RPG - Part II: Games I've Played

In the early days of this blog, I started several 'theme' posts with titles that included things like "Part I". I guess I was short of ideas for posts back then, and set up for myself some recurring topics to keep things moving around here. Now, my problem is not so much lack of postable topics, it's lack of time and motivation (i.e. anger) to post interesting things.

One year ago today, I posted such a "Part I" topic, about Role Playing Games (RPGs). I think it's time to move on to part II.

I previously talked about games I own. Today, I'd like to talk about some of the RPGs I've played. The first RPG I ever played, as is true for many but not all gamers, was Dungeons and Dragons. I'm pretty sure my first play at that game was in the awkwardly-named Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Second Edition, the venerable old cobbled-together-and-tacked-on-additions-galore system. I think I still own the basic rulebooks (Player's and Dungeon Master's guides) plus one version of a monster manual and some of the expansion books. I had lots of fun playing AD&D in various friends' basements during my highschool years, and I'd really like to get back in to regular role-playing, especially of some form of D&D.

I've played a little of the current version of the grand old franchise, Dungeons and Dragons 3.5. I don't own any of the books, so I'm less familiar with the rules than I was with second edition. What I've seen of it looks fun, and I think the basic flavour of the older versions - role-playing as opposed to roll-playing - has been more-or-less preserved. There's still lots of rules-lawyering and min-maxing, of course, but the switch to pretty much everything on a d20 looks like it removed some of the uber-otaku obsessions with differing probability distributions associated with d12 vs. 2d6 et cetera.

The d20 system has been expanded to other genres of RPG, including the Star Wars roleplaying system. That was great fun, too, when I played it for a few sessions in Victoria, years ago. The Jedi system in that game is pretty broken, in my opinion, but then it has to be or the whole game gets horribly unbalanced. In the movies, the Jedi are basically the be-all and end-all of characters - the only notable characters in the movies who don't have The Force are Han Solo and Boba Fett, both of whom spend most of their time on-screen interacting with Jedi or Sith (who are just Jedi with asshole powers). Still, a fun system, even if one does have to keep reminding the party's token Jedi that, as a 3rd-level character, they're still technically a teenager, so they should act more like whiny Luke or whiny Anakin (aside: how heritable is 'being a whiny little bitch'? Father and son in the movies have it in spades...) and less like old Obi-Wan. Anway...

I've also played one-off adventures in Rifts (back in high school, see my comment on Part I), and some weird every-character-is-an-inmate-at-a-mental-institution minor-publisher RPG at a game store a few years ago. The other players in that game were all long-time friends with each other and very familiar with the rules, so in-jokes and logic leaps I couldn't follow abounded. Not as much fun.

I can't think of any other RPGs I've played, though as I said in Part I I own rulebooks for several other systems, most notably GURPS and Blue Planet. I'd really like to expand the above list of games I've played, but I don't know how to go about finding other players around here, while simultaneously avoiding the horrible, horrible losers that are unfortunately so common in the RPG-playing world. It's called "bathing", guys...