Roleplay Stuff!

So I disappeared for a while (health problems and stuff, but I'm getting better).

But while I was gone, I got back into tabletop roleplay! I'm currently part of an incredibly complicated Trail of Cthulhu game, and I was playing Pathfinder for a while.

I'm becoming very fond of the GUMSHOE system, and I was wondering about others experiences with different systems.

What are your favourites? What was the craziest character you ever made? role play (characters and story) or roll play (numbers and stats)?

My favorite so far is still the EABA system, not well known and can be daunting to pick up.  I first used it because of the system creating bell curves in dice results.  Stuck with for the versatility and it giving non-combat the same important and dynamic feel of combat.

Ended up making my own setting and also adapting the horrible battletech rpg to that system, which ended up being a favorite of our group.

My favorite character was one of a ninja party that traveled as a small performing troop, mine was a puppeteer that specialized in disguise and causing distraction.  Only one player took demonblood (which let him have actual magic) so we had a lot of fun gathering info and taking out enemies of our clan without anything but our wits and stealth.  Overall in 12 sessions we had 1 actual combat, everyone had a fantastic time and that campaign gets talked about frequently.

I liked the d10 system from Whitewolf which I used to play Exalted and Scion.  I like the setup of those games as you start out fairly strong to begin with and really you are just looking for niche thing to excel further at.  Really it was interesting to imagine how wiht the character from Scion that I jumped 10 stories in the air and slashed down at a Gashadokuro

The system I have the most experience with is DnD 4th, but I've had a go at a bunch of other systems too (some more than others). I haven't done any tabletop roleplay for ages, but am a member on a website called RPOL which is forum-based RP. I'm playing in several games and running one of my own :).

My main experience from Pen and Papers is Shadowrun, but I do love it quite a bit

I'm a big fan of Fate, myself.

I've played, and liked a lot of systems through the years, but right now, I find that FATE (especially FATE accelerated with a little bit of core) is exactly what my players and I need. we can easily create any kind of story, any kind of character in a short time - and still have some rules to fiddle with.

I tried to write a Trail of Cthulluh campaign but the characters have too many parts for me, and I lose myself. It must be age - I played far more heavier systems when I was younger. Right now, I "need" simple, flexible systems made for improvisation, especially those who allow the "gamemaster" to dive in with nearly no preparation, I became lazy.

I am planning to continue our D&D 4th edition campaign, currently halted, with FATE, as soon as my players will stop having new ideas for FATE characters and universes :D

One of my favorite systems was the rules used by "Rêve de Dragon" (Dragon Dream), a french RPG from thirty years ago - a complex, precise system with some faults, but one you enjoyed a lot fiddling with especially when you did "magic" : my players enjoyed more doing magic research for new spells and getting a little.. excentric as a result than going in adventure :) But today I would not be able to do anything with it , I am afraid.

Silverleaf - Surely you mean OMG FAT EYES? ;)

I do indeed!

I'll second the nomination for FATE Accelerated, especially because I've written some things for Amanda Valentine's tween lit web site and find her to be good people.

My favorite obscure system is Everway.

As somebody who played 1st & 2nd edition AD&D (but skipped 3.X for assorted reasons), I happened to like 4th. Enough so that I wrote material for Kobold Press (via the web site) and Dragon (I got a paid credit!).

Oh, I own Everway! I've played it but never GMed it.

I've GMed a lot of campaigns, and this is the first time I haven't had (at least) two parallel games running at the same time in years. We're currently playing a (simplified) Traveller game (Mongoose's rule set, because they are the lightest of the latest versions).

I’m also planning a sequel to a customized-rules campaign that used Everway as the basis but puts a little more structure around it to allow some better management of character capabilities and expectations. Our customization is based on something called Amberway. (If you like Everway, you might appreciate it.)

Last year we wrapped up two campaigns:

• A Pathfinder test to see how we could simplify and streamline it (as some of our players prefer lighter rules structures), using the Council of Thieves adventure path from Paizo. The fact the players get to actually become "actors" in a play as part of the adventure path was the key reason I chose that one - I knew some of the folks we play with would really enjoy that!
• A long-running (16-year) D&D 2.7 (homebrewed D&D 2nd edition with the some of the Player's Options rules included) game that I'd found myself frustrated with from a rules perspective. It was set in an old campaign setting I'd created a long time ago that started as AD&D, upgraded to AD&D 2nd, then evolved to the customized version we were playing over the years. I'm hoping to start another campaign set there in a couple years, but using a new ruleset (probably either a lighter version of Pathfinder or D&D 5th, depending on the rules available at the time, the players involved, etc.).

