most influential tabletop RPG designers

[Johan Larson]

Who are they?

Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson for D&D
Sandy Peterson for Call of Cthulhu
Marc Miller for Traveller
Steve Perrin and Greg Stafford for RuneQuest
Mark Rein-Hagen (and others?) for Vampire: The Masquerade
George MacDonald and Steve Peterson for Champions
Ed Greenwood for The Forgotten Realms
Steve Jackson for GURPS

Others?

[MadWombat]

A couple of possibilities:

Steve Peterson for Hero Games
M.A.R. Barker for Empire of the Petal Throne

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Johan Larson

Who are they?

Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson for D&D
Sandy Peterson for Call of Cthulhu
Marc Miller for Traveller
Steve Perrin and Greg Stafford for RuneQuest
Mark Rein-Hagen (and others?) for Vampire: The Masquerade
George MacDonald and Steve Peterson for Champions
Ed Greenwood for The Forgotten Realms
Steve Jackson for GURPS

Wayne Shaw invented the concept of disadvantages, that is traits that are undesirable and which you choose during character creation in exchange for compensatory points. It was as part of a point-based superhero character creation system that to some extent inspired Champions.

It's not just RuneQuest, but more widely the Basic RolePlaying system family in general, and perhaps in particular Stafford's Pendragon RPG.

People in Denmark and Sweden will also often have played or otherwise touched the "Draker och Demoner" RPG, which was a licensed translation (with some changes) of BRP, and at least in Denmark it seems to have been deliberately published and packaged in such a way that some people might mistake it for a translation of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D vs DoD). I happen to have some serious problems with BRP, but compared to what else was around at that early time, it did offer several improvements.

Mark Rein*Hagen made Ars Magica first, before Vampire and the other World of Darkness subsystems.

Both Ars Magica and Pendragon seem to be early examples of historical fantasy, although taking somewhat different approaches.

I think the main one you've overlooked, if we ignore "indie" type systems (which I know nothing about and also consider to be irrelevant) is Greg Costayikan's Star Wars D6-based syste, published by West End Games. As I recall reading, it was very well received.

Chivalry & Sorcery has a reputation, or wants to have a reputation, for being high-historicity, but I had a brief email exchange with the thencurrent publisher of it something like 10 or 12 or 15 years ago where I couldn't get them to explain what was so high historicity about the C&S: Rebirth set that I had purchased. Only much later did I realize that Rebirth is eminently high-historicity if you come from a D&D background, but since I don't, instead coming from an Ars Magica and GURPS background, Rebirth is justifiably underwhelming. So I'm not sure it did inspire a lot of people. What I've seen, both Rebirth which I've read fairly closely and earlier versions which I've skimmed bits of, it was a very variant kind of D&D, with character classes and so forth, and super-elaborate magic systems filled with hoops that the player's character had to jump through (compare Ars Magica's far less hoop-intensive vis system), although discussion on Usenet perhaps 10 or 15 years ago did involve some claims from the original designers about what was probably, from a 1970's or early 80s perspective, game design innovations.

I don't think RoleMaster counts. It's its own thing, and doesn't seem to have inspiret much of anything else. The ICE guys also did MERP, which seems to me to have a huge number of supplements, covering not only the War of the Ring-era but also Second Age and earlier. But again it seems to have not inspired a lot of others to do other similar things. The LotR/Silmarillion setting doesn't lent itself well to game mechanics and objective simulation. Later they did HARP, which I think is somewhat RM/MERP-like but I haven't really looked (it didn't sound any more interesting than RM did, so why bother?), while Steven S. Long, long the curator of Hero System, made the Lord of the Rings RPG published by Decipher.

I kinda want BESM to be on the list. But I don't think it deserves it. I don't think it made as hugh a splash as it should, and it's telling that 3rd Edition never really got published. Part of the explanation for its limited success might be potential fans who assumed it was a system for something they perceived to be the genre of anime, which is absurd since anime isn't a genre, but with their lack of understanding of what anime is and what genre is preventing these potential fans from becoming actual fans.

