RPGaDay #30 Rarest RPG Owned

This would have to be my first printing of the AD&D sourcebook Deities and Demigods. You know, the one with the Cthulhu and Melnibonean pantheons? It turns out that those were still under copyright at the time, so the books had to be recalled and reprinted without the unlicensed material.

You could probably also call Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road
pretty rare. Less than 200 copies are currently in print. Less than 500 total sales. Those numbers can certainly grow (and I hope they do), but they're certainly not a sign of taking the RPG industry by storm.

RPGaDay #29 Most Memorable Encounter

This would have to be Tina.

This was the megadungeon game responsible for both Ted and Kyle. Our halfling rogue got zapped with amnesia out of nowhere and in bursts this pixie who claims to be his wife and mother of his children insisting that he defend her from these intruders (presumably, the rest of the party). If it weren't for some clever roleplay, he might have sneak attacked the lot of us.

Tina eventually became one of our points of contact in the dungeon. If we needed info on anything going on in there, we turned to her. It wasn't until a while later that the DM revealed that Tina had started out as a randomly rolled encounter.

RPGaDay #28 Scariest Game You've Played

I've already told my Ravenloft story, and that's as scary as I get. I've never played a deliberate horror game. I don't own Call of Cthulhu, though I do have a good selection of World of Darkness material. Never played it though.

I tried to run a NWOD mortals game, but it didn't go too well. There was a supernatural element to the game, but it never achieved anything like horror.

RPGaDay #27 Game You'd Like To See A New/Improved Edition Of

Not many of those at the moment. Most games on my shelf are either actively supported, or niche enough that they work well enough for their niche and don't need much revising.

A couple of exceptions do exist however.

Star Trek. I would love to see an actively supported Star Trek RPG. I don't know that I'll get it though. The current film franchise is likely to be the dominant paradigm, and that has me somewhat less enthused.

Palladium. Back in the early 80's Palladium Books was an innovator in RPG design. But then the 90's came along and Palladium developed a mega-hit in their Rifts game. The problem with that is they've been milking that mega-hit pretty much ever since. Their other game lines got revised editions simply to make them more compatible with Rifts.

While the mechanics may have been awesome in the 80's and acceptable in the 90's, they're pretty atrocious by modern standards. While they may have beaten D&D to the punch with ascending Armor Class, there are other AD&D tropes that they have stubbornly adhered to. Like different experience tables for each class, and strict skill progressions. And lets not get into comparisons with non-D&D-based systems.

RPGaDay #26 Coolest Character Sheet

The best character sheet, in my opinion, isn't just one that holds all the information I need about my character. It's one that helps me play the game.

Savage Worlds did something really clever with their character sheet. They put the wound level chart and spell point tracker along the edge of the paper. So instead of marking and erasing stuff that's going to change regularly over the session, you can mark your status by sliding a paperclip down the page.

RPGaDay #25 Favorite RPG That No One Wants To Play

All of them, really.

Because D&D is at the top of nearly everyone's mind when it comes to RPGs, it's the game that nearly everyone plays. It's usually fairly easy to get a D&D game started. But finding people who want to try out some other game is usually tougher.

So let's take a look at some of the games on my shelf that might be a tougher sell than the others.

IronClaw. The main turn-off here is that it's a "furry" RPG. By which I mean that your character options are anthropomorphic animals. But people love making unwarranted assumptions and poo-poo the game on the basis of that one word.

Having actually run the game, I really liked it. It was easy to run, fairly easy to play, and the setting was a very interesting take on pseudo-Europe. And nobody had sex.

I haven't had the opportunity to pick up the latest "Squaring the Circle" edition, but it's on my list.

Tibet. One of the more interesting games from Vajra Enterprises, a company that specializes in interesting subject matter. The setting is Tibet during the 1950's, when the Chinese takeover of the country occurred. But alongside this oppressive reality also exists the supernatural world as the Tibetans believe it to be. Karma is a real thing and can be used to power magical effects.

Between the exoticism of the setting and the brutal reality of the time period, I am not confident in my ability to find a group that can do this game proper justice.

RPGaDay #24 Most Complicated RPG Owned

This is another one where you're probably expecting me to say GURPS, isn't it? Well, I'm not. And I have a couple of reasons why.

First of all, I think complexity in an RPG is subjective, at least to a degree. No one playing a game needs to know every rule. So no matter how thick an RPG book is nobody needs to know more than a few pages of rules at a time. Some games differ in where they put their complexity. For example, building a first level character in D&D is relatively simple. But as play progresses and the character gets new weapons, spells, powers and abilities, that character becomes more complicated. Since each new rule is introduced one at a time, the player feels that the game remains simple.

GURPS front loads its complexity, requiring you to juggle points and priorities as you build your character. But once the character enters play, the game is actually quite simple. Even if you get into GURPS Vehicles (which is not easy by a long shot), once you've done the cube roots and other obscure math to build a sailboat, you know everything you need to know about that sailboat and never need to do any of that math again.

Secondly, there are a couple games on my shelf that have it beat. I've mentioned Burning Wheel once or twice. That is a game you've really got to play to comprehend. I had to actually build a character to understand how the process worked. And there are functionally 3 different combat systems, as well as an involved social combat system, each with their own intricacies.

Another one worthy of mention is Arduin Eternal, a revival of the classic Arduin RPG. The mechanics are fairly simple. It's moved to percentile roll high, much like Rolemaster (which I do not include because I do not have it in my collection currently). But also like Rolemaster, character creation is a bear. Lots of lists and page flipping.