Call of Cthulhu - it's a classic, extremely important, and the system can still stand up today. It's perfect for what one wants it to do. It also upends the idea of 'winning' at an RPG. Your character succeedes in CoC by staying as ignorant as possible while trying to survive.
D&D 5th Edition - D&D because it IS tabletop roleplaying. 5th edition because the rules are designed to be splatbook proof, even at high levels. You can have good games at any character or player level.
Paranoia - it turned the 'Monty Haul' style of murder-hoboing on its head AND the Gygaxian-style play of 'tell the caller what you want to do and they'll tell the GM' into a flurry of giggly note scribbling between GM and players.
Honorable mention: Torg for making the idea of a shared-world metaplot real for a lot of players. That made a community out of people rather than the endless number of personal settings. Compare to Traveller, which has a metaplot but people talk about 'in MY Traveller universe', where EVERYONE's Torg games happened in the same universe - to the point that local campaigns were made official canonical happenings.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shostak
Your local librarian asks you to choose three RPGs for the collection. Which three do you recommend, and why?
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