Your Favorite Tabletop Role-Playing Games

Feelitmon wrote: 2. Champions is the game that I have probably spent the most time thinking about, creating content, engaging with other players and GMs online, and proof-reading. This is a wonderful points-based superhero game in the mold of V&V or GURPS Supers. What Champions does so well is to model the seemingly irreconcilable facts that a) superheroes wield destructive power that ought to result in massive loss of life and b) most comics don't actually kill off major characters very often. So one player wants to play a gun-toting super-patriot with no qualms about killing, another player wants to play an invulnerable brawler, and the third player wants to play a psionic character with completely normal physical characteristics? Champions has you covered, and quite elegantly. This was GURPS before GURPS, and it did it better, although the HERO system had mixed results when ported over to non-superhero settings, in my opinion.

Man, I have owned this for decades and still haven't got to play it. It looks really cool. One of these days...

No love for Ars Magica?

Still the most extraordinary role-playing system I've come across over three decades in the hobby. The setting is simple: it's early Medieval Europe, but everything in folklore is real. God, the Devil, faeries, mythical creatures and, of course, magic and wizards. Rules-wise the best thing is the magic system which lets players combine fifteen different disciplines to effectively create any spell they want.

What really blew me away, though, was its concept of troupe play. In this, everyone runs three characters - a wizard, a "companion" (some local notable like a knight or monk) and a peasant. There are no false power differentials here, and a neophyte wizard could blow away the mightiest warrior like swatting a gnat. On each adventure a player selects one of their characters and describes what the others are doing: a wizard might be studying, a peasant might be helping to rebuild the coven's hideout. All of these activities are incorporated by the GM in the ongoing plot.

And speaking of the GM, it's a temporary role. They have characters like everyone else, all of which are assigned to "background" tasks while they're being the GM. They run several adventures in a story arc, and then hand over to another player to continue the narrative with their own ideas. Over time, the idea is that all these things adds up to an epic cohesive tale woven by the group as a whole, with participants pinging off each other's ideas. It's incredible. It was also hugely influential, with one of the authors going on to found the World of Darkness line while the other founded the idea of one-shot narrative games.

Other favourites: the new edition of Paranoia is fantastic. Also D&D 5e. I love the idea of adventuring in Glorantha but none of the existing rule sets for that setting have ever really set me on fire.

Perdo Corporum! I had some good sessions of Ars Magica, even though my mage got incinerated by a fireball at the end of the first adventure. I think we hit the summer holidays around that time and didn't pick it back up.

In the mid-late 90s I was heavily into WoD, mainly due to the university LARP that was running. We did sometimes run dice and paper games but for the most part it was getting the books for all the lore we could pull into the LARP*, and getting into stupid usenet arguments with Justin Achilli. I loved the work Bruce Baugh put into Wraith: The Oblivion, and I'd love to cite that as my top game, but we didn't get to play much of it. Vampire: The Masquerade has to be my number one RPG, purely for the volume of experiences it brought.

Second only to that has to be AD&D 2nd Edition with THAC0 and all that nonsense. This was a game that I was able to share with my sister, and to this day she still has all those books, though I did get her a full set of 5th Ed for Christmas. It's also the game that got me into Games Workshop, as I used to buy Dragon magazine and White Dwarf back when that had RPG stuff in it. The first time I saw the miniature diorama photos for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader was all it took to fall down that rabbit hole. Still, AD&D 2nd is responsible by far for the most tabletop RPG role-playing I did in my life.

It's a long way from those top two to any third place. I liked MERP (Middle Earth Role Playing) though I never used the setting, funnily enough. I just took the rules and ran a small game with that. I had a decent time overall with Shadowrun, but never really liked the setting. Similarly I never clicked with the humour of Paranoia, though I did run a couple of games. Another RPG that someone borrowed and I never saw again (along with the Judge Dredd RPG).

*We didn't do that Mind's Eye Theater stuff. This was a home-brew from some Fantasy LARPers so there was rubber sword stuff going on. Challenges were hard set win/fail based on stats or expending blood to boost them, and relying on RP to not cheese or twink the game, with mixed results.

I love the World of Darkness setting despite the extreme cosmological problems, but I never liked their mechanics. The basic die roll to attack in combat had too many steps:

1. GM decides on relevant skill and relevant attribute.
2. GM decides on target number, based on the current situation.
3. Player rolls a bunch of 10-sided dice, based on the relevant skill and the relevant attribute.
4. Player counts how many dice met or exceeded the target number. These are successes.
5. Player can choose to spend a point of Willpower for an automatic success.
6. Depending on the type of potential damage (bruising, aggravated, etc.), the defender may get a soak roll.
7. The soak roll is a bunch of 10-sided dice, based on a relevant skill and attribute.
8. Defender counts up number of successes on soak roll.
9. Subtract soak roll successes from attack roll successes.
10. If the net number is positive, mark off that many boxes of health on the defender.
11. Depending the type of damage, the health boxes may be marked off with a slash, an x, or a star. These markings are also potentially changed if health boxes are already filled in with some kind of mark.
12. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until the fight is over.

