Let's break off the thread a little and talk about those old-school games we dig, and why the diggin'.
Like, say, Classic Traveller. Not real coherent in the skills department, but easily patched -- and great googly, is it expandable. It's built out of expandability. It makes its own gravy!
Or Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes. A modern-era T&T offshoot which allows for a variety of adventures, and ends up being somewhat generic (i.e., multi-genre) in the process. Needs a little polish in some places, but perfectly serviceable.
Next?
I've already mentioned TSR's Conan boxed set several times. Why? It's fast, simple, gritty, has a unified resoloution mechanic, an early example of mook rules and a suitably dark and dangerous magic system. It's incredibly easy to houserule and can be applied to most fantasy or historical settings with very little work. Attributes are derived from skill totals rather than the other way around, which makes for a nice, logical twist. NPC's and monsters can be statted up in minutes, and the system pretty much fades into the background during play.
What's more it's now becoming freeware under the ZeFRS project. The site is only half complete but the essentials have already been posted:
http://www.midcoast.com/~ricekrwc/zefrs/
If I may rehash an old (if predictable for me) favorite:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: My lord. Countless hours of rolling up mutant animals (80 in the main book alone, hundreds including all the sourcebooks), running them out, and having a blast. One of a small subsection of games where character generation is just about as much fun as playing the game itself. Man, spending Bio-E--just a massive range of options, customization potential, etc. CharGen was/is a bit clunky, but that's the way things go.
MegaTraveller - I've been naysayed for it, but I still consider it a superior skill system than most I've seen, even today.
DC Heroes - My supers game. The exponential attributes, benchmarks, and simple yet robust handling of powers really makes supers tick for me.
Quote from: Zachary The FirstIf I may rehash an old (if predictable for me) favorite:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: My lord. Countless hours of rolling up mutant animals (80 in the main book alone, hundreds including all the sourcebooks), running them out, and having a blast. One of a small subsection of games where character generation is just about as much fun as playing the game itself. Man, spending Bio-E--just a massive range of options, customization potential, etc. CharGen was/is a bit clunky, but that's the way things go.
One of my absolute favorite games! A classic!
-clash
MegaTraveller: It´s the best weapons damage/penetration munition type simulator in any RPG still playable fast and loose. Pure genius!
Anything Battletech: It´s basic engine was adaptable, quick and translated very well into other games. Also look at Renegade Legion.
Tunnels & Trolls: Roll some dice, add them, tell a story. Take that, you indy fiend!
Abenteuer in Magira: Ancient german role-playing game, consisting of a few mimeographed books with proto-LARP pictures glued to the front. Very playable, interesting world and some features that are still missing from modern games.
Swordbearer: You want a reason to kill orcs? Well, they're a neccesary component for your spells. A really good magic system and the rest isn't bad, either. Forgotten classic. Plus: Bunrabs.
QuoteSwordbearer: You want a reason to kill orcs? Well, they're a neccesary component for your spells. A really good magic system and the rest isn't bad, either. Forgotten classic. Plus: Bunrabs.
FGU, black box. Not forgotten! But try to find players for that one...
TMNT and Other Strangeness was the first RPG I ever played, and I still have a bunch of the books for it.
I've also got a soft spot for Revised Recon, just because it's easy as heck to grind through characters without slowing down play.
I would have to agree with Zachary and Pseudoephedrine about TMNT. I always enjoyed it. (Heck still do today, except I'm more focused on the "After the Bomb" setting for it.)
I also like Star Frontiers. Everything seemed to work well (skill checks, combat, and etc) without bogging down. I like the alien races. And the destructive power gamer in me likes being able to dial up up the power on a laser pistol. :D
Quote from: PseudoephedrineI've also got a soft spot for Revised Recon, just because it's easy as heck to grind through characters without slowing down play.
Man, you and me both! That game seriously needs more love than it gets.
