Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Ten Favorite RPG Products of All Time

So I'm jumping on the band wagon that the Other Side Blog has continued.

10) Heroes Unlimited
It was my second super hero RPG, my first class based RPG and my introduction to the Palladium Megaverse of games.  There were so MANY things about the game I simply did not understand, which is okay, because many basic ideas were omitted, but I still love it and it still holds a special place for me.

9) Rolemaster 2nd Edition
It's funny because, in many ways, I think DnD 3rd Edition owes as much to Rolemaster as it does to DnD.  I would make character after character and read its many arcane rules and just try to understand it.  I even spent a small fortune on photocopies of characters sheets and weapon charts.  It's funny, because in the PDF age, the game is far less intimidating.  My wife really wants me to run this some day.

8) Ultimate Powers Handbook for TSR's Marvel Super Heroes RPG
This is the first gaming product I ever had to hunt down.  I even called TSR back in the day to try to find it.  It vastly expanded the options to Marvel Super Heroes and is still quite a bit of fun.  When I finally got ahold of copy, I ended up scoring 3 copies in roughly a single week.

7) Dragon Age Sets 1 and 2
I really like Chris Pramas and Green Ronin and I truly respect their goal to make an introductory RPG available again.  I think the system is great and it runs like a dream and I look forward to when Set 3 is out and they move on to their own setting for the rules.  A great game for beginners and veterans.

6) Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition
This has become my favorite edition of the game.  Great settings and Kits, being amongst the highlights for me.  I still feel DnD 5th Edition feels very close to 2E.

5) Rifts
What a hot mess.  So many incredible ideas and so many things that are wrong with the rules.  I've come to believe that the Skill system is the game balance in the rule set.  At least according the game's creator.

4)  Feng Shui
There was a point when I would use Feng Shui to run nearly anything.  It hasn't aged as well as I would have liked, but so many of the best lessons I learned as a GM were while running this game.  Action movies have always been more of an influence on me than fantasy novels and Feng Shui helped me tap better into that inspiration.

3) 13th Age
In many, many ways 13th Age is the best version of DnD I've ever read or played.  And why not?  It's architects are Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo, so of course it's great.  It could be number one, but nostalgia is a powerful tool.

2) Legends of the Five Rings 1st Edition
Epic in nature and grand in it's scope, L5R took a super tight rules engine, a spectacular setting and metaplot and awesome writing and wrapped it up in one beautiful package and supported the rules with regular splatbooks and boxed sets.  John Wick will always have a place in my gaming heart.  He was a rockstar to me.  And this game is central to the history of myself and my wife and oldest daughter.

1) Champions 4th Edition or the Big Blue Book
I'm a child of comic books, not Middle-Earth.  Moon Knight is more important to me than Gandalf.  I identify with Peter Parker more than Frodo.  I'd rather hang out with the New Warriors than the Fellowship of the Ring.  And Champions let me take all of those hours of drawing and creating characters and stories in my high school years and use them in a game.  With friends.  We learned the rules like they were some apocryphal text.  We learned the game's language and used it and reused and tried to top each other.  We argued more than we played, and I still have fond memories of it.  You see, Captain Midnight did not meet his end, his series is simply on hiatus, waiting for the inevitable reboot.




2 13th Age





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