Yes I'm back with new and important questions. (Not that I ever left, or stopped writing. Just you know, more questions..)
So what game most shaped your playstyle?
The reason for asking this is two fold. While I've played more AD&D/D&D than most other games, I realized in the "Best Selling TSR.." thread that TSR itself shaped me towards NON D&D play early on. It did so with such wonders as Gamma World (Classless), Star Frontiers (Skill Based), an Marvel Superheroes (Player driven) aspects. Now I tend to prefer games which have the features mentioned, or something relatively similar.
Don't mistake me in saying those features are "better", I just like them quite a bit. In fact I still enjoy class based games a bit. (True20, my own Derelict Delvers, Mazes and Minotaurs)
I can look and say that MSH is still one of the games I'd love to play and do so regularly. It shaped my play a bit more flexible and laid back, and willing to see the rules as guidelines to shape play outcomes, not just "Do this, Don't Do that" but something aimed at allowing you to recreate experiences (in this case comic books, as seen circa 1980 Marvel Universe)
Arduin shaped how I think about games generally. There's an earnestness to the gonzo in Arduin that makes it work for me. I've played a ton of full-gonzo games since, but none as sincere. That's what I try to foster in any game I play, regardless of the genre or the style.
Games? I guess D&D and Shadowrun, but what really shaped how I see games is television shows like Buffy and the Wire. How they tell stories is amazing to me. Add in years fo comic books, and cheap fiction and you have I how I see games.
I'm pretty unaware of a lot of stuff, as I don't keep up on the industry or releases-hell until long after people apparently stopped playing it I had no idea games like Gamma World, or Traveler existed. Much of my exposure comes from meeting people who actually play stuff, or randomly coming across things in stores.
Now with the internet I am discovering that there is more out there.
For 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.
I started on Chaosium's RuneQuest II back in 1981.
The whole story first idea of Glorantha as a setting and dealing with NPCs as characters really appealed to me.
I stayed with that ruleset, Stormbringer, RingWorld, ElfQuest, Call of Cthulhu, though mainly RuneQuest for nearly twenty years.
What I liked was that each player character could be developed a bit at a time and shaped to not only how you wanted them to come out as but also shaped from their experience in play.
Also the big influence was which cult you entered, but all the PCs could be in the same cult yet very different to each other.
D&D, of course, but then as a reaction against elements of D&D, Runequest would be next. I only played RQ per se a little bit, but the ideas in it were pretty important to me. (It's possible that I actually encountered these ideas first in Ysgarth and The Fantasy Trip, but RQ, especially RQ 3, was the most robust presentation.) Skill-based development of abilities seemed to make it a lot easier to view characters as individuals first and professions second, which then invited thinking about characters in relation to society and the world. In RQ 3 character generation was culture- and background-based which offered a naturalistic approach to character definition. Even when I was playing class & level-based games in the 80's, my friends and I brought this back by, basically, designing character classes on the fly to match character concepts. Or in another case, distinguishing a character's class from "who he is".
Either way, D&D or RQ, I'm a fan of fantasy gaming and classic escapist stuff. I doubt I'd have gotten into gaming if Vampire had been the public face of RPGing at the time. The fantasy/myth/ancient/medieval elements interacted with interests outside of gaming to be sure: I was an avid SF & fantasy (particularly Tolkien) fan before getting into RPGs, and I studied history, archeology, and classics in college.
Quote from: Serious Paul;277909Games? I guess D&D and Shadowrun, but what really shaped how I see games is television shows like Buffy and the Wire. How they tell stories is amazing to me. Add in years fo comic books, and cheap fiction and you have I how I see games.
I can relate to this.
Besides other kinds of media, I would say that what has shaped my playstyle have been the people I have gamed with over the years.
Regards,
David R
Hmm, I started with Fighting Fantasy RPG based on the gamebook rules, and looking back those games I ran at 11 & 12 years old were still amongst my coolest; the simple rules allowed for easy homebrewing. I guess I was shaped more by 1e AD&D, then and since I've mostly run modules and focused on good vs evil epic struggles, but I'd like to get back to the freedom & openness of those first days.