Incidentally, for a blast from the past, the original Recon is available for free as a pdf from Palladium's Cutting Room Floor (http://www.palladium-megaverse.com/cuttingroom/index.html).
Nifty. Thanks for the heads-up.
Rolemaster - We had many years of fun rolling on the Critical charts. Something evocative about reading those criticals. 66E on any table was cool. The system is crunchy and character creation took a while but what fun we had.
Stormbringer 1st Ed - Amazingly unbalanced but we didn't care. The games we played were fun! The system is easy to learn and run. Moves quietly into the background as you go around fighting either agents of law or chaos. Oh, the art was incredible.
Basic D&D - I actually started playing AD&D at 7. Basic D&D allowed me to run games. It was simple and cheaper than buying all of the AD&D hard covers. I could buy adventures at the toy store. It only took around 10 minutes to make characters and play. I loved the Larry Elmore artwork.
Star Frontiers - It was our first sci-fi game. I can't recall how many times I've crashed on Volturnas. The assault scout seemed to be the vehicle of choice.
Robotech - Our first exploration outside of TSR and really the only Palladium game we played to any extent. We had some great times playing this and almost got into a fight over a typo or "What do you mean the Veritech doesn't have ultra-violet sensors?". It makes me smile everytime where I see my brother penciled it in the book. I plan on writing a campaign based on the SDF-1 actually crashing in American Samoa in 1985 or 87.
Nostalgic games? As in games that I remember some of the best times with? Those are simple to list, Basic D&D, Star Frontiers, and Villains & Vigilantes. Close runners up are AD&D, Paranoia, T&T, and CoC, but those are remembered for more specific reasons.
D&D & Star Frontiers are probably my favorite “nostalgic” games because they are the ones I played the most with my Big sister Colette. She is the one who got me into almost every geek hobby I love, and was pretty much my role model growing up. Not only that, but those were some of the best stories ever told. Unlike most people, my first adventures didn’t start as hack and slash and then develop into great stories…it was actually quite the reverse. With my sister things were always very much about the story, lighthearted, and about good vs. evil. Sort of fairy tale type of game. It was always about the story, character development, and cool fun NPCs and villains.
Later, when my sister went off to college I began playing more with my peers, and the games were much more social, more about rules, and more about getting together with friends than telling a story. Those were fun time too (with those second listed games), but not the same as those early games with my sister.
V&V was a bit different. It was about my Junior year in High School, when I had settled on my very good group of life friends (still friends with them all, despite the fact that we live a good distance apart). At that time we had all gotten seriously into comic books, so it was only natural that we try some super hero role playing. Unable to afford Champions, we settled on the thin V&V rules at $6. Those were some seriously good adventures, and seriously fun times with friends. V&V marks the peek good nostalgic years of my life.
Basic D&D and Traveller.
Each one wins because their rules were not just simple, they were elegant in design. Both games gave you just enough to get yourself and a few friends in trouble, the rest was up to you to create.
I don't have any, sorry.
Heh...
See my sig. ;)
V&V.
Something died in me whan my group switched to FASRIP. We ditched our years in the making shared homebrew universe (I still use elements of it today, though) and became second stringers in the MU. I was never able to get into it.
"Dragon Warriors" - I've had the set since they were published when I was 12. I just kind of grokked it in that it did everything D&D tried to do, only better. It's still one of my favourites. YMMV.
Quote from: gale_wolf"Dragon Warriors" - I've had the set since they were published when I was 12. I just kind of grokked it in that it did everything D&D tried to do, only better. It's still one of my favourites. YMMV.
Great game. I wouldn't say it was "better" than D&D (insert obligatory "All hail the Moldvay Basic Set!" warcry) but it was definitely more flavourful. The implied setting of earlier books was a dark reflection of England during the early middle ages, with the exception of knights in full plate. The scenarios often read like twisted fairytales, I loved the idea that dungeons were retitled 'Underworlds,' and were often supernatural places where one expected to encounter dark, nonsensical shit. Giving them a pagan, spiritual dimension worked very well in reinforcing the idea that these weren't just monster spawning points.