What about the whole freeware RPG thing? Where did it start? I remember from back in the early 1990s there was a lot of talk about TSR exerting or wanting to exert an extreme degree of control over publications (note the OGL and d20 license things almost a decade later; quite a wind change), and that caused a number of explicitly freely useable systems to be made, including some kind of net.book-thingie system whose name I don't recall, and of course FUDGE by Steffan O'Sullivan, and numerous other web-published freeware systems (and even a few ones that may have been published slightly before the web arrived - Quest FRP was initially shareware). Some other free systems include The Guide to Adventure, Brand X and the probably more obscure "Epic" or "EPIC". Of those, FUDGE seems to be the only one which had any influence, in that it, a system based on simple simulation, inspired the creation of the metagaming-based... what's it called again? FATE or something. As I said, I have no interest in "indie" games.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Johan Larson

Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson for D&D

Yes, for the concept.

Steve Perrin and Greg Stafford for RuneQuest

For showing that you could have organised mechanics.

George MacDonald and Steve Peterson for Champions

For lots of concepts, notably Advantages, Disadvantages and systems of modifiers.

Marc Miller for Traveller
Sandy Peterson for Call of Cthulhu
Mark Rein-Hagen (and others?) for Vampire: The Masquerade
Ed Greenwood for The Forgotten Realms

All of these made the same kind of contribution: expanding the range of stories, and providing settings for them.

Steve Jackson for GURPS

Mostly doing it better. There aren't many basic concepts that are original to GURPS, or TFT before it. It just works better as a generic system.

[vicky_molokh]

Mark Rein•Hagen for Storyteller and its derivatives.
Grabowski and Moran/Borgstrom for Exalted.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Grabowski and Moran/Borgstrom for Exalted.

In what way has Exalted influenced the rest of the hobby?

The question was "most influential", not "best designer" or "most imaginative" or "most talented" or "first to do X".

(So, for instance, I think GURPS is "most influential" at promoting the idea of generic systems independent of a setting. BRP might have printed a condensed version of their mechanics as a reference, but it was included in a bunch of setting-specific games, and not marketed as its own thing independent of their games. But, after GURPS appeared, just about everyone stripped the setting-specific parts of their rules and started claiming they, too, were generic systems. Although I'd heard of RQ and Cthulhu, I'd never heard of BRP as a standalone thing until post-GURPS. That's a difference in influence.)

[Andrew Hackard]

I would credit the Paizo team for Pathfinder, not because it broke particularly new ground in gameplay but because it showed that a publisher could in fact challenge D&D's dominance of fantasy roleplaying and thrive at a time when D&D itself was foundering.

I agree with Greg Costikyan, but for Paranoia, not the d6 system. Paranoia's tropes ("Trust the computer." "Traitor!") leaked out into the hobby even if people never actually played the game. In a lot of ways, I think the same is true of Call of Cthulhu; people talk about "losing SAN" who have never played the game.

If you're going to credit Ed Greenwood for the Realms, I think you also have to credit Weis and Hickman for Dragonlance.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

If you're going to credit Ed Greenwood for the Realms, I think you also have to credit Weis and Hickman for Dragonlance.

The Dragonlance setting is vaguely more original than Forgotten Realms, but I honestly don't see the strong appeal of either. The Dark Sun setting is original, but failed to gain success.

The Mythic Europe setting in Ars Magica is much more original than it seems, in than unlike most other RPG settings it goes for high historiticy rather than the D&D Land ambience, but rather than gain popularity by that, Mythic Europe intimidates most in the hobby into assuming that you need a PhD in medieval history to participate.

[Daigoro]

I was going to say Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (UK) for their Fighting Fantasy series of books, as an introduction for young readers to RPGs and which was a gateway for myself, but I'd forgotten they were also the founders of Games Workshop, which is influential enough by itself. They also published White Dwarf magazine, which in the 80's at least had a huge influence on the spread of RPGs, until it and GW started to focus more on Warhammer.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

In what way has Exalted influenced the rest of the hobby?

The question was "most influential", not "best designer" or "most imaginative" or "most talented" or "first to do X".

The given examples seemed to list people most influential within the context of this or that system/game line (listed after 'for'). In that sense Grabowski influenced Exalted, while Mark Rein•Hagen had an influence on multiple games based on the same engine (but not on, say, GURPS).