allotment on action figures. :)

So let's tackle yesterday's and today's topics:

Day 15:  Longest RPG Campaign


With my Tuesday Night Crew, I've played through two "Zeroes to Heroes" games.  The first, a Forgotten Realms 3.5 game went from 1st to 18th or 19th level.  I'm not sure about the precise chronology (sometime in the second half of 2008 until January 2010 or so, more or less weekly, with a few breaks in there).  So that's a qualifier.

We also ran a similar Pathfinder game ("Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil") which started in the fall of 2010 and ran through the spring of 2013 or so (as I recall I didn't make the grand finale).  That game was notable for one of my PCs dying.  So that was long-term and cool.

The granddaddy these days is my friend Greg's 4e game. According to my records, we started June 6, 2010, so the game is over five years old now.  It's not on a tight schedule, but we've just ticked over to Epic Tier as of our last session, so I'm betting we've got at least another year left before we hit the endgame.

Day 16:  Longest Game Session.

An eight+ hour Champions game in the summer of 1982.  We averted an alien invasion, largely through diplomacy and some pretty major bluffing.  The session was seriously roleplay heavy, and I remember we went about five hours at one stretch without rolling a die.

RPGaDay2015: Day 14

It's been two weeks and I've stayed on schedule.  Tomorrow and Sunday might be late; we've got a road trip this weekend.  We'll see.

Anyway, favorite RPG accessory.  Another easy answer.  It's this bad boy here, The World's Greatest Screen.  It's a heavy-duty four-panel GM screen with eight 8.5 x 11 pockets that you can use to insert any damned thing you want. I love it so much I've got both the portrait and landscape versions.

Seriously, this thing appeals to me on so many levels.  I am a devoted user of GM screens, but most commercial/official ones let me down in some way (sturdiness, decisions regarding information, ugly).  With TWGS, I can make my own custom everything.  And believe me, I do.

RPGaDay2015: Day 13

Favorite RPG podcast:

I'm very picky when it comes to podcasts, especially gaming podcasts.  To earn my ongoing loyalty, they need to meet the following criteria:

Length:  No more than ninety minutes per episode.  I don't care how interesting your topic is, I listen to these things on my commute and seldom feel like devoting multiple days to it.  Also, in my experience, the longer the podcast, the more likely there's a bunch of cruft due to poor editing, poor decision-making, or both.

(I will listen to a longer actual-play podcast so long as 1) it stays on topic (I don't need to hear a bunch of non-game table talk; 2) It's still edited into discrete episodes; and 3) The GM and players actually know what they're doing.  Chances are, if I'm listening to an actual play, it's because I want to get a sense of how the game plays. If I hear glaring rules errors, I'm tuning out.)

Frequency:  You've got to maintain your output if I'm going to keep listening.

Originality:  I'm not looking for you to reinvent the wheel.  But I don't want you to rehash the same topics over and over again (or, ideally, at all).  If you keep retreading the same ground over and over again, I'm going to get bored.  At least look at it from a different angle.

Every Episode Is Someone's First:  I really hate podcasts that cater to an established audience the podcasters know in some capacity.  In-jokes abound, often times schtick or comments are directed to that select group of people and it quickly becomes an impenetrable mess for a listener who isn't in on the joke.

So yeah, I'm a hard sell on most podcasts.  For a couple of years, I was a big fan of "Two GM's, One Mic," but they started getting repetitive, and then life got in the way of their schedules.  I used to listen to "Darker Days Radio" religiously when I was taking evening walks, especially their "Secret Frequency" segments.  But, I have zero prospects for playing a World of Darkness game, their expansion to covering other games I don't play, and sporadic scheduling meant I stopped listening.

The one that I have stuck with from the beginning is "Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff."  While there have been occasional clunkers (for instance, I couldn't listen to the segment on Cagliostro because of mispronunciation), the fact that each episode breezes along through multiple topics, some very gaming oriented, others less so, makes it easy to just fast-forward past a minor annoyance to get to something more to my liking.