The rules were cool, too. As a kid I thought subtracting Defense from Attack then rolling under on a d20 was inspired, and applied it as a general system for skills and the like before I knew what a Unified Resoloution Mechanic even was. The core classes were great, as were the vaguely historical monsters. Hobgoblins weren't grunts to be slaughtered out of hand, they were powerful and intelligent individuals wielding darkly sorcerous power.
I'm pretty excited by the revised hardback James Wallis has in the pipeline. Hopefully it'll inspire a mini-revival of an old school game that deserved a lot more attention than it actually got.
Old-school games?
Empire of the Petal Throne: a very servicable OD&D variant with a nifty world, fun rationales to go dungeon crawling and fun dungeons, period. Weird monsters, strange deities, cool spells, some genuinely creepy art by the creator himself. Plus a rudimentary yet awesome mass combat system.
Quote from: MelanOld-school games?
Empire of the Petal Throne: a very servicable OD&D variant with a nifty world, fun rationales to go dungeon crawling and fun dungeons, period. Weird monsters, strange deities, cool spells, some genuinely creepy art by the creator himself. Plus a rudimentary yet awesome mass combat system.
Yes! Good times.
I'm trying to revive that feel with my
Savage Tekumel (http://home.earthlink.net/~djackson24/Delbert6.htm) conversion.
=
Sosthenes recently described Tunnels & Trolls' system as "roll some dice, add them up, tell a story". A great summary. I love it. I like this game; it's streamlined and uncomplicated, with lots of wiggle-room. It may be kind of gestalt in the combat department, but it's easy enough to compartmentalize and personify.
I know that Talents are a late (official) addition to the rules, but...dude, I just made up a warrior whose talent is "Sheer, ballsy will". If you can prove that does not rock, I will think about giving you a donut.
Villains and Vigilantes, for making a superhero game and doing things well early on, but notably for fairly quick and easy handling of map based movement, as well as the best handling of super speed I've seen, as well as offering many tactical options in ways that were easy to follow, sadly the jumping rules were a mess of complexity I still don't want to touch.
Marvel Superheroes (Faserip), for doing Marvel Universe well, simply and making charts cool--a single resolution chart that handled the game mechanics, simple direct and easy to understand. Abstract movement that fit comic books a bit more than tactical style play, and basically did superheroes of Marvel "right".
Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes: Tunnels and Trolls slightly more complex brother. It's an espionage/detective game that has solid handling of all the things needed for such a game and even some suggestions to expand into modern "fantasy" (investigative/supernatural) style play. Add to that its handling of "live" clues, and you've a slim game which does its job well and gets out of the way. (Guns are deadly, but in play fairly inaccurate, which plays up the tropes of the genres it covers well--people get shot at but rarely hit, when they are hit, its going to matter.)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for the reasons above: For years, that game had the most fun, intense character generation hands down. For a while back in high school, some friends and I would make characters, play a session, then the next week make new characters and play again.
TORG: Big New Jersey Girl Hair meets techno-primitive-pulp-horror-ninja action. It was my first exposure to multi-genre, multi-world gaming that was cohesive and made sense. The heroes were Heroes, with a clear goal: Save the world(s). It was never, ever hard to make a TORG adventure.
I like the reference to T&T and MSPE "doing their job and getting out of the way." The consistency of the rules lets you drop in a rule to do pretty much anything you want, without the house rules breaking the feel or seeming bolted on. And everything you actually want to do often is in there, laid out in clean, simple language. They're both still around. It's too bad more people don't give them a try.
There're really the foundation of the indy games, without pretension or bizarre conceits.
My nostalgic favorite for drawing me into a whole new world that has never grown old is Space:1889. I love all the games from that family, and I continue to enjoy all sorts of alternative Victoriana.
