I'm wondering what games/versions of games (D&D or whatever) best capture a the feeling that you/ your character are in a strange wondrous land where anything is possible? And maybe what games most fail to capture that? And why?

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;619320I'm wondering what games/versions of games (D&D or whatever) best capture a the feeling that you/ your character are in a strange wondrous land where anything is possible?

Torg, hands down.

Shadowrun, to a lesser (though still pretty great) degree.

Talislanta hits that spot for me.  There is a plethora of races/cultures and not one of them is 'human,' and it all takes place on a single continent (well, for the most part).

OD&D (1974) for me.

Planescape for D&D, Transhuman Space from GURPS.

Talislanta was too weird for my tastes.

Thanks for the quick replies guys.

Quote from: Benoist;619329OD&D (1974) for me.

This one's interesting since most of the other games people have mentioned have a more defined exotic setting.
I think maybe I know what you mean, but feel free to elaborate. From a GM POV, out of all the D&Ds maybe this is the one with the feel you can make whatever you want with it, without having balance or RAW or whatever get in the way?

Some of the supplements and variants out there for it are fairly trippy too (e.g. Arduin)

Quote from: Yong_Kyosunim;619335Planescape for D&D, Transhuman Space from GURPS.

Talislanta was too weird for my tastes.

Fine line between wondrous and weird, maybe.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;619356I think maybe I know what you mean, but feel free to elaborate. From a GM POV, out of all the D&Ds maybe this is the one with the feel you can make whatever you want with it, without having balance or RAW or whatever get in the way?

That's basically the idea yes, but not just from a GM's POV, from a player's as well. It's really the game that got the sense of wonder "lightning in the bottle" thing going, which you can take in all sorts of directions, from swords and planets to gritty pseudo-medievalism to post-apocalyptic mutant wars to whatever else you want at your game table, really. From a player's POV, I'm thinking immediately of Mike Mornard (Old Geezer) playing a Balrog in the original Greyhawk and the like. It's a liberating experience when you use the frame of the game as a launching pad and just go nuts with it from there (and not necessarily in "retro stupid" directions, mind you), instead of considering its set of rules as limits to what you can and cannot do with your game, really.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;619356Some of the supplements and variants out there for it are fairly trippy too (e.g. Arduin)

For me they are perfect examples of different directions in which you can take the basic boxed game. Use them as inspiration, just create your own thing from there, and you can take the game in any possible direction you want.

best: palladium fantasy 1e

Quote from: Benoist;619365That's basically the idea yes, but not just from a GM's POV, from a player's as well. It's really the game that got the sense of wonder "lightning in the bottle" thing going, which you can take in all sorts of directions, from swords and planets to gritty pseudo-medievalism to post-apocalyptic mutant wars to whatever else you want at your game table, really. From a player's POV, I'm thinking immediately of Mike Mornard (Old Geezer) playing a Balrog in the original Greyhawk and the like. It's a liberating experience when you use the frame of the game as a launching pad and just go nuts with it from there (and not necessarily in "retro stupid" directions, mind you), instead of considering its set of rules as limits to what you can and cannot do with your game, really.

Yup. In a one-shot I ran for my Shadowrun group recently, one of the players rolled up a baby dragon. It was awesome!

Rifts does a great job of thinking that any damn thing can be over that hill.

This is kind of tough because what I think of as "sense of wonder" is the elation of having a new world unveiled before your eyes, that's so intrinsic to my enjoyment of the hobby as a whole.

Off the top of my head:

D&D, my first RPG. Bear in mind that I was 12 and had never read a fantasy book (only knew fantasy stuff via movies and the odd comic) so it was also my introduction to fantasy.

Rifts, for its genre-defying, kitchen-sink setting. This was long before the recursive memetic "ninja pirate zombie robot dinosaur Abraham Lincoln" Internet bullshit, and it was refreshing and honest and grabbed you and fired up my imagination like nothing before it.

Old World of Darkness, for being the first setting that I really got into.

Runequest, which takes an apparently unintuitive combination of brutal and gritty combat and out-there Campbellian metaphysics, and somehow the result is bigger than the sum of its parts. Gary and Dave might be our hobby's patron deities, but Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin are fucking wizards.

Tékumel, for demonstrating to my older, more jaded self that elaborate, consistent world-building and gonzo awesomeness were not mutually exclusive.

Eclipse Phase, for suturing tropes from all over transhuman SF into a very enticing game setting that, while not strictly hard SF (it's even got psionics), feels "hard SF" like no other game that I know of.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;619370Yup. In a one-shot I ran for my Shadowrun group recently, one of the players rolled up a baby dragon. It was awesome!

Here you go. That's the stuff I'm talking about. My wife played a Boggart like that in an OD&D game I ran. It was awesome as well. It's just really cool to hear the concepts players come up with and, aided by a frame like OD&D, just go "OK. Sure. Let's just do it." and not have to bother coming up with capacities-within-capacities with shitloads of rules caveats and feats and bullshit beyond the bare minimum needed to run the thing as a capable member of the group. It's awesome, really.

I would say, for me, it's AD&D and Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play that really "do it" as far as a sense of wonder go.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;619382I would say, for me, it's AD&D and Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play that really "do it" as far as a sense of wonder go.

I'm really curious. How do you define "sense of wonder" in that context? It's not that I disagree with you, it's just that I'm not seeing how you define the criteria to begin with, with such an answer at the exclusion of other games I know we both know.

To me, Ben, the sense of wonder comes in the expression of the rules (partially) and largely in the campaign worlds baked into both rulesets.  AD&D is somewhat firmly a "Greyhawk" game (first and foremost) - look at the various artifacts and magic items and spell names.  Stepping in to that world, or into the Old World of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play through the mechanisms of the rules of each game (1e AD&D, 1e WHFRP) really does bring a sense of "Wow, that's really cool".  It's not just the trappings of their campaign settings, but how the rules go about expressing those things.

More later, if you're interested.