I wish I could play in a campaign of (....)
Friday the RPG discussion day of the week.
Are there any games that you have wanted to play a campaign in but have never had the chance?
There are so many games out there! The pool of games to select from is broad and deep, with the RPG industry 30 plus years old (depending on what yard stick you wield.) Add to that long history the current small press renaissance that we are in the middle of it seems there are more great games popping out every time a guy turns around. Each of us must have at least a few games that make us say, “Damn! I wish I could get a game of that rolling.”
I put the question to the group I game with and one of the guys gave back, “GURPS discworld.”
Unsurprisingly I have never read any of the Discworld books. And with all respect to Mr. Pratchett, I don’t plan on starting in on it right away, simply because all told I think there are like 40+ novels to chew through. As an RPG however the discworld RPG powered by GURPS light and written as a standalone by Phil Masters and the series author Terry Pratchett, looks fun as all get out. I think my lack of setting knowledge would relegate me to “bungling player” status, but any game with a cover image of the grim reaper, standing on a mountain top, jamming out on a flying V, has a tiny bit of my heart already.
I put the question to the group I game with and one of the guys gave back, “GURPS discworld.”
Unsurprisingly I have never read any of the Discworld books. And with all respect to Mr. Pratchett, I don’t plan on starting in on it right away, simply because all told I think there are like 40+ novels to chew through. As an RPG however the discworld RPG powered by GURPS light and written as a standalone by Phil Masters and the series author Terry Pratchett, looks fun as all get out. I think my lack of setting knowledge would relegate me to “bungling player” status, but any game with a cover image of the grim reaper, standing on a mountain top, jamming out on a flying V, has a tiny bit of my heart already.
What was striking to me was yet another friend also answered emphatically GURPS as a game he had never played in a campaign and would love to try.
GURPS again.
Damn.
GURPS.
I have mixed feelings about GURPS and here is what it stems from, NOTHING. My opinion is based only on internet reading and hear-say. I have been lead to believe that GURPS is very, very crunchy and difficult to get into, but a good system once every one gets the hang of it. Roll under skill on 3d6 modified by the GM does not seem “super Crunchy” to me (I know there is a ton more to it.) Considering the game came out in 1986 and is still around, It has held up really well. (Better than the Palladium’s RIFTS? From 1990, yeah I think so.) Still, system crunch is not normally something popular with our group, so to see GURPS come up twice from two separate guys was kind of surprising.
I think I should revisit GURPS and just see what is being offered lately and look in on the system. I have no qualms in saying that Steve Jackson as an individual and Steve Jackson Games as a company have been one of the most influential entities in the gaming industry over the past 30 years. I also know for a fact that SJ games were a HUGE part of my early gaming life. (Car-wars old school style baby) This makes me have even less of a clue about how I could have missed out on SJ games flagship RPG for all this time.
Another game or games I guess that came up were the Apocalypse / Dungeon World systems.
Another game or games I guess that came up were the Apocalypse / Dungeon World systems.
I have a great deal of respect for the designers of Apocalypse world, and the writers of Dungeon World. So much so I dedicated a blog post to how influential the text of Dungeon world has been in how I am approaching Shards of Thimbral.http://dustpangames.blogspot.com/2013/11/how-to-not-steal-from-your-friends-gm.html
I agree these games look like they would be great fun to run campaigns in. I am not sure how well the system handles long running story arcs, (considering the GM is not supposed to bring those kinds of plans to the table.) I do know that the fiction created while moving the story along would be awesome, and that’s always for me anyway, the point.
I think along the same system lines and yet another Apacolypse world powered effort, I would love to try an arc of Nanoworld (a game of clones) by Fine mess games. It just looks fun and interesting.
Also, one of my friends mentioned Savage worlds Deadlands.
