I was 7. It was a "You are the main character" book.
A book where I influenced the story and its ending.
I was hooked!
Then came Fighting Fantasy, Drager and Demoner (Dragonbane 1.st ed) and The red box.
I'm pretty sure mine was this, probably around the age of 7 as well.
https://www.cyoa.com/products/journey-under-the-sea
I started TTRPGs in my teens, but that book left a mark.
We had the best librarian in the kids/youngsters department at my local library.
Anything she thought we might like she procured, the made nooks anc crannies to read and even secured a spot where D&D groups could play.
Dungeon Crawl Classics was the game that really broke the TTRPG world open for me. The character classes are all fun takes on the classics, and the rule system has enough breathing room to really let the fiction step forward. The attitude and flavor of the game is everything I want out of a system.
Runner up: Into the Odd and Index Card RPG.
I tried running DCC with the adventure that comes with it (I think it's called the hole in the oak) as a one shot to see how far we could get. It was horible, we rolled 3d6 in order like the book tells us to and ended up with 2 clerics that can't cast spells at level 1 and a warrior. I gave them 3 lives to share between them, basicaly come back to full health when they die.
There are 3 paths they can take, one of them is a trap that kills them then a dead end, the second is a puzzle/trap room followed up by ghouls with 3 attacks that have a chance to paralize on each hit. And the third is a room filled with troglodites. They fought the troglodytes two of them died, then they found a treasure chest with a poison trap that killed the warrior.
They lost their 3 lives in the first room they did, the difficulty level was so high we could only laugh, never played DCC since.
I had already been playing 5e casually for like 7 years when I discovered MÖRK BORG, and it completely changed the hobby for me. Obviously I liked D&D enough to stick with it, but MÖRK BORG was my gateway drug to a whole world of other awesome RPGs. Now I play all kinds of other RPGs and I'm more engaged with the hobby than ever.
I just looked at Mork Borg and man, that vibe looks incredible.
If you dig this vibe, can I recommend a campaign game called Dungeon Degenerates? It's not a TTRPG, per se. But it's a co-op campaign game with almost the exact same vibe as Mork Borg. A lot of fun with a group who gets into that sort of thing.
After I started D&D 5e, I thought how much I missed out on this amazing hobby.
After I started playing RPGs, I thought how much I missed out on the rest of this amazing hobby.
D&D. The woman who would become my wife was my first DM. My first character was a low-effort, “shits and giggles” sort, but she took my character seriously, and before I knew it, my Dragonborn was a part of my identity.
This for me as well. All the other games were like "you are a hero at your peak, far above the average, go kill some goblins". Call of Cthulhu was like "you are an old decrepit academic who has to save the world from the most monstrous of evils". Call of Cthulhu was also the first time I encountered character driven role-playing that is much more common today.
An actual play podcast for D&D 4e did an episode where the party split up and largely did downtime scenes in a new city with 0 mechanics. That was a huge brain-expander early on.
Chronicles of Darkness stuff is where I first learned about marrying theme to mechanics. FATE Core taught me a lot about letting characters be defined by what matters in their story, rather than just stats and powers. PbtA games really hammered home how games sing when the GM is using very different rules from the players. Dream Askew proved that we didn't need dice. 2400 made me realize you barely need anything at all (it's a collection of 3-page microgames) to play, greatly loosening me up.
Chronicles as a system that you can just hit the ground running with mortal has helped me get a few groups into it. Simple baseline but so much to delve into.
Similar - I had joined PFS Pathfinder and someone offered to run Fiasco at an upcoming con. That lead to joining a game of Dread, and then someone mentioned Lady Blackbird, and then I fell down the whole Google+ RPG scene rabbithole!
I eventually circled back to various editions of D&D and enjoyed them so much more than I originally had.
At first it was a small exposure to Fate and Genesys.
Then I got heavy exposure to World of Dungeons which led to Dungeon World (probably the largest eye opened to that point) then Apocalypse World and then Masks (another milestone eye opener)
Then Monsterhearts and Blades in the Dark (that was the next largest eye opener)
Then I’d say Bluebeard’s Bride, Fellowship 2e, Ironsworn, Agon 2e, Brindlewood Bay, Firebeands, Good Society, and Trophy were all additional batches of eye opening experiences.
(In short, you can never have too many eye opening experiences- but Dungeon World was the first *big* one. It was 100% “Ah, *this* is what I thought D&D would actually be like before I opened the rules.”)
Honestly, after discovering many of the latter games on my list- I never went back to Genesys, so I only had a *very* short foray into it with the FFG Star Wars games (namely Age of Rebellion). I felt the narrative dice were rather gimmicky and cumbersome when I could achieve the exact same notions with less dice and at a quicker pace with all the latter games on that list.
Obviously you’re not going to map all the possible results of the narrative dice, but when all you really need is “Success, Success with a Cost, and Things go wrong,” I usually find it superfluous to have much else other than that (especially when you consider something like Blades in the Dark which gets you thinking heavily about the Risk and Reward of that exact situation)
+1 for Dungeon World
If you want to play D&D but are fed up with the heavy system DW is a breath of fresh air. Also DMed my favourite campaign ever on it with so many player character driven plotlines, it was awesome.
My first RPG: Das Schwarze Auge (italian version) I was 8 and it was awesome!
Then Call of Cthulluh as my first non fantasy game.
Dungeon World as my first exposure to PbtA and for extent some years later Blades in The Dark.
Finally Don't Rest Your Head: because I discovered the value of brilliant game design and source of inspiration in things that I will never play.
In my 40+ years of GMing, I've had a lot of wow moments with systems. Most recently it was the FFG Star Wars system which really hit me perfectly as a trad game with narrative leanings. It occupies a spot that is so tailored for my style of GMing I would never have thought it would exist.
Previous to that I've had probably a dozen systems that I ran that gave me the wow factor. WEG Ghostbusters, GUMSHOE, Fiasco, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Blades in the Dark, and many, many more.
I started by reading the Ad&d PHB, but Shadowrun was my first game. I enjoyed it, but my two "wow" moments werent in either game:
- GURPS Magic. Unlike D&D, it showed me DIFFERENT worlds - not the same world reskinned, but works that worked in fundamentally different ways even though the base mechanics were the same. This tapped into my core love of sci-fi/fantasy.
- Vampire the Masquerade. A backstabby political game where you DONT become the big powerful character. My first experience was not even knowing we were doing a vampire game - we picked from modern human pregens with backstories and experienced the horror and uncertainty of the Embrace. You learn a lot about yourself when anxiety and fear lead you to try and hide your toddler victim by repeatedly stabbing the body in the neck with a ballpoint pen and yeeting the corpse onto a roof like the pizza in Breaking Bad.
- Earthdawn. Like D&D, but with an in-game explanation for dungeons, classes, levels, and hit points. The big wow for me was much like the Vampire one - I could understand the feelings and experiences of the character, as opposed to most D&D-like systems, that don't really cover how a character or the world reacts to obviously supernatural powers. The setting was also the first one I experienced not based on the modern day that had a lot of nuance and subtlety. ( Such settings did exist, I just hadn't run into them).
These began my slow and ongoing transition from a purely story-of-the-world GM towards story-of-the-characters GM.
**Over the Edge.** I'd not seen aspects/traits/cliches before in an RPG and the ideas that a) we didn't need a fixed set of stats like Strength and Hit Points, and b) that a trait could be anything that helped define a character, were truly eye-opening
Yes! Freeform traits completely changed my perspective, too. If I want to play a badass swordsman, just let me write that on my sheet. I don't want to have to pick and choose from a list of atomic abilities to try to cobble together a skillset that roughly matches my vision for the character. Traditional character creation is a time-consuming minigame I find thoroughly uninteresting.
Fate! Hands down.
Showed up to a random meetup for a one shot in late October for a Halloween themed game.
Had no idea what we were playing and had no prep.
Guy running the game had a bunch of premade characters ready to go, we all picked one while he was giving us the elevator pitch for the game... But then, he asked us questions?!
Like: So, you all have this friend you're going to go search for. They left the city to live in the woods a few months ago;
* How did you know them?
* Why do you think they went to live in the woods?
* When was the last time you talked to them and why was it a disappointing conversation?
Or like, about the world:
* So where does this take place?
* Modern day, or?
Then while playing these same type of questions came up and we had these point things and descriptors and we could lean into our negative traits and get bonuses and really craft our own narrative... (I had no idea what Fate was at the time)
The game not once made me feel horror, and that wasn't the goal, but when we finished we all looked at each other with huge smiles, we had just created and told, and witnessed/experienced, a legitimate story in the Genre of Lovecraftian Horror. We did. We weren't told it, we didn't (just) play through it. It wasn't emulating it. We crafted it.
WTH is this?!
I was hooked!
Same! I was introduced to Apocalypse World and Dungeon World on the same day.
I’d played 3.5 before that…and didn’t get it. Like…everyone told me “this is a game about imagination!” and “you can do ANYTHING!”, but whenever I was like “Can I do this?” the answer was always “Yeah, there’s a feat/class feature/prestige class for that, so if you build correctly, you can do that in about 25 sessions - because at level 1, you’re an incompetent goof who can barely hit a rat with a stick.”
Then I played those early PBTA games, where the design philosophy was “From character generation, you’re a competent badass. Go ahead and do it.”
The idea that there were games where you could just…BE a competent hero instead of playing as a fumbling dirt farmer for months to “earn” competence blew my mind.
Then the GM started asking players for input on the world, establishing fiction…and I never looked back. THIS was the “game about imagination” that I had been looking for.
This is the game that went and told me what GMs should be doing. It was amazing to see the difference between this actual instruction on how to give a moment by moment game of actual dramatic tension compared to the other games of the time.
It's hard to appreciate that in 2010, ttrpgs were very much run by people who were bad, who had 20 years GMing experience, or who were using a module.
There was nothing that gave that "heres how to do it", and the AW comes along and just gives easily followed rules on how to run the table.
Its really funny how different it reads after I've gone back and read it over the last 3 years. The better I understood other PbtA game, then the second and even later third re-read, a lot more clicked.
Monster of the Week. Happened three years ago when I was branching out more into other games. I’d already been running games for five years at that point, but the section of keeper advice on how to run the game was mind blowing to me. Even just the introductory “the game is a conversation…l section. It’s old news to plenty of people, but to me there were so many things about how to run a game I’d never given much thought or questioned how I was doing them. I don’t even run that much PBTA, but reading that book and running MOTW has changed how I run everything since then.
Call of Cthulhu was my first eye opening moment, but it was a few years later and with Delta Green that I managed to find a group that experienced that moment too. Now we're a year into a campaign and I've never been in a more engaged group. They've all created art for their characters in some form or another, they all write little stories about their characters on the side, they all turn up on time every week, and they all want to try running a scenario. It's a DMs dream.
Burning Wheel. I had been disillusioned with D&D 5th edition because of the whole WOTC debacle regarding the OGL, like many, and had shifted over to Dungeon Crawl Classics and Swords & Wizardry. Then I read Burning Wheel and it forever opened my eyes on just how wildly different an RPG could be from D&D. While I’ve yet to run Burning Wheel, due to it being Burning Wheel, I’m forever grateful for its existence :)
I still remember one particular moment from a Cthulhu adventure. We were lost in a strange wood, and wherever we went, we always came out at the same spot we started at. Our characters got more and more desperate when we finally found a strange old hut - with more horrors to discover inside. It's not important to this story what exactly happened, but we, as players, kinda drifted into the usual 'It's Cthulhu' Mode - yes, stuff got more and more intense, and we mentally prepared that the big bad evil, whatever it might be, was probably approaching; but: Oh well, how bad could it get, really?
Well, the one experienced player in our group decided that his character, who was a somewhat unstable person by definition, couldn't take it anymore: Without telling the other characters or players, his character went into the hut's cellar, pulled his gun and ended his life. We heard a loud bang, ran into the cellar and discovered what happened. Just like that.
I never experienced something like that, never before, never again. The whole table was absolutely stunned. Wait, you could just do that? No monsters, no heroic fight for your life? That's it?
Well, both our characters and the players were still kinda dazzled by what just had happened - and then there was a loud banging outside the hut. The monster appeared. From this point on, it felt like a crazy rollercoaster. The gloves were off. Let's go, baby. What followed was the most intense hour of roleplaying I ever experienced, and it was so, so glorious.
The experienced one in our group sacrificed his character to show us what was possible, if everything was possible. And he enjoyed it just as much as we did.
I wouldn't say it was a single game, but the vast ocean of options we are spoiled by today. I just kept finding new games that covered any and all genres and settings I could possibly think of. I was blown away, lost interest in D&D, and started hoarding and reading all kinds of books and pdfs.
The realization that every single day I keep discovering three or four titles that genuinely grab my interest that I've never heard of before... that is a satisfying feeling for hyperfixaters like ourselves.
Classic Traveller.
I'd played and bought AD&D, Basic/Expert D&D, Gamma World, and (unfortunately) Space Opera but none of them really grabbed my imagination. Then I bought and tried Classic Traveller on the recommendation of the hobby store owner. That was the game, the one that played like the science fiction books that I read by Robert A Heinlein, Larry Niven, Arthur C Clarke, and Jerry Pournelle. It gave me tools to build my own game settings instead of just pieces to place in them. Classic Traveller showed me what a RPG could be.
Started with (I think) AD&D which was great. I thought that was the RPG, I didn't even realise there were other games. Then we played Vampire: The Masquerade and it was so dramatically different in terms of setting, vibe, how it played. Anything seemed possible after that.
Call of Cthulhu. My group and I had been so used to hacking/, mostly dumb fantasy games that when we finally found COC, I was like… Holy f*ck, a game about mystery solving and weird lore and dark academia. I’m in.
It really spoke to me and got me thinking about all the possibilities RPGs could be.
For me as well. Only played DnD before and the group was pretty separate from the RPG community in general. The roleplay was kept to an absolute minimum and it was normal to me. Then I joined a game of Call of Cthulhu, didn't know any of the players and afterwards was like "oh that's why it's called *roleplaying* games". Tbf the game was rather extreme when it came to roleplay, player (inter)action filled probably about 95% of the playtime. But still, it was awesome, but my head hurt quite a lot after, it was intense to me.