My nostalgic favorite for a game that simply never once ever offered a negative experience is Hong Kong Action Theater! (1st ed.) I still run it at conventions when I have the time. I've run dozens and dozens and dozens of scenarios in this game and every single one has been a gas.
My nostalgic favorite for something so wierd and awesome and full-gonzo fun that it locked me into the hobby forever is Arduin. Damn, I love Arduin. I don't care that it wasn't well-organized or well-balanced, or well-edited or any of that stuff. It was enthusiastic and colorful and awesome!
Marvel Super Heroes: genre emulation done right. Plus just a great, great game system.
D&D: Nobody does it better. Makes me feel sad for the rest. Nobody does it, half as good as you. Baby, you're the best.
Oh yeah, and Gamma World, just about any edition. The rules were always varying degrees of FUBAR but the game world was really awesome.
This is what the new edition missed. GW fans were always willing to put up with wonky rules for the setting, so making the rules tighter at the expense of the setting accomplishes exactly nothing.
Quote from: stu2000My nostalgic favorite for something so wierd and awesome and full-gonzo fun that it locked me into the hobby forever is Arduin. Damn, I love Arduin. I don't care that it wasn't well-organized or well-balanced, or well-edited or any of that stuff. It was enthusiastic and colorful and awesome!
I played this once in the 86-87 I really liked it (the GM had a lot to do with it). anyway, anyone if there is there a PDF or anything? I'd really like to get a look at it.
An outfit called Emporer's Choice reprints and releases the material economically. They are going to release a fresh new version of Arduin soon, one that presumably makes sense. I'm a little leery. I play Arduin cause I like to make my own kinda sense. :)
Does Warhammer 2nd count as a nostalgic game? Because I'm having a boatload of fun with it. :D
I would have to say Top Secret - I just had loads of fun sneaking around trying to one up KGB agents.
Star Frontiers - rules were clunky at times but quick and easy to understand and had great adventures.
Gamma World - since it was the first rpg I personally owned that I did not borrow from my older brother.
Quote from: Andy KTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for the reasons above: For years, that game had the most fun, intense character generation hands down. For a while back in high school, some friends and I would make characters, play a session, then the next week make new characters and play again.
Same here. I played the game when I was eight or so (around 1990-91), and we didn't really know much about how an RPG worked, so we just created characters and then had them fight and trashtalk one another and when one of them died, we rolled up another. I remember using Micro Machines for vehicle combat once I got the "Road Hogs" supplement.
TMNTAOS is one of two older games I actually still run, the other being Ringworld.
-clash
Add me to the T&T crowd. Loved that game.
I liked the old basic D&D game with the blue cover. The book's cover portrayed a red dragon in a treasure room, with a magic-user and fighter entering said room about to attack it. The adventure module in the back of the book was fun. I expanded it when I was a kid, and we spent endless hours exploring it.
After I expanded it, the place housed monsters, traps, strange magicks, and even an oddly-placed tavern for the various pirates, rogues, and scoundrels in the area to do their business in.
I lost that book. :( But damn, it was fun! :)
RC D&D.
It did everything you needed, from level 1 to level 36. Totally complete. Totally one book.
:cool:
Living Steel: Wow, you have aliens, power armor that talks, a intermittently operational teleportation system, a rage virus like in 28 days (though less extreme), and the native resistance. All in a Ridley Scott/James Cameron style post-war planet. Thankfully I was just a player, as the system had some eclectic aspects to it as it was basically a simplified version of Phoenix Command.
Hivers: No, not really an RPG, but the coolest, most intriguing race from the original Traveller. They were the thing that made me WANT to play Traveller.
Cyberpunk: The original black box. Somehow the text and art holistically fused into a sexy monster that represented that 'Twenty Minutes Into The Future' version of the 80s that I consider definitive Cyberpunk perfectly. Sadly, each subsequent addition lost more and more of this spirit until it finally became Robot Chicken. How I ask you? HOW!?!?
I'll try to dredge my memory for more.