Roleplaying Games

Prince Valiant, Greg Stafford's 1989 game from chaosium based on Hal Foster's legendary Sunday cartoon strips, is the idea game for introducing folks to roleplaying games: it has simple rules, clear presentation, a setting that is known to almost everybody, and a number of short adventures included in the book makes it easy to pick up and play anytime, and easy for new players to understand. Too bad it is out of print. (This, by the way, was the original “Story Telling Game”.) Pendragon, Stafford's next Arthurian game, is a wonderful game for the confirmed gamer, but doesn't serve as well as an introductory game.

GURPS, by Steve Jackson Games, the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, is particularly well supported with sourcebooks.

CORPS, the Complete Omniversal Roleplaying System by BTRC, a terse and elegent generic roleplaying system.

Elric! by Chaosium (and Stormbringer, its predecessor and now (2001) it's successor as well), along with its companion games Corum and the past and future Hawkmoon. Here's some thoughts on why to game in the world of Elric.

Fudge, written by Steffan O'Sullivan and a host of USENET posters in the early 1990s and originally published in book form by Grey Ghost Games and now by many publishers, is both a complete roleplaying game for those who like free-form rules-light games and a construction kit for building your own custom roleplaying game for those who prefer something more crunchy.

There is a community-maintained Guide to Fudge that is a distillation of of the wisdom of the Fudge Mailing List. Steffan has his own Fudge page with a lot of designer notes and links to other Fudge pages.

Epiphany by BTRC, a deceptively simple dice-less fantasy roleplaying game. (I have a short description of it).

Call of Cthulhu by Chaosium, is a classic horror roleplaying game set in the worlds of H. P. Lovecraft's stories.

WFRP

DragonQuest, originally published by SPI.

Space: 1889, by Frank Chadwick, the original steampunk roleplaying game, was originally published by Games Designers Workshop and has been republished by Heliograph, Inc. (I have a short description).

BESM (Big Eyes, Small Mouth) from Guardians of Order, an anime RPG, is a good game even for those who aren't really anime fans.^[1] The second edition is especially good, giving you a lite, flexible system that works reasonably well from normal humans to over-the-top superheros, as well as integrated robot/mecha/vehicle and magic design systems. If someone asked me to recommend a good universal roleplaying game that was simpler than the Hero System from Hero Games, better at high-power levels than CORPS, and complete in one book (unlike GURPS), I'd say BESM would be a good choice.

Tri-Stat dX, released in July 2003, looks like a fairly comprehensive synthesis of BESM and Guardians superhero game, SAS. dX is a bit crunchier than BESM, and is completely generic (without the anime trappings of BESM), but at 10$US for the printed version and free for the PDF it's definitely a great value. I hope this does well for Guardians.

Personally, though, I'm glad that Guardians is still supporting BESM, since the addition of PMVs to Tri-Stat dX adds just enough extra complexity to the base system to turn some people off. I don't think it's actually that much more complicated, but it certainly gives that appearance.

BESM's more-or-less effects-based powers system is pretty flexible, but the effects-based paradigm takes some getting used to; I remember being surprised and delighted when I learned that in BESM a AD&D-like thief backstab ability is something that you build with the standard Weapon Attack attribute with a couple of weapon disabilities. This system does seem to work well for anime-type characters, who may all have weird and unique powers. Mostly things are well defined, like Weapon Attack, but there are a few places where things are a lot more fuzzy. Overall it works pretty well, and is much simpler than Hero.

Big Eyes, Small Mouth, 3rd edition was published by White Wolf's Arthaus division after Guardians of Order ceased operations, and I got my copies on 2007/01/30. On a brief but reasonably complete scan it looks like a good further development of BESM 2nd edition, gaining the benefits of the various Tri-Stat implementations while becoming only a little more complex, with options to reduce the complexity to about that of 2nd edition or perhaps even a little less. It is compatible in philosophy and spirit to the earlier editions, but characters are not directly compatible. It made me want to play it when I read it, which is always a good test. Except for that fact that it is already (at the end of 2007; at least it is still available in PDF) out of print I can't see why I'd want to use Hero or GURPS instead of BESM 3^rd edition unless there was already an exceedingly well-written supplement for a particular setting, genre, or campaign that I particularly wanted to use.

There were some minor errata in the 1^st printing, and the author (and former proprietor of Guardians of Order) Mark C. Mackinnon made the corrections available.

Story Engine, 2nd Edition by Hubris Games, used for their science fantasy setting Maelstrom. The game is dice and mechanics light and, as you might expect from the title, focuses more on the dramatic aspects of roleplaying than the simulationist or gamist aspects.

The stripped-down but complete^[2] version, Story Bones, used to be available for download at their giveway page along with a lot of other Maelstrom/Story Engine material, but the Hubris Games site unfortunately disappeared some time in 2003. I make some of those materials, including Story Bones, available here.

Precis Intermedia Gaming now sells PDFs and physical books of the Story Engine and Maelstrom Storytelling lines. Yay!

Castle Falkenstein by R. Talsorian Games (and the GURPS version).

Issaries, Inc.'s Glorantha products, including the RPG HeroQuest and it's predecessor Hero Wars.

Professor M. A. R. Barker's complex science-fantasy world, Tékumel, while heavily influenced by non-European cultures, is its own unique setting.