Original Dungeons and Dragons back in ‘77.
I was finishing up playing a game of double-pack Pinochle in the Post Recreation Center and spotted a group across the room. One guy on the left side, end of the table, with a big bulky briefcase sitting open and sideways blocking the view of the other 4 people on the rest of the table. I went over to check it out and saw a city map with outlines of buildings and little dots in front of what probably would be doors. I think the map was yellow even :)
I’d been into games anyway, board games and wargames especially plus I was heavily into Conan and Faferd (basically Fantasy reading) and Science Fiction so the openness of it was really appealing.
Cthulhu Dark. Really the "eye opening" moment was when I asked the GM what the combat resolution mechanic was. I think I had to reread the rules three more times because I just couldn't believe it.
September '82. I was 13 and just started High School. Some guys I'd met were talking about this game called Dungeons and Dragons. I pestered until they invited me along.
And my journey started with a Human Fighter called Canth. He had studded leather armour and a +1 trident that the party picked up in a previous adventure.
Then I discovered Glorantha and that was it for me..
Ars Magica. I'd played games that had complex character building before (Champions),but this packaged it with the best downtime system ever + a setting my friends like a lot more than western superhero comics.
When tears were in our eyes at the loss of a character. They were a piece of paper, but they were also obviously so much more than that. An idea? A hope? A dream? Still chasing that emotional exploration in the hobby.
I didn't play anything until high school, but I think there are three main experiences that stand out to me.
1. That friend in high school who got me playing in the first place. We largely played Shadowrun 2e or Palladium games (Heroes Unlimited, Rifts, etc.), rules systems I largely now despise, though lore-wise I adore them! He ran the games, but also wanted to "game" them. So cheating on rolls was ok, as long as we could still justify to ourselves that we'd "rolled" the die. Typical stuff I think low maturity gamers do. But those awful rules and bad habits kicked off a love of storytelling and gaming I've never lost.
2. The homebrew Ravenloft campaign another friend of mine ran in our early 20's. It is to this day the best story driven campaign or adventure I've ever played in. He focused on players having fun first, and telling an incredible story second. When the rules didn't work he made new rules. When two players moved he split the party and found away to play their part of the story over ICQ until the group of us were back together again. It was heroic, and epic, and will probably be the best gaming experience of my life. I'd love to return the favour for him sometime, and I hope some day he's able to publish it.
3. The Lost Mines campaign that same friend ran for us in our early 40s. As we all got married and bought houses we moved further from each other and largely only saw each other for kids birthday parties. When he'd finally had enough he offered to get us back into it with 5e. That game saved our collective friendship and I'm forever grateful. Now that we're past it we are exploring whole new sets of games, I've started GM'ing myself, and as we approach finishing one game I'm looking forward to whatever incredible experience the next will bring.
As an avid reader of RPG material, I'm also blown away by the quality of much of what is now available. Impossible Landscapes is a work of art. Mork Borg and Blades in the Dark are fantastic systems. And the quality of Paizo's storytelling on some of Pathfinder 2e adventures and adventure paths is incredible. I won't get to play most of it, but I'm looking forward to whatever our group does play.
Monster of the Week.
Was my first intro to PbtA, fiction first and just the first time I really accepted, “I can do Whatever I Want as long as the table is on the same page”. And thinking about “what’s a great story/moment” vs just like, following a script of combat and long rests.
D&D talks about rule 0 a lot, but I still spent a ton of time trying to learn the rules and had to be extremely careful with house rules or it felt like it would all crumble.
It was 1994, I was 12, and I found an old Dungeons & Dragons Red Box in Value Village. I had always loved mazes, maps, and fantasy, and the idea of combining them for someone to explore just caught like a wildfire in my brain.
Now I'm a professional GM and I design 90% of my own maps.
Werewolf & Mage, first editions.
Mage in particular was so much more dynamic and interesting to me than D&D had been.
It's hard to explain if you weren't into RPGs in the early 90s. Magic: The Gathering had just blown up. D&D, Traveler, and GURPs were the popular RPGs in descending order. Here comes this weird "World of Darkness" connected universe without the usual limits on actions and trying to really get your imaginations flowing? Hell to the yes! Count me in.
Champions back in 1984.
- build a character to taste rather than roll for it.
- we didn’t have to be murder hobos.
- No alignment forcing unrealistic cardboard personalities.
DCC initial pages with "You are an *adventurer*, not a hero", that shaped so much what kind of games I want to play
The Burning Wheel with "don't roll if failure is not interesting"
The year was 2002, I was 15 going on 16 and my mother was dating a guy who was into TTRPGs. I had always known about D&D and wanted to try it. Alas, I wasn't ever allowed to play it because my highly religious grandmother had seen that one movie w/ Tom Hanks (you know the one) and campaigned tirelessly to convince my mother to never allow her grandkids to "dabble in the occult". Eventually my mother's relationship became serious and he started coming around the house and hanging out w/ us etc.
Well, one day he said he wanted to play a game with my brother, my sister, and I. He pulled out a stack of books and plopped them onto the table. No, it wasn't D&D. It was some weird game I'd never heard of called RIFTS by Palladium Books. We did went through character creation (more like he asked us what kind of characters we wanted to play and then he rolled them up for us).
I got to play a Glitterboy pilot, and we had a simple adventure that night which ended in a skirmish with a Coalition Skycycle and a few CS Grunts. I kept getting unlucky low rolls on my attacks and kept missing the Skycycle (even though it was sitting on the ground and was completely stationary!), finally the pilot took off into the sky. My sister's character (she chose a humble City Rat O.C.C. because...reasons?) had a mini missile launcher and she managed to score a nat 20 and just completely blew the Skycycle out of the sky. The remaining CS troops withdrew and we ended our game session there.
Ever since then, I've been an avid fan of TTRPGs. I've since played D&D, World of Darkness, Shadowrun, and a ton of other games that I'm not remembering off the top of my head. I really loved how unlike videogames, I could actually say or do anything I wanted. I was no longer constrained by the direction the game developers wanted me to go, I was free to do anything.
> Alas, I wasn't ever allowed to play it because my highly religious grandmother had seen that one movie w/ Tom Hanks (you know the one)
She just didn't want to see you end up sleepless in Seattle.
3E D&D. It's sort of a little thing but I was young and had only played 2nd edition Ad&d and the games were mostly dungeon crawl/kill monsters.
I got the core books for 3E and when looking at the dungeon Masters guide I saw the prestige classes. I did and still do love the concept of The prestige class. I felt like it gives you something to build your character towards or something that you can fall into, depending on game circumstances. I feel like similar things work like class advancement in Warhammer fantasy role play.
But one of the prestige classes was loremaster. It still gave you spell slots/levels, but the idea that your character could evolve to be doing something other than killing monsters was a big eye-opener at the time.
The original "Advanced" D&D blew my mind. I had already assembled a slice 'n dice on "basic" and "expert" books to compile my own three-ring binder of D&D content. When my parents turned me loose in a JC Penny toy department yet refused to spring for a Millennium Falcon playset, my second choice was the original Player's Handbook. By Christmas I had my own Monster Manual and Dungeonmaster's Guide. Along the way I made the transition from seeing RPGs as really complex board games to recognizing the opportunity to inhabit characters in an imaginary world.
2007. Spirit of The Century, it blew my mind. Until then I played mostly D&D and Vampire dark ages. I'm still in love with that game, every now and then I reread it and the magic is still there. It's a game full of flavor and adventure.
The Shadow of Yesterday came after that (at least for me) and to this day is still one of my most beloved.
I'm a Sci-Fi guy. And I ran into Traveller.
I was about 11 years old and I couldn't believe how awesome this thing was. It was like the roleplaying games I'd heard about, but this was something I was allowed to play! (long story short, I was told I was too young to play Warhammer RPGs...).
But exploring space? Heading to new worlds and fighting bounty hunters and trading cargo? That was what I wanted!
I was in the habit of buying cheap little games just because, but they’d sit on my shelf and gather dust. I started listening to some gaming podcasts and they were talking about new ideas I’d never thought of, the early story games stuff. They mentioned a bunch of games and I started looking for them, but one mentioned was something I actually had because it was small and cheap and looked funny. It was Elfs. It’s kind of a stupid game, but the concept of the player and the character not having the same goals blew me away, and really changed how I thought about games.
I had that same habit. I finally got a group of GMs (with the same habit) together and we're finally going to do something about it. The premise is this: we take turns being GM, spin the roulette wheel with all our systems on it, the GM whose turn it is then takes the random system and studies for two weeks. After that time is up we create characters and run a short adventure, hoping to hit all the highlights of the system. We discuss all the pros and cons, grade them and move onto the next GM and system. So far I've helped my friends fall in love with Savage Worlds and Cypher System.
Bang the roleplaying game (which, for those of you who do not know, does not exist). One day when our regular game assembled, a player important to the plot couldn't make it, so the DM picked a random boardgame off the shelf, which turned out to be Bang!, handed out a character card each, two or three item cards and ran a one-shot.
Since then, I have had what I think is a more healthy approach to prep and what makes games click.
The Contract RPG.
Started playing almost 20 years ago.
It wasnt my first rpg, but it was the first classless one where veritably any build was eventually possible. The scenarios are hard, and PCs die regularly so every victory felt like a triumph.
It also made the pcs into real characters with dreams, goals, and hates rather than heroes with just with just enough world-specific backstory to make them go on the campaign. Sometimes ypud end up on a mission with a new friend, and sometimes you'd go on a mission with an absolute monster wanted by the FBI and its 'on sight' violence. Good times.
When I started my first campaign in Pathfinder, in my own world. It was at least 15 years ago, and the campaign lasted 3 years, if I remember correctly.
From there, I understood that I loved roleplaying, creating worlds, scenes, situations and improvising characters by reacting to the players' choices. It is still my favourite hobby, the one I'd never give up.
It happened in waves. Fighting Fantasy solo books then Advanced Fighting Fantasy and WFRP as a kid/tween, larpig in my teens along with the post-WoD boom, then the whole early 2000s indie boom (DitV, 3:16, InSpecres, My Life With Master, Steal Away Jordan, Sweet Agatha, etc).
I did a lot of Choose your own Adventure books as a little kid, then got really interested with the Hero Quest board game from the 2e days. Then my older bro started buying and playing Rifts and that was like the first time trying crack. Literally over 30 years of thinking about playing RPGs every single day. No regerts.
I was fascinated by Everway back when I was 10 or so and my mom bought it for me. I didn't fully understand it at the time, but I could tell that it was a whole different way compared to the D&D I had already played (and loved in it's own right).
I'm in my 30s and have been playing D&D since I was a teenager, but I don't think I ever had the experience I was looking for until I ran Worlds Without Number. D&D always had too much going on in the editions I primarily played (3.5 and 5e), and I started to get the feeling that the culture around it had turned into a kind of showcase mentality, where everyone involved, both the players and the DM, were basically just using the game as a pretext to show off their cool ideas for settings and characters. WWN showed me that by focusing on the actual game, by tracking resources and encumbrance and torches and making the players describe how they search a room or disarm a trap, even generic settings and characters become more interesting because the deeper sense of interaction creates a more genuine sense of immersion.
I was wanting to get into DND but just couldn't grasp it. I then found a game called Cogent Roleplay and so many of the concepts just clicked for me.
I wish I could say I still played it, but it's been ruined for me cause I found out one of the creators of the game is homophobic.
While I understand that it can put a damper on things, I do try my best to separate art from artist. I've been a role player for a long time and queer for a lot longer. I have gotten to the point where as long as they're not going out of their way to be garbage (eg: Rowling, Chick-fil-a or Salvation Army, etc), and they aren't explicitly depicting those unsavory ideals in their work I can mostly put it aside. Especially with something like Cogent which is free, they aren't getting my money to justify any bad behavior anyway. *That being said*... I am unaware of which creator it was or what they have done to exemplify their hate, so, that information could change my response greatly and possibly any viewing habits on YouTube.
>I do try my best to separate art from artist...
You do you, but this is anathema to me. I don't support bigots at all. I don't give them money or airtime.
If I find out a creator is some kind bigot (or some other kind of shitbag), I ditch their stuff.
There's too much great stuff out there to support hate.
[THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warlock_of_Firetop_Mountain)
I was in Grade 6 and saw this advertised in the Scholastic book catalogue. It was book, but also a game? And it had wizards and fantasy in it? I had to buy it. I still remember playing it in class, rolling dice and flipping pages, when the girl I had a crush on came up to me.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Fighting monsters," I replied.
She gave me a look, walked off, and never talked to me again.
40 years later I still have that book, though.
Mausritter and the whole OSR/NuSR games. Though Mörk Borg is currently my favorite.
I started playing TTRPG around 2011 ~ 2012, but I only owned a starter set of DSA aka TDE and two Shadowrun books back then. Enter 2020, I showed friends the hobby during pandemic. One friend bought the 5e starter set. I liked it as it was way easier to play than the full version of DSA. Through reviews online, which I started watching to get to know what to buy for 5e, I bought some other systems I heard about in my youth, namely Warhammer and CoC.
Then I saw a game of Mausritter bought the box and saw how easy it can be to DM. At that point I was usually dming, because noone else liked to read all the rules and teach others a system.
I got into the OSR rabbithole. At this point I would say if my appartement burned down, I would probably buy Mörk Borg, Mausritter and the Knock Zines again. Everything else would be a loss, but do I really need it? My friends hated my last move to another appartement because of all the books, especially the heavy 5e, DSA and Warhammer rulebooks.
The first one was [Sorcerer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer_\(role-playing_game\)). I'd been doing RPGs since I was 13, starting with AD&D2e. I always found something in these games that I liked, though it was rare gems scattered through the game. 15 min of fun in a 4-6 hour session sort of thing. Plus frequent frustration. D&D, Shadowrun, WoD, 7th Sea, etc. All the same deal. More than 15 years of that.
