Shadowrun, Earthdawn and I guess TMNT. (Although really you could sub any Palldium game since they're all kind of the same.)

One year and a bit on since I first posted on this thread, ICONS is still my top game. It's not lost any of it's shine, I'm nowhere near tired of it yet. It's the game that keeps on giving.

However there are a couple of new entrants in my top games list, namely; Barbarians of Lemuria and Bulldogs!.

BoL is just a brilliant game design - so compact and yet so full of flavour. I'm not even that much of a fantasy (or S&S) buff, but I still enjoy running it.

Bulldogs! is basically just another sci-fi version of Fate so it's hardly original. But I like what they did with the (playable) alien races and the very loose but instantly accessible setting. I'm also sold on the few rule tweaks it makes like ditching the skill pyramid and just having the one Stress track.  

The result of all this is that , perhaps for the first time ever, I'm actually running all recent, even vaguely popular games rather than old, often unfashionable or out of print ones. Very peculiar.

An update? Hell, why not?

Quote from: The Butcher;418687D&D Rules Cyclopedia. Everything worth using in any D&D game, ever -- from humble tomb-robbers to knighthood, kingship and literal apotheosis -- neatly packed in hardcover, and yet easily portable.

Still my favorite version of D&D, and the one I'm the most familiar with, but right now, for my new campaign I'm torn between this and AD&D 1st edition. Bear in mind that, by some quirk of fate, I've never, ever DMed AD&D (1e or 2e), though I've played the hell out of AD&D 2e.

Quote from: The Butcher;418687Savage Worlds. The perfect system for emulating pulp adventure, or Hollywood action movies; even the quirky, "broken" math helps. Character creation is quick, my players love gimmicks like wild dice and card-based initiative, and there are several great settings available for it.

I stand by my comment, but after 2-3 years of running a lot of Savage Worlds, I'm experiencing mild system burnout. SW is great for a certain type of game, but after a specific a Castles & Crusades game, in which my PC was reduced to 1hp and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, I realized that the system's abundant gimmicks to foster action movie antics actually detract significantly from the gaming experience, taking away alot of the grit and challenge. In other words, it's too fucking easy to suceed, and too fucking hard to die. I've never had a PC die, or even close to death (2 Wounds is the closest I've got) in 2-3 years and that feels wrong to my possibly skewed, D&D- and GURPS-nurtured sensibilities.

Still, it is a great system for a certain sort of campaign, and I've had a lot of fun playing with it, warts and all.

Quote from: The Butcher;418687Mongoose Traveller. It's a bit early to tell, as I've been running it for less than 6 months, but right now it's looking like an excellent toolkit for hard(ish) spacefaring SF. I'm not sure whether my group's warmed up to it, though.

Out of four players, two hated it, one was indifferent and one kind of liked it. A lukewarm response which may or may not have had anything to do with my inexperience as a Traveller ref, or players' lack of familiarity with the "have ship, will travel" format. I still want to give this game a chance in the near future.

And of course, one criminal omission in that list was Rifts. I'm no big fan of the Palladium system, but it's certainly not as bad as it's usually made out to be; only character creation is a real pain in the ass. And the setting is such a brilliant device to bring together tropes and characters from every imaginable genre of fiction. This is the precise sort of game in which a dragon, a cyborg, a wizard and a hobo team up to fight skull-obsessed Nazis and their giant spider-legged skull-mecha, slobbering tentacled slavers and their hot amazon bodyguards, Mexican vampires, invading armies of hungry psionic bug-men, the Four Horsemen of the Motherfucking Apocalypse, and others.

7th Sea (original edition) is totally rocking my world these days. With just a little houseruling is playing like a breeze and delivering what is promising. The setting is interesting and I have yet to read any book of the line that is crap (the Nation books are extremely awesome, by the way).

Quote from: D-503;416160I've run Crimefighters and it worked really well, it would do what you want easily.

On the general question, Call of Cthulhu.  I like second edition best but they're all good.  I use this for tons of stuff, I use it as a generic system in fact adapting it to different settings and periods.  I hardly ever use the mythos itself but I love that too.

Classic Traveller, though I'd be fine with the Mongoose version which is excellent.  Just a really clean and playable sf rpg.

WFRP 1e.  Bursting with character.  The later versions may all work better, but they lack flavour.

Space 1889.  Appalling rules, but just the best setting ever.  Great chargen too.

Gangbusters.  I've only run this once but I was blown away by it.  Just a really great game.

Pendragon.  Dude, it's Pendragon.

My tastes haven't changed that much it seems.

Before I saw this post I thought Crimefighters, Call of Cthulhu, Space 1889 and Pendragon.

I haven't played WFRP in a while so it's dropped off the list. Classic Trav has probably been replaced by Stars without Number which is an exceptional game.

Quote from: Imperator;4860837th Sea (original edition) is totally rocking my world these days. With just a little houseruling is playing like a breeze and delivering what is promising. The setting is interesting and I have yet to read any book of the line that is crap (the Nation books are extremely awesome, by the way).

I was put off by the sheer number of supplements it seemed to require. How have you found that?

What house rules have you used?

Love the stat names. Brawn, Panache, that's a swashbuckling rpg.

Hi, seems like a good place for an early post.

Some I have in common with the OP...

BASH! UE - great system that seems to have been overshadowed somewhat by trendier lite supers games IMHO.

Swords & Wizardry Core/Complete  - Complete really just for the Druid class to use in my campaign world.

Mongoose Traveller - seems like a pretty damn good revamp of Classic.

Also...

Doctor Who Adventures in Time & Space - I'm a huge Who fan and I find that this plays really well.