Moldvay's D&D for me; my older brothers were stuck babysitting me all the time and let me play with them. I was six or seven and they were six and seven years older than me. Dungeon crawls made a huge impression on my tender young mind then.
Heavy Gear taught me that playing a character exploring and existing in a world radically different than our own was one of the most fun and interesting parts of roleplaying. My D&D worlds until that time (roughly age 13-14) had merely been pastiches, and it was reading things like Life on Terra Nova that showed me there was a different way.
Traveller (Classic and Mega). More recently, Spycraft and Spirit of the Century.
One thing I can't really relate to in many modern discussion is how stymied some people seem to get by running games with skill systems and having tasks at the center of the resolution. Traveller taught me to run and play in the style of "finding a path to the goal using the skills you have."
It's part of the reason I considered D&D 3e such a stride forward (and 4e such a step back) was that 3e had a real skill system.
My more recent experiences with Spycraft and SotC got me more comfortable using FATE point/action dice sorts of things. To the point, after I played Mongoose Traveller, I considered strapping on SotC's aspects.
Choose-Your-Own-Adventures and Fighting Fantasy were the biggest influence in my play-style. It really defined my approach to D&D and other RPGs. D&D was pitched to me as "like a CYOA -- but you don't just get 2 or 3 choices".
OD&D (along with early variants Arduin and Warlock) probably had the biggest influence. Classic Traveller would probably come in second.
Definitively Shadowrun, which has been my second game after TDE.
With it's rules for connections, the acquiration of connectionsand it's concept of downtime, favours for connections etc., it introduced me to what I call the snowball campaign (start with a vaguely defined set-up and see as it grows as it rolls down the hill, all with player input rather than GM imposement from above), and it introduced me to intelligent dungeon-crawls where problem-solving and out-thinking play a major role (rather than just rushing from door to door and clobbering random orcs who don't wander around at all at the sound of combat - and yeah, I'm well aware that a fantasy dungeon hasn't to be like this, and that especially a _good_ fatasy dungeon doesn't work that way, but until then, we didn't get it, as TDE didn't teach this).
I had some other enlightening experiences later, like the lifepath and random table goodness of CP2020, or the fluidity and think-out-of-the-box aspect of the Traveller UTP, but Shadowrun has been the major step for me from clueless dabbler in the dark to a passable GM who knows what he's doing.
Quote from: Silverlion;277902Yes I'm back with new and important questions. (Not that I ever left, or stopped writing. Just you know, more questions..)
So what game most shaped your playstyle?
Two words:
Classic TRAVELLER- Ed C.
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
Quote from: Imperator;278076RuneQuest and CoC made me a manly man.
Bingo! RQ3 was the eye-opening game for me. I was playing AD&D regularly, but there was this nagging feeling at the back of my head about it. I then started playing in a RQ3 game, and I realized that RQ3 matched my preferred play style better than AD&D. I still love AD&D, but I prefer a skill-based system over a class-level system ultimately.
Champions and Arduin.
Arduin, and a bad GM that forced the use of a hips-bust-waist table for female characters upon me shaped most of my negative impressions about gamers, and how to game wrong. But it also started me down the path of playing only female characters - originally as a knee-jerk silent protest, but in time I just got stuck with it to the point where I draw mental blanks anytime I try to make a male protagonist. And I still can't play Arduin... 24 years after that one session, and I still feel disgusted any time I see an Arduin book.
Hero system shaped my perception of options and a need for control over characters and character design. As a GM, it shaped my perceptions on how to lay out a plot and what constituted an adventure. Even though I don't think it did that in the best of ways. My adventures tend to be rather confusing... Its not so much that I followed the mold in Hero System published adventures, but that I came to it with Champions before I ever read super hero comics, and took a disjointed path to a genre I didn't yet know - and got stuck in a mode of thought that still plagues me today...
:p