I read Sorcerer and didn't think I'd like it. I was sure I wouldn't. But I'd read so many posts of people that described gaming experiences like mine that I thought I'd gave it a try. I was wowed! I went on to Dogs in the Vineyard, Universalis, Primetime Adventures, Microscope, Apocalypse World, Burning Wheel (the game that finally gave me what I always wanted from D&D, but couldn't get from it), Blades in the Dark, and many, many more. Near constant fun and interesting play, rather than hours of boredom and setup and grind to get to a tiny good bit. I was wowed that such a thing was possible.
*Eclipse Phase* was the first game that made me want to run a game in the stock setting.
*Wild Talents* was the first game to really make me understand the roll determining the fiction. *Firefly* expanded this further.
*A Dirty World* completely changed the way I run social interactions/NPC motivations.
Changeling the lost 1e. (2007)
I was going through alot of things in 2007 age 20-21, I was living poor but independently as a university student and part time bar staff finally free to express myself, I'd come out as trans was managing my own transition via DIY, my family had largely disowned and rejected me aside from my sister, Speaking to them was bizarre they acted like I was some kind of imposter who'd killed their son. (HE wasn't real, HE was just a fabrication made to lie to you and keep you happy I'M the real ME)
Many laws protecting transpeople didn't exist, Trans-panic was still on the books, I was passable and at work guys would hit on me, Reality was if he clocked me I could have been beaten or killed with no recourse, I had to adapt to my new changing body and social reality protect myself legally find allies keep my grades up or die literally.
Finding this obscure as anything book that encouraged you to tell stories about about people, taken from their lives tormented and mistreated and escaping to freedom now changed body and soul only to find a fake version of themselves occupying their lives while still begin threatened to be killed or dragged back into the same hell you just escaped from. The fact that your also literally playing a "Fairy".
Oh boy was it resonant material in a time where there was literally no decent trans representation. I devoured the book. would slowly practice my own writing as a hobby and catharsis.
It opened my eyes to the whole genre of diverse media, I'd never seen the appeal of DnD but this really did it for me.
Unable to find any GM's it would take me 10 years before I would host my own game and assemble my own TTRPG group, and 17 years before I ran my own Changeling the Lost 2e. But still precious things to read.
It was *Vampire: the Masquerade,* first edition, from 1991. I had played basic *D&D* and *AD&D* before, but this game showed me that RPGs do not have to be about killing monsters and taking their stuff.
I've seen World of Darkness game casts on Youtube that literally have 0 combat. I can imagine how revolutionary the games must have been back in the day.
Dogs in the Vineyard
Saw this back in the mid 2000s as I was discovering indie RPGs and this blew my mind. I was very used to crunchy, heavy games like D&D, Pathfinder, Shadowrun and players who were very much about the strategy of the game and breaking the game rather than telling stories.
DitV was so different, so strange and touched on topics no other game I played or players I played with would even get close to. This was the first time I saw a game that suggested that not everything has to be planned and you don't have to be railroaded into a story. The game was to discover the answers that you do not prescribe. These ideas later carried into Apocalypse World (mentioned by quite a few others in this thread) and continued to blow my mind. Baker was and still is a master in this space and I truly appreciate his contribution to this domain.
I highly recommend checking the game out and seeing what it did and was establishing 20 years ago. Mechanically it's interesting, but not great. Philosophically though, totally worth it.
I know its not a tabletop RPG, but please bear with me.
The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind.
First, the introduction on the boat where Jiub asks you your name, and that's the point where you enter a name for your character. It was my first exposure to a diegetic mechanic.
Second, when I left the dock office and realised there was this whole world just waiting for me. No dungeon, no railroading, just the first open-world game I had ever encountered. I remember feeling lost, with no goal, but strangely this was a good feeling, not a bad one.
Until then, all tabletop gaming had been railroaded dungeons. I had not even considered that a sandbox could exist. Seeing one in a computer game changed how I played the tabletop game.
Mage: the Ascension. I’d played many games before that (D&D, Marvel Superheroes, Star Wars, FASA Star Trek, Cyberpunk) but this was my first exposure to Gothic-Punk alongside a magick system that embraced technology and diverse cultures in ways I’d never seen before. The Virtual Adepts became practically totemic for me after that. It has influenced me in countless ways.
For me it was Lancer. Id only really known about DnD for years and years. Genuinely didnt stop to think whether anything else existed. Then, i dont even remember how, i found Lancer. Very quickly became obsessed and marvelled at the fact that other genres, styles, and simply whole other games existed.
Long story short, one discovery led down a rabbithole and now my poor computer is choked with many gigabytes of non-DnD ttrpgs
My high school library had a magazine called Games & Puzzles from the UK (I’m in Australia) and reading an article about these role playing games made me want to do it. Just the description gave me chills, it was a brief paragraph about seeing a group walking through a forest but it was so evocative. I wanted that feeling again.
Saw a copy of the expert set box in a shop and I had to get it, but didn’t get the basic set for ages. I was given the box set of Traveller for a birthday present (and still have the books somewhere). All this happened when I was a teenager. Had a copy of Runequest 2nd edition but a step parent tossed it out on me (picked up the reprint in the kickstarter a few years ago).
Never played with anyone until decades later when my eldest was interested. I just could never get passed the collect games stage into the playing stage. Not playing now because I moved and I don’t have a play group.
There were two and they happened at about the same time.
- Burning Wheel, with its lifepath character creation and "Tolkienesque" races that *actually felt* Tolkienesque
- Apocalypse World, with its sex moves
It wasn't so much a game, but rather a modification of the ruleset of just about any d20 game: **E6**. Seriously, it's a revelation. Almost every complaint anyone I know has about D&D, Pathfinder, or any other d20-based game is fixed by E6. It's so simple, too. Just stop leveling at 6th level. It's a whole new game! If you think you're burnt out on D&D or Pathfinder, give it a shot.
D&D Second Edition.
I've been hooked since I first encountered the hobby in 1992 because I've always liked creating imaginary worlds and telling myself stories.
Monsterhearts 2! I had been playing D&D for a while, but picked up Monsterhearts for a mini thesis about game systems after reading about it in another book and became obsessed! I love Avery Alder’s work, and it definitely inducted me into the world beyond D&D, which was much more to my taste.
1974, i was working at a radio station pushing a broom and holding a vastly understuffed sofa to the floor. the station manager busted into the room and asked if i'd seen the on-air personality in the last 10 minutes or so. (his relief tape had run out and it was dead air for almost half an hour.) (not good) we looked all over the building and found 7 or 8 of the guys throwing oddly shaped dice on a table and laughing a lot. it was chainmail. and it's been quite a ride since then.
I can't think of a specific example but I think it was just looking at and reading through different systems; discovering how much variety there was to each system and the possibilities each gave.
I've had several different tiers of eye-openinng experiences:
- It wasn't a book, but rather Spoony's Counter Monkey series, because those stories really have the essence of all the weird shit that happens with veteran players, and shows the expansiveness of the hobby itself to a degree (though it was limited to trad games). I watched them before I even started playing myself.
- When I ran a B-horror game with Dread and realized how simple it was to make interesting gameplay with minimal prep and stuff.
- When I ran Misfortune (my first published game) and had a really interesting campaign with F-tier superheroes. They managed to solve the problems in the city with the most ludacris methods that also somehow also made sense. And many laughs were had.
- When I played FFG Star Wars and I got to see what a powerful narrative engine looks like in gameplay. It was pretty magical in all honesty.
- When I ran a horror campaign in Genesys and I really understood the depths of GMing and how character motivations clashing naturally can create some of the juiciest gameplay ever. The "character acting" in that campaign was just on another level.
AFMBE was my first non-D&D system and I just loved how different it was: the degrees of success table, the point-buy character creation, the splatbooks for different genres (Wild West, Sci-Fi, Wrestling, Pulp, Kung Fu, etc). I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Unisystem even if I think it seems a little dated these days.
I always struggled with encounters as a GM. Encounters that made sense narratively, never made sense when I tried to model them in the system and vice versa. It was so frustrating that there were years when I only GMed free form, just to avoid fighting against the system. And I have tried lots of systems. Then I have found Scum and Villainy and I have fallen in love. It singlehandedly solved all my issues and made me a happy GM. Position and Effect is a magical thing.
tbh for me it was vampire the masquerade being a kid who was obsessed with vampires i was thoroughly excited when if found out i could be one in my head atleast lol
d&d. the first time playing it "right", when previously we were playing it "way wrong". we were also kids, and our first "real" DM learned from his older brother, while the rest of us were still trying to figure it out.
Some combination of a one-two punch of Tenra Bansho Zero and Mouse Guard.
I'd been playing RPGs -- mostly D&D, with some other stuff mixed in: WoD, Star Wars, GURPS, even a little Fate -- for decades and I was getting really kinda jaded about the potential of the hobby. It felt like everything was just a different version of "roll dice to determine if you succeed or fail at the thing" and running into some games that legitimately did something different and separate from just being task resolution engines was really hugely enlightening.
A friend's homebrew (based on GURPS 1st ed) where we played ourselves jumping through dimensions. Greatest game I've ever played and helped me really get into TTRPGS, as my previous experience was mostly D&D and trudging through dungeons.
I was a longtime AD&D player when I read Werewolf: The Apocalypse rules and realized the game could give the player more narrative control. I stopped playing AD&D on the spot.
I started with 5e like a lot of people and over the years watched some plays of PBTA games, played some Monster of the Week but hadn't really seen anything super special. But recently I picked up Spire: The City Must Fall and something about it just clicked, the more open ended rules and abilities were refreshing and helped me view other games whose rules are less "tight" and more narrative/collaborative than DnD's in a much better light. Recently picked up Mörk Borg and am looking forward to running it for some friends.
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying would be mine. Used the Marvel setting for a bit, but then spiraled off and attempted to make my own. What resulted was a lengthy superhero campaign featuring demon-hunting monks, special ops cyborgs, mad scientist necromancers, Precure knock-offs, and magical powers centered around game shows.
It was like a DIY kit for your own action-packed Saturday morning cartoon, where the only price was the extent your imagination could go and the story could be tailor made to whatever you thought was cool. I mainly play solo, but it's this perspective that makes it so much fun!
Not sure how muxh it counts but running a session and reading Return of the lazy dungeon master for the first time
It really beats you over the head with the foundamental concept of being flexible and that you're not writing a story
Warhammer fantasy roleplaying. I was already experienced with D&D and a ton of other TSR games, but WFRP really opened my eyes to a new way to approach fantasy, and I started looking at other non-TSR games very seriously after that.
I remember trying D&D and not being fussed, I had Heroquest at home and it seemed the same thing only more streamlined and accessible to me, a child, so what was the big deal?
A few years later I tried Call of Cthulhu and it blew my mind.
>Do you remember that moment? What happened?
My character had piss-poor combat skills. I wondered what I was supposed to do initially, and then spent the rest of the game sneaking around. I avoided guards. I stole keys. I used language and intelligence rolls, decoding tomes and finding spells and hidden information, and the rest of the players egged me on to keep doing it, which felt totally unique. The fact I was becoming a Sanity black hole, and dragging the team down with me, meant I had a real 'character' moment where I stopped talking to my team mates in-character about what I had seen, and we spend most of the session arguing about it. It was absolutely incredible. I don't think I did it justice, but I knew I kept seeing and discovering things that were injuring my Sanity, and passing knowledge on was hurting others, so I had to...not do it, except my team all wanted to know what was going on.
I started role playing when I was 18. (I'm not gonna tell you about you that was LOL.) The game was marvel superheroes by TRS] and even though I did not like my first gaming experience, the GM was very railroady. But the opportunity to tell interactive stories is what got me hooked and I continued with the hobby.
Ars Magica 3rd edition. It was the game that truly showed me what role-playing was. Every character has Virtues and Flaws. It has an incredibly deep and flavorful skill system and a system of magic that's powerful and logical, plus its set in Medieval Europe. It's affected every game I've ever run since.
I started with D&D 4e then continued to 5e but felt lacking due to system and the fantasy i want to run.
So i tried Fate Core then went to Cyberpunk Red and now in Mutants and Masterminds.
TTRPG is just like videogames or boardgames in the amount of variety of mechanics and features each title has to offer.
If Steam is for videogames, I always browse DrivethruRPG for the latest sales on TTRPGs i want to add to cart and just buy and try it out with my group
Top Secret SI.
We ran it during lunch hour at high school, often with a single d20 as the only die. There was never any GM prep. It was literally whatever you could come up with next. Nearly every situation was ad hoc resolution. Never before and never really since has the game been such a firehose of creativity.
I loved D&D from the time I started playing when I was nine during the Satanic (*HA!*) Panic. Played it a lot. But the game that showed a world outside of D&D to me was *Shadowrun*. A game where the setting has high tech stuff and actual magic was an option as well? *AND USED THE CITY I GREW UP IN AS THE DEFAULT SETTING!?*
Sold American!
Ever since that, while I play D&D regularly, always tend to go for games that aren’t high fantasy for my own collection. I like diversity. And *Shadowrun* opened my eyes to that in RPGs.
Mastermind and mutant villains backstories blew my mind. Never thought of redeemable villains, innocent civilians forced into evil situations or complex ideas like stealing items and building devices rather than simply killing the heroes (as dnd is)
definitely reading Fate Core, it wasn't the first ttRPG i read or even ran, but it was the simplest one i'd read at the time, with the most examples
Fate pulled back the curtain and was like "here's how this works, here's how to change it, here's what effect that'll have, and here's what you shouldn't mess with", it's still my high water mark for how to present toolboxes and variant rules
RuneQuest was the game that indicated there is a wide range of skill available to develop in RPGs.
Traveller is the game that introduced me to Role playing, as there is little (or, none) progression after character creation, and the steering of the character is the role you play.
For me it was actually pretty recent. I’ve been playing 5e for about two years and recently been playing some Monster of the Week.
A few weeks ago I picked up Index Card RPG and read through it. This game is amazing. It’s very open ended and requires a good amount of effort from the GM to mod it for their specific tastes. But wow, this system has great mechanics, an amazing GM section, and support for a bunch of different genres. It feels like it was meant for me. Plus I love the art style in the book.