I used to play a lot of CoC but burnt out on it a long time ago. I would like to find a decent horror game as a replacement but there mostly just seem to be a big bunch of urban fantasy games around.

Quote from: km10ftp;486145(...)I used to play a lot of CoC but burnt out on it a long time ago. I would like to find a decent horror game as a replacement but there mostly just seem to be a big bunch of urban fantasy games around.

So, it shouldn't be urban fantasy. Any other requirements?

In the non-urban fantasy horror detachment I personally like All Flesh Must Be Eaten (Eden Studios) and Ghostories (Precis Intermedia). The upcoming Horror Show (Bedrock Games) also looks promising.

Quote from: km10ftp;486145I used to play a lot of CoC but burnt out on it a long time ago. I would like to find a decent horror game as a replacement but there mostly just seem to be a big bunch of urban fantasy games around.

The core (new) World of Darkness book, plus World of Darkness: Antagonists, actually makes for a solid horror game, which only really shifts into urban fantasy gear with the Monster: The Whatever books (Vampire, .

And even then, Hunter: The Vigil played at Tier One, and maybe even Tier Two, does not feel like "urban fantasy" at all. Monsters are everywhere, they're horrid and vicious, and it takes a pitched battle, ingenuous tactics and a cell of crazy driven hunters to take one down.

The World of Darkness "core" line offers plenty of inetesting add-ons for a game using mortals only. Ghost Stories, Mysterious Places, Midnight Roads and, of course, Slasher (my perennial favorite) spring to mind.

Favorite games: Runequest 3rd & MRQ II, Shadowrun 3rd, World of Darkness, Pendragon, The One Ring (newer entry here ).

Favorite settings: Planescape, Glorantha, Shadowrun, Delta Green, Kult, Mage the Ascention, Unknown Armies, Transhuman Space.

WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD

Quote from: D-503;486096I was put off by the sheer number of supplements it seemed to require. How have you found that?

What house rules have you used?

Love the stat names. Brawn, Panache, that's a swashbuckling rpg.

The game does not require supplements, but they're generally so good and useful that you will want to use them, as they add a lot of good stuff to the game.

So, you can easily have a fantastic game using just the core books and the GM screen supplement, which brings a great set of rules for building your ship and is a must if you are in a pirate campaign. If you add the rules and stuff from the supplements it just gets better, but they're not crucial as mostly consist of new swordman schools and the like. You can add them piece by piece, as you learn the new stuff. Seriously, the core books alone are more than enough.

Of course, as it happens with games that were on a supplement treadmill, important rules information may end spread over a huge amount of books, but fortunately the guys of the official mailing list of the game compiled a handy reference PDF (in English) containing all the rules published on the original edition of the game, so I use that. It's a 181 page document, far from unwieldy, excellently written and laid out, so it's easy to use as reference. No fluff, no art, just the rules. I assume I can email this document to anyone interested, as it's a fan-made compilation. As I have printed out that PDF, I don't need to have any other book at the table, so I run the game using this PDF, the GM screen, and printouts of NPCs or locations as needed (I own all the supplements in PDF format, having acquired them at an excellent price in Drivethru).

Whenever I run a game with many supplements and lots of rules spread over them I always generate a master document for our reference, so I have all the rules and none of the fluff in one book. In this case, they just did the work for me I'm translating it to Spanish anyway as most of my players are not so proficient in English, and also helps me to learn the rule by memory. It was very valuable for me when I was running Vampire: the Masquerade, and now it's a real time-saver.

Re: house rules. The two most important regard the XP system and Raises.

If you play RAW, you have to declare that you ask for a Raise if you expect to reach the target number easily, so you can get additional benefits. If you don't ask for it, you may "waste" an excellent roll missing a chance of causing more damage, doing the task faster or whatnot. So, if the TN is 20 it doesn't matter if you roll 21 or 99, your PC is not getting any additional benefit from the roll and that sucks. So, in my game, for every 15 points you exceed the TN, you get a Raise as if you have asked for it, which may be an additional dice of damage, or ending the task faster, or whatever.

According to the book (which is confusing in this chapter and sometimes contradicts itself), at the end of the story you get 1-5 XP (GM call according to the difficulty of the adventure), plus double the value of any Background you have that has featured prominently in the adventure (Background a re problems that haunt your PC) plus 1 XP for every remaining Drama Dice you have. Which is stupid, because the system encourages you to keep and hoard Drama Dice, instead of spending them in doing awesome stuff.

So my XP houserule is that each individual PC gets a flat 3 XP per session, plus twice the value of any Background that has appeared in the session. Also, during the session, for every Drama Dice the GM spends, the group receives 1 XP that adds to a pool that is evenly divided between the PCs when the adventure ends (any excess XP is pooled for the next, or spend in common things, like, for example, improving the capabilities of the crew, which is somethign my players are loving).

The logic behind is is that Drama Dice expenditure on the part of the players should be encouraged, and whenever the GM spends Drama Dice is raising significantly the difficulty of the adventure (because he's improving NPC's rolls, or activating special abilities of them or activating a PCs Hubris against him), so this additional difficulty should be reflected in more XP. We have found this system to work flawlessly and to produce an adequate pace of improvement for the PCs. After 20 sessions in the campaign they've seen a significant growth, but they have plenty of room ahead.

The game is great and I heartily recommend it to everyone. I0ve heard good things about the D20 edition, but i can't say: I've yet to read it (it's a long reading list ). I'm about to start reading the official adventures, I can comment more on that if you are interested, or have any other question.

I like Angry Birds.