Deadlands is pretty awesome, those blokes over at Pinnacle Entertainment Group have won something like eight origins awards for this sucker and managed to port the setting in to several game systems (GURPS, D20, . The mix of Horror, western, steam, and a bit of pulpy adventure make Deadlands pretty much jump off the page when you read it. To put it mildly, the setting is tough to beat. Team that up with a tweaked Savage Worlds system where in combat is a bit harsher and deadlier, I think I would also like to get in on a few games of this. Let you in on a secret (shhhhh!) I really like westerns, so I have a bit of a soft spot or the Weird West setting.
Related to the above, keep an eye out for Deadlands Noir. It looks pretty awesome as well.
OK so that covers what My friends said now it’s my turn and I’m going to get a bit out of type for this answer.
I would love to play a campaign using the HERO game system. Yeah I know that’s more crunch than GURPS which I just complained about a few seconds ago. I know, but there is something about the system I enjoy. It might be that 5th edition character creation is slammed into a HUGE book all its own, or that it has been around since 1989 and I have just never gotten to play it. Something about that system has a draw for me as a player. I am honestly not sure I would want to run the darn thing, that’s just me being honest. There is a lot to HERO; I think a GM experienced with the Hero system is a must. As a player though, having this over grown RPG sandbox / toolkit at my disposal is just so appealing. I can ignore the math and the huge books and all the other HERO strangeness, just to say I built my own lightning bolt attack from the ground up. Add to this the options of like a billion splat books ofver the years and yeah the HERO system is an old , clunky mess of a system with completely limitless possibilities.
Also a player does not have to go the crazy huge stack of $60 books approach. I have the PDF’s for champions complete and Fantasy Hero, they are both relatively compact, Champions is I think 240 pages or there about, and are fully playable, good stuff.
Let me also say that as a quick aside, my second choice is DUNGEON CRAWL CLASICS (or DCC.) I love everything about this game and would love to play it in a long campaign. However, when it came time for me to start running an old school fantasy game, even though I own DCC and think it is AWESOME, we ended up playing AD&D2ed. This came to pass both out of nostalgia and also because everyone in the group (pretty much) already knew the game, and owned some books. (I was the only one with a copy of DCC.) In a perfect world however, I think I would be playing in a DCC game at the table with friends and my wizard would be slowly creeping toward a depraved end consumed by mutation, power, and madness.
So that’s my “I wish I could play in a campaign using this game,” Game. HERO system is very much an out of character choice for me, game for me true enough, but one that has been dancing around the edges of my gaming experience for as long as I can remember. I think I even have an old copy of champions floating around my addict, that I never talked anyone into playing…HMMMMM….?!
So what are yours?
Question, Comments and Shenanigans welcome.
As always thank you for reading.
Due to lack of proof reading on my part I noticed that the count on the number of times I use the word “awesome” in this post is disturbingly high. If I ever let it go above 2 again I suggest some one find be and punch me in the eye.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
Carry on.
Interesting list.
ReplyDeleteI have a lot of early GURPS stuff, played in a couple games, tried running one that didn't really get off the ground. I like the system, but if you are GMing it, you may find yourself having to veto or tone down character builds that really go to excess in stacking up mods on a single aspect, combat monsters or charisma monsters. My experience and books are 80s vintage so some of that may be different in later editions.
I collected both Apocalypse World and Dungeon World, enjoyed reading them but have not yet played them. Dungeon World is on my short list.
I've been collecting the Deadlands Reloaded stuff for a couple years now with vague intent to run it. So far its been just a skirmish battle miniatures at a convention that went pretty well.
DCC caught my attention similarly. So far I ran a playtest and one hilarious funnel game at a con and played as a player once. I enjoy it, but it doesn't really fit my current player groups.
Hero is like GURPS but more so. I have the basics. Only ever played it once, but have friends who were deeply into it back in the day.
I was so surprised when two of the guys in the group I game with mentioned GURPS.
ReplyDeleteOne of them is a big FATE player who really enjoys narrative and one shot games, so I never expected to see him post GURPS anything, (IT might just be that he is a Discworld fan and I don’t know it) The other guy is a D&D player from way back, so for him it makes more sense, but I was still a bit surprised. I can only imagine a game like GURPS that has been around for so long and has so many splat books and works on a point buy system for characters could lead to some pretty crazy abuses by players. Same goes for Hero, doubly so.