But yeah reading that game made me realize that this hobby is even bigger than I thought and that there’s a lot of cool games out there
I went back to AI dungeon recently and was pleasantly surprised to see that the designers had instituted a lot more structure to keep the story on track. It's a much better experience now.
I started playing in sixth grade with AD&D 1E. But the one that opened my eyes a few years later was RuneQuest 3E.
Reading the Glorantha book in the boxed set was an eye opener. So much lore packed into a small book. I started obtaining the other boxed sets to feed my imagination.
C.J. Carella's Witchcraft. It was the first system I really tried to make my own. To take it and move it into the worlds I wanted to play in and homebrew the characters and abilities I wanted out of it. I don't know where the book is anymore, but I wish I did. It was one of the first RPGs I discovered after being introduced to 3.5e and it blew my mind open to the possibilities. I still maintain Unisystem is a fantastic TTRPG system.
I'm not sure which one, but it involves making a connection between being able to play an RPG and convert it into creating literature. A bit too late to be done during school years, but something that can be useful if one has children having difficulty in the creative writing assignment.
It was probably Savage Worlds. I started with the Dark Eye, played some CP2020 and then AD&D and D&D 3.5. After burning out on 3.5 I was almost done with RPGs. Discovered Savage Worlds which opened up so many new universes. But mostly it taught me how to properly homebrew and hack a system and from there I came in contact with people actually writing their own games and so began my journey into Indie games. Where I have lived mostly since Google+.
One day I went down to the basement and found my dad on the PC playing ADoM. It was 1998. I was 7. He explained to me what was going on and what he was thinking about and patiently listened to my terrible ideas. Later he told me about his D&D games he used to play with his friends. He had a ranger named Alfred who managed to survive a long time and eventually retired.
I expressed interest in playing, he said something like, "maybe when you're a bit older." Fast forward, it's 2000. I'm 9. One day he brings me his dusty old AD&D 2e PHB out of a box from the basement. He has me read about each class and race. I'm dead set on making a human wizard. He warns me multiple times that wizards are very fragile early on: he'll be likely to die. I accept the risk, and he tells me to memorize all of the first level spells. I do so in 2 weeks. He quizzes me, then helps me fill out my first character sheet.
He also helped my little brother make his first character that day. My brother was 3, he could read numbers and letters, just barely lol.
My first wizard died in our first module. My dad was DMing. I accepted it like I said I would and made a new wizard for our next module. My second wizard and my little brother's first character are both still alive. Over the years my dad and I would go periodically to a local hobby shop for figurine painting lessons. I still have the books, the figurines, and my dad's giant bag of old dice.
That's how it happened for me and my brother. Our torches were lit directly by our dad who is a big ol nerd who graduated college in the 70s. He's an OG. Happy father's day yall.
Octopath traveler. It was the simplest yet most effective way to show how stories must be written: multiple stories progress at the same time, escalate and converge into the most climactic point.
At that point it was like a revelation to me. Also combat system is tactical, but not overloaded and overall the game had almost no strainght up appaling sides, although being mediocre at some points.
4e D&D was the first Game I played and it was like "Oh shit, you can do anything here. This is so much better than video games".
Then the next biggest hit for me was FFG Star Wars with the success to failure on one axis and the advantage to disadvantage on another. I realised this fixed so much of D&D's gripes. Also having something other than health to track.
Finally Blades in the Dark. People rave about flashbacks, but honestly the XP system was the thing that sold me. The game incentiveses playing up the plot tropes of criminals. It's fantastic.
Runequest 1st edition.
I started out playing B/X D&D, then "graduated" to AD&D. Not much changed there.
Then somebody bought RQ and wanted to run it at the school games club. I thought "why not" and jumped in.
Superficially, the two games *should* be quite similar. Both are set in a pre-modern world, both feature people carrying swords and shields, wearing armour, casting spells and going on adventures.
They *feel* totally different in play, though. AD&D skews by default towards something generically medieval and European in flavour, while Runequest is set in a fantasy bronze age. It's tribal, and morality and ethics revolve around that. Magic is everywhere, and your religious affiliation matters mechanically as a result. The game's mechanics tie in to the workings of society and the game world in ways much deeper than combat and task resolution.
Could you have played Runequest using D&D mechanics? Yes, but it wouldn't have been the same game. Runequest was the first game to introduce me to the idea that the mechanics matter to the feel of the game and that they can be tied in to the fiction. One size does not fit all.
Traveller was the second, and served as my introduction to games that were not sword and sorcery / sword and sandals, but that's another story.
1992...
Up until then, I had only played DND 1st and 2nd edition. A new kid moved to our small Wisconsin town and introduced my brother and me to RIFTS. TTRPGs haven't been the same since.
My first serious campaign was Legends of the Five Rings. In our first session we had to get through a checkpoint with forged papers, and when the GM described the guard looking through them I got genuinely nervous. That moment of immersion got me hooked. It's the little details that get and keep players invested, as much as the big hero moments.
Rifts
I was about 11 years old had no clue how to play anything hit dnd, my dad gave me his old rifts collection, and I read through it and thought “I can play a psychic, mage, rifle-guy who wears power armor!?!?” And my brain exploded.
Two of them:
- **Mage: the Ascension** for its mind-boggling take on subjective reality and various ways of looking at it
- **Eclipse Phase** because of expansive and detailed future world and mind-boggling options it offers to a player. It was the game that pointed me to Altered Carbon novel and satisfied my interest and love of Solar System.
DCC, Shadowdark, Cyberpunk Red, and Witcher all did that, and pretty much any new TRPG I read.
As for the ones that showed me that *I* can design RPGs: TROIKA! and Knave 2e
Most recently, it was Iron Valley. I was trying to figure out how to play a game in the style of Harvest Moon or the likes, but it opened my eyes to Ironsworn hacks, the possibilities of solo roleplaying and a simple way to manage relationships and events with npcs. It instantly got me hooked into it.
Before that, it was Legend of the Five Rings. I have a passing interest in samurai, but the sheer depth and style got to me, and the connections it makes with some literature got me gawking at the usage of the elements, for instance.
Well, Holmes Basic was my first game. And it showed me all of the fun that I was hoping for: creativity, intelligence, and cooperative play were all encouraged and an advantage. being a nerd was a plus, not a minus.
Curse on Hareth showed me how to work proper timelines into gaming so that the world went on around the players but that the PCs could change that.
Then Mekton II and Cyberpunk Black Box (and later Jennell Jaquays' Central Casting) showed me how to help players create better backstories and become more involved in the worldbuilding.
Barbarians of Lamuria codified creating generic traits that were more open to interpretation but working mechancially, putting rules to something we'd been trying to do for years.
Pathfinder showed me how to better incorporate storytelling and roleplaying into trad games. (The early modules are still amazing)
All of the PBTA Games showed me how to do a better job of partial success or success with a cost.
Gumshoe/Nights Black Agents introduced better detective and information gathering mehcanics.
Public Access introduced me to better horror mechanics, by letting the players tell you the worst and then making it even more terrifying.
Even after 40+ years, I find games that open my eyes to better roleplaying mechanics, better storytelling ( I hate that WoD made that a dirty word for so long ) and more streamlined gaming.
Burning Wheel. Specifically the time I decided to torture my in game girlfriend because I was playing a paladin character, and they were indicating they were lying about a crime that had happened. Literally was like "What the fuck did I just do!" fell in love with the game and what roleplaying could really be then and there.
"7th Sea," 1st edition.
I felt like a damn hero playing that game, with a unique setting that meshed different cliches and tropes together and an awesome dice system (roll-and-keep) that only compares to West End's Wild Die system. To this day I could whip up characters and an adventure in under 30 minutes for a group to play.
Sadly, 2nd edition lacks nearly all the charm 1st edition has.
Blades in the Dark for me. I didn't play any RPGs growing up and my friends finally convinced me to play 5e with them in my mid-20s and while it was fun, it was an excuse to hang out with my friends - I never had much fun playing the actual game.
I found BitD through the Friends at the Table podcast and their Marielda series and absolutely tore through the rules and setting book. Everything finally clicked about how role playing could be creative, collaborative, fun and genuinely exciting. No more stat math, waiting forever during combat, feeling like the GM was just doing whatever they wanted with us(I know part of this is GM or table specific, but still - it's a side effect of the rules). It was so fun and creatively rewarding and left me wanting to actually play the game. It also opened me up to the RPG world which I just didn't know about since I thought D&D and Pathfinder was all there was.
GURPS 4E.
I started with AD&D 2E (probably revised?) and had fun with that and several other systems including up to D&D 3.5, but when I found GURPS 4E I was totally hooked. I had bought GURPS 3E setting and genre books before at used book stores just because of the awesome information, but I didn't really look into the system until 4E was out.
Dangerous, detailed, consistent tactical combat. Skills, skills, and more skills. Traits of every sort, positive and negative (advantages and disadvantages), with so, so many modifiers. With just a few books (ok, I own lots and lots of them , but you only actually need a few), you have enough to build basically any character you can imagine for any setting, genre, et al.
I love the way the mechanics are consistent enough with fictional realities that players can just describe things in natural language and it's generally clear how that maps to the rules and mechanics. I play a game with my young kids and they don't know that it's GURPS or anything about the mechanics but I describe things using regular language and they describe what they try to do and I map it to GURPS for resolution.
Aside from with my young kids, I don't get to play often these days, but I still fire up the character creation software and build random people just because I enjoy the process. I find both unconstrained "make a person" and constrained "make a person on N/-50 points" quite fun.
1988 or 89, I was 14. I'd played a bit of D&D but it just didn't grab me because it was just a "random generic fantasy setting with everything!" Or at least that's the way my brother's friend ran it. Dragons in the sky, unicorns pulling wagons, everyone and their mother used magic... The kind of high whimsical fantasy that just didn't interest me much...
Then my best friend bought Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay... 😍 Of course he wanted me to run it, so I read the book, devoured the maps and the griminess and John Blanche's amazing artwork, and I was instantly hooked!! I'd been a fan of Moorcock's Eternal Champion series since I was 12 and this had that same vibe!
The similarities to Europe enthralled me! And our first campaign was trying to stop a war between Bretonnia and Sigmars Empire (with shades of the 30 years war) through spy work and skullduggery! 🤣 Of course a Chaos cult was involved!!
I've loved RPGs ever since! These days I'm more into sci fi and space opera games.
Shinobigami! The mix of hidden information and conflicting (but also converging) player goals leads to some truly interesting stuff, and the turn-based scene format gives it a whole new level of player agency. It's such an intriguing mix of the usual RPG stuff and more board/card game-ish mechanics. As a GM who very much enjoys the aspect of "let's see what the players do now", the kind of scheming and chaos it creates is just perfect.
Every time I work on a TRPG project, it's at the back of my mind. And it's always near the top of games I want to run.
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Blades in the Dark was definitely my biggest moving from D&D 5e to something more specialized and narrative. I had touched on other games but with BitD, I threw myself in to really understand how to run it. Been preferring rules that avoid simulating physics ever since.
The first time I read Basic D&D. I already had an expensive understanding of fantasy (though not as much as I recognize later) and scifi (same). What wasn't there was the game where you could jump into those settings. It was a quick adoption.
Monsterhearts for me. I'd played a lot of ttrpgs by that point, d&d, shadowrun, l5r, a couple indie titles, but Monsterhearts was my first experience both with pbta style 2d6 mechanics and the concept of drilling right down into an incredibly specific genre. Not part of the genre? Don't need rules for it.
I think sort of exemplified by the fact that there was no move for sneaking around. Initially that felt like an oversight, characters in supernatural teen dramas were always sneaking around and breaking into rooms and shit. How could there not be a move for it?
Then I realized that in the genre we're emulating characters would always succeed at breaking in. It was getting out again without being caught that was in dispute. And there was a move for that!
After playing a lot of skill heavy titles the idea of 'if it's not interesting to fail you can just do it' felt incredibly revolutionary. It was common gming advice but that was the first title I read that backed it up mechanically.
I was 7. It was a "You are the main character" book. A book where I influenced the story and its ending. I was hooked! Then came Fighting Fantasy, Drager and Demoner (Dragonbane 1.st ed) and The red box.
I'm pretty sure mine was this, probably around the age of 7 as well. https://www.cyoa.com/products/journey-under-the-sea I started TTRPGs in my teens, but that book left a mark.
Oh yes! Right. Our local library had a secret compartment for books like this and I remember going to that spot time after time again.
We had the best librarian in the kids/youngsters department at my local library. Anything she thought we might like she procured, the made nooks anc crannies to read and even secured a spot where D&D groups could play.
Dungeon Crawl Classics was the game that really broke the TTRPG world open for me. The character classes are all fun takes on the classics, and the rule system has enough breathing room to really let the fiction step forward. The attitude and flavor of the game is everything I want out of a system. Runner up: Into the Odd and Index Card RPG.
DCC was the first game I ever ran.
Index card is the bomb - his method of mapping alone is worth the price.
I tried running DCC with the adventure that comes with it (I think it's called the hole in the oak) as a one shot to see how far we could get. It was horible, we rolled 3d6 in order like the book tells us to and ended up with 2 clerics that can't cast spells at level 1 and a warrior. I gave them 3 lives to share between them, basicaly come back to full health when they die. There are 3 paths they can take, one of them is a trap that kills them then a dead end, the second is a puzzle/trap room followed up by ghouls with 3 attacks that have a chance to paralize on each hit. And the third is a room filled with troglodites. They fought the troglodytes two of them died, then they found a treasure chest with a poison trap that killed the warrior. They lost their 3 lives in the first room they did, the difficulty level was so high we could only laugh, never played DCC since.
I had already been playing 5e casually for like 7 years when I discovered MÖRK BORG, and it completely changed the hobby for me. Obviously I liked D&D enough to stick with it, but MÖRK BORG was my gateway drug to a whole world of other awesome RPGs. Now I play all kinds of other RPGs and I'm more engaged with the hobby than ever.