By the way, there are often ties in initiative, with limited means to break those ties.

Live-action play in the World of Darkness was worse, because you use Rock-Paper-Scissors instead of dice. Skills and supernatural abilities often give you a chance to re-test after a given test of RPS. So it's like flipping a coin, a lot, and the coin often lands on end and must be re-flipped. Except that there is a slight pyschological dimension, due to the inherent second-guessing of RPS. Now imagine such a combat involving two dozen players with maybe 2 or 3 referees to manage it.

Xerxes wrote: 1. Dragon Warriors - flat out the best and most atmospheric low fantasy rpg

Dragon Warriors just missed my top 5. I never had the original (corgi?) books, but I thought the Mongoose/Flaming Cobra edition was fantastic.

Quick Top 5

1. AD&D 2nd Edition – so many issues, but I probably played this more than anything. When rolling up characters, anyone who could possibly meet requirements to become a paladin was obligated to be one.
2. Deadlands – The initiative system in this game was really quite clever. Quickness check determined number of card draws from a standard deck of playing cards. Initiative counted down from Ace to 2 with Spades, Hearts, Diamonds and Clubs. If you wanted, you could put a card up your sleeve for the next round instead of taking an action. Sleeve cards could interrupt any action when taken. The western horror setting was very cool too.
3. Vampire: the Masquerade – The setting was really well done, but the storyteller system always felt pretty wooden.
4. Battlelords – Alien mercenaries running around space working for various companies for contracts or bounties. It’s basically the standard loot and slay campaign, but watching someone’s character become more in debt due to cybernetic replacements and take more dangerous work to pay off that debt in an unending doom spiral was always good motivation for characters.
5. Paranoia – The system was pure garbage (West End Games), but the setting was a delightful dystopia governed by an oppressive AI where membership to a secret society was treasonous (everyone is in a secret society). Being a mutant is treasonous (everyone is a mutant) and death is inevitable. Despite that, each citizen has five clones in tanks waiting to pick up where you left off.

Mr. White wrote: Dragon Warriors just missed my top 5. I never had the original (corgi?) books, but I thought the Mongoose/Flaming Cobra edition was fantastic.

Hell yeah. I forgot about this.

Paranoia will always be my favorites role-playing game, it was the first game I ever saw that took it's high-concept premise and managed to work its themes and ideas throughout the mechanics and play style. It's one of the rare story-focused games that people seem to grasp intuitively, even dedicated power-gamers and rule lawyers seem perfectly happy to roll with the game's "your screwed anyways so you might as a well play along" ethos. It's also absolutely hilarious.

Second-runners up are Unknown Army's grimy post-modern horror and Delta Green's Lovecraft in the modern law enforcement/intelligence framework.

I love the setting for the original Mage: The Ascension but I have never actually gotten to play it.

I was kind of waiting for someone to mention Ars Magica, so thanks, Matt and Jem! That system sadly almost never lived up to its promise for me, mainly because of the group I played with and the DM, who couldn't give up control over his story to have another DM take it somewhere else. I had some fun sessions with it as a player. And my worst gaming experience ever, details on that other site.
Shadowrun was fun for about two years, but never as fun as Paranoia, which we used to play as a kind of intermission between campaigns of Call of Cthulhu. Learned a lot from that as a DM.
I was lucky to find Call of Cthulhu before I was twenty, after years of increasingly dull fantasy roleplaying (ever heard of Das Schwarze Auge?) with an increasingly dull group of mainly power gamers. A well-done campaign of CoC is where it's at for me. This, as has been mentioned, includes players capable of roleplaying ignorance (especially of mythos stuff), incompetence and growing madness and paranoia, which isn't as hard as one might think. Especially if the campaign and DM support slightly divergent goals for the PCs, the level of mistrust and paranoia can take it to another level. Proceed with extreme caution, though or you lose the plot.
We had characters retire or spend long periods of time in asylums, thus turning into NPCs. If it fit, random NPCs were then taken over by players to keep the story going. Being able to get advice from a veteran or, as the DM, just pull a rabbit out of your behind without losing a beat made our world so much bigger.

1. Call of Cthulhu
2. Fiasco
3. Stormbringer
4. Paranoia
5. Ars Magica

A baker's dozen:

1. Mouse Guard. A great game of little heroes. Crunchy and involved, rewards long-term play. Characters develop and change, and are constantly pushed to decide what is truly important to them.

2. Torchbearer. The core system of Mouse Guard, recast as a dungeon crawl. Still crunchy and involved, but this time the system wants to murder you, which is does by mechanically reinforcing exactly how pants-shittingly terrifying it would be to be a fantasy tomb raider. Exploring caves in the real world is already lethally dangerous; now take away all modern technology and add giant spiders.

3. Ryuutama. A Japanese RPG, translated a few years ago. The tagline is "Miyazaki's Oregon Trail," which is about right. Cute and heartwarming stories of journeys. Food, water, and encumbrance are front and center, and it is quite possible to starve and die if you aren't careful -- but this reinforces the themes of teamwork and togetherness. Perfect in tone and setting.

