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Old 08-30-2014, 10:01 PM   #1
Agemegos
 
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Default #RPGaday topic 31: Favourite RPG of all time

I'm doing RPG-a-day in August, as promoted by Dave Chapman (Autocratik). This is it: Day 31 of 31.





Favourite RPG of all time.

I've already divulged (on Day 18) that my favourite game system is ForeSight, so in the interests of keeping the repetition down to dull roar I'm going to take this theme as asking about my favourite RPG in the sense of game run, not game system.

I have pulled off some very neat pieces of work at short lengths, often in adventures that I came up with in half an hour while a scratch team of players were whipping up characters for a one-shot. There was a beautiful little Alan-Garneresque adventure that started in Cheshire on Midsummer Eve 1939 and ended with the PCs dying of hypothermia in an underground lake in Austria, having laid down their lives to set loose King Arthur and save Britain. There was the adventure of The Man With the Wooden Foot in a Gehennum scratch game, and a neat piece in which Mark Cogan's character casually passed himself off as an avatar of Coryon, only to discover in the denouement that he had unwittingly effected exactly one of the Devil's bargains that that oneiros is fabled for. There was a FLAT BLACK one-shot in which the twist ending was that the villain's scheme could not possibly work because Tony Purcell's character wasn't carrying a lethal weapon. Even 9,401, the adventure I designed for Phenomenon 2005 and have run several times since, has its admirers.

But in all those cases the flashy effects and dramatic conclusions have been the fruit of GMing pyrotechnics, and there has been actually rather little substantial collaboration with the other players. The same is true to a smaller extent with my neatest and most symmetrical and most formally satisfactory campaign, the seven-session Survivors campaign that I ran at the end of second semester 1987, and that absolutely, positively had to finish before the start of swot vac. That had some beautiful improv scenes in it (including the "most memorable encounter" I described on the 29th), but I exercised some pretty heavy-handed control to make sure that the campaign jumped through all the intended fiery hoops.

The Giants of the Earth derailed their campaign before the end of their first session. The plan was for a long serious of increasingly obvious attempts by the Emperor Regikhord IV to arrange a marriage between his daughter-and-heiress Lysandra and a mysterious scapegrace called Jokanan, of no discernible antecedents. Halfway through the first session, while Jokanan was trying to steal the princess whom the PCs had rightfully rescued, a PC shot him dead and dumped his body over the side of the boat. My campaign plan was completely derailed. So I put that sucker into four-wheel drive and kept right on going.

By the terms of the decree that he had contrived as a way of surreptitiously ennobling Jokanan, Regikhord elevated the PCs to the very lowest level of the technical nobility, and gave them an estate of worth — but that was haunted and deserted. After the PCs dealt with that and put their feet on the path to riches and power and the bitter enmity of the emperor, one (the one who shot Jokanan, it happens) fell in love with the princess and begged her father for her hand. With no excuse for refusing this suit outright (the PCs were in the position that he had designed to make Jokanan an eligible suitor) the emperor set a romantic-sounding but impossible precondition: that within one year and one day the suitor should deliver up the Sword With No Name as a bride price. The PCs investigated the Sword with No Name, and found that it had been ontologically lost by someone fooling around with archetypes. So they went to the Land of Lost Things in the World of Dreams and un-lost it. Then they could determine by research that it was in the hoard of Chlorophane, the mightiest and richest of dragons, whose whereabouts were unknown. So they went to the bottom of the Ocean to ask the King of Elemental Dragons of the Sea where it was. And they went to the World of Forms to fetch the antithesis of fire for putting out Chlorophane's internal flame if necessary. And they did a deal with a minor god to get a magical portal opened between their home and the island where Chlorophane had his lair. Then they tried to sneak into Chlorophane's lair and steal the Sword, but got spotted. In the running fight that followed one was killed and another critically injured and a third badly injured, but they put out Chlorophane's fire which made him really mad and he heard the password that opened the gate. And when they thought they were safe he followed them through into their castle and turned out to be a powerful naming magician but he got stuck and the party magician despite his wounds magically weakened one scale on Chlorophane's head and the last PC on his feet stabbed him to death with the Sword with No Name.

So the dead PC was resuscitated by this mysterious healing-woman who had been hanging around, and took the Sword with No Name to the emperor as his daughter's agreed bride-price. And married the princess, and became the darling of the Opposition. Then the PCs set about a project to recover Chlorophane's prodigious hoard from an island on the other side of the world, and they had to pay 90% (by volume) for transportation, but still ended up with the basement of their castle so stuffed with gold and silver and objets d'art and miraculous artifacts that the mere rumour of their wealth destabilised the kingdom. When the mysterious healer-woman had all four PCs in debt for their lives she asked them to destroy a plague of werewolves in Ramastaarn and restore her to her queendom, so they did that. Neighbours and tenant had problems, provincial governors became problems. Ghosts and ogres were dealt with. PCs had affaires and got married. Annoying but unkillable people came from Plane of Higher Consequence. The emperor's position got worse and worse and his enmity ever more bitter. The empress had to be rescued and taken home to the Blessed Isles. There was a cold civil war that eventually went hot, and love affaires and secret heirs and deeds of derring-do. In the end the PCs were kings, or dead, or widowed and self-exiled to Faerie.