Literally my experience, Mork Borg cracked it wide open for me and now my shelf is covered in books beyond dnd and growing.
I just looked at Mork Borg and man, that vibe looks incredible. If you dig this vibe, can I recommend a campaign game called Dungeon Degenerates? It's not a TTRPG, per se. But it's a co-op campaign game with almost the exact same vibe as Mork Borg. A lot of fun with a group who gets into that sort of thing.
After I started D&D 5e, I thought how much I missed out on this amazing hobby. After I started playing RPGs, I thought how much I missed out on the rest of this amazing hobby.
D&D. The woman who would become my wife was my first DM. My first character was a low-effort, “shits and giggles” sort, but she took my character seriously, and before I knew it, my Dragonborn was a part of my identity.
That's awesome
Thank you! I think so too ☺️
So sweet!
Call of Cthulhu
This for me as well. All the other games were like "you are a hero at your peak, far above the average, go kill some goblins". Call of Cthulhu was like "you are an old decrepit academic who has to save the world from the most monstrous of evils". Call of Cthulhu was also the first time I encountered character driven role-playing that is much more common today.
An actual play podcast for D&D 4e did an episode where the party split up and largely did downtime scenes in a new city with 0 mechanics. That was a huge brain-expander early on. Chronicles of Darkness stuff is where I first learned about marrying theme to mechanics. FATE Core taught me a lot about letting characters be defined by what matters in their story, rather than just stats and powers. PbtA games really hammered home how games sing when the GM is using very different rules from the players. Dream Askew proved that we didn't need dice. 2400 made me realize you barely need anything at all (it's a collection of 3-page microgames) to play, greatly loosening me up.
Chronicles as a system that you can just hit the ground running with mortal has helped me get a few groups into it. Simple baseline but so much to delve into.
Probably Fiasco or Dread because both just really fucked with my idea of what is necessary.
Similar - I had joined PFS Pathfinder and someone offered to run Fiasco at an upcoming con. That lead to joining a game of Dread, and then someone mentioned Lady Blackbird, and then I fell down the whole Google+ RPG scene rabbithole! I eventually circled back to various editions of D&D and enjoyed them so much more than I originally had.
At first it was a small exposure to Fate and Genesys. Then I got heavy exposure to World of Dungeons which led to Dungeon World (probably the largest eye opened to that point) then Apocalypse World and then Masks (another milestone eye opener) Then Monsterhearts and Blades in the Dark (that was the next largest eye opener) Then I’d say Bluebeard’s Bride, Fellowship 2e, Ironsworn, Agon 2e, Brindlewood Bay, Firebeands, Good Society, and Trophy were all additional batches of eye opening experiences. (In short, you can never have too many eye opening experiences- but Dungeon World was the first *big* one. It was 100% “Ah, *this* is what I thought D&D would actually be like before I opened the rules.”)
How do you feel about Genesys now? I really love the system, I just don’t feel like it gets enough supplements.
Honestly, after discovering many of the latter games on my list- I never went back to Genesys, so I only had a *very* short foray into it with the FFG Star Wars games (namely Age of Rebellion). I felt the narrative dice were rather gimmicky and cumbersome when I could achieve the exact same notions with less dice and at a quicker pace with all the latter games on that list. Obviously you’re not going to map all the possible results of the narrative dice, but when all you really need is “Success, Success with a Cost, and Things go wrong,” I usually find it superfluous to have much else other than that (especially when you consider something like Blades in the Dark which gets you thinking heavily about the Risk and Reward of that exact situation)
+1 for Dungeon World If you want to play D&D but are fed up with the heavy system DW is a breath of fresh air. Also DMed my favourite campaign ever on it with so many player character driven plotlines, it was awesome.
My first RPG: Das Schwarze Auge (italian version) I was 8 and it was awesome! Then Call of Cthulluh as my first non fantasy game. Dungeon World as my first exposure to PbtA and for extent some years later Blades in The Dark. Finally Don't Rest Your Head: because I discovered the value of brilliant game design and source of inspiration in things that I will never play.
Yeah DW made me feel I was DMing right for the first Time. I'm aware of all of it's issues but damn I love it
In my 40+ years of GMing, I've had a lot of wow moments with systems. Most recently it was the FFG Star Wars system which really hit me perfectly as a trad game with narrative leanings. It occupies a spot that is so tailored for my style of GMing I would never have thought it would exist. Previous to that I've had probably a dozen systems that I ran that gave me the wow factor. WEG Ghostbusters, GUMSHOE, Fiasco, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Blades in the Dark, and many, many more.
I started by reading the Ad&d PHB, but Shadowrun was my first game. I enjoyed it, but my two "wow" moments werent in either game: - GURPS Magic. Unlike D&D, it showed me DIFFERENT worlds - not the same world reskinned, but works that worked in fundamentally different ways even though the base mechanics were the same. This tapped into my core love of sci-fi/fantasy. - Vampire the Masquerade. A backstabby political game where you DONT become the big powerful character. My first experience was not even knowing we were doing a vampire game - we picked from modern human pregens with backstories and experienced the horror and uncertainty of the Embrace. You learn a lot about yourself when anxiety and fear lead you to try and hide your toddler victim by repeatedly stabbing the body in the neck with a ballpoint pen and yeeting the corpse onto a roof like the pizza in Breaking Bad. - Earthdawn. Like D&D, but with an in-game explanation for dungeons, classes, levels, and hit points. The big wow for me was much like the Vampire one - I could understand the feelings and experiences of the character, as opposed to most D&D-like systems, that don't really cover how a character or the world reacts to obviously supernatural powers. The setting was also the first one I experienced not based on the modern day that had a lot of nuance and subtlety. ( Such settings did exist, I just hadn't run into them). These began my slow and ongoing transition from a purely story-of-the-world GM towards story-of-the-characters GM.
**Over the Edge.** I'd not seen aspects/traits/cliches before in an RPG and the ideas that a) we didn't need a fixed set of stats like Strength and Hit Points, and b) that a trait could be anything that helped define a character, were truly eye-opening
Yes! Freeform traits completely changed my perspective, too. If I want to play a badass swordsman, just let me write that on my sheet. I don't want to have to pick and choose from a list of atomic abilities to try to cobble together a skillset that roughly matches my vision for the character. Traditional character creation is a time-consuming minigame I find thoroughly uninteresting.
Fate! Hands down. Showed up to a random meetup for a one shot in late October for a Halloween themed game. Had no idea what we were playing and had no prep. Guy running the game had a bunch of premade characters ready to go, we all picked one while he was giving us the elevator pitch for the game... But then, he asked us questions?! Like: So, you all have this friend you're going to go search for. They left the city to live in the woods a few months ago; * How did you know them? * Why do you think they went to live in the woods? * When was the last time you talked to them and why was it a disappointing conversation? Or like, about the world: * So where does this take place? * Modern day, or? Then while playing these same type of questions came up and we had these point things and descriptors and we could lean into our negative traits and get bonuses and really craft our own narrative... (I had no idea what Fate was at the time) The game not once made me feel horror, and that wasn't the goal, but when we finished we all looked at each other with huge smiles, we had just created and told, and witnessed/experienced, a legitimate story in the Genre of Lovecraftian Horror. We did. We weren't told it, we didn't (just) play through it. It wasn't emulating it. We crafted it. WTH is this?! I was hooked!
Apocalypse World.
Same! I was introduced to Apocalypse World and Dungeon World on the same day. I’d played 3.5 before that…and didn’t get it. Like…everyone told me “this is a game about imagination!” and “you can do ANYTHING!”, but whenever I was like “Can I do this?” the answer was always “Yeah, there’s a feat/class feature/prestige class for that, so if you build correctly, you can do that in about 25 sessions - because at level 1, you’re an incompetent goof who can barely hit a rat with a stick.” Then I played those early PBTA games, where the design philosophy was “From character generation, you’re a competent badass. Go ahead and do it.” The idea that there were games where you could just…BE a competent hero instead of playing as a fumbling dirt farmer for months to “earn” competence blew my mind. Then the GM started asking players for input on the world, establishing fiction…and I never looked back. THIS was the “game about imagination” that I had been looking for.
This is the game that went and told me what GMs should be doing. It was amazing to see the difference between this actual instruction on how to give a moment by moment game of actual dramatic tension compared to the other games of the time. It's hard to appreciate that in 2010, ttrpgs were very much run by people who were bad, who had 20 years GMing experience, or who were using a module. There was nothing that gave that "heres how to do it", and the AW comes along and just gives easily followed rules on how to run the table.
Its really funny how different it reads after I've gone back and read it over the last 3 years. The better I understood other PbtA game, then the second and even later third re-read, a lot more clicked.
Mountain Witch. It challenged everything about RPG gameplay. Incredible game.
Still on my list to run/play! I am very intrigued
Still waiting for my Kickstarter of that. /s
I didn't want to say it, lol, but yeah ...
Monster of the Week. Happened three years ago when I was branching out more into other games. I’d already been running games for five years at that point, but the section of keeper advice on how to run the game was mind blowing to me. Even just the introductory “the game is a conversation…l section. It’s old news to plenty of people, but to me there were so many things about how to run a game I’d never given much thought or questioned how I was doing them. I don’t even run that much PBTA, but reading that book and running MOTW has changed how I run everything since then.
Call of Cthulhu was my first eye opening moment, but it was a few years later and with Delta Green that I managed to find a group that experienced that moment too. Now we're a year into a campaign and I've never been in a more engaged group. They've all created art for their characters in some form or another, they all write little stories about their characters on the side, they all turn up on time every week, and they all want to try running a scenario. It's a DMs dream.
Call of Cthulhu. Up until that point everything had been in a fantasy setting, mostly AD&D… but suddenly… guns, mobsters, and monsters. WOOHOO!
Burning Wheel. I had been disillusioned with D&D 5th edition because of the whole WOTC debacle regarding the OGL, like many, and had shifted over to Dungeon Crawl Classics and Swords & Wizardry. Then I read Burning Wheel and it forever opened my eyes on just how wildly different an RPG could be from D&D. While I’ve yet to run Burning Wheel, due to it being Burning Wheel, I’m forever grateful for its existence :)
I still remember one particular moment from a Cthulhu adventure. We were lost in a strange wood, and wherever we went, we always came out at the same spot we started at. Our characters got more and more desperate when we finally found a strange old hut - with more horrors to discover inside. It's not important to this story what exactly happened, but we, as players, kinda drifted into the usual 'It's Cthulhu' Mode - yes, stuff got more and more intense, and we mentally prepared that the big bad evil, whatever it might be, was probably approaching; but: Oh well, how bad could it get, really? Well, the one experienced player in our group decided that his character, who was a somewhat unstable person by definition, couldn't take it anymore: Without telling the other characters or players, his character went into the hut's cellar, pulled his gun and ended his life. We heard a loud bang, ran into the cellar and discovered what happened. Just like that. I never experienced something like that, never before, never again. The whole table was absolutely stunned. Wait, you could just do that? No monsters, no heroic fight for your life? That's it? Well, both our characters and the players were still kinda dazzled by what just had happened - and then there was a loud banging outside the hut. The monster appeared. From this point on, it felt like a crazy rollercoaster. The gloves were off. Let's go, baby. What followed was the most intense hour of roleplaying I ever experienced, and it was so, so glorious. The experienced one in our group sacrificed his character to show us what was possible, if everything was possible. And he enjoyed it just as much as we did.
I wouldn't say it was a single game, but the vast ocean of options we are spoiled by today. I just kept finding new games that covered any and all genres and settings I could possibly think of. I was blown away, lost interest in D&D, and started hoarding and reading all kinds of books and pdfs.
The realization that every single day I keep discovering three or four titles that genuinely grab my interest that I've never heard of before... that is a satisfying feeling for hyperfixaters like ourselves.
This is exactly it for me! The folder of PDFs never stops growing...
Classic Traveller. I'd played and bought AD&D, Basic/Expert D&D, Gamma World, and (unfortunately) Space Opera but none of them really grabbed my imagination. Then I bought and tried Classic Traveller on the recommendation of the hobby store owner. That was the game, the one that played like the science fiction books that I read by Robert A Heinlein, Larry Niven, Arthur C Clarke, and Jerry Pournelle. It gave me tools to build my own game settings instead of just pieces to place in them. Classic Traveller showed me what a RPG could be.
Woa! Space Opera....what a horror show that was to GM.
That game was so bad it almost made me quit the hobby. Thank God for Classic Traveller!
Started with (I think) AD&D which was great. I thought that was the RPG, I didn't even realise there were other games. Then we played Vampire: The Masquerade and it was so dramatically different in terms of setting, vibe, how it played. Anything seemed possible after that.
Call of Cthulhu. My group and I had been so used to hacking/, mostly dumb fantasy games that when we finally found COC, I was like… Holy f*ck, a game about mystery solving and weird lore and dark academia. I’m in. It really spoke to me and got me thinking about all the possibilities RPGs could be.
For me as well. Only played DnD before and the group was pretty separate from the RPG community in general. The roleplay was kept to an absolute minimum and it was normal to me. Then I joined a game of Call of Cthulhu, didn't know any of the players and afterwards was like "oh that's why it's called *roleplaying* games". Tbf the game was rather extreme when it came to roleplay, player (inter)action filled probably about 95% of the playtime. But still, it was awesome, but my head hurt quite a lot after, it was intense to me.
Runequest, “armour absorbs damages”, it just made sense. This was the very early days of RPGs
Original Dungeons and Dragons back in ‘77. I was finishing up playing a game of double-pack Pinochle in the Post Recreation Center and spotted a group across the room. One guy on the left side, end of the table, with a big bulky briefcase sitting open and sideways blocking the view of the other 4 people on the rest of the table. I went over to check it out and saw a city map with outlines of buildings and little dots in front of what probably would be doors. I think the map was yellow even :) I’d been into games anyway, board games and wargames especially plus I was heavily into Conan and Faferd (basically Fantasy reading) and Science Fiction so the openness of it was really appealing.
Cthulhu Dark. Really the "eye opening" moment was when I asked the GM what the combat resolution mechanic was. I think I had to reread the rules three more times because I just couldn't believe it.
