Quote from: Silverlion;277902So what game most shaped your playstyle?

It would be a tie between Amber and Stormbringer (1st edition), with some additional flavoring from Feng Shui and Pendragon, as well.

WEG Paranioa

AD&D1e..
then a wild bunch of games, including Palladium Fantasy, Beyond the Supernatural, Rifts, Heroes Unlimited, etc.
settling towards the most significant systems of Torg and (Mayfair) DC Heroes

...then back to D&D after 1999 or so.

Probably 1st Ed. D&D until I played SotC, which really blew my mind. Before that I mostly took for granted that roleplaying mostly meant dealing with the mechanical side of the game in a way that was less than optimal tactically. SotC is great in that the whole mechanical system is set up to avoid forcing people to gimp themselves mechanically in order to really act like a pulp hero.

Boot Hill.

There's a simplicity to the game. It's very much a product of its tabletop minis roots: detailed combat mechanics, but roleplaying "rules" consisting of a handwave in the direction of the referee.

Characters are defined more by what they do than what they are on paper. That's stayed with me through the years.

D&D got me into gamming but I'd say Twilight 2000 and 2300AD really shapped my playstyle. Those two probably pushed me into games like Heavy Gear.

SJ games TOON definitely did.

To me RPGs are most about getting people together and having a good time, more so than anything else.

Also Vampire: the Masquerade. It clued me in to the fact that RPGs could be also have serious characterization and delve a bit more into maturity.

Yeah, those two definitely influenced my playstyle more than any other games.

RuneQuest and CoC made me a manly man.

Quote from: KenHR;277934Moldvay's D&D for me...  Dungeon crawls made a huge impression on my tender young mind then.

Me too.

Later Dragon Warriors and WFRP inspired me to adopt a more complex and nuanced approach to world building, NPC design and adventure writing. Everything I've learned since has been little more than variations and refinements on the elemental lessons those early games imparted.

Quote from: Imperator;278076RuneQuest and CoC made me a manly man.

Quite.  These two helped me realise there were rpgs that produced the kind of play I really enjoyed, I don't think either has ever really been bettered either.

While D&D, AD&D, first edition Gamma World, and Top Secret laid the foundation, I would say that Warhammer pulled me from simple encounter (or dungeon) based gaming to gaming that focussed on the other elements of role-playing.

In my early years of gaming the dungeon was the star of the show. The characters' goal was simple. Overcome the challenges of the dungeon. The characters were reacting to their environment.

When Warhammer came around, we shifted our style of play. The PCs' had goals rather than a single goal. This is due in part because Warhammer (as we played it) lacked dungeons (in the traditional sense). The players began to interact and have an impact on the world outside of the encounter areas. The environment started reacting to the characters.

This style of play was re-enforced later with Vampire:the Masquerade; again because the dungeon was nearly existent.

It became the norm with Heavy Gear, Call of Cthulu, and other later games that we played (and continue to play).

I definitely had a remarkably unique playing style circa 1984, when I first had a huge flood of people who had already played D&D and other games, but where I got it from is unknown to me. Certainly not a bought roleplaying game as people would always say "Gene's games" were definitely the same style from game to game at that time. As a kid, I used to play weird make believe games with rules some regarding toys some regarding teams so maybe thats what started it. 70's comics were definitely a big influence in particular Jack Kirby's post-Marvel Age search for different styles of comics "gods walk the earth", "searches for lost knowledge" and "apemen everywhere possible". The bigger the game the heavier it weighed on my playing style especially if it was hardcore players who expected "out of the package" all the time. That said, I think my playing style was worn down from all the years of public gaming and people bringing in expectations from other games however, I feel like I'm not only recovered from all that but I've gotten better at delivering unique content rapidly and convincingly without skipping a beat...but theres always one guy...

There's no doubt that Paul's version of Shadowrun had more influence on my playstyle than anything else, just as novels are clearly the greatest influences on my GMing. But more recently, semi-serial episodic character-driven TV shows have been influences, such as SG-1 and Buffy/Angel.

But one moment in playing has had a completely disproportionate influence on me. In high school, a group of my friends sat down to play D&D - which I didn't really do very often - and one of their fathers joined us. His name was Marion, and he owned a gaming store, and he was about a billion years old and cut his teeth on the very earliest RPGs, after a career in wargaming. Everything was perfectly normal until the first time it was his turn to speak in-character. Suddenly, there was this completely different person sitting at the table: Marion didn't just say what his character would say in Marion's voice, he spoke with the voice of the character. Everything changed: his kinesics, his tone of voice, his attitudes and morality, the choices he'd make. He became his character, until he was done saying what he needed to say, and suddenly Marion was sitting there again.

That idea - that roleplaying was, indeed, for the playing of a role, completely astounded me. Ever since, that's been my goalpost, my standard. I want to be able to completely emulate another person - without ever moving from the table - and then switch back to being Engine when I'm done. I don't want to just talk like my character talks, but make decisions like Engine: I want people to think, "Where'd Engine go? Oh, he's become Loranis. Engine will be back in a moment." And while I still don't meet my golden standard, I get closer and closer, and more importantly, the meme of playing-a-role while roleplaying has spread throughout my group and beyond, until it's become the ideal for most of us.

So thanks, Marion. You kind of sucked in most other ways, but in this way, you have changed the lives of myself and those around me for the better. You gave us an ideal we appreciate, a goal for which to strive, in a single moment of your life. Good on you, mate.

Quote from: Soylent Green;277911For me it was West End Game's Star Wars, and not so much because I am a massive Star Wars fan but because of the system. D6 was the first system I encountered that felt like it wasn't just a random collection of rules the author considered to be rather neat, it had a design. It was simple, elegant but remarkably complete, able to do things with ease that other chunkier systems struggled with.

It was also the game that introduced to me (and I guess others) the notion of "cinematic" gameplay, which of has come to mean all sorts of different things, but I take it to mean emulation how things work in the movies rather than how things work in reality or in a wargame.

I'd say it shaped my playstyle becasue in the end the things that WEG's Star Wars did well are still the things I consider important in a system while the things it did not do well (chracter progression, detailed equipment and tactical battles) remain the things I really don't care about.

This.

The game that most influenced how I run games was Ars Magica. It made me realize I didn't have to be in charge of everything for the game to run smoothly.

Seanchai