What's the best RPG game of all time?

[Drake Tungsten]

Crono Trigger, Crono Trigger, a thousand times Crono Trigger!

[Oerdin]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Yes and no. The problem with AD&D (and Rolemaster to a lesser extent) is characters gain experience by killing. A player is not rewarded to be a good roleplayer by the book, a player is rewarded to be a combat monster. This skills too generic and some others too restrictive.

I know in both 1st and 2nd editions od AD&D the DM's guide had a section on awarding experience points based upon role playing, creativity, and no combat skill use (my theif always made out on that last one).

[Sikander]

I started playing RPGs in 1975. The first game I played was Engarde!, and Three Musketeers era RPG that is still one of my favorites. It is still played pbem on the net, and has been expanded by players quite a bit. As many of these players are old farts like myself the level of roleplaying is quite excellent.

I also played D&D for the first time in 1975. It was actually completely unplayeable in its original form, and even after they added Greyhawk (the first expansion book) it still needed quite a bit of work to make it go. Back then there were two kinds of campaigns. Campaigns where an overly anal GM tried to make the systems as described in the rules work, and campaigns where a more creative (but often less diligent and lazy) GM used the rules as he saw fit, only using them as a rough guide.

All of my gaming friends ran a game or two, and almost all of us made up our own original RPGs. It's really quite simple. Ten years after my first experience in RPGs I was invited to play an RPG with some of the younger guys I was serving with in the army. The contrast blew me away. These guys had never made anything up in their lives, and instead relied entirely on pre-set modules that contained adventures. It was unbelievably lame, and the corresponding role-playing was lame as well. The most successful RPG during my army days was one set in the wild west (can't remember the name of the rules set). We had a real cowboy playing as well as a professor of linguistics whose speciality was American Indian languages of the west. Those two guys stole the show often as not, especially when they were trying to purchase horses or whiskey from the locals.

My advice for pen and paper players is to base your game loosely on a published set of rules so that your players don't come into the game completely cold. But vary from those rules whenever you feel like it. Keep less of your attention focused on your elaborate plans for a world and more on your players, specifically what they are interesting in, how is the adventure paced etc. Spur their imagination and your game will be a success. Keep in mind that while it is your world, it's going to be a dull one without sharing it with players.

As for best rules set, I'd have to go with what I know which are all oldies. I'd say Engarde for simple elegance, and Bushido for a moderately complex system that allowed for a lot of modification. The two best games that I ever played were based on modified Bushido rules.

[Bosh]

UR:

The problem with AD&D (and Rolemaster to a lesser extent) is characters gain experience by killing.

Just can that rule and award XP according to GM discretion. There's nothing worse that a GM can do than follow the rules when they get in the way.

When all the Orcs are evil, your character is free to kill them, right?

Well the canned D&D settings are mostly pretty awful (except planescrape, which looks fairly interesting, but which I only saw after I stopped playing, which was a looooooooooooong time ago). If your GM is too lazy to at least adapt them then you've got problems...

My biggest problem with D&D is that the combat system sucks donkey balls. Fighter types (at least in the old editions) had no real strategies available to them and and then you had the ridiculous concept of hitpoints going up but the damange that fighters could deal staying constant, which made high level people completely invulnerable to a good stab of a kitchen knife in the back by an angry housewife which should have at least a CHANCE of doing some damage. And its a bit ridiculous to have high level duels consist is what boils down to constant nicking with never the possibility of a death blow. And then there's all kinds of stuff like you're not more likely to get hit by 1 guy swinging at you for 10 minutes than 10 guys swinging at you from all sides for 1 minute, the problems are enormous.
Loremaster (or was it Rolemaster? I forget) was a bit better, your characters could get mangled good and fast, but there were too many damn charts to page through.

Any good combat system would do four things:
1. Have combat between two half-way competant people consist of extensive parrying with the occasional nick, until one of the two gets worn down and then usually is taken down with just a blow or two.
2. If you're surrounded by 30 teenages with sharp sticks, I don't care how good you are, you're going down and fast.
3. Have there always be a chance that your character is going to be incapacitated any minute while in combat.
4. Now have that all too common and idiotic "mages start out wimpy and then get powerful enough to blow everyone else away while sitting in a lawn chair" trend.

If you've got them, then you should be fine, haveing good rules for non-combat stuff isn't what's important its having a good GM. For a good GM it doesn't matter too much if he's playing HeroQuest or GURPs or whater except in combat.

[Whaleboy]

Chess

[MikeH]

Warhammer was good. Games Workshop had another really good one as well. Golden Heroes. That was a great RPG.