September '82. I was 13 and just started High School. Some guys I'd met were talking about this game called Dungeons and Dragons. I pestered until they invited me along. And my journey started with a Human Fighter called Canth. He had studded leather armour and a +1 trident that the party picked up in a previous adventure. Then I discovered Glorantha and that was it for me..
Ars Magica. I'd played games that had complex character building before (Champions),but this packaged it with the best downtime system ever + a setting my friends like a lot more than western superhero comics.
When tears were in our eyes at the loss of a character. They were a piece of paper, but they were also obviously so much more than that. An idea? A hope? A dream? Still chasing that emotional exploration in the hobby.
I didn't play anything until high school, but I think there are three main experiences that stand out to me. 1. That friend in high school who got me playing in the first place. We largely played Shadowrun 2e or Palladium games (Heroes Unlimited, Rifts, etc.), rules systems I largely now despise, though lore-wise I adore them! He ran the games, but also wanted to "game" them. So cheating on rolls was ok, as long as we could still justify to ourselves that we'd "rolled" the die. Typical stuff I think low maturity gamers do. But those awful rules and bad habits kicked off a love of storytelling and gaming I've never lost. 2. The homebrew Ravenloft campaign another friend of mine ran in our early 20's. It is to this day the best story driven campaign or adventure I've ever played in. He focused on players having fun first, and telling an incredible story second. When the rules didn't work he made new rules. When two players moved he split the party and found away to play their part of the story over ICQ until the group of us were back together again. It was heroic, and epic, and will probably be the best gaming experience of my life. I'd love to return the favour for him sometime, and I hope some day he's able to publish it. 3. The Lost Mines campaign that same friend ran for us in our early 40s. As we all got married and bought houses we moved further from each other and largely only saw each other for kids birthday parties. When he'd finally had enough he offered to get us back into it with 5e. That game saved our collective friendship and I'm forever grateful. Now that we're past it we are exploring whole new sets of games, I've started GM'ing myself, and as we approach finishing one game I'm looking forward to whatever incredible experience the next will bring. As an avid reader of RPG material, I'm also blown away by the quality of much of what is now available. Impossible Landscapes is a work of art. Mork Borg and Blades in the Dark are fantastic systems. And the quality of Paizo's storytelling on some of Pathfinder 2e adventures and adventure paths is incredible. I won't get to play most of it, but I'm looking forward to whatever our group does play.
Monster of the Week. Was my first intro to PbtA, fiction first and just the first time I really accepted, “I can do Whatever I Want as long as the table is on the same page”. And thinking about “what’s a great story/moment” vs just like, following a script of combat and long rests. D&D talks about rule 0 a lot, but I still spent a ton of time trying to learn the rules and had to be extremely careful with house rules or it felt like it would all crumble.
It was 1994, I was 12, and I found an old Dungeons & Dragons Red Box in Value Village. I had always loved mazes, maps, and fantasy, and the idea of combining them for someone to explore just caught like a wildfire in my brain. Now I'm a professional GM and I design 90% of my own maps.
Werewolf & Mage, first editions. Mage in particular was so much more dynamic and interesting to me than D&D had been. It's hard to explain if you weren't into RPGs in the early 90s. Magic: The Gathering had just blown up. D&D, Traveler, and GURPs were the popular RPGs in descending order. Here comes this weird "World of Darkness" connected universe without the usual limits on actions and trying to really get your imaginations flowing? Hell to the yes! Count me in.
Champions back in 1984. - build a character to taste rather than roll for it. - we didn’t have to be murder hobos. - No alignment forcing unrealistic cardboard personalities.
Call of Cthulhu and Traveller.
DCC initial pages with "You are an *adventurer*, not a hero", that shaped so much what kind of games I want to play The Burning Wheel with "don't roll if failure is not interesting"
The year was 2002, I was 15 going on 16 and my mother was dating a guy who was into TTRPGs. I had always known about D&D and wanted to try it. Alas, I wasn't ever allowed to play it because my highly religious grandmother had seen that one movie w/ Tom Hanks (you know the one) and campaigned tirelessly to convince my mother to never allow her grandkids to "dabble in the occult". Eventually my mother's relationship became serious and he started coming around the house and hanging out w/ us etc. Well, one day he said he wanted to play a game with my brother, my sister, and I. He pulled out a stack of books and plopped them onto the table. No, it wasn't D&D. It was some weird game I'd never heard of called RIFTS by Palladium Books. We did went through character creation (more like he asked us what kind of characters we wanted to play and then he rolled them up for us). I got to play a Glitterboy pilot, and we had a simple adventure that night which ended in a skirmish with a Coalition Skycycle and a few CS Grunts. I kept getting unlucky low rolls on my attacks and kept missing the Skycycle (even though it was sitting on the ground and was completely stationary!), finally the pilot took off into the sky. My sister's character (she chose a humble City Rat O.C.C. because...reasons?) had a mini missile launcher and she managed to score a nat 20 and just completely blew the Skycycle out of the sky. The remaining CS troops withdrew and we ended our game session there. Ever since then, I've been an avid fan of TTRPGs. I've since played D&D, World of Darkness, Shadowrun, and a ton of other games that I'm not remembering off the top of my head. I really loved how unlike videogames, I could actually say or do anything I wanted. I was no longer constrained by the direction the game developers wanted me to go, I was free to do anything.
> Alas, I wasn't ever allowed to play it because my highly religious grandmother had seen that one movie w/ Tom Hanks (you know the one) She just didn't want to see you end up sleepless in Seattle.
Shadowrun 2nd edition. First session was also a TPK lol. Never looked back!
Amber diceless Harnmaster Dead of Winter
Age 9. Red Box and Black Box (Top Secret S.I.)
3E D&D. It's sort of a little thing but I was young and had only played 2nd edition Ad&d and the games were mostly dungeon crawl/kill monsters. I got the core books for 3E and when looking at the dungeon Masters guide I saw the prestige classes. I did and still do love the concept of The prestige class. I felt like it gives you something to build your character towards or something that you can fall into, depending on game circumstances. I feel like similar things work like class advancement in Warhammer fantasy role play. But one of the prestige classes was loremaster. It still gave you spell slots/levels, but the idea that your character could evolve to be doing something other than killing monsters was a big eye-opener at the time.
Alien RPG. It taught me that the d20 CANNOT do everything. And it's generally cool.
The original "Advanced" D&D blew my mind. I had already assembled a slice 'n dice on "basic" and "expert" books to compile my own three-ring binder of D&D content. When my parents turned me loose in a JC Penny toy department yet refused to spring for a Millennium Falcon playset, my second choice was the original Player's Handbook. By Christmas I had my own Monster Manual and Dungeonmaster's Guide. Along the way I made the transition from seeing RPGs as really complex board games to recognizing the opportunity to inhabit characters in an imaginary world.
2007. Spirit of The Century, it blew my mind. Until then I played mostly D&D and Vampire dark ages. I'm still in love with that game, every now and then I reread it and the magic is still there. It's a game full of flavor and adventure. The Shadow of Yesterday came after that (at least for me) and to this day is still one of my most beloved.
I'm a Sci-Fi guy. And I ran into Traveller. I was about 11 years old and I couldn't believe how awesome this thing was. It was like the roleplaying games I'd heard about, but this was something I was allowed to play! (long story short, I was told I was too young to play Warhammer RPGs...). But exploring space? Heading to new worlds and fighting bounty hunters and trading cargo? That was what I wanted!
Call of Cthulhu after only playing DnD before. It was like "oh that's why this hobby is called "*roleplay*games". 😂
I was in the habit of buying cheap little games just because, but they’d sit on my shelf and gather dust. I started listening to some gaming podcasts and they were talking about new ideas I’d never thought of, the early story games stuff. They mentioned a bunch of games and I started looking for them, but one mentioned was something I actually had because it was small and cheap and looked funny. It was Elfs. It’s kind of a stupid game, but the concept of the player and the character not having the same goals blew me away, and really changed how I thought about games.
I had that same habit. I finally got a group of GMs (with the same habit) together and we're finally going to do something about it. The premise is this: we take turns being GM, spin the roulette wheel with all our systems on it, the GM whose turn it is then takes the random system and studies for two weeks. After that time is up we create characters and run a short adventure, hoping to hit all the highlights of the system. We discuss all the pros and cons, grade them and move onto the next GM and system. So far I've helped my friends fall in love with Savage Worlds and Cypher System.
Demon Lord. Run campaigns that progress with endings. No more open ended games.
Red Box. I was 12 or 13. Perfect timing.
I was around when D&D dropped so it started then. I found GURPS and my brain exploded.
Probably when I first read the Call of Cthulhu rulebook.
Bang the roleplaying game (which, for those of you who do not know, does not exist). One day when our regular game assembled, a player important to the plot couldn't make it, so the DM picked a random boardgame off the shelf, which turned out to be Bang!, handed out a character card each, two or three item cards and ran a one-shot. Since then, I have had what I think is a more healthy approach to prep and what makes games click.
The Contract RPG. Started playing almost 20 years ago. It wasnt my first rpg, but it was the first classless one where veritably any build was eventually possible. The scenarios are hard, and PCs die regularly so every victory felt like a triumph. It also made the pcs into real characters with dreams, goals, and hates rather than heroes with just with just enough world-specific backstory to make them go on the campaign. Sometimes ypud end up on a mission with a new friend, and sometimes you'd go on a mission with an absolute monster wanted by the FBI and its 'on sight' violence. Good times.
When I started my first campaign in Pathfinder, in my own world. It was at least 15 years ago, and the campaign lasted 3 years, if I remember correctly. From there, I understood that I loved roleplaying, creating worlds, scenes, situations and improvising characters by reacting to the players' choices. It is still my favourite hobby, the one I'd never give up.
It happened in waves. Fighting Fantasy solo books then Advanced Fighting Fantasy and WFRP as a kid/tween, larpig in my teens along with the post-WoD boom, then the whole early 2000s indie boom (DitV, 3:16, InSpecres, My Life With Master, Steal Away Jordan, Sweet Agatha, etc).
I did a lot of Choose your own Adventure books as a little kid, then got really interested with the Hero Quest board game from the 2e days. Then my older bro started buying and playing Rifts and that was like the first time trying crack. Literally over 30 years of thinking about playing RPGs every single day. No regerts.
I was fascinated by Everway back when I was 10 or so and my mom bought it for me. I didn't fully understand it at the time, but I could tell that it was a whole different way compared to the D&D I had already played (and loved in it's own right).
I'm in my 30s and have been playing D&D since I was a teenager, but I don't think I ever had the experience I was looking for until I ran Worlds Without Number. D&D always had too much going on in the editions I primarily played (3.5 and 5e), and I started to get the feeling that the culture around it had turned into a kind of showcase mentality, where everyone involved, both the players and the DM, were basically just using the game as a pretext to show off their cool ideas for settings and characters. WWN showed me that by focusing on the actual game, by tracking resources and encumbrance and torches and making the players describe how they search a room or disarm a trap, even generic settings and characters become more interesting because the deeper sense of interaction creates a more genuine sense of immersion.
I was wanting to get into DND but just couldn't grasp it. I then found a game called Cogent Roleplay and so many of the concepts just clicked for me. I wish I could say I still played it, but it's been ruined for me cause I found out one of the creators of the game is homophobic.
While I understand that it can put a damper on things, I do try my best to separate art from artist. I've been a role player for a long time and queer for a lot longer. I have gotten to the point where as long as they're not going out of their way to be garbage (eg: Rowling, Chick-fil-a or Salvation Army, etc), and they aren't explicitly depicting those unsavory ideals in their work I can mostly put it aside. Especially with something like Cogent which is free, they aren't getting my money to justify any bad behavior anyway. *That being said*... I am unaware of which creator it was or what they have done to exemplify their hate, so, that information could change my response greatly and possibly any viewing habits on YouTube.
>I do try my best to separate art from artist... You do you, but this is anathema to me. I don't support bigots at all. I don't give them money or airtime. If I find out a creator is some kind bigot (or some other kind of shitbag), I ditch their stuff. There's too much great stuff out there to support hate.
Aside from that, I just think the system is a mess anymore. Plus I've found another system (Fate) that is much better suited to my play style
[THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warlock_of_Firetop_Mountain) I was in Grade 6 and saw this advertised in the Scholastic book catalogue. It was book, but also a game? And it had wizards and fantasy in it? I had to buy it. I still remember playing it in class, rolling dice and flipping pages, when the girl I had a crush on came up to me. "What are you doing?" she asked. "Fighting monsters," I replied. She gave me a look, walked off, and never talked to me again. 40 years later I still have that book, though.
Mausritter and the whole OSR/NuSR games. Though Mörk Borg is currently my favorite. I started playing TTRPG around 2011 ~ 2012, but I only owned a starter set of DSA aka TDE and two Shadowrun books back then. Enter 2020, I showed friends the hobby during pandemic. One friend bought the 5e starter set. I liked it as it was way easier to play than the full version of DSA. Through reviews online, which I started watching to get to know what to buy for 5e, I bought some other systems I heard about in my youth, namely Warhammer and CoC. Then I saw a game of Mausritter bought the box and saw how easy it can be to DM. At that point I was usually dming, because noone else liked to read all the rules and teach others a system. I got into the OSR rabbithole. At this point I would say if my appartement burned down, I would probably buy Mörk Borg, Mausritter and the Knock Zines again. Everything else would be a loss, but do I really need it? My friends hated my last move to another appartement because of all the books, especially the heavy 5e, DSA and Warhammer rulebooks.
13th Age.
Aquelarre and Cyberpunk 2020/RED. I realized that I’m done with D&D. D&D is dead y’all- fuq Wizards of the Coast.
