August 25

#RPGaDAY Day 4: Most recent RPG purchase

The last RPG I bought was the One Roll Engine from Bundle of Holding. A collection of books and supplements using the One Roll Engine system.

I guess I really wanted it for the Better Angels RPG, a game where you play a supervillian granted their powers after they struck a deal with a demon.  Character creation is co-operative and sees you create not only your villain but also influencing the demon of another player character.

 

 

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August 25

#RPGaDAY Day 25: Favourite RPG no one else wants to play

In some ways I consider myself lucky with the players I have gamed with over the years as there have been very few refusals on what to play and eventually even All Flesh Must Be Eaten got played.

Of the games I have to hand only Battlestar Galactica has yet to be run and enjoyed by my friends. I think the reason is that at the heart of the game it has a military hierarchy which can cause headaches on its own, let alone dealing with a dwindling population count.

 

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August 24

#RPGaDAY 24th: Most Complicated RPG Owned

When I started gaming I was all up for the complicated rule systems as I was a fan of the games as being as realistic as possible.

I was going to suggest Phoenix Command but that’s not a proper RPG rather a replacement combat system which leaves me to consider another candidate and I can’t really choose between either of them.

So I guess the most complicated games I own are Earthdawn and The Babylon Project.

Earthdawn.

On first glance the game appears to promise so much in the way of background; which it has in spades and a unique resolution system which is where it gets complicated.  Trying to keep track of all the different values and the different die types is a real pain in the behind.

The Babylon Project.

I loved Babylon 5 and I when I heard of a licensed role-playing game I had to have it, the downside was that at the time it was only published in the US; luckily I was going on holiday to the US that year and tracked a copy down.  The game has nine or ten stats and a very complicated combat system.

 

Category: fantasy, RPG, sf | 2 Comments on #RPGaDAY 24th: Most Complicated RPG Owned
August 23

#RPGaDAY Day 23: Coolest looking RPG product / book

As a somewhat veteran gamer who has seen various books from B&W efforts of typesetting through to the early days of DTP packages and the later revolution of full colour books I have seen several games that try to stand out from the crowd.

One or two have caught my eye over the years and I’ve bought them because they look cool, of these my favourite would have to be Trail of Chtulhu by Pelgrane Press.  The whole book just exudes coolness and sets the tone just right for tales of Lovecraftian horror.

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August 23

#RPGaDAY Day 3: First RPG Purchased

The first game I ever purchased was the Marvel Superheroes basic set and I picked this up after seeing various adverts for it in the Marvel comics I was reading at the time.  This wasn’t an easy find especially since I was on holiday at the time.  I seem to remember getting strange looks from the staff at the Virgin store when I bought it and it cost me £12 or so of my holiday money.

The next problem was trying to understand it and then trying very hard to teach my parents and grandparents how to play.  I gave up in the end and had to wait to get home before I could inflict it upon my willing victims, err, friends 🙂

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August 22

#RPGaDAY Day 22: Best Secondhand RPG Purchase

In the past I used to use eBay and a specialist dealer Second Games Galore to acquire games that I missed the first time around as well as scouring the dealers room at conventions.

I had to think long and hard about this post for today as to what would be my favourite purchase and out of all of the games its TORG by West End Games.  If you recall I mentioned this game in a previous post so have a look at it here: http://www.generaltangent.com/blog/2014/05/05/top-10-rpg-list-number-7/

 

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August 22

#RPGaDAY Day 2: First RPG Gamemastered

The first game I ever decided to run was the red box edition of DND with a group of friends who got me involved with gaming in the first place.

I sat down with them and ran them through the classic dungeon module B1, In Search of the unknown. I can’t really recall if it was a success or a failure but I know that I made a fair few mistakes that day and endeavoured to learn from them.

Funnily enough, when I started gaming again on Skype, I decided to use this very module as an introduction for them as well as using some of the classic names for the example player characters 🙂

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August 21

#RPGaDAY Day 21: Favourite Licensed RPG

In my collection I have several games that may fit into this category and trying to pick one has been a bit of a nightmare.  For some Star Wars seems to fill this niche, for others it is Serenity.

There is only really one game that I was happy to see licensed and that is that awesome Ghostbusters RPG. A very simple rules light system coupled with some really awesome adventures and you all play Ghostbusters!  The published adventures were a hoot to play and packed full of the atmosphere of the first movie.

I think it’s a real shame that such a gem of a game is long out of print although there is a spiritual successor in the form of InSperctres.  There used to be a homepage for this game but it looks like it has vanished, rpgnow looks like the only place to get the game these days.

 

 

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August 20

#RPGaDAY Day 1: First RPG Played

We all remember the first game we sat down to play with friends and the memory of that day is still as fresh in my mind as the last time I played.

A friend of mine had offered to run AD&D and after acquiring a copy of the Players Handbook from a nearby game store for the price of £11.95 I spent the Saturday afternoon devouring the contents of this strange hardback book.

My very first character was a cleric of some-sort, I can’t really remember much more than that aside from the fact I had a neat miniature to represent him now and through his later careers.

It was a great time to sit down with people I knew, one or two friends, an acquaintance and someone who just didn’t like me for some reason.  We spent an enjoyable afternoon scrabbling around some castle fighting goblins I think until the guy who didn’t like me decided to stab me.

Yes, you did read that correctly, he stabbed ME not my character, specifically he drove his sharpened pencil into my shin which smarted somewhat.  So I moved places away from this unstable idiot and the session broke down shortly after that.

As I was getting my things to go, I noticed my miniature had been taken from my bag and after a few minutes I was able to find it and slipped out the front door shortly afterwards.

From that day I was hooked and decided to play as often as I could.

 

 

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