I played a lot, the best (and longest) campaign we ever had at anything was using Marvel Super Heroes. Wasn't the best system ever but it was an awesome campaign because of the GM and players.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG was a great system, and a strange one as well.

I also liked Paranoia easily the most humorous RPG out there, and we had some fun with Toon which is an awesome RPG where you are cartoon characters. It's like being in a Tom and Jerry or Bugs Bunny cartoon.

In the fantasy genre Middle Earth Roleplaying (MERP) was another good one. We played a great story of that. The GM for that one was a huge LotR fan and he put us in a story that was on the fringes of real historical LotR events.

[Jack the Bodiless]

Originally posted by MikeH
...real historical LotR events.

Like Alexander's defeat of the Orcs of Persia.

[Kropotkin]

I liked swedish games the most, like drakar och demoner (version 3 particulary) and Neotech. Those game made it possible to play the kind of realistic, almost naturalistic, kind of games I prefered but didn't work well with D&D or MERP.

[Straybow]

In Greek myth heroes were favored by the gods with subtle protection. Fantasy RPGs are designed to model heroic characters in mythical worlds. A hardened special ops vet with black belts in multiple martial arts is barely competent on that scale, maybe like a 3rd level character. Nobody in this world is the equivelent of a "name level" fighter or monk, unless you believe the Musashi legends and the like.

If Conan was to be taken down by thirty teenagers with sticks it is because of Fate, not because Conan's speed, strength, and supra-natural combat skills weren't fully capable of chopping them to bits in a couple minutes with nary a scratch on his noggin.

/me steps down from soapbox

The GM makes all the diff. I played in an AD&D tournament where my team lost because we accomplished the stated objective instead of getting sidetracked and killing the dragon with his pile of treasure. Stupid. I played a future type RPG (MegaTraveller, or something) but the GMing was a little lame, so it the campaign died for lack of interest.

[MikeH]

Dragon and treasure? Wow, a very imaginative scenario they gave you.

[monkspider]

Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger.

[Urban Ranger]

Sik,

"I also played D&D for the first time in 1975. It was actually completely unplayeable in its original form, and even after they added Greyhawk (the first expansion book) it still needed quite a bit of work to make it go."

I too have the original box set, to show that I am one of the veterans

"All of my gaming friends ran a game or two, and almost all of us made up our own original RPGs."

It depends. After all, a RPG system can be simple or very elaborate.

"My advice for pen and paper players is to base your game loosely on a published set of rules so that your players don't come into the game completely cold. But vary from those rules whenever you feel like it."

Well yes, it's not all that simple though, and the less you need to vee off from the rules, the better. Every GM makes his own stuff up, even something as minor as fudging dice rolls, or ignoring saving throws, etc.


Boshko,

"Just can that rule and award XP according to GM discretion. There's nothing worse that a GM can do than follow the rules when they get in the way."

Well, you see, many AD&D players are also themselves DM's, so they know the rules about experiences and stuff. Sure, you can fudge things a bit here and there, but you can't just withold XP from a party that killed off a bunch of orcs, say. Another problem with that is there really is no other consistent framework of granting XP in AD&D. Granted, you can heavily modify the system just like what a friend of mine did, but it's not really AD&D anymore because so many things were different.

"Fighter types (at least in the old editions) had no real strategies available to them and and then you had the ridiculous concept of hitpoints going up but the damange that fighters could deal staying constant, which made high level people completely invulnerable to a good stab of a kitchen knife in the back by an angry housewife which should have at least a CHANCE of doing some damage."

There are good and bad points to a simple combat system. Sure, you could design one that requires miniature figures (or at least cardboard counters) and a hex grid, such as Warhammer and DragonQuest, which allows all sorts of interesting tactics, but the downside is an encounter would take half a night to resolve. However, I agree with you that this whole HP idea is rather silly, as was nicely illustrated by a cartoon in an old Dragon magazine. There's this fighter standing around with "85 HP" on his chest with a big grin, even though there's this big bulge coming out of his chest in the shape of a cannonball.

Then of course there's Armor Class...

"Loremaster (or was it Rolemaster? I forget) was a bit better, your characters could get mangled good and fast, but there were too many damn charts to page through."

I think it's Rolemaster with all those fun charts of critical hits. Some of those are really nasty.

"For a good GM it doesn't matter too much if he's playing HeroQuest or GURPs or whater except in combat."

I am not so sure, because some systems do have an extensive list of noncombat skills/powers/etc. that characters can have. Can you play the piano well? Have you travelled the world extensively? Do you have connections with the shady underworld? Perhaps you have exceptional hearing? Do you work as a reporter and have access to information others don't? These are all very interesting details to add to your character.