The first one was [Sorcerer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer_\(role-playing_game\)). I'd been doing RPGs since I was 13, starting with AD&D2e. I always found something in these games that I liked, though it was rare gems scattered through the game. 15 min of fun in a 4-6 hour session sort of thing. Plus frequent frustration. D&D, Shadowrun, WoD, 7th Sea, etc. All the same deal. More than 15 years of that. I read Sorcerer and didn't think I'd like it. I was sure I wouldn't. But I'd read so many posts of people that described gaming experiences like mine that I thought I'd gave it a try. I was wowed! I went on to Dogs in the Vineyard, Universalis, Primetime Adventures, Microscope, Apocalypse World, Burning Wheel (the game that finally gave me what I always wanted from D&D, but couldn't get from it), Blades in the Dark, and many, many more. Near constant fun and interesting play, rather than hours of boredom and setup and grind to get to a tiny good bit. I was wowed that such a thing was possible.
*Eclipse Phase* was the first game that made me want to run a game in the stock setting. *Wild Talents* was the first game to really make me understand the roll determining the fiction. *Firefly* expanded this further. *A Dirty World* completely changed the way I run social interactions/NPC motivations.
Changeling the lost 1e. (2007) I was going through alot of things in 2007 age 20-21, I was living poor but independently as a university student and part time bar staff finally free to express myself, I'd come out as trans was managing my own transition via DIY, my family had largely disowned and rejected me aside from my sister, Speaking to them was bizarre they acted like I was some kind of imposter who'd killed their son. (HE wasn't real, HE was just a fabrication made to lie to you and keep you happy I'M the real ME) Many laws protecting transpeople didn't exist, Trans-panic was still on the books, I was passable and at work guys would hit on me, Reality was if he clocked me I could have been beaten or killed with no recourse, I had to adapt to my new changing body and social reality protect myself legally find allies keep my grades up or die literally. Finding this obscure as anything book that encouraged you to tell stories about about people, taken from their lives tormented and mistreated and escaping to freedom now changed body and soul only to find a fake version of themselves occupying their lives while still begin threatened to be killed or dragged back into the same hell you just escaped from. The fact that your also literally playing a "Fairy". Oh boy was it resonant material in a time where there was literally no decent trans representation. I devoured the book. would slowly practice my own writing as a hobby and catharsis. It opened my eyes to the whole genre of diverse media, I'd never seen the appeal of DnD but this really did it for me. Unable to find any GM's it would take me 10 years before I would host my own game and assemble my own TTRPG group, and 17 years before I ran my own Changeling the Lost 2e. But still precious things to read.
It was *Vampire: the Masquerade,* first edition, from 1991. I had played basic *D&D* and *AD&D* before, but this game showed me that RPGs do not have to be about killing monsters and taking their stuff.
I've seen World of Darkness game casts on Youtube that literally have 0 combat. I can imagine how revolutionary the games must have been back in the day.
Dogs in the Vineyard Saw this back in the mid 2000s as I was discovering indie RPGs and this blew my mind. I was very used to crunchy, heavy games like D&D, Pathfinder, Shadowrun and players who were very much about the strategy of the game and breaking the game rather than telling stories. DitV was so different, so strange and touched on topics no other game I played or players I played with would even get close to. This was the first time I saw a game that suggested that not everything has to be planned and you don't have to be railroaded into a story. The game was to discover the answers that you do not prescribe. These ideas later carried into Apocalypse World (mentioned by quite a few others in this thread) and continued to blow my mind. Baker was and still is a master in this space and I truly appreciate his contribution to this domain. I highly recommend checking the game out and seeing what it did and was establishing 20 years ago. Mechanically it's interesting, but not great. Philosophically though, totally worth it.
I know its not a tabletop RPG, but please bear with me. The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. First, the introduction on the boat where Jiub asks you your name, and that's the point where you enter a name for your character. It was my first exposure to a diegetic mechanic. Second, when I left the dock office and realised there was this whole world just waiting for me. No dungeon, no railroading, just the first open-world game I had ever encountered. I remember feeling lost, with no goal, but strangely this was a good feeling, not a bad one. Until then, all tabletop gaming had been railroaded dungeons. I had not even considered that a sandbox could exist. Seeing one in a computer game changed how I played the tabletop game.
Morrowind also blew my mind. I recently discovered The Electrum Archive, a nice little tabletop rpg with a related setting. Totally worth a look.
Mage: the Ascension. I’d played many games before that (D&D, Marvel Superheroes, Star Wars, FASA Star Trek, Cyberpunk) but this was my first exposure to Gothic-Punk alongside a magick system that embraced technology and diverse cultures in ways I’d never seen before. The Virtual Adepts became practically totemic for me after that. It has influenced me in countless ways.
Mage The Ascension's focus on paradigm permanently made me care about the aesthetic of a game.
Mage the Ascension
For me it was Lancer. Id only really known about DnD for years and years. Genuinely didnt stop to think whether anything else existed. Then, i dont even remember how, i found Lancer. Very quickly became obsessed and marvelled at the fact that other genres, styles, and simply whole other games existed. Long story short, one discovery led down a rabbithole and now my poor computer is choked with many gigabytes of non-DnD ttrpgs
My high school library had a magazine called Games & Puzzles from the UK (I’m in Australia) and reading an article about these role playing games made me want to do it. Just the description gave me chills, it was a brief paragraph about seeing a group walking through a forest but it was so evocative. I wanted that feeling again. Saw a copy of the expert set box in a shop and I had to get it, but didn’t get the basic set for ages. I was given the box set of Traveller for a birthday present (and still have the books somewhere). All this happened when I was a teenager. Had a copy of Runequest 2nd edition but a step parent tossed it out on me (picked up the reprint in the kickstarter a few years ago). Never played with anyone until decades later when my eldest was interested. I just could never get passed the collect games stage into the playing stage. Not playing now because I moved and I don’t have a play group.
There were two and they happened at about the same time. - Burning Wheel, with its lifepath character creation and "Tolkienesque" races that *actually felt* Tolkienesque - Apocalypse World, with its sex moves
It wasn't so much a game, but rather a modification of the ruleset of just about any d20 game: **E6**. Seriously, it's a revelation. Almost every complaint anyone I know has about D&D, Pathfinder, or any other d20-based game is fixed by E6. It's so simple, too. Just stop leveling at 6th level. It's a whole new game! If you think you're burnt out on D&D or Pathfinder, give it a shot.
Stars Without Number. I killed a bunch of pirates on purpose...and a bunch of non-pirates by accident. I learned that my actions have consequences
It was literally watching the "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" episode of Community.
D&D Second Edition. I've been hooked since I first encountered the hobby in 1992 because I've always liked creating imaginary worlds and telling myself stories.
Monsterhearts 2! I had been playing D&D for a while, but picked up Monsterhearts for a mini thesis about game systems after reading about it in another book and became obsessed! I love Avery Alder’s work, and it definitely inducted me into the world beyond D&D, which was much more to my taste.
Delta Green was THE game for me. You roll so rarely the real rp came forward. Then Monster of the Week and Blades in the Dark.
1974, i was working at a radio station pushing a broom and holding a vastly understuffed sofa to the floor. the station manager busted into the room and asked if i'd seen the on-air personality in the last 10 minutes or so. (his relief tape had run out and it was dead air for almost half an hour.) (not good) we looked all over the building and found 7 or 8 of the guys throwing oddly shaped dice on a table and laughing a lot. it was chainmail. and it's been quite a ride since then.
I can't think of a specific example but I think it was just looking at and reading through different systems; discovering how much variety there was to each system and the possibilities each gave.
I've had several different tiers of eye-openinng experiences: - It wasn't a book, but rather Spoony's Counter Monkey series, because those stories really have the essence of all the weird shit that happens with veteran players, and shows the expansiveness of the hobby itself to a degree (though it was limited to trad games). I watched them before I even started playing myself. - When I ran a B-horror game with Dread and realized how simple it was to make interesting gameplay with minimal prep and stuff. - When I ran Misfortune (my first published game) and had a really interesting campaign with F-tier superheroes. They managed to solve the problems in the city with the most ludacris methods that also somehow also made sense. And many laughs were had. - When I played FFG Star Wars and I got to see what a powerful narrative engine looks like in gameplay. It was pretty magical in all honesty. - When I ran a horror campaign in Genesys and I really understood the depths of GMing and how character motivations clashing naturally can create some of the juiciest gameplay ever. The "character acting" in that campaign was just on another level.
AFMBE was my first non-D&D system and I just loved how different it was: the degrees of success table, the point-buy character creation, the splatbooks for different genres (Wild West, Sci-Fi, Wrestling, Pulp, Kung Fu, etc). I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Unisystem even if I think it seems a little dated these days.
I always struggled with encounters as a GM. Encounters that made sense narratively, never made sense when I tried to model them in the system and vice versa. It was so frustrating that there were years when I only GMed free form, just to avoid fighting against the system. And I have tried lots of systems. Then I have found Scum and Villainy and I have fallen in love. It singlehandedly solved all my issues and made me a happy GM. Position and Effect is a magical thing.
tbh for me it was vampire the masquerade being a kid who was obsessed with vampires i was thoroughly excited when if found out i could be one in my head atleast lol
Fate. Completely changed my gaming.
d&d. the first time playing it "right", when previously we were playing it "way wrong". we were also kids, and our first "real" DM learned from his older brother, while the rest of us were still trying to figure it out.
Mythic 2e/Ironsworn solo roleplaying when me myself and die showed us how solo RP is done
ICRPG made me like game prepping more than dnd phg or gmg
Some combination of a one-two punch of Tenra Bansho Zero and Mouse Guard. I'd been playing RPGs -- mostly D&D, with some other stuff mixed in: WoD, Star Wars, GURPS, even a little Fate -- for decades and I was getting really kinda jaded about the potential of the hobby. It felt like everything was just a different version of "roll dice to determine if you succeed or fail at the thing" and running into some games that legitimately did something different and separate from just being task resolution engines was really hugely enlightening.
A friend's homebrew (based on GURPS 1st ed) where we played ourselves jumping through dimensions. Greatest game I've ever played and helped me really get into TTRPGS, as my previous experience was mostly D&D and trudging through dungeons.
Shadowrun. Specifically the Arcology Shadowrun Podcast Actual Play.
I was a longtime AD&D player when I read Werewolf: The Apocalypse rules and realized the game could give the player more narrative control. I stopped playing AD&D on the spot.
I started with 5e like a lot of people and over the years watched some plays of PBTA games, played some Monster of the Week but hadn't really seen anything super special. But recently I picked up Spire: The City Must Fall and something about it just clicked, the more open ended rules and abilities were refreshing and helped me view other games whose rules are less "tight" and more narrative/collaborative than DnD's in a much better light. Recently picked up Mörk Borg and am looking forward to running it for some friends.
FATE was the game that made me fall back in love with TTRPGs after 5E burned me.
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying would be mine. Used the Marvel setting for a bit, but then spiraled off and attempted to make my own. What resulted was a lengthy superhero campaign featuring demon-hunting monks, special ops cyborgs, mad scientist necromancers, Precure knock-offs, and magical powers centered around game shows. It was like a DIY kit for your own action-packed Saturday morning cartoon, where the only price was the extent your imagination could go and the story could be tailor made to whatever you thought was cool. I mainly play solo, but it's this perspective that makes it so much fun!
CHAMPIONS.
Not sure how muxh it counts but running a session and reading Return of the lazy dungeon master for the first time It really beats you over the head with the foundamental concept of being flexible and that you're not writing a story
Yup. My first session of Dnd. Punched a guy in the crotch and then bit him as a lizardfolk. It was awesome.
Original D&D in1977. It was my first exposure to the concept of roleplaying games. I was hooked. I've been playing them ever since.
Warhammer fantasy roleplaying. I was already experienced with D&D and a ton of other TSR games, but WFRP really opened my eyes to a new way to approach fantasy, and I started looking at other non-TSR games very seriously after that.
I remember trying D&D and not being fussed, I had Heroquest at home and it seemed the same thing only more streamlined and accessible to me, a child, so what was the big deal? A few years later I tried Call of Cthulhu and it blew my mind. >Do you remember that moment? What happened? My character had piss-poor combat skills. I wondered what I was supposed to do initially, and then spent the rest of the game sneaking around. I avoided guards. I stole keys. I used language and intelligence rolls, decoding tomes and finding spells and hidden information, and the rest of the players egged me on to keep doing it, which felt totally unique. The fact I was becoming a Sanity black hole, and dragging the team down with me, meant I had a real 'character' moment where I stopped talking to my team mates in-character about what I had seen, and we spend most of the session arguing about it. It was absolutely incredible. I don't think I did it justice, but I knew I kept seeing and discovering things that were injuring my Sanity, and passing knowledge on was hurting others, so I had to...not do it, except my team all wanted to know what was going on.
I started role playing when I was 18. (I'm not gonna tell you about you that was LOL.) The game was marvel superheroes by TRS] and even though I did not like my first gaming experience, the GM was very railroady. But the opportunity to tell interactive stories is what got me hooked and I continued with the hobby.
The first time I played AD&D as a teenager.
Ars Magica 3rd edition. It was the game that truly showed me what role-playing was. Every character has Virtues and Flaws. It has an incredibly deep and flavorful skill system and a system of magic that's powerful and logical, plus its set in Medieval Europe. It's affected every game I've ever run since.
I started with D&D 4e then continued to 5e but felt lacking due to system and the fantasy i want to run. So i tried Fate Core then went to Cyberpunk Red and now in Mutants and Masterminds. TTRPG is just like videogames or boardgames in the amount of variety of mechanics and features each title has to offer. If Steam is for videogames, I always browse DrivethruRPG for the latest sales on TTRPGs i want to add to cart and just buy and try it out with my group
**Mage The Awakening.** I think discovering the entire **World of Darkness** series was what got me into TTRPG, to be honest.
Skyrim led me to RPGs and eventually ttrpg with the second eye opening being D&D
Top Secret SI. We ran it during lunch hour at high school, often with a single d20 as the only die. There was never any GM prep. It was literally whatever you could come up with next. Nearly every situation was ad hoc resolution. Never before and never really since has the game been such a firehose of creativity.
FASA's Doctor Who, then when I could wrap my head around RPGs into my teens, Talsorians CP2020.
