The Pen-And-Paper RPG thread! Options

[Colonel Mustard]

Just posted this up out of curiosity to see who here on the forums plays any kind of Pen-And-Paper/Tabletop RPGs in the vein of D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Exalted etc. I'm a player of Pathfinder (think D&D version 3.75) and have dabbled in Call of Cthluhu and the Warhammer 40,000 RPGs, and I'm just interested in seeing what people on the forum have done in regard in regard to these games, seeing as these boards are devoted to an RPG series; you a hardened veterans of the dungeon crawl? An exhausted, baffled and exasperated DM? A fresh-faced level 1 fighter with little experience of the game and no idea why the DM keeps bursting into tears whenever you suggest Bull Rushing somebody? Or are you just RPG-curious*?

Anyway, this is the Colonel Mustard totally not a survey to see if he's truly alone in this harsh, dark world thread. Do have fun, and I am curious to see how many vidja gamers play on the tabletop as well.


*Like Bi-curious but with a much smaller chance of actually having sex.

[SubRosa]

I do not play P&P RPGs anymore. I sort of drifted away from all the people I gamed with. However I did play and GM for about 20 years or so. Like probably everyone, I started out with D&D. Back then it was Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which really dates me. I still have my first edition Deities and Demigods with the Cthulhu Mythos and Fafnir and Grey Mouser gods in it.

I gamed with several different groups over the years. After those early D&D days we mostly did games like Call of Cthulhu (which is still one of my all time favorite RPGs), Earthdawn, Shadowrun, the old West End Star Wars, Marvel Superheros, and Champions/Fuzion. We also dabbled in a lot of other games for a session or two, just to see if we would like them or not. I remember DC Heroes, Chill, The Price of Freedom, MORG (I am not sure if I got that name right), Vampire the Masquerade and Werewolf, Wheel of Time, Paranoia, Recon, and lots of others I cannot remember any more.

I GM'ed a Star Wars game, which was tons of fun as it started out with the players all being Imperials. I used West End's Minos Cluster expansion to set it in. The cool thing was that as the game went on, all of the PCs wound up defecting to the rebellion. I wove in a lot of characters and events from the Tie Fighter video games, like Admiral Harkov, Zaarin, and the Tie Advanced. The PCs were at ground zero for the final showdown between Vader and Harkov, and meeting Vader face to face is what pushed many of them right into the Rebel cause. It was all without me prompting them to do it either. They just saw the true face of the Empire, and did not like it. After that they became Rebel Commandos working for General Madine, and I kept the game going for a few more years that way. I really liked that, because the players were what determined the course of the game, not me.

I ran a Marvel Superheros game after that, which was a ton of fun. After about 5 years of that it got stale though, so I moved on to running Earthdawn, and then finally Shadowrun. Those two games were lots of fun, since they took place in the same world, just in different times. Because of that I was able to bring characters and ideas from my Earthdawn game into the Shadowrun one.

One thing I really loved about Earthdawn was the emphasis on legends, and the very real power they had in the world. In that game, items spontaneously enchanted themselves if they were associated with legendary deeds. The Horrors also made wonderful villains, since they could Mark someone and work through them without that person even knowing it.

Shadowrun also holds a very special place in my heart. It was a wonderful blending of magic and cyberpunk (granted they stole most of the cyberpunk from William Gibson, but he never minded). It was a very fun game, with a wonderfully dystopian future.

I was always more a roleplayer than anything else. Getting into another person's head - and away from the real world - for a while was always the appeal for me. Although we certainly had powergamers in the group too, and what I guess I would call puzzle-solvers. They got the most fun out of being faced with some conundrum and trying to figure out a way out of it. Call of Cthulhu was always good for that sort of thing, since going in guns blazing against a Shoggoth is never a good idea!

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Oct 4 2012, 05:17 PM