Straybow,

"In Greek myth heroes were favored by the gods with subtle protection. Fantasy RPGs are designed to model heroic characters in mythical worlds."

Not quite. The only RPG system I know of in which characters are supposedly very powerful is Elric, based on the novels. Not Warhammer, Runequest, Fantasy Hero, or MERP. Not even AD&D. The whole problem with seeing AD&D in that light is it was not designed that way, it was an improvement on D&D, which came from Chainmail, a set of rules for miniature figures.

[Timexwatch]

Fallout and Fallout 2 for the PC. I've never played an RPG in real life.

[Bosh]

Sure, you can fudge things a bit here and there, but you can't just withold XP from a party that killed off a bunch of orcs, say.

Oooooh, yes you can
But I get the point. If players know the system to well you get way too much fiction-breaking as in "ooooh they're orcs, so they'll have 1d8 HPs each and shouldn't be much of a problem."

[MikeH]

I've just remembered the critical hits tables in Warhammer.

It was great reading about the terrible flesh rending wounds you'd inflicted. Ooooooh.

[MrFun]

If you heretics want to disregard the awe-inspiring and inspirational Final Fantasy III that's fine -- but don't blame me if you end up in the wrong place after death.

[Stuie]

Two favorites:

Harnmaster/Harnworld for its incredible level of detail in portraying a medieval-like fantasy world.

Empire of the Petal Throne for the brilliant setting (and it was the first RPG I ever played - way back in 1975).

[Jac de Molay]

Star Frontiers and Traveler.

[Harry Seldon]

Final Fantasy VII.

[Bosh]

Mr. Fun: Yeah FF III is easly the best computer RPG in regards to story. But if you want pure strategy then Final Fantasy Tactics easily beats it (and everything else I've played) although the story is pathetic...

[monolith94]

mr. fun, what do you think of the story of ff X? I found it enthralling...

[LDiCesare]

I don't like D&D for the stereotypical characters. It's hard to create your own.
That's why I like Rolemaster a lot. You can have a fighting mage. Of course he will be inept at fighting, but he can do stuff which a magic user is not expected to, and the critical tables are fun.
The Chaosium games (Call of Cthulluh, Stormbringer, ...) were great too. In particular, the deadly combat system was interesting, as it would make you think before fighting even a small monster.

Paranoia deserves a special mention.

My favourite game was actually a little known fame called 'Malefices', in which our GM hid so many of the rules that it was all down to roleplaying. When you roll the dice and have no idea what the effect will be, it can be really fun.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

The ones that stick out for me...

MERP- because it had such excellent add-ons and expansion packs. Good character creation and combat system too.

Bushido- Tremendous character creation (took a good two hours to create a character) and really immersive setting.

Traveller- The basic game was nothing special, but all those expansion packs really fleshed it out.

Call of Cthulhu- My favourite. About as difficult as trying to lick your own anus, with characters going insane all the time, but that was just part of the fun.

[MrFun]

monolith94, I never played that game -- the latest and last Final Fantasy title I ever played was Final Fantasy VII, which was a well-done RPG.

Originally posted by Boshko
Mr. Fun: Yeah FF III is easly the best computer RPG in regards to story. But if you want pure strategy then Final Fantasy Tactics easily beats it (and everything else I've played) although the story is pathetic...

Oh -- I loved Final Fantasy Tactics.

[Japher]

FF Tactics Rocked! So did Chrono Trigger!

I too like AD&D 2nd Ed. over the others, and White Wolf did create a very fun world (I liked MAGE the best), but I had some issues with the Dots thing...

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp
The ones that stick out for me...

MERP- because it had such excellent add-ons and expansion packs. Good character creation and combat system too.

Bushido- Tremendous character creation (took a good two hours to create a character) and really immersive setting.

Traveller- The basic game was nothing special, but all those expansion packs really fleshed it out.

Call of Cthulhu- My favourite. About as difficult as trying to lick your own anus, with characters going insane all the time, but that was just part of the fun.

one of my freidns took 5 horus to make a character in palladium

but than, it took everyone else ~ 1 hour (and none of us had a clue abotu the rules and most of us didn't know much about RPGS to start with)

Jon Miller

[Harry Seldon]

FF Tactics did rock.

[UnOrthOdOx]

Personally, I preferred an often overlooked Tactics Ogre to FF tactics.

Graphics were not near as good, but actual gameplay was far better IMO.

[MrFun]

I loved Ogre Battle -- but when I rented Tactics Ogre to see if I like it, I thought it SUCKED.

[UnOrthOdOx]

It started slow, but when you got through the initial story/tutorial and into the actual storyline, it was quite good.

Though for some reason NOT slaughtering a town when you were ordered to made you 'Evil'...