This impetus of this post was encapsulated nicely by your comment. I’m building a game currently, and when I look around the one almost universal trait of gamers is we all have at least one game we wish we played more or bought and never got a chance to play. This is especially true when the longer form of campaign play is added in. IT seems the one thing we can always get around to is picking up that “one more game” for the shelf.
Good article, with a lot to think about. I generally find myself in the position of 'always the GM, never the player'; in addition, I've just managed to get a gaming group together for the first time in over a decade, so there's a whole host of games I'd love to play. Top of the list for me, I think, would be Changeling: The Lost. I've always enjoyed the World of Darkness settings, both Classic and New; but of all of them, the themes and tone of CtL stand out above the rest. Especially when you consider the missed opportunity that was Changeling: The Dreaming (a game I loved, but was almost schizophrenic in its confused identities).
ReplyDeleteYou know, I have never played any WOD game, I think it is because I always think of Vampire the Masquerade, from back in the 90's. I'm not going to badmouth the game, but I was never that into the subject matter so think I glanced over other white-wolf offerings..
DeleteNow that I have been looking some ore some of their game seem really interesting. Hunter, Geist and Mage all seem like games I could really dig into. Changeling has always been a cool Idea to me , humans that the Fae have abducted in one way or another returning “changed,” but I have just never been able to put my finger on exactly what to DO with it.
Gurps has a great many sourcebooks which would be useful for the enterprising GM to fill in details with their favorite rules-lite system. That is how I approached this question when I began trying to get back into table top rpg's. I would probably have to be the GM, and I would want to play something which would be of interest to the players I might be able to gather. Therefore I concluded I would want to use a simple rules set which could be used for any genre. With all the old game books I still have on my shelf I felt I could use those resources to flesh out the initial adventure surroundings. If the players enjoyed their pick, I would continue to develop the game world as the campaign jugged along.
ReplyDeleteI agree about GURPS being a treasure trove of game info and ideas. Just take GURPS martial arts, just that book can change the way any group looks at hand to hand combat wither you play GURPS or not.
ReplyDeleteI think that is one of the great strengths of an older universal system like Hero or GURPS, there's so much out there that you can flesh out a game world to suit the exact group you have.
I would love to run or play in a campaign of Golden Sky Stories (originally Yuuyake Koyake). Unfortunately, I'm right in the middle of the busiest portion of my schooling. Oh well. Maybe early next year.
ReplyDeleteI've played GURPS to death, and can honestly say that while it does everything okay, it does nothing overly well, or even excellently. I've also run Apocalypse World and WoD. My overall review of them is "meh." They're not terrible systems, but nothing stands out about them, either. I prefer a system that does one thing really well, and then have to forgive all its faults.
I will have to give Golden Sky Stories a look, I have not heard of that one before, thank you for mentioning it.
ReplyDeleteI have heard that GURPS is a jack of all trades master of none kind of system. That seems to be the curse of the really expansive universal systems.
I suspect that Golden Sky Stories (GSS) will not be the sort of game you're looking for, Actually, It's as far from GURPS as you can possibly imagine in terms of both system (eg violence is universally frowned upon in GSS) and concept (you play magical animals wanting to become human).
DeleteIt seems you've got your heart set on GURPS, so I'd suggest playing that. It certainly gave me a lot of good times, at least until my taste in rules systems changed.
Well slow down a second :)
Deletethe reason GURPS came up is because two of the guys who I game with brought it up when I put this question to them. Unless they get some books and decide to run it I don't plan on starting a Gurps campaign any time soon or otherwise. I think my tastes would surprise you in that I really enjoy very narrative games, more inline with Apocalypse World, Fates that kind of thing. True enough Magical Animals wanting to be human is not my normal thing, but heck I would try it.
I am pretty amazed by the variety of game systems that have been brought up. It is true that if a person has been in this hobby for a while they will have some game that they just never got to play..
we should do a "Play the game that got away" drive for the holidays.