For a really, really simple system you can use Dread. It is usually used as a one-shot sessions instead of a campaign. Character creation is based on answering a questions about your character, instead of creating stats and numbers (which aren't in the game). Instead of using dice to determine if you succeed or fail, you have a Jenga tower. Depending on how difficult the task is, the GM determines how many blocks you pull. If the tower falls, you character is out of the game. That's it.

[quote="Theta_Sigma"]

So I disappeared for a while (health problems and stuff, but I'm getting better).But while I was gone, I got back into tabletop roleplay! I'm currently part of an incredibly complicated Trail of Cthulhu game, and I was playing Pathfinder for a while.I'm becoming very fond of the GUMSHOE system, and I was wondering about others experiences with different systems.What are your favourites? What was the craziest character you ever made? role play (characters and story) or roll play (numbers and stats)?  

[/quote]

Welcome back. Sorry to hear about the problems. Glad you're getting better.

I like rules light systems (though I admit I also enjoy rolling dice and having SUPER huge bonuses to things, whether it's a +12 sword or the ability to make just about any knowledge role). 

Rabit is often my GM and he, I, and the people we generally game with are very focused when starting a campaign on identifying what everyone is looking for out of the campaign and crafting something we'll all enjoy. Then he goes off and does a ton of work that he purports to enjoy in order to provide a setting and set of rules that fit what we're looking for. We do our part in character creation and we all work together during game play. It's pretty great, really. I'm blessed. 

For our current campaign we went through our most extensive discussions yet before settling on the game and the characters. We spend way too much time on our game for it not to be fun. These included picking a genre (Sci Fi), considering half a dozen or so characteristics of gaming (level of silliness, amount of fighting, number of expected sessions, etc.), picking a subgenre (Firefly-like crew of a transport), and then jointly brainstorming the types of characters/skills that might be in such a party and staking out mostly non-overlapping characters. From there Rabit did world building and the rest of us went into character development, with each of us working w/ Rabit and sometimes with each other to craft backgrounds that would fit with each other and the world.

The resulting game play can look pretty banal to others. We often have very little action and progress the plot quite slowly. We played last night, for instance, and I think our entire session consisted of discussions with each other and a dinner meeting with a client. But think about it. What did you like about Firefly? Was it the fights? For me, it was how the characters interacted. In the parlance of Robin's Laws, most of our group are Storytellers and Method Actors, though much of the other types are also represented. I am primarly a Method Actor and a Power Gamer. My characters all tend to be interested in being powerful, but they are interested in all sorts of different power for all sorts of different reasons. My character in this campaign has virtually no fighting skills, but is extremely well connected. In most situations, he's the person that can get the crew in the door -- get somebody to hear our side, take a meeting, give information, or lend resources. 

Oooh, yay!

I'm a long-time roleplayer, which is how I got into board games in the first place.  I started with D&D 2e (the black books with the red borders), back when I was in middle school.  Even before that, I was addicted to the Choose Your Own Adventure books and Wizards, Warriors, and You.  

When I was in undergrad, I founded the Wittenberg Role-Playing Guild.  That group's lasted for 13 years and just held their 12th consecutive convention.  The WRPG's been a busy group in the past few  years, with a good many of us entering the gaming industry.  I founded Blackfall Press and wrote/produced Cold Steel Wardens: Roleplaying in the Iron Age of Comics.  In addition to that, I freelance for several other companies, including Cubicle 7 Entertainment, GameWick Games, Gun Metal Games, and a handful of others.

Eric Ebbs (who joined two years after the guild was founded) kickstarted and created Era of the Ninja, which he'll be selling at GenCon.  Will Herrmann (another former Guild President), a huge Savage Worlds fan, created the framework for his Wild Card Creator as a senior computer science thesis project, which he's turned into the smoothest, most intuitive SW character generation software out there.  Katrina Ostrander (a third Guild President) currently works for Fantasy Flight Games--she produced several of the current Star Wars roleplaying books, but now works in FFG's fiction department.

My current home group has a wide variety of tastes.  Right now, we're playing the Savage Worlds: Hell on Earth plot point campaign, "The Worm's Turn".  Before that, they were playtesting some material for my CSW follow-up book.  

Other systems I enjoy?  Lady Blackhawk is a great little micro-system, and the creator has a phenomenal game up on KS right now (Blades in the Dark).  Cartoon Action Hour and ICONS are phenomenal games.  I'm itching to run a game of All for One: Regime Diabolique, but I'm not sure when that's going to happen.  

We had a really good time playing through Lady Blackhawk with our group, but I personally don't enjoy systems with meta-rules, as they take me out of the game. (For example, games where I have to do something in-game to activate/get something in the rules structure, as in LB we have to do certain things in-game to get back abilities that have been used.) That's just me, though.