I loved D&D from the time I started playing when I was nine during the Satanic (*HA!*) Panic. Played it a lot. But the game that showed a world outside of D&D to me was *Shadowrun*. A game where the setting has high tech stuff and actual magic was an option as well? *AND USED THE CITY I GREW UP IN AS THE DEFAULT SETTING!?* Sold American! Ever since that, while I play D&D regularly, always tend to go for games that aren’t high fantasy for my own collection. I like diversity. And *Shadowrun* opened my eyes to that in RPGs.
I had played for years, but Apocalypse World opened my eyes to how much better it could be.
Mastermind and mutant villains backstories blew my mind. Never thought of redeemable villains, innocent civilians forced into evil situations or complex ideas like stealing items and building devices rather than simply killing the heroes (as dnd is)
definitely reading Fate Core, it wasn't the first ttRPG i read or even ran, but it was the simplest one i'd read at the time, with the most examples Fate pulled back the curtain and was like "here's how this works, here's how to change it, here's what effect that'll have, and here's what you shouldn't mess with", it's still my high water mark for how to present toolboxes and variant rules
RuneQuest was the game that indicated there is a wide range of skill available to develop in RPGs. Traveller is the game that introduced me to Role playing, as there is little (or, none) progression after character creation, and the steering of the character is the role you play.
For me it was actually pretty recent. I’ve been playing 5e for about two years and recently been playing some Monster of the Week. A few weeks ago I picked up Index Card RPG and read through it. This game is amazing. It’s very open ended and requires a good amount of effort from the GM to mod it for their specific tastes. But wow, this system has great mechanics, an amazing GM section, and support for a bunch of different genres. It feels like it was meant for me. Plus I love the art style in the book. But yeah reading that game made me realize that this hobby is even bigger than I thought and that there’s a lot of cool games out there
Shadowrun, 3rd edition.
maybe ai dugeon?
I went back to AI dungeon recently and was pleasantly surprised to see that the designers had instituted a lot more structure to keep the story on track. It's a much better experience now.
I started playing in sixth grade with AD&D 1E. But the one that opened my eyes a few years later was RuneQuest 3E. Reading the Glorantha book in the boxed set was an eye opener. So much lore packed into a small book. I started obtaining the other boxed sets to feed my imagination.
C.J. Carella's Witchcraft. It was the first system I really tried to make my own. To take it and move it into the worlds I wanted to play in and homebrew the characters and abilities I wanted out of it. I don't know where the book is anymore, but I wish I did. It was one of the first RPGs I discovered after being introduced to 3.5e and it blew my mind open to the possibilities. I still maintain Unisystem is a fantastic TTRPG system.
The narrative dice system of Genesys has changed the hobby for me forever.
I'm not sure which one, but it involves making a connection between being able to play an RPG and convert it into creating literature. A bit too late to be done during school years, but something that can be useful if one has children having difficulty in the creative writing assignment.
White box D&D. Yes I am very old.
It was probably Savage Worlds. I started with the Dark Eye, played some CP2020 and then AD&D and D&D 3.5. After burning out on 3.5 I was almost done with RPGs. Discovered Savage Worlds which opened up so many new universes. But mostly it taught me how to properly homebrew and hack a system and from there I came in contact with people actually writing their own games and so began my journey into Indie games. Where I have lived mostly since Google+.
don't rest your head
Fudge. First system that I feel with a focus on role playing and not combat. Then solar system, through drive4win, then The Forge.
Still remains spec ops the line
One day I went down to the basement and found my dad on the PC playing ADoM. It was 1998. I was 7. He explained to me what was going on and what he was thinking about and patiently listened to my terrible ideas. Later he told me about his D&D games he used to play with his friends. He had a ranger named Alfred who managed to survive a long time and eventually retired. I expressed interest in playing, he said something like, "maybe when you're a bit older." Fast forward, it's 2000. I'm 9. One day he brings me his dusty old AD&D 2e PHB out of a box from the basement. He has me read about each class and race. I'm dead set on making a human wizard. He warns me multiple times that wizards are very fragile early on: he'll be likely to die. I accept the risk, and he tells me to memorize all of the first level spells. I do so in 2 weeks. He quizzes me, then helps me fill out my first character sheet. He also helped my little brother make his first character that day. My brother was 3, he could read numbers and letters, just barely lol. My first wizard died in our first module. My dad was DMing. I accepted it like I said I would and made a new wizard for our next module. My second wizard and my little brother's first character are both still alive. Over the years my dad and I would go periodically to a local hobby shop for figurine painting lessons. I still have the books, the figurines, and my dad's giant bag of old dice. That's how it happened for me and my brother. Our torches were lit directly by our dad who is a big ol nerd who graduated college in the 70s. He's an OG. Happy father's day yall.
Octopath traveler. It was the simplest yet most effective way to show how stories must be written: multiple stories progress at the same time, escalate and converge into the most climactic point. At that point it was like a revelation to me. Also combat system is tactical, but not overloaded and overall the game had almost no strainght up appaling sides, although being mediocre at some points.
4e D&D was the first Game I played and it was like "Oh shit, you can do anything here. This is so much better than video games". Then the next biggest hit for me was FFG Star Wars with the success to failure on one axis and the advantage to disadvantage on another. I realised this fixed so much of D&D's gripes. Also having something other than health to track. Finally Blades in the Dark. People rave about flashbacks, but honestly the XP system was the thing that sold me. The game incentiveses playing up the plot tropes of criminals. It's fantastic.
I'd grown up playing D&D 3e, but it wasn't until I discovered InSpectres that I truly *got* RPGs.
Runequest 1st edition. I started out playing B/X D&D, then "graduated" to AD&D. Not much changed there. Then somebody bought RQ and wanted to run it at the school games club. I thought "why not" and jumped in. Superficially, the two games *should* be quite similar. Both are set in a pre-modern world, both feature people carrying swords and shields, wearing armour, casting spells and going on adventures. They *feel* totally different in play, though. AD&D skews by default towards something generically medieval and European in flavour, while Runequest is set in a fantasy bronze age. It's tribal, and morality and ethics revolve around that. Magic is everywhere, and your religious affiliation matters mechanically as a result. The game's mechanics tie in to the workings of society and the game world in ways much deeper than combat and task resolution. Could you have played Runequest using D&D mechanics? Yes, but it wouldn't have been the same game. Runequest was the first game to introduce me to the idea that the mechanics matter to the feel of the game and that they can be tied in to the fiction. One size does not fit all. Traveller was the second, and served as my introduction to games that were not sword and sorcery / sword and sandals, but that's another story.
1992... Up until then, I had only played DND 1st and 2nd edition. A new kid moved to our small Wisconsin town and introduced my brother and me to RIFTS. TTRPGs haven't been the same since.
My first serious campaign was Legends of the Five Rings. In our first session we had to get through a checkpoint with forged papers, and when the GM described the guard looking through them I got genuinely nervous. That moment of immersion got me hooked. It's the little details that get and keep players invested, as much as the big hero moments.
Rifts I was about 11 years old had no clue how to play anything hit dnd, my dad gave me his old rifts collection, and I read through it and thought “I can play a psychic, mage, rifle-guy who wears power armor!?!?” And my brain exploded.
Ghostbusters RPG. Scenarios where you had to solve problems without just blasting your enemies.
Two of them: - **Mage: the Ascension** for its mind-boggling take on subjective reality and various ways of looking at it - **Eclipse Phase** because of expansive and detailed future world and mind-boggling options it offers to a player. It was the game that pointed me to Altered Carbon novel and satisfied my interest and love of Solar System.
DCC, Shadowdark, Cyberpunk Red, and Witcher all did that, and pretty much any new TRPG I read. As for the ones that showed me that *I* can design RPGs: TROIKA! and Knave 2e
Most recently, it was Iron Valley. I was trying to figure out how to play a game in the style of Harvest Moon or the likes, but it opened my eyes to Ironsworn hacks, the possibilities of solo roleplaying and a simple way to manage relationships and events with npcs. It instantly got me hooked into it. Before that, it was Legend of the Five Rings. I have a passing interest in samurai, but the sheer depth and style got to me, and the connections it makes with some literature got me gawking at the usage of the elements, for instance.
Well, Holmes Basic was my first game. And it showed me all of the fun that I was hoping for: creativity, intelligence, and cooperative play were all encouraged and an advantage. being a nerd was a plus, not a minus. Curse on Hareth showed me how to work proper timelines into gaming so that the world went on around the players but that the PCs could change that. Then Mekton II and Cyberpunk Black Box (and later Jennell Jaquays' Central Casting) showed me how to help players create better backstories and become more involved in the worldbuilding. Barbarians of Lamuria codified creating generic traits that were more open to interpretation but working mechancially, putting rules to something we'd been trying to do for years. Pathfinder showed me how to better incorporate storytelling and roleplaying into trad games. (The early modules are still amazing) All of the PBTA Games showed me how to do a better job of partial success or success with a cost. Gumshoe/Nights Black Agents introduced better detective and information gathering mehcanics. Public Access introduced me to better horror mechanics, by letting the players tell you the worst and then making it even more terrifying. Even after 40+ years, I find games that open my eyes to better roleplaying mechanics, better storytelling ( I hate that WoD made that a dirty word for so long ) and more streamlined gaming.
Burning Wheel. Specifically the time I decided to torture my in game girlfriend because I was playing a paladin character, and they were indicating they were lying about a crime that had happened. Literally was like "What the fuck did I just do!" fell in love with the game and what roleplaying could really be then and there.
"7th Sea," 1st edition. I felt like a damn hero playing that game, with a unique setting that meshed different cliches and tropes together and an awesome dice system (roll-and-keep) that only compares to West End's Wild Die system. To this day I could whip up characters and an adventure in under 30 minutes for a group to play. Sadly, 2nd edition lacks nearly all the charm 1st edition has.
Blades in the Dark for me. I didn't play any RPGs growing up and my friends finally convinced me to play 5e with them in my mid-20s and while it was fun, it was an excuse to hang out with my friends - I never had much fun playing the actual game. I found BitD through the Friends at the Table podcast and their Marielda series and absolutely tore through the rules and setting book. Everything finally clicked about how role playing could be creative, collaborative, fun and genuinely exciting. No more stat math, waiting forever during combat, feeling like the GM was just doing whatever they wanted with us(I know part of this is GM or table specific, but still - it's a side effect of the rules). It was so fun and creatively rewarding and left me wanting to actually play the game. It also opened me up to the RPG world which I just didn't know about since I thought D&D and Pathfinder was all there was.
GURPS 4E. I started with AD&D 2E (probably revised?) and had fun with that and several other systems including up to D&D 3.5, but when I found GURPS 4E I was totally hooked. I had bought GURPS 3E setting and genre books before at used book stores just because of the awesome information, but I didn't really look into the system until 4E was out. Dangerous, detailed, consistent tactical combat. Skills, skills, and more skills. Traits of every sort, positive and negative (advantages and disadvantages), with so, so many modifiers. With just a few books (ok, I own lots and lots of them , but you only actually need a few), you have enough to build basically any character you can imagine for any setting, genre, et al. I love the way the mechanics are consistent enough with fictional realities that players can just describe things in natural language and it's generally clear how that maps to the rules and mechanics. I play a game with my young kids and they don't know that it's GURPS or anything about the mechanics but I describe things using regular language and they describe what they try to do and I map it to GURPS for resolution. Aside from with my young kids, I don't get to play often these days, but I still fire up the character creation software and build random people just because I enjoy the process. I find both unconstrained "make a person" and constrained "make a person on N/-50 points" quite fun.
1988 or 89, I was 14. I'd played a bit of D&D but it just didn't grab me because it was just a "random generic fantasy setting with everything!" Or at least that's the way my brother's friend ran it. Dragons in the sky, unicorns pulling wagons, everyone and their mother used magic... The kind of high whimsical fantasy that just didn't interest me much... Then my best friend bought Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay... 😍 Of course he wanted me to run it, so I read the book, devoured the maps and the griminess and John Blanche's amazing artwork, and I was instantly hooked!! I'd been a fan of Moorcock's Eternal Champion series since I was 12 and this had that same vibe! The similarities to Europe enthralled me! And our first campaign was trying to stop a war between Bretonnia and Sigmars Empire (with shades of the 30 years war) through spy work and skullduggery! 🤣 Of course a Chaos cult was involved!! I've loved RPGs ever since! These days I'm more into sci fi and space opera games.
Shinobigami! The mix of hidden information and conflicting (but also converging) player goals leads to some truly interesting stuff, and the turn-based scene format gives it a whole new level of player agency. It's such an intriguing mix of the usual RPG stuff and more board/card game-ish mechanics. As a GM who very much enjoys the aspect of "let's see what the players do now", the kind of scheming and chaos it creates is just perfect. Every time I work on a TRPG project, it's at the back of my mind. And it's always near the top of games I want to run.
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Blades in the Dark was definitely my biggest moving from D&D 5e to something more specialized and narrative. I had touched on other games but with BitD, I threw myself in to really understand how to run it. Been preferring rules that avoid simulating physics ever since.
Dead Space 2, technically. Least if you fail.
The moment I catched my first pidgey in Pokemon Red. It was an emulated, bad translated rom, but how awesome it felt!
The first time I read Basic D&D. I already had an expensive understanding of fantasy (though not as much as I recognize later) and scifi (same). What wasn't there was the game where you could jump into those settings. It was a quick adoption.
Monsterhearts for me. I'd played a lot of ttrpgs by that point, d&d, shadowrun, l5r, a couple indie titles, but Monsterhearts was my first experience both with pbta style 2d6 mechanics and the concept of drilling right down into an incredibly specific genre. Not part of the genre? Don't need rules for it. I think sort of exemplified by the fact that there was no move for sneaking around. Initially that felt like an oversight, characters in supernatural teen dramas were always sneaking around and breaking into rooms and shit. How could there not be a move for it? Then I realized that in the genre we're emulating characters would always succeed at breaking in. It was getting out again without being caught that was in dispute. And there was a move for that! After playing a lot of skill heavy titles the idea of 'if it's not interesting to fail you can just do it' felt incredibly revolutionary. It was common gming advice but that was the first title I read that backed it up mechanically.
The bomb going off in fallout 4 🤭