Of course there was a certain amount of filler as well, and loose ends got dropped here and there. In the end I didn't ring down the curtain at the natural denouement, and the campaign straggled out in anticlimax. But the first part of it, from when I let the players have their heads until the story of their conflict with Regikhord was played out in his death was my favourite RPG experience of all time. I spent a two or three long sessions a week in a flow of collaborative improvisation. Though I had cards up my sleeve and manipulative fingers in multiple pies, there weren't any forced choices and I very seldom knew what was going to happen next. It was a story that Frank Hampshire, Andrew Smith, Tony Purcell, Anthony Bushell and I told to each other as we made it up, and I found it both absorbing and exhilarating.
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Last edited by Agemegos; 08-31-2014 at 05:08 AM.
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Old 08-31-2014, 01:42 AM   #2
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Default Re: #RPGaday topic 31: Favourite RPG of all time

Mine has to be Dungeons and Dragons, in all of the various incarnations I've played regularly. Whether Charts, THAC0, Feats, or Honor dice, D&D's been fun for over 30 years and I'm still playing a version of it today.

I almost said Paranoia. I love Paranoia, but as a comic-relief break from the character depth and long storylines you get into in other RPGs. Plus I didn't get into Paranoia until the '90s, so D&D's got a 10 year head start. :)
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Old 08-31-2014, 02:31 AM   #3
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Default Re: #RPGaday topic 31: Favourite RPG of all time

Yeah, still GURPS. For favourite campaign that I've run, it's probably a joint first between the Reign of Steel game that served as a testbed for Will to Live and the WWII-with-magic game that's still going on. They're both reletively recent, so I hope to run better ones in the future!
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Old 08-31-2014, 04:34 AM   #4
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Default Re: #RPGaday topic 31: Favourite RPG of all time

Well, based on how often I use it: GURPS.

Based on how it liberated me from DnD: RuneQuest.

Based on how much they opened up my GMing: a tie between OTE and EVERWAY.
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Old 08-31-2014, 07:59 AM   #5
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Default Re: #RPGaday topic 31: Favourite RPG of all time

GURPS has the potential, but I haven't played it much. The best campaign was in 2ndE D&D. Nostalgia value gives it all to Swedish Drakar&Demoner.
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Old 08-31-2014, 08:22 AM   #6
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Default Re: #RPGaday topic 31: Favourite RPG of all time

* Best campaign I have ever played in: My friend Janet's Changeling: The Dreaming campaign. Wildly goofy action, eccentric characters, but some moments of real terror.

* Best campaign I ever ran: I'm going with Manse. Run in Big Eyes Small Mouth. Inspired partly by the cosmology of Exalted, partly by the communities of mages in Ars Magica, partly by the isolated caste setting of the Gormenghast books (which I don't actually like as fiction!), partly (obviously) by the anime style of action and drama. Each of the four players had four characters: A senior member of an aristocrat house of mages with its own traditional magic style, an adolescent cadet member of such a house, a soldier with the duty of guarding the mage community, and a servant of the castle establishment. Players were all very imaginative people who contributed their own full measure of worldbuilding; in fact I ran the first two years of the campaign predominantly off character backstories. And we managed to have comedy, romance, terror (not horror), and even politics woven in.

* Game system I use most: GURPS, no question.

* RPG I like best aesthetically: I think I'm going with Mage: The Ascension, because I really, really like the way the system enables freeform magic and the way the whole thing reflects the ontological subjectivism that's the world premise. It does have the big flaw of the Nephandi, but then RuneQuest II, which would be my other choice, has the similar flaw of Chaos.

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Old 08-31-2014, 09:49 AM   #7
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Default Re: #RPGaday topic 31: Favourite RPG of all time

Runequest, due to the length of time I've played and been familiar with it, and because of its ties to Glorantha.
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Old 08-31-2014, 11:03 AM   #8
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Default Re: #RPGaday topic 31: Favourite RPG of all time

My favourite out of things I've run is probably Infinite Cabal, because of its sheer variety of weirdness and the scale of the issues it deals with.

Second is probably some D&D of a decade ago, based on The Exploits of Engelbrecht, which taught me an important lesson about adapting stories from other media to RPGs: leave out all the principal characters, and put the PCs in their place.
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Old 08-31-2014, 11:34 AM   #9
Anders
 
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Default Re: #RPGaday topic 31: Favourite RPG of all time

Quote:
Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery View Post
Runequest, due to the length of time I've played and been familiar with it, and because of its ties to Glorantha.
Have you looked at the Guide to Glorantha?
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Old 09-01-2014, 02:43 AM   #10
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Default Re: #RPGaday topic 31: Favourite RPG of all time

Now that it's all over… Michael and I considered our answers to all of these questions at somewhat greater length in the latest episode of the podcast Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice.
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