Nobody brought up D&D 5e? Well, I will. I've been loving the newest edition ever since the playtest. It's got a fairly open-ended structure that makes it easy to homebrew (I've already created a psion class and a resource-gathering alchemy system), and the combat is much faster than I remember it ever being in 4th or 3.5...th. I really, really want to GM a 5e game, but my friends are all super busy at the moment. I wish they weren't mostly seniors with giant projects to do... they really liked the last game I ran for them, during the playtest.

I haven't tried 5th Edition yet...I've seen plenty of games of it come up on RPOL but I think I'd rather play it with someone I know on my first go...plus I don't have a copy of the rulebook or anything. I already have several games on the go though, so even if I was gonna look into DnD 5th Edition, it's gonna have to wait till I'm playing a few less games (plus I'm running one as well). This is all forum-based, though, not tabletop.

If you're willing to run by forum, I'm perfectly happy to play. 5e is really good and the combat improvements are very welcome.

I'm also a fan of Scion, Exalted and the various White Wolf games. As well as Call of Cthulhu and John Wick's Houses of the Blooded.

Has anyone tried to port SotM to a supers system?

Debating trying to use Fate or, if my players are insistent on crunch, maybe M&M3E.

Just Sentinels is an Apocalypse World hack of Sentinels. There's also stuff right here on the forum for Mutants & Masterminds!

I believe there were some Mutants and Masterminds conversions somewhere in the Off-Topic forum.

At Gen Con a couple years ago, I think someone did a Sentinels game using Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.

Ha! Got you back!

Augh!  Counter-ninja'd!  Well played, sir.  Well played.

I love you guys. Even if you're OBVIOUSLY wrong about Bunker.

I wanted to run a Sentinels game, so I love that I don't have to reinvent the wheel! Awesome.

Wait, you can do that? I mean, I GMed other games here, but I always figured D&D was too complicated. How do you coordinate this?

You can run pretty much any tabletop RPG on a forum, if RPOL (Roleplay Online) is anything to go by…DnD is one of the most popular (that and Pathfinder) in fact. I've also played in a couple of DnD games on an entirely different forum before I joined RPOL (the guy who ran that first DnD game was the one who ended up pointing me at RPOL when someone he knew on there was starting up a game of Mouse Guard and he knew I'd mentioned being interested in it at some point). Really, you just need a bunch of threads (OOC thread, IC thread, maybe a rules thread, stuff like that) and it's helpful if there's also somewhere the GM can store their own resources (though they can just use their own hard drive, I suppose ;)). Having character sheets visible to the GM helps a lot, too. Oh, and in terms of actual gameplay, finding a way to tweak combat so that one round doesn't take about three weeks of real time is kind of useful too ;).

I wouldn't recommend running on the GtG forums without their permission, but as Ameena said, you can run pretty much anything on a forum. It lends itself more to narrative and character driven stories, in my experience, but it's totally possible.

Edited for clarity.

GtG has said they are okay with it, so long as the threads are all in the Off Topic forum.

Try not to create too many threads, too, okay? Don't want to completely take over OT. If you find you really need a lot of threads (let's say more than 3), let a Mod know and we'll figure out options for you.

There are plenty of other sites you can use if you want to run a forum-based RPG anyway - I've mentioned RPOL, which is a site specifically dedicated to hosting forum-based games. There's another site called Obsidian Portal which isn't so much a place to play games as a repository for GMs (and, if the GM has given permisison, the players) to store all their game info and maps and anything else.

So many RPGs. I'd say my favorites have been White Wolf's WoD, Trinity-Aberrant-Adventure!, Scion, Exalted, Scarred Lands. From others: Feng Shui, Fading Suns, Mutants & Masterminds, Icons, BASH!, Shadowrun, Earthdawn, and Eclipse Phase.

Fate is currently my favorite thing, although I haven't played much of it yet. The closest I've come is running an Icons game (which is some kind of Fate hybrid), but I am leaning toward straight up Fate, esp. Mecha vs. Kaiju, The Dresden Files, Nova Praxis, several more I am forgetting, and the Fate game being done for the superhero fiction series Wearing the Cape.

Capes, Cowls, and Villains Foul is really good, if you like the more storytelling type games. If you've heard of Cartoon Action Hour before, it basically a superhero version of that. For quick pick-up games, that and ICONS are my go-to.

Cartoon Action Hour is pretty brilliant.  I played a game at Origins run by one of the editors, using characters from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.  

That session may be one of the best convention games I've played, in a week marked by Venture Brothers-Paranoia and Golden Age JSA-ICONS.

Thank you for the recommendation! I've not heard of that. I have heard of Cartoon Action Hour.