On February 23, 2001 Guardians of Order announced that they'd be publishing a new Tékumel game, Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne.. As will surprise no fan of Tékumel, it's turned out to be a complicated project, and it has been delayed several times. The good news is that both Guardians of Order and the Tékumel experts who are writing the game are committed to a quality product

Guardians of Order finally released its Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne roleplaying game in late February of 2005, and it is good.

The Dying Earth RPG, based on the Dying Earth novels by Jack Vance and published by Pelgrane Press is a delightfully quirky game that fits the world of the novels perfectly.

Skyrealms of Jorune, created by Andrew Leker and Miles Teves in the early 1980s, was an extremely detailed science-fantasy roleplaying game that went through three editions and sadly is currently out of print. It used the slogan “Leave your world behind”. It has a mailing list

Talislanta, created by Stephan Michael Sechi in 1987, is an exotic, quirky, fantasy roleplaying game somewhat influenced by Jack Vance's fantasy novels. It that avoided the European cultural and mythological cliches at the base of so many fantasy worlds, and used the slogan “No Elves” in one of its best remembered ads. It was republished in a fourth edition by Shooting Iron in July 2001, and the first print run of 1600 copies sold out in only two months. The second printing became available sometime around November or December 2002. There is an active mailing list.

Nobilis is R. Sean Borgstrom's roleplaying game of Sovereign Powers, the personfications of aspects of reality, such as Pain, Love, Nights, or Books. Orignally published by Pharos Press and later in an expanded second edition by Hogshead, the second edition is now now published by Guardians of Order, which hopes to publish additional supplements for it in the future.

Savage Worlds is Pinnacle Entertainment Group's “Fast! Furious! Fun!” generic RPG. I'd read about it and looked at the Test Drive several times, but it hadn't really clicked for me until I read grubman's 101 days of Savage Worlds of 2005-07-26 on rpg.net. I got the revised version in late 2005 and was delighted by its mix of simplicity, versatility, and moderate tactical detail. It is designed for folks who want something that is easy to prepare for and easy and fast to run, and I think it suceeds at these goals very well. Characters start off competent and get better, but are never invulnerable. The core rulebook works well for fantasy, science fiction, historical, and pulp-level heroics and horror. It is not super detailed, concentrating on low overhead. The core rulebook is very complete, containing everything you need to play, including a nifty mass combat system, vehicle rules, a sampling of creatures, and so forth. It is well supported, with a line of interesting setting/campaign books (fantasy, fantasy pirates, super-villains, weird wild west) and a number of good PDF adventures (zombies, fantasy, 1930s, TV parody, Kids in Idyllic England), and there are third-party publishers who also produce for it, as well as a sizable fan community. I've been playing with my daughter and her cousins and my brother and it has gone very well. I haven't run a campaign yet (I have to finish the D&D adventure we're playing), but I'm looking forward to it.

To compare it to Big Eyes, Small Mouth, it has simpler character generation, more tactical options in combat, but actually less bookkeeping during combat. BESM has a more flexible powers/magic system, but Savage Worlds powers/magic system works well for most things, and can be easily expanded.

D&D is where I got my start, but I moved away from it during the ending of the AD&D years. At that time I was looking for something with more verisimilitude and detail and less arbitrary restrictions. To be honest, I was sick of D&D and that colored my reactions for years afterwards. I've since come to see the pros as well as the cons of D&D, and though it's not my favorite RPG I can deal with it much better these days.

The D&D Rules Cyclopedia is an amazing feat: one book that encapsulates the best of traditional D&D in an amazingly complete package. This book makes me wish I'd run or played Basic/Expert/RC D&D. I've since found that several of the Basic/Expert D&D modules are classics (thank goodness for inexpensive PDFs of out-of-print games!), and the combination is almost enough to prompt me to run a few RC D&D games. Almost. (I'm probably more likely to run a Savage Worlds game using those modules.)

1^st edition AD&D has a quirky charm that 2^nd edition lacks, perhaps largely due to Gygax's odd but educational writing style. Reading later editions of D&D puts me to sleep in only a few pages, but even when I'm confused by Gygax's prose it never puts me to sleep. On the other hand, 2^nd edition is definitely easier to understand.

3^rd edition and the more-or-less minor update 3.5^th edition D&D are very well designed and designed very tightly, but they're not the 1^st game I'd reach for when I wanted to play something. Mechanically they are more complicated and less flexible than I prefer at this point in my life (although much more flexible mechanically than 1^st or 2^nd editions), and they encode a great number of things in the core rules that I'd prefer to leave out. Many of these things make D&D characters seem less real to me: it's hard to squeeze a real character into a “1^st level rogue”. On the other hand, for the type of game-play for which they are designed, they're excellent, and I'd not hesitate to play in a 3^rd or 3.5^th edition campaign. And while I'd not write my own campaign from scratch, I'd happily run one from prewritten modules — in fact I am!

4^th edition looks interesting, mechanically. It looks like it has been tightly focus on making all the base classes much more fun to play in the tactical battlemap-and-miniatures mode. Unfortunately, it also seems to have shifted entirely to supporting gamist play, leaving nowhere for simulationist play. As for the fluff and fluff related mechanics, such as the selection of races and classes and the changes to alignment, I'm quite displeased.

I'm reserving judgement on 4^th edition until I've actually played it.

Newsgroups:

Advocacy

I'm also interested in how society at large regards roleplaying games and in their social effects. Some information on this is available from the unoffical CAR-PGa site.

Web Forums

I find Web Forums much more painful to read than newsgroups, but I understand why most online discourse on roleplaying games has moved shifted to that medium.

Online Magazines