4. Burning Wheel. Tolkien by way of Game of Thrones. A superb lifepath system that creates deep, passionate, and flawed characters. The core system is simple, and laser-focused on pushing characters to their breaking point. Complex (but optional) subsystems for zooming in on moments of superb drama.

5. Contenders. An odd duck -- a GMless RPG of noir boxing stories. Think On the Waterfront, Cinderella Man, Hurricane, etc. Boxing as a metaphor for struggle and (possible) triumph. The fights serve to highlight the relationships in the characters' lives, and why they're fighting. The combat system is really good, avoiding the twin traps of the death spiral (where whoever lands the first hit grinds away and wins) and random combat (where combat is so swingy that anyone can win at any time, so it doesn't matter that you made a bunch of good decisions previously). Here, if you get beaten down you can fight back by being smart.

6. Dogs in the Vineyard. A seminal game about power and authority. Tell the players that they represent God, give them a gun and a badge of authority, and turn them loose into complex real world messes -- greed, envy, affairs, sabotage, jealousy, pride, hate. No one is truly innocent, but everyone looks to the players to make a decision. I don't play it much these days but it informs every game I run.

7. Pendragon. One of the foundations of the hobby, about one of the foundational myths of Western culture. A game of passion and drama that somehow seamlessly blends high chivalry, faerie, and blood-and-mud dark ages war. D&D addresses its lethality by adding healing potions and magic. Pendragon address its by adding a generational aspect: when your PC dies, you may start playing his eldest son. So it pressures players to wed, start a dynasty, and protect it with alliances. A brilliant game.

8. Dungeon Crawl Classics. The funniest parts of D&D, turned up to 11. Crazy, random, and gonzo. Supported by a stellar line of adventures.

9. The Quiet Year. I talked about this in a recent thread. It's not really an RPG, but if you like RPGs you'll probably like this. Tells great and moving stories.

10. Blade of the Iron Throne. A great, dark sword & sorcery epic with crunchy combat. I wrote a review of it here .

11. Legend. A member of the Runequest family. This one's my favorite; it's clear and fast, without a lot of excess cruft.

12. Stormbringer. Navigating the eternal war between law and chaos in Moorcock's Young Kingdoms.

13. Burning Empires. A variant of Burning Wheel, set in the universe of the Iron Empires comics. Kind of 40k-esque without the goofier elements. Has a strict overarching structure that force-marches the game to a thundering conclusion.

Former favorites, now sitting dusty in the corner:

Call of Cthulhu. I had so many great times with this, but am mostly over it now. My tastes for how I like to GM have shifted in a direction that makes investigative games hard for me to run. (Basically, if there is a solution to a mystery, and the players can't figure it out, then you get to either watch them dick around for the rest of the session, or you spoon-feed them the solution. Neither is satisfying to me anymore.)

Fiasco. Also had good times with this, but it's so lightweight mechanically that it's barely above sitting down with your friends and deciding to tell a story. Great if you're all on the same page, otherwise a frustrating waste of an evening.

Ah, how could I forget about Burning Empires. We played a great campaign of that when it first came out. So awesome.

I have a copy of the mouse guard roleplay game sitting around. I thought the challenges system was weird but it seemed interesting.

It is both weird and interesting. The abstract nature of it makes it both flexible and possibly confusing. It's easy enough to know what Attack, Defend, Feint, and Maneuver mean in the context of a physical fight; but when you are "fighting" a blizzard it can get weird.

But it works well, gets everyone at the table involved, and produces good results and good stories.

dysjunct wrote: Call of Cthulhu. I had so many great times with this, but am mostly over it now. My tastes for how I like to GM have shifted in a direction that makes investigative games hard for me to run. (Basically, if there is a solution to a mystery, and the players can't figure it out, then you get to either watch them dick around for the rest of the session, or you spoon-feed them the solution. Neither is satisfying to me anymore.)

Not on my watch. I mean, we are supposed to help each other have a wonderful roleplaying experience, but if they fail, they fail. If the murderer goes free, of course he will be back, maybe setting up a plan to destroy those pesky investigators. If the Beast is summoned, well, best of luck. We had the world go down in flames and humanity enslaved once or twice. Wrap the characters' stories up and open a new book. I don't think it's fun if you always succeed, and in CoC the stakes can be pretty high.

Thanks for Pendragon. Completely forgot about that. Memories.

1. Astonish Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea - basically basic/AD/D in a much more Howard setting, very dark fantasy.
2. Dungeon Crawl Classics - all basic dnd but very gonzo
3. Paranoia
4. Gamma world
5. Warhammer FRP - 2nd edition - almost entirely because of the D100 (or with expansion D1000) careers table in character generation.
6. Dark Heresy - probably had most fun as a player in this, though the D100 system is nothing special.
7. Burning Wheel - overly complex but I end up liking it